update on smasher

After my euphoria from installing smasher without any problems I had some time to try out this very nice audio toy. It comes with some help, although it won’t explain everything. However, one easiely recognizes what is going on. What I didn’t realize before installing it was that smasher is not (hopefully yet) designed for live usage. So one can not synchronize playback with other programs (at least I didn’t know how to) and I couldn’t change slicing during playback. When smasher choked on something one cannot reconnect to the jack server. Alltogether it’s a very nice piece of software. One can prepare great loops with nice effects and save them to a wav. Thank you developers.

I have to add another note to my former post. When I installed it on my second machine, running as well on Ubuntu 8.04, it didn’t want to work straight away. On startup smasher  said:

smasher: /usr/lib/libwx_gtk2u_aui-2.8.so.0: \
        version `WXU_2.8.9' not found (required by smasher)

It turned out that some updates from this library are not included in Ubuntu. Adding apt.wxwidgets.org to the package sources list (see) lets you update to the needed version from the wxwidget developers page.

Smasher, an open source beat-slicer

For a time now I was looking for an open source beat-slicer. I came across Smasher reading Dave Phillips’ latest article on linuxjournal.com, always a good read by the way. As he does a review on it in his article and I just installed it ten minutes ago, I will not bother you by another review.

As he points out, Smasher needs a variety of libraries to be built. Trying to compile it, I bumped into an error in wrapsound.cpp a few times, until I realized that from the same sourceforge page one can download a package smasher-1.1.6-ubuntu_i386.deb. It worked without problems for me on Ubuntu 8.04.

Then I started up Smasher and to my full delight it played the example file back as well straight to alsa as through a jack-server. So I’m quite excited about trying it out…

snapshot from smasher.sourceforge.net