Nama

The first group of shots show Nama's GUI layout. All of those letters on the right side of the track display (EF P1 P2 L1 L2 L3 L4) are buttons for accessing Ecasound effects, Ecasound presets, and LADSPA plugins. The GROUP control below the Mixdown track is a global setting that influences all user tracks. The Palette and Namapalette buttons on the upper right are for selecting colors.

Mixer Window - Rec

The track in red is ready to record a file track_4.wav from soundcard input 2, the track in blue is set to play back vocal_2.wav. (The version number is automatically incremented.) Blue highlighting of the Master track indicates that the mixer output will be sent to the sound device. Red in the top band indicates a live input will be recorded. A preview command is available for testing without recording to disk.

Mixer Window - Mixdown

The Mixdown track is ready to record to the file Mixdown_2.wav. Yellow in the top band indicates that a mixdown is pending. It is possible to mixdown while simultaneously recording live inputs.

The Effects Window - Basic

Ecasound and LADSPA provide Nama's effects-processing. Here a midi controller is applied to a flanger effect on the guitar track. A reverb effect is applied to the mixer output.

Mastering Mode

The master_on command creates Eq, Low, Mid, High and Boost tracks for processing the mixed signal before delivering it to the Master and Mixdown tracks for output. The choice of plugins and signal routing are based on the design of the Jamin mastering program. (See the mastering section.)

Default plugins are defined in .namarc, Nama's configuration file.

The corresponding sliders appear in the effects window, one row per track. An extra numeric indicator is provided to the left of the frequency sliders or other sliders where logarithmic behavior is required. The screen must be scrolled to get to some of the sliders.

Text Display

Like Ecasound, Nama can be run entirely from a terminal, while providing the convenience of tracks, buses, versions, events and other high-level abstractions. Nama's text interface is based on a recursive-descent grammar with autocompletion, shortcuts, help for commands and plugins, diagnostics, and full access to Ecasound interactive commands.

Here is the output of the show_tracks command, with mastering mode enabled:

Here is the output for a single track, the low-frequency branch of the mastering network. The command shown sets the first parameter of effect "O" (lowpass filter) to 200 Hz.

The help screen is two keystrokes away.

last updated 4 months ago #