Written by Robert McWilliam (rmcw@allmail.net), Dennis Lichtenthäler

Start Jokosher

To start Jokosher, click Applications -> Sound & Video -> Jokosher.

Create a project

When Jokosher starts it will by default display a splash screen:

This gives options to create a new project, open a project that has been used recently from the list on the right or open another project. There is also a button to open the preferences dialog, and one to quit Jokosher.

Create a new project now - click on the Create a New Project button. If you want to leave a project and then come back to it later you can just save the project and exit Jokosher, then when you come back the project will be in the list of recent projects on the right and you can open it either by double clicking on it or by clicking once to select it and then clicking the Open Selected Project button.

After you have clicked the Create a New Project button, Jokosher brings up the new project dialog:

Here you pick a name for the project, choose which folder it is going to be saved in, and can set the author. The default setting for the Author field is your Linux username. The author information is not actually used yet but in the future it will be put into ID3 tags and much more - it is still worth entering it correctly though so that it is already in the project for when Jokosher has features to make use of it.

When everything is set correctly click OK.

Add instruments

You should now have an empty Jokosher workspace.

We now want to add some instruments. This is done by clicking the Add Instrument button on the toolbar:

Or from the Project menu:

Either option brings up the Add an instrument dialog:

At the moment all instruments are the same except for the name and the icon. This will change with later versions of Josher where different instruments will have appropriate settings for the equaliser.

Select an instrument to add by either double clicking it or clicking once to slect it and then clicking on OK.

The instrument is then added to the workspace:

The instrument can be renamed by clicking on its name and then entering a new name or editing the existing name.

Now we need to get some audio into the instrument by either importing it from a file or recording it live.

Import audio from a file

Audio can be imported from a file to any instrument. This is done by right clicking in the instrument lane to bring up the context menu and then selcting the Import Audio File… option:

This then brings up the Import file… dialog:

Where you can selct which file to import. After clicking Open the file will be imported into the instrument. Importing might take a little while as the file is processed, a progress indication is displayed in the instrument lane.

Once Jokosher has finished processing the file a waveform will be displayed in the instrument lane showing the volume of the audio:

Record audio

To record audio to an instrument you first need to configure which connection on your sound card(s) you want the instrument to record from. This is done in the Configure Instrument Connections dialog, which can be opened from the Project menu:

This dialog lists the instruments in the project and displays the available inputs on your sound card. You can now map an input (like Line-in or Microphone) to your corresponding Jokosher instrument:

Once the correct inputs have been selected for all the intruments click Close.

Next you need to arm the instruments that you want to record into by clicking the button circled:

At present Jokosher can only record to one instrument at a time. If you try to record without any instruments armed Jokosher will tell you to arm an instrument first.

To record click on the record button on the toolbar:

And then to finish recording click Stop:

Editing

Jokosher features several options for editing recorded or imported audio blocks:

Split

A block of audio can be split into two blocks.

Position the mouse where the split is to be made:

Double click to split the audio block:

Each block can then be moved independently by clicking and dragging it:

Trim

Trimming a block of audio removes, and discards all of the block except what is selected. To trim: select the part of the audio to keep by holding down the Shift key and dragging the mouse over the audio. When it is selected a Trim button will appear below the selection.

Click on the Trim button and the audio block is trimmed to just the selection.

Moving and duplicating

There are a few ways that audio blocks can be moved around within a project. The simplest is to moves them to a different time by clicking and dragging them to where you want them.

The audio blocks can also be Cut, Copied and Pasted. This can be done by right clicking on the audio block to bring up the context menu:

and then selecting Cut or Copy from this menu. Then right click where you want the audio to be pasted, and select Paste from the context menu that comes up:

Cut, Copy and Paste can also be accessed from the Edit menu.

Mixing

The next task is to set the volume levels for the different instruments: mixing. This is done in the Mixing workspace:

The Mixing workspace is accessed by clicking on the Mixing button in the upper right of the Jokosher window:

The Recording button can be used to get back to the Recording workspace.

The level for each instrument is set by dragging the volume indicator:

to the desired level. Behind the volume indicator is a VU meter for the instrument which shows the volume of the audio in the instrument at the current time, this will change as the audio plays.

Exporting the project

Once you have your project edited to perfection, Jokosher can export it into a single file for distribution. This is done with the Mixdown Project option on the File Menu. This brings up a dialog where you can select a file name, a place on your computer to put the file and the type of file to create:

When everything is set as you want click Save and a status window is brought up while Jokosher processes your project. This can take a while for a large project (or using a slow computer).