Hear Me Now

Jonni Bidwell takes a break from his frantic  conference snacking schedule to interview  audiophiles and gentlemen, 64 Studio.

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The folks behind 64 Studio (https://64studio.com) are Isle of Wight-based hacker duo Daniel James and Chris Obbard. Their eponymous first contribution to the FOSS ecosystem came in 2005 – a real-time, Debianbased multimedia distribution which exploited the (then) new instructions in AMD’s early 64-bit processors.

Nowadays they contribute to all sorts of multimedia efforts, including openMHA (Master Hearing Aid), a project which uses Linux to power hearing aids. They were at the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit in Edinburgh in October 2018, where they took the time to chat to wannabe turntablist Jonni Bidwell. Naturally, the conversation tended towards one of their other projects: PiDeck, a Pi-powered digital vinyl system that allows people to mix/scratch/cut their digital music using time-coded vinyl on a conventional turntable.

Linux Format: Daniel, you used to write for Linux Format – and indeed our erstwhile rival, then later sister magazine and now alas deceased Linux User & Developer…

Daniel James: I was maintaining a list of UK-related Linux websites in the ’90s. Alan Cox had started it and no longer had time to work on it, so I took over. When the first magazines were launched in the UK, around 1999, the impetus was coming from advertisers like IBM who wanted to spend money to show how committed they were to open source. They were hunting around for UK-based people who knew about this stuff. And there weren’t that many of them.

LXF: Nice. Our subscribers can find your contributions in issues 100-130 in our archive and indeed the last years of LU&D issues. Tell me about 64 Studio.