Cryptoucan™ song: making of

Written by Dominik Joe Pantůček on January 24, 2019.

While creating Cryptoucan™, I had the opportunity to also practice my other skills. Today, I would like to briefly explain how the music for the videos was made and how the infamous Pretty Good Privacy a.k.a. Cryptoucan™ song was made. Read on to learn something about music production on GNU/Linux!

Everyone remembers the success the Cryptoucan™ song – as seen in Video 1 below – was at LinuxDays[1] conference. More and more people are asking, how are we – or more specifically, how am I – producing such music. Other companies hire external marketing specialists for such tasks… But that is not the case here at Trustica.

Video 1: Cryptoucan™ stage: Pretty Good Privacy

We are producing the music using GNU/Linux with Jack Audio Connection Kit[2] as the digital audio workstation core with FluidSynth[3]/QSynth[4] for the MIDI[5] instrumentations, Audacity[6] for audio editing and Rosegarden[7] for composing and mixing everything together.

When it comes to hardware, you might be surprised how all this can be done using pretty common computer with consumer “i7-5600U CPU @ 2.60GHz” CPU, sub-10€ USB[8] audio card, simple 4-line mixer bought in 2001 and small MIDI keyboard[9].

Picture 1: Rosegarden project with Pretty Good Privacy / Cryptoucan™ song.

As you can see in Picture 1, the whole composition is rather simple and fits on one computer screen. And as it has been almost three years since I bought the Oxygen 61, this week it was time to upgrade to Keystation 88[10] and I must admit, it makes the work flow much smoother.

 

Hope you enjoyed a small peek under the hood of our production process and stay tuned for more next week! We can also promise you (finally) more usage videos here.

References

1. https://www.linuxdays.cz/2018/

2. http://jackaudio.org/

3. http://www.fluidsynth.org/

4. https://qsynth.sourceforge.io/

5. Wikipedia contributors. (2019, January 21). MIDI. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 21:43, January 23, 2019, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MIDI&oldid=879396547

6. https://www.audacityteam.org/

7. https://rosegardenmusic.com/

8. Wikipedia contributors. (2019, January 15). USB. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 21:44, January 23, 2019, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=USB&oldid=878562282

9. https://www.m-audio.com/products/view/oxygen-iv-61

10 https://www.m-audio.com/products/view/keystation-88