[linux-audio-dev] rave + rant

[Paul Davis]

i just want to stop for a moment and reflect on the power of the open
source software model. for a long time, a rather glaring defect in
ardour was the inability to record at a higher frame rate (say, 48kHz
or 96kHz) and then easily produce an audio file of the piece at
44.1kHz, the standard for redbook cd audio.

i avoided trying to add the code because i knew that resampling was
complex and had some significant depth to it - i was busy enough with
other things.

then erik comes along with his libsamplerate library, and it took me
less than 15 minutes to add the capability to the backend of ardour
(plus another 45 minutes of work on the GUI to control it).

now, The Unix Way calls for the use of tools like sox to do this work:
small, independent applications that do one thing and do it well. Ok,
that's not exactly a good description of sox, but you get the
point. There is nothing wrong with this model for some purposes,
especially for people who want to play around with many different
possibilities. 

but when rob pike wrote "the unix programming environment", he was
clear (at least to me) that the main strength of The Unix Way was in
providing a really productive environment for *prototyping*. it turns
out that its a really nice environment for getting many kinds of real
work done too, especially for many experimental music folks, and i
wouldn't want to see the end of the toolset that sox is just one
aspect of.

but ... but ... i am just glowing with the way libraries like
libsamplerate and libsndfile provide the same simple "just plug it
together" functionality that the unix shell and all our pipe-connected
utilities do. this time, its not to being offered (directly) to
command line users, but to people writing GUI-based software and thus
ultimately to their users.

it really makes me feel good to be able to turn around and explain to
my disbelieving kids "yes, somebody wrote this really useful software
and they just made it available so that other people could use it.
that made it easy for me to make my software (with which i do the
same) be so much more useful for many people".

thanks to erik, thanks to RMS for the GPL and thanks to everybody on
this list and elsewhere who is making this revolution possible. 

--p