I got the idea to use my laptop as a music recording studio after being inspired by my friend Rico. After challenging Google and reading up a bit I found Ardour and Hydrogen (both available in the Synaptics repository). My goal was to be able to record acoustic sound and combine it with base, drums and so on.

Ardour has the multi channel recording with mixing and adjusting levels. Really cool. Hydrogen is a fairly advanced drum machine that comes with two built in set of drums. When starting Ardour first and then Hydrogen they both hook into a sound backend called Jack. Jack synchronizes the programs so the drums are transferred over. I’m looking forward to testing this out more and look for some nice plugins for Ardour to get Reverb or echo and so on. Also some more drum sets would be nice; I’m sure I’ll find it.

The install was quite seemless and everything is working without any backend configurations. The sound is not really good when running Compiz due to CPU load. The only tricky thing is to learn the menues; with many many choices for managing sound. I now have my portable mini-studio which is really cool.