Note: While this site is maintained primarily for historical reasons, Turn-Key Linux Audio is very much alive and in-use, currently maintained in two forms: 1) For Linux, maintained at the Eastman Computer Music Center by Matthew Barber and 2) For OSX (ported in 2007) at the Cornell Electroacoustic Music Center by Kevin Ernste. The former is available as a dependency-enabled RPM for Fedora/PlanetCCRMA here and the latter can be found on the downloads page. Although this site is maintained by Kevin Ernste primarily for historic purposes, the packages are still very much in use and under ongoing revision and development.

For updated downloads for Linux and OSX, please contact the developer.

Turn-Key Linux Audio is a fully automated Linux/Unix installer package which takes audio application bundling to the next step by integrating audio utillities and applications together within a Unix environment.

Ease of installation is literally only the beginning. Global variables and intelligent aliases based on the CARL/BICSF system give users top-down control over the organization and location of large files such as those associated with audio and video. Filesystem space is optimized at the environment level.

By default, the system specifies a home soundfile directory ($SFDIR) for each user from which all audio files are read and to which all audio files are written. All music applications open ready to read and write to this location and its subdirectories. As you add applications to your arsenal, creating new aliases is simple: everything resides in one location.

The package assumes a base Linux (or other Unix, see below) install, but from there everything is automated with the execution of a single script ("install.sh"). Run the script, grab coffee, and make music. Currently the supported base systems include:

Follow the links to these sites for specific details on the core packages they include.

The core of this package is modeled after the system used at the Eastman Computer Music Center (ECMC), and is therefore a kind of mirroring package. Its original intent was to make the same power of the ECMC studio machines available to students in their own homes (something only open-source software can facilitate!), but it is now being made available to anyone. My hope is that it will be useful not only to users, but as a way of showcasing Linux's unique capabilitiies and flexibiliy in comparison with other commercial music software tools/packages available to composers and musicians.

Kevin Ernste