AVL-Drumkits Blonde Bop Kits + Hand Percussion Kit (Beta)

[AVLinux]

Hi H2 Users and Devs!

When I released my most recent AVL-Drumkits Blonde Bop kits I hadn't got around to getting them into Hydrogen '.h2drumkit' format yet and then life intervened and it has taken me this long to make amends... :oops:

I will be honest in saying that I had completely gotten away from using Hydrogen Drum Machine for many years and it was drifting off my radar and then life intervened again... The drummer in my longest running band retired and after doing a few shows as an Acoustic Duo with our bass player I was missing a backbeat terribly so I ended up using Hydrogen on an old laptop again as the basis to program some backup beats... I've never been super fond of bands playing acoustic music with Drum machine sounds that could have lifted from an AC/DC record so in the interest of another side project I had in the works I got busy with recording and sampling all my hand percussion stuff lying around the Studio as well as recording my own Finger snaps, Hand claps and Foot stomps to create a nice organic sounding percussion kit that sounded natural with acoustic content but still had some funky kick to it..

The result is the "Buskman's Holiday" a small but mighty collection of sounds with 10 velocity layers per piece. Don't look at this as an exotic World Hand Percussion kit with every possible nuance, it's more like a Busker's toolkit to get direct and organic beats going with a unique soundset that leaves most Drum machine wavetables in the dust.. In particular the upper Cajon and Congas are sampled with both left and right hand strikes so that opens up 20 velocity samples per piece on them.

Soooo.... as a peace offering to my Hydrogen brothers and sisters who had to wait so long I am offering the beta of this new Acoustic Hand Percussion Kit to you first. It is my hope that it will become a full AVL-Drumkit product (SFZ, SF2, LV2) in time but since I'm gigging regularly with this exact h2drumkit file I thought I might as well share it as-is first... Stay tuned for the other formats in the near future!

DOWNLOADS:
Blonde Bop Kits:
http://www.bandshed.net/sounds/h2drumkit/AVL-Drumkits_BlondeBop/

Buskman's Holiday BETA:
http://www.bandshed.net/sounds/h2drumkit/AVL-Drumkits_BuskmansHoliday/

WTF is an AVL-Drumkits Blonde Bop!?:
https://youtu.be/sQbcKJw3oRc

[theGreatWhiteShark]

Awesome! Thanks a lot!

If you want, I can upload them to our drumkit collection on SourceForge. This way they will be available in the Online Import dialog within Hydrogen.

[theGreatWhiteShark]

Thanks!

All fixes related to the image handling can be found in branch releases/1.2 and will be part of the 1.2.3 patch release. If you like, I could make you an AppImage of the branch's HEAD in case you want to test the fixes or create more kits.

[AVLinux]

If Hydrogen still builds on Debian Bullseye I can just compile it, I don't do it often these days but I haven't completely forgotten how.. Alternately maybe the MX Linux Packagers (the base of AV Linux) will build a update when 1.2.3 is tagged.. Does Hydrogen source still contain a Debian control file and allow to build Debs from the source folder?

[theGreatWhiteShark]

If Hydrogen still builds on Debian Bullseye I can just compile it

Sure. I'm working on Devuan Chimaera which is based on Bullseye.

From our INSTALL.md

$ sudo apt-get install cmake qtbase5-dev qtbase5-dev-tools  \
	qttools5-dev qttools5-dev-tools libqt5xmlpatterns5-dev  \
	libqt5svg5-dev libarchive-dev libsndfile1-dev libasound2-dev  \
	liblo-dev libpulse-dev libcppunit-dev liblrdf0-dev  \
	librubberband-dev
$ ./build.sh m x

Does Hydrogen source still contain a Debian control file and allow to build Debs from the source folder?

Uh. There is a folder dedicated to Debian but I haven't looked into it or yet alone touched it so far. Quite possible it has fallen into despair.

[AVLinux]

OK, will see how it goes once you get to 1.2.3.

Also a HUGE thank you for using and supporting AppImage, I think it is the only sane option and I love it's "self-contained-in-userspace" ethos... I am not a fan of Flatpak or Snap and their intrusions in the system wide folders but my opinions don't mean much... In general if it has an AppImage I'll use it, if it's one of the others I avoid like the plague..

Also a personal thanks to you and the other developers for keeping Hydrogen moving forward!

[theGreatWhiteShark]

Thanks a lot!

I actually looked into Flatpak first. It has some nice features though, like sandboxing apps and the ability to grant and revoke permissions to e.g. read/write the home folder. But as JACK support is broken when using classical JACK and not PipeWire, it is almost a no-go for audio applications.

This in combination with supporting AppImage took me 2-3 months. But it already starts to pay off since it eases developing tremendously as I can just hand it to Linux users so they can test the fixes of their issues themselves.