Interview with Jokosher maintainer Laszlo Pandy

In this first in what I hope will be a series of interviews about linux multimedia I talk with Laszlo Pandy, the leading force behind audio editing application Jokosher. In addition to talking about Jokosher itself and Laszlo's involvement we also will talk about the general state of Linux multimedia.

Thank you for taking the time to speak with us Laszlo. To kick off could you give us an introduction on who you are and how you got started working on Jokosher?

Laszlo: I'm Laszlo Pandy, one of the two lead developers of Jokosher. I am an undergraduate student who uses Ubuntu and loves to develop with Python. School is easy enough that I have spare time between classes, which I started to fill with open source a couple of years ago.

I knew Java from school and quickly taught myself Python, but when I was new to Linux it was still hard finding an open source project to contribute to, which is why I make an effort to include anyone I can in the Jokosher project.

One day I was listening to Jono Bacon announce on LugRadio that someone had started his idea for JonoEdit, and he mentioned that everyone should get involved right now before the code was too complicated to pick up easily. So I did exactly that. I was given SVN access the next day. Since then people have come and gone, and myself the other lead developers gradually inherited more responsibility for the project.

Laszlo:Currently the main contributors are David Corrales, Peteris Krisjanis, Michael Sheldon, and myself.

Laszlo: The project was first conceived by Jono Bacon as a way to record his famous podcast LugRadio without using any proprietary software. The focus would be on having the small set of features necessary to produce a podcast with a simple interface and low learning curve. Jono provided a list of requirements under the name JonoEdit which included integration with GNOME, use of GStreamer and using Python so that it was easy to hack on.

In January of 2006 Jason Field started development on what at that time was called JonoEdit. Soon after Jono and other LugRadio fans came on board. Our first release was four months later. This release was just a preview and was not particularly useful. However it proved that non linear editing worked with GStreamer, and set the direction for our clean interface to this day.

Development has continued at a steady pace since then, with the exception of a six month period around the end of 2007. During this time myself and the other lead developers had other commitments which reduced our momentum, and therefore interest in the project waned. Fortunately, after a few exaggerated rumors of the project's death, we started development again and were able to push out two releases this summer. Unfortunately our community of contributing users and developers has not
returned to the same level.

Laszlo: Our main goal is to allow users who are new to audio production produce a simple podcast or musical track. This audience might be GNOME users who want a program that integrates will with their desktop, or users coming from other platforms who need to mix audio but don't require many of the advanced features that a program such as Ardour provides.

Actually Jokosher was designed for the desktop user, and not for a professional studio with custom hardware. Therefore any system that has enough power to get good performance with any of the recent linux distributions will be able to run Jokosher without a problem.

You do want to make sure you have a sound card that is well supported by your distribution, but I think we have come far enough that it is easier to find a card that works well than it is to find a card that doesn't. The next version of Jokosher will support recording from multiple channels simultaneously. It is not easy to find a multichannel card with good linux support, so the one we are recommending that works is M-Audio's Delta 44 and other cards with the same chipset.

Laszlo: The greatest challenge for us is turning feedback from users about recording problems into constructive information. There are a few reasons for this including the cryptic Gstreamer error messages, which results from the complexity of interaction in large pipelines. Another reason for this is because of the different hardware configuration, and the varied hardware support on linux.

Having the user submit GStreamer debug logs helps a little bit, but it takes a keen eye to search through thousands of lines and find the source of the error, let alone the source of the problem. We plan to include some tools with Jokosher to help identify and solve the most common problems, but I don't expect this to work in all cases.

Laszlo: The only major feature a user will notice in the 0.10 release of Jokosher is the crash backup feature. It is the same as many word processors; every five minutes your project is saved, and if there is a crash Jokosher will prompt you to restore from the backup on next launch.

Most of the other changes were bug fixes including many fixes for some very ugly crashes.

What kind of applications would you like to see on linux to supplement Jokosher?

Laszlo: Obviously Pitivi for editing video would be a great supplement to Jokosher. I would also like to see utilities which make it easy to capture any audio and redirect it to an application like Jokosher. We have a branch of Jokosher which has limited integration with the Telepathy framework to record voice calls, however a more general solution would be nice.

I also think programs which allow greater integration of mobile devices would be very exciting. This could mean anything from Jono's idea for Jokosher Remote which allows remote controlling Jokosher over wifi so you don't have to sit at the computer during the recording, to simply integrating your bluetooth audio device seamlessly with your desktop.

Laszlo: I use Totem, Exaile and Amarok for general playback and listening to music. Occasionally I will use Audacity to edit audio; it is especially useful if I am not at home and have to use Windows. Does gst-launch count as a multimedia application? I use the Gstreamer command line utility extensively for testing and transcoding my files.

As someone who has worked on an end user targeted multimedia application. How would you describe the state of general multimedia support under linux?

Laszlo: I would say it is more confusing than anything else. The multimedia capabilities of linux today are very good, however knowing which application and which framework to use when is still a challenge for many users. The fact that so many of our users know the names of ALSA, PulseAudio and GStreamer does not just indicate that we have very knowledgeable users, but that our users have to be knowledgeable. Desktop user should not have to know any of this, and should not have to do anything special to make it work.

Gstreamer, PulseAudio, as well as Phonon are all moving us in the right direction. Hopefully it won't be long until everything is seamless, but there are still a few hiccups along the way. Users shouldn't have to know what a sound server is, but they learn about it when they find out it is PulseAudio which is making their Flash sound support not work.

So looking ahead, what is your roadmap for Jokosher going forward?

Laszlo: We already have two very big features completed and ready to be merged. The first is the ability to use any Gstreamer source for recording or playback. This means support for JACK , PulseAudio and maybe even Windows' DirectShow and Apple's CoreAudio. The the second is the ability to record multiple tracks simultaneously either from multiple sound cards, or a multichannel sound card. It is easy to imagine how useful this would be to record each voice or instrument on its own channel.

In the months before the next release we hope to also make some important interface improvements to make using the program much smoother, and provide some tools to diagnose cryptic Gstreamer error message and recording problems.

Are there any concrete uses of Jokosher that you heard of that you thought where fun or nice?

Laszlo:There are a few people we know have used Jokosher to record mixtapes, or simple songs, but the only concrete example I know of recently is a podcast by of our active users Ben Webb. He publishes a podcast at http://freedomsocks.co.uk/blog/ and comes online frequently to tell us what doesn't work in his recording sessions. This is really useful for us so that we know what to concentrate on. Unfortunately we don't have very many users who participate like this.

Thanks for your time Laszlo, much appreciated!

To learn more about Jokosher visit www.jokosher.org. Interview done by Christian Schaller