[linux-audio-dev] Developing a music editor/sequencer

Dave Griffiths dave at pawfal.org
Fri Feb 4 15:53:25 UTC 2005


On Wed, 2 Feb 2005 19:49:42 +0000, Chris Cannam wrote
> On Wednesday 02 Feb 2005 19:02, Paul Davis wrote:
> > I continue to think that this crazy.
> 
> So do I.
> 
> The design process at work here reminds me a lot of the way I 
> approached Rosegarden: look at how other applications work and what 
> they do, and then add in a few interesting generalisations to make 
> it more potentially flexible in ways that happen to meet my own 
> preconceptions about how people might use the system, thus resulting 
> in something that looks innovative and interesting to me, and just 
> looks like another sequencer or score editor to everyone else.
> 
> For example, Rosegarden contains structure intended to support 
> things like arbitrary layout engines for editing; multiple different 
> layouts on the same music data; event-based systems that are not 
> MIDI, and so on.  Yet because it has taken so much development work 
> just to do the basic MIDI and audio support that people expect from 
> a sequencer, and because we are so few developers, most of this is 
> still unused.  It would have been far better, for my own personal 
> aims, to have worked on something that was not so obviously a 
> sequencer application and that instead focused on the one or two 
> experimental features I was really interested in and ignored 
> everything else.

That's a really interesting observation, and one that I have experienced to
some extent too. Writing open source software starts out as a need to do
something a bit different, then before you know it you're spending
weeks/months/years getting features that are quite ordinary working, then
working really well. It's still great experience, but if there is existing
software which does all this stuff already - to the outside world this sort of
catch up is a waste of time.

I've lately been playing with lots of utterly wacky sequencing ideas, and yup,
writing some code to do this, but I've found using high level scripting
languages, as many existing applications as possible, as many external
libraries and protocols and really just concentrating on what I'm trying to do
- means I spend much more time making music, and the quantity of code needed
is really quite small. 

cheers,

dave



More information about the Linux-audio-dev mailing list