slab 4.09-14b review

SLab is a digital audio recording software suite for UNIX platforms

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 2259K Developer: Nick Copeland

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SLab is a digital audio recording software suite for UNIX platforms. It is currently supported on most versions of Linux, and FreeBSD. SLab is a multitrack harddisk recording application, a set of tools to record music to disk on a PC platform (running Unix of course). The application is software only, it just requires a reasonable PC with a soundcard. There are some limitations on soundcard support, and obviously some limits on track counts based on CPU/disk performance.

The name is pronounced either "slab" as a single word, or "ess-lab", whichever you prefer. I would have given it some groovy name, but most of the names I would like are already in use! "Yet another audio recording tool" would perhaps be a good alternative, since there are many available.

SLab consists of a mixing desk, tape deck, wave editor, and a few other auxilliary tools including digital effects processing.

With SLab you have the possibility to record up to 8 channels of music simultaneously (probably more in future versions).

Requirements:
Basically, you need a Unix (Linux) system with a working soundcard that is capable of full duplex with an OSS driver.

When using Linux, your kernel needs SYSV IPC. Soundcards tested in 16 bit full duplex mode are:

Creative SoundBlaster AWE PCI. SB-64 PCI and SB-128 PCI
Gravis UltraSound MAX PnP.
Ensoniq SoundScape [Basis for some Creative SoundBlaster 64/128 PCI series].
Cirrus Chipsets.
Yamaha OPL3-SAx.

Until 3.0 SLab was developed on a P133 16 MB system, but it now generally gets tested on P300/P450 systems, your mileage is CPU dependent. Get gobs of disks if you want to do some real recording, 16 tracks CD quality requires about 80MB a minute. Compression can be applied to reduce this requirement by up to a factor of 4, at a consequent loss of signal quality since the compression algorithms are all lossy.

GUI is based on TCL/TK, and has been reved to 8.0.

You DO NOT need TCL/TK installed to use this application, it should be complete. The required TCL/TK header files can be found in the SLAB_HOME/tcl.files directory. Either use the "startSLab" script provided with the distribution, or point your TCL_LIBRARY and TK_LIBRARY environment variables at this directory.