terminatorX is a realtime audio synthesizer that allows you to "scratch" on digitally sampled audio data (*.wav, *.au, *.ogg, *.mp3, etc.) the way hiphop-DJs scratch on vinyl records. It features multiple turntables, realtime effects (buit-in as well as LADSPA plugin effects), a sequencer and MIDI interface - all accessible through an easy-to-use gtk+ GUI. This software is designed to run under Linux, FreeBSD and the like.

Nothing. TerminatorX is free software. Read the license (GPL V2).

TerminatorX should run on any recent Linux or FreeBSD system. I develop terminatorX on an X86-System, but the source contains support for big endian machines (PowerPC for example). If you experience platform related troubles, please let me know.

TerminatorX operates at an arbitrary sampling rate with 16Bit samples and 2 channels (aka stereo). Samples will be converted to mono on loading.

This depends on the file your loading. Wavfiles are loaded with the buit-in wave loading routines (if enabled on compile time) and this happens very fast. For compressed audio files the necessary decompression will consume quite some CPU time on loading.

Since Version 3.73 loading of audio files has been significantly accelerated with the libaudiofile, libvorbis and mad methods.

Oh well due to my laziness I guess. Benno Senoner wrote a patch against 3.2 to support "on-the-fly" reading of wavfiles. The problem is the patch wasn't applicable to later versions of terminatorX, nor would it work with sox/mpg123 support. I still plan to port the patch to the newer releases sometime.

Update: If you want to use your joystick along with your mouse I suggest using my tiny aseqjoy tool to connect your joystick to the MIDI input port of terminatorX.

If you want to use another mouse however, you need to configure this mouse as an XFree86 XInput devices and from what I've read I assume you'll need to have XFree86 3.3.3.1 or higher. If you want to know how to do this read your XF86Config manual page (run man XF86Config) and find the part on "the optional XInput section". If you successfully configured your second (third ...) mouse / input device for XFree86 you now need to turn on XInput-support in the Options-dialog of terminatorX and you have to select the XInput device you want terminatorX to initialize. Now either press "Apply" or "Ok" and you should be able to scratch with that devices next time you press "Start".

You probably downloaded the binary-rpm-package and your libstdc++ is outdated. This seems to occur on Mandrake systems only. Upgrading with a newer libstdc++ package should fix this.

You don't have the libstdc++ headers installed. Install the libstdc++-devel package for the libstdc++-package you have installed.

Now this issue is rather tricky, as it seems a lot of problems can be the reason here, but there are some things you can try:

• Make sure that your X-Server supports XFree86-DGA. Remove any lines that read

  Option "omit xfree86-dga"

  from your XF86Config. Check whether the Server loaded DGA by running xdpyinfo - if DGA is loaded one of the lines you get from xdpyinfo should read XFree86-DGA. To check whether DGA actually works run dga as root - Warning: the only way to exit this tool is pressing 'q' on your keyboard - and it might take some seconds until it reacts.

• Try running terminatorX as root. This fixes the problem for most people.

If all this doesn't help let me know.

Like all audio applications terminatorX' performance improves significantly from running with realtime scheduling priority. However current Linux or *BSD systems don't allow regular users to achieve realtime priority, so you need to install terminatorX suid-root if you want to allow regular users to run terminatorX with realtime priority.

Note: installing any program suid-root is potentially dangerous and could be exploited - so if other people have access to this machine, too, you should reduce the number of suid-root programs.

The old suid-root method has gone - you have to configure terminatorX with POSIX capabilities to allow running suid-root:

• --enable-capabilities: this method (enabled by default) drops root privileges very early (which is good) and only keeps the capability of renice-ing processes. It is Linux-specific though and requires a not-too-old 2.4.* kernel and the libcap library.

Again: this method might have yet unknown flaws so if you want to be 100% sure that your terminatorX installation is no security threat do not install terminatorX suid-root.

Ensure that you have read the entry above before you consider following the instructions below.

As root cd into the directory you installed terminatorX to (typically that is /usr/local/bin or /usr/bin) and run the following commandline:

chown root: ./terminatorX && chmod u+s ./terminatorX

No, there is no such version, nor will I port it myself - as I hardly have the time to maintain the regular version. If you plan to port it, please let me know.

If you don't know find out a little something about Public Enemy. Learn who TerminatorX is or see him do his work