Paul Davis (formerly known as Paul Barton-Davis [1] ) is a British-American [2] software developer best known for his work on audio software (JACK) for the Linux operating system, and for his role as one of the first two programmers at Amazon.com. [3] [4]
Davis grew up in the English Midlands and in London. After studying molecular biology and biophysics, he did post-graduate studies in computational biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot and EMBL in Heidelberg. [5]
He immigrated to the U.S. in 1989. He lived in Seattle for seven years, where he worked for the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of Washington, [6] and several smaller software companies in Seattle. While in Seattle, he helped to get Amazon.com off the ground during the period 1994–1996, making critical contributions to Amazon's backend systems alongside Shel Kaphan, [7] [3] before subsequently moving to Philadelphia in 1996. In 2019 he moved with his wife to Galisteo, NM [8]
He went on to fund the development of various audio software for Linux, including Ardour [9] and the JACK Audio Connection Kit. [10] He works full-time on free software.
He is also an ultra-marathon runner and touring cyclist.
Larry Arnold Wall is an American computer programmer, linguist and author. He is best known for creating the Perl programming language and the patch tool.
The Open Sound System (OSS) is an interface for making and capturing sound in Unix and Unix-like operating systems. It is based on standard Unix devices system calls. The term also sometimes refers to the software in a Unix kernel that provides the OSS interface; it can be thought of as a device driver for sound controller hardware. The goal of OSS is to allow the writing of sound-based applications that are agnostic of the underlying sound hardware.
A software modem, commonly referred to as a softmodem, is a modem with minimal hardware that uses software running on the host computer, and the computer's resources, in place of the hardware in a conventional modem.
Ardour is a hard disk recorder and digital audio workstation application that runs on Linux, macOS, FreeBSD and Microsoft Windows. Its primary author is Paul Davis, who was also responsible for the JACK Audio Connection Kit. It is intended as a digital audio workstation suitable for professional use.
JACK Audio Connection Kit is a professional sound server API and pair of daemon implementations to provide real-time, low-latency connections for both audio and MIDI data between applications. JACK was developed by a community of open-source developers led by Paul Davis and has been a key piece of infrastructure and the de facto standard for professional audio software on Linux since its inception in 2002. The server is free software, licensed under GPL-2.0-or-later, while the library is licensed under LGPL-2.1-or-later.
A digital audio workstation is an electronic device or application software used for recording, editing and producing audio files. DAWs come in a wide variety of configurations from a single software program on a laptop, to an integrated stand-alone unit, all the way to a highly complex configuration of numerous components controlled by a central computer. Regardless of configuration, modern DAWs have a central interface that allows the user to alter and mix multiple recordings and tracks into a final produced piece.
Rosegarden is a free software digital audio workstation program developed for Linux with ALSA, JACK and Qt4. It acts as an audio and MIDI sequencer, scorewriter and musical composition and editing tool. It is intended to be a free and alternative to such applications as Cubase.
Robert M. Love is an American author, speaker, Google engineer, and open source software developer.
Gabe Logan Newell, also known by his nickname Gaben, is an American businessman who is the president of the video game company Valve Corporation.
Audible is an American online audiobook and podcast service that allows users to purchase and stream audiobooks and other forms of spoken word content. This content can be purchased individually or under a subscription model where the user receives "credits" that can be redeemed for content monthly and receive access to a curated on-demand library of content. Audible is the United States' largest audiobook producer and retailer. The service is owned by Audible, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc., headquartered in Newark, New Jersey.
Barrett Harrington Martin is an American drummer and record producer from Washington. He is perhaps best known for his work with the alternative rock bands Screaming Trees and Mad Season. He was also a member of Skin Yard, Tuatara, and Walking Papers, and has performed as a session musician for many artists in a variety of genres. As a producer, he has won one Latin Grammy and has been nominated in two other categories. As an ethnomusicologist, he has produced two albums for the Shipibo Shamans in the Peruvian Amazon Rainforest, and one album for the Neets'ai Gwich'in in the Alaskan Arctic.
The baudline time-frequency browser is a signal analysis tool designed for scientific visualization. It runs on several Unix-like operating systems under the X Window System. Baudline is useful for real-time spectral monitoring, collected signals analysis, generating test signals, making distortion measurements, and playing back audio files.
PulseAudio is a network-capable sound server program distributed via the freedesktop.org project. It runs mainly on Linux, including Windows Subsystem for Linux on Microsoft Windows and Termux on Android; various BSD distributions such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and macOS; as well as Illumos distributions and the Solaris operating system. It serves as a middleware in between applications and hardware and handles raw PCM audio streams.
Linux is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution (distro), which includes the kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses and recommends the name "GNU/Linux" to emphasize the use and importance of GNU software in many distributions, causing some controversy.
Ubuntu Studio is a recognized flavor of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, which is geared to general multimedia production. The original version, based on Ubuntu 7.04, was released on 10 May 2007.
Henry Brian Valentine is an American software executive and casual poker player. He has held positions at large companies including Intel, Microsoft and Amazon.com.
Qtractor is a hard disk recorder and digital audio workstation application for Linux. Qtractor is written in C++ and is based on the Qt framework. Its author is Rui Nuno Capela, who is also responsible for the Qjackctl, Qsynth and Qsampler line of Linux audio software. Qtractor's intention was to provide digital audio workstation software simple enough for the average home user, and yet powerful enough for the professional user.
Harrison Mixbus is a digital audio workstation (DAW) available for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X systems, and Linux operating systems, first released in 2009. It combines a modern DAW model with a traditional analog mixing workflow, incorporating Harrison's analog console modeling. Based on the open-source Ardour DAW, Mixbus is enhanced with proprietary DSP, offering features like analog-modeled EQ, compression, and summing on each channel strip. It also includes mix buses with tone controls and tape saturation, alongside a master bus equipped with a limiter and loudness monitoring tools. Mixbus is based on Ardour, the open-source DAW, but is sold and marketed commercially by Harrison Audio Consoles.
Lennart Poettering is a German software engineer working for Microsoft and the original author of PulseAudio, Avahi and systemd.