Jokosher FAQ
Jeff Ratliff
<jefrat AT gmail DOT com>
Jokosher History
Q: Why is it called Jokosher?
A: The idea for Jokosher was originally conceived on the LUGRadio Forums. It was originally dubbed "JonoEdit" in honor of Jono Bacon who edits LUGRadio, and couldn't find a multi-track editor on Linux he liked.
Jokosher comes from Mr Bacon's name:
Jo from (Jo)no
Kosher = no bacon (pork != kosher)
Q: What happened to Jonoedit?
A: Per Mr. Ben:
Jono was adamant, and I agree with him, that the name Jonoedit should not be used, because it is a community project, not just 'his'. Even though he was the one who came up with the spec, and has provided much of the impetus, there are many others involved in the project. Jokosher was the name chosen...
General Usage
Q: What is a Project?
A: A Project is the thing you're working on in Jokosher, whether it be a song, a podcast or you doing karaoke over an audio file your parents sent you. It's a way of grouping sounds, instruments, and audio files into something that will eventually be mixed and released as a single audio file.
Q: What is an Instrument?
A: What other editors call a track or a file is an Instrument in Jokosher. After all, that's what you're dealing with in real life. You've got 4 voices for a podcast, or drums, bass, guitar, vocal for a song. You think in terms of instruments, not tracks or files, so why not work that way? It's just one less hoop to make your brain jump through when you're trying to create. (Note that an Instrument technically is a collection of files that all have to do with the same instrument/voice/audio source. More than one piece of audio can be recorded into the same Instrument.)
Q: Why can't I import an audio file from the File menu?
A: Jokosher is all about Projects and Instruments. Files don't really exist. What you want to do is add an instrument, and have that instrument be an audio file.
- click Add Instrument (upper left corner of main window)
- choose audio file as the instrument type (you can actually choose any instrument type you want, but most of the time "audio file" makes the most sense)
- click OK
- now, just right click on the new Instrument and choose "import file". You will get a dialog box that will let you bring in an existing audio file for editing.
Problems and Bugs
Q: When starting Jokosher I get the following output in terminal. Is there something wrong?
0:00:00.540872000 2245 0x8259ad8 ERROR GST_PIPELINE ./grammar.y:494:_gst_parse__yyparse: no element "lame"
A: This is simply Jokosher trying to detect which encoders are available during startup.
You may not have the Lame MP3 encoder installed since many distros don't include it for legal reasons. If you want to have MP3 encoding support in Jokosher, you must install the Lame Gstreamer plugin. Sometimes this is as simple as just installing 'lame' with your package manager.Q: When starting Jokosher, there used to be a window that popped up asking which project I wanted to open, but it doesn't happen anymore. What happened?
A: There is a setting for this in Jokosher preferences. Click Edit -> Preferences. Under the setting Application Start-up select Show welcome dialog and the window will be back next time you start up.