[linux-audio-dev] Re: image problem [was Re: [Alsa-devel] help for a levelmeter]

Paul Davis paul at linuxaudiosystems.com
Tue Oct 22 18:29:01 UTC 2002


>Then explain it this way, and do not contradict yourself by initially
>saying Jack will never replace other sound daemons, and then mention

yes, i think i wrote contradictory things. i sometimes do that. my
original point was that JACK was not *intended* to replace other sound
daemons. its design, its development process, its performance
characteristics, its capabilities: all these were done with no
attention paid to its suitability as a general purpose server. if it
turns out to be useful for that, great. if not, its not a failure on
our part.

>electronic and acoustic sound sources," so obviously you have no idea
>what RTcmix is. Sure, it did not have a fancy gui (although that just

i do know what RTcmix is. i've used it. its a really cool program. its
not the sort of thing i would use for RTP. if you do, thats great, but
most of the people who are buying software for RTP are also not
looking for software like RTcmix.

>LADSPA plugin out there... Yet you say it's no good for commercial
>market... Hmmm...

csound is massively more capable of generating interesting sounds and
music than reaktor and unity-ds1 put together. yet which one is "good
for the commercial market"? a lot of good work has gone into making
csound more useful to people without a background in assembler/fortran
programming, and the core program continues to be extremely
capable. that doesn't make it a good tool for "the commercial market".

>If you knew anything about the market, then you'd realize that as many
>SOPME/RTP studios there are in the world, they don't stack up to the
>amount of money educational institutions spend on building their
>electronic music studios, and this is where apps like RTcmix are an
>equal concern as Protools (even the university this list is hosted on

i defined my market as the SOPME/RTP world. if you want to point out
that educational institutions are a bigger financial pie, thats
great. the problem is that their needs and goals don't align with
those of the SOPME/RTP world all that much. there are several computer
music and audio technology departments and institutions around the
country that do amazing work, both from a software and a musical
perspective, but just like the stuff that emerges from computer
science departments, very little of it ever sees the light of day in
the rest of the world without a serious mangling, if not a complete
rewrite. its an interesting market, full of a lot of smart and good
people. so smart, in fact, that they have really smart people like
fernando around who can not only compile and install ardour (as well
as send patches), but also build the whole of planet ccrma in his
copious spare time. such institutions might have reasons to send some
grant money toward the LAD community, but they have lots of reasons to
save money when they can, and they can save a lot by using their own
inhouse expertise when it comes to free software. "hmm, we can spend
US$8K on this ardour-based prebuilt DAW, or fernando can put on one of
our stock audio-configured intel PC's and we pay nothing?"

>of the INDIVIDUAL University studios in the US spend over $100,000/year
>for the new equipment/software. How much do the SOPME/RTP spend once
>they equip it for the first time?

>> i never said that not supporting JACK makes something a toy. i noted
>> that most of the audio applications for linux are (1) written to use
>> OSS and (2) are toys. there are thousands of links to such programs on
>> dave's pages. the toys are fun, and often very useful. however, they
>> are not viable candidates to act as the basis of SOPME/RTP for most
>> people.
>
>But are commonly used in educational institutions for professional music
>making purposes. 

if you stick with the first clause of that sentence, i agree with
you. but the second part: i have *never* seen anything but
commemorative recordings of music that were made within education
institutions. professional music making is done outside of such
institutions, fostered by the education and research that is performed
inside of them. the musical pieces that do emerge from the media lab,
from ccrma and other places flutter briefly in the thin air of
academic music appreciation, and then vanish back into the ether from
which they came. meanwhile, hundreds of small studios around the
country are recording jazz, country, blues, pop, rock, mesopotamian,
carnatic, electronic, opera ... some of which will end up being sold
to pay someone's salary. and a few times a week, some large halls and
many more smaller ones will echo (sorry, reverberate) with the sounds
of orchestras and smaller ensembles keeping alive the "serious" music
of the past and the present. occasionally someone will use a computer
in some capacity at one of these concerts, and occasionally what they
do with might end up resulting in some kind of financial exchange that
underlies "professional music making".

>> why don't you just spend $US60 on a decent audio interface that
>> supports hardware multiopen, and stop looking for software solutions?
>> the trident cards are nice, simple, reliable and cheap. 32 hardware
>> stereo streams.
>
>Because most people who perform their music on concert venues DO NOT
>WANT TO LUG ARROUND A TOWER, but rather have a laptop!!! Give me one

ah, so that's a new constraint. 

>laptop that does multiple opens in Alsa RELIABLY (Maestro 3i does two
>streams and hiccups on third and is not being used in newer laptops any

did you try this under windows or macos yet? did you find any laptop
that has a half-decent audio interface available? why do you think
digigram and now rme and others are making the devices they are? my
experience of motherboard-mounted audio interfaces is that they are
universally utter crap.
 
>more anyhow, even the all-cherished RME Hammerfall DSP on which I spent
>way much more than $60 does not do multiple opens (heck it does not work
>at all for me, and from what I've seen for many others, in Linux) even

i don't have a laptop. i have tried to report to the best of my
ability what we have learned about how to get the cardbus interface
working (its there in the link from the ALSA card matrix). what needs
changing has nothing to do with the driver, but is instead related to
the kernel, the cardbus mgr software and the BIOS. one of the perils
of the free software world is that its hard to find a direction to
point one's finger in blame. this is definitely one of those
instances. it is clear that the driver works (bar the warm reboot
issue - even RME have no idea about that whatsoever), but its
definitely not clear what has to be done to get the kernel's
pci/cardbus/hotplug system to work smoothly with it.

>though it clearly stores audio into the memory buffer which could be
>easily hacked to do downmixing of outgoing streams, yet it is not me who
>has rights to the RME driver changing/updating, is it?)

you're welcome to send patches. i don't have any CVS write access to
alsa either, btw.

the rme driver doesn't support software mixing only to the extent that
alsa doesn't support software mixing. no alsa driver supports software
mixing more or less than any other. software mixing doesn't fit into
the alsa driver architecture in any way. people ("us") looked at the
windows kernel mixer that people love for its transparent mixing of
streams and noticed how much cakewalk, motu, steinberg and others
hated it and lobbied microsoft to change it. they did, and those
companies love the result, which is, suprise suprise, rather like
ASIO and JACK in its "callback/interrupt-driven" design. those drivers
don't support software multi-open unless someone writes with that in
mind and creates "subdevices". its been the policy of ALSA not to do
that unless it reflects a true hardware capability. some cards have
multiple subdevices, but alsa never claims that a 10 channel card is
really 5 stereo devices. you can use it as a stereo card, and that
will permit multi-open, but this functionality is not part of the low
level driver in any way - its all in alsa-lib and the infamous
.asoundrc file.

>On one hand you complain how your life is tough, but when people propose

i wasn't complaining. my life is great. its also full. 

--p



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