[linux-audio-dev] Anyone planned a GTK2-based Multitracker?

[Chris Cannam]

Seems I missed a brief, pointless flamewar here.  I've no interest in 
re-lighting it, but I might as well reply to a couple of the concrete 
points about Rosegarden, just for completeness.  Don't anyone feel 
obliged to reply to this, please.

On Saturday 10 Apr 2004 12:22 pm, Tim Orford wrote:
> For me personally,
> Rosegarden is based on a simplistic outdated user interface model

Rosegarden is a pretty traditional program, and deliberately so.  Some 
of the internals are capable of some damned clever stuff but the 
focus in the GUI has always been to do a sensible range of basic, 
useful stuff in a competent and comprehensible way rather than to do 
any one thing spectacularly well.  My apologies if that bores you, 
but an application is only a tool after all -- exactly the same 
description would apply to something like MusE, Ardour, Audacity etc.

Still, I've no problem with people insisting that Rosegarden is 
unsuitable for them because they want an application with a more 
particular focus than it has, rather than necessarily because of any 
features it lacks.  Looks like I disagree with Richard there.

> uses the wrong toolkit and wrong language, has spent too long on
> score editing, and only has audio as an afterthought.

These are criticisms of the development of the software, rather than 
of the software.  None of those decisions is in itself relevant to a 
user, only the visible results of those decisions.

Of course this is a developer's list, discussing software whose source 
is available, so that sort of criticism is expected and reasonable, 
especially in the context of whether one should help out in 
developing a program or not.  But consider how absurd it would sound 
to criticise (say) Logic on the basis of the language and GUI toolkit 
chosen to implement it.  Why care?

I'm inclined to think that any time you look at a program and say 
"well, it's a promising program but it's using the wrong language and 
toolkit" you're probably just making a mistake in self-perception: 
you think you're criticising one thing (the program), when in fact 
you are only thinking about another (how you would have written the 
program).

> Whenever i
> tried it i was plagued with segfaults.

Now that's where we like bug reports.

> There is no method listed on
> the webpage to submit feedback to you without a subscription.

You can post to rosegarden-devel and rosegarden-user without 
subscription, although your posts will go through a moderator to 
avoid spam, or you can enter bugs on the SourceForge tracker, which 
we use very actively.  (The latter is probably not made obvious 
enough on the Rosegarden page.)  It's all public; we don't encourage 
anyone to submit bug reports privately.

> In addition, the main developer is regularly impolite

Rosegarden has no main developer.  It's had the same three core 
developers for some years now, plus a handful of other developers 
with CVS commit access, several active translators, and a body of 
users whose views are taken very much into account.  It's closer to 
democratic than most Linux audio apps.  Whether that's a good thing 
is of course also open to question.


Chris