[linux-audio-dev] Re: What Parts of Linux Audio Simply Work Great?

[Christoph Eckert]

Hi,


> personally, if i knew it would help, i wouldn't mind
> spending time patching existing apps and submitting patches
> to their coders, if it brought everyone into a 'common
> base' that could be further exploited to put linux audio in
> a better state.

much appreciated. You're welcome :) . But first of all we need 
the "big picture".

[...]

> all it takes is for us to make a concerted effort at
> solving the situation, get *one* distro leader to get
> behind the effort and add our solution to their next
> release, and it'll snowball from there.

Forget it. The distros put packages together (that's their 
first job) and create installers and configuration GUIs. They 
do not help improving packages.
We "simply" need to do the job - independent from any distro.

It's like DMIX. It would have been easy to include it some 
time ago but they didn't. Now DMIX is part of ALSA per 
default and they say "Buy me I have now softwaremixing 
included". As if Mandriva or any other had written it...

[...]

> i think the hard work done by the core linux audio
> developers is far, far, far, under-appreciated for the
> advances made; certainly Jack and Ardour and co., are a
> formidable base to work from.

Jep.

> but the fact is: it -is- a mess.

Jep. But as told by another participiant, the mess is mainly 
valid for the Multimedia/Consumer desktop. Audio for the 
active musician is relatively simple. Install JACK, qjackctl 
and the desired apps and you're done. And desktop audio is a 
thing which has a minor priority for most of us. BUt I'd like 
to see that even consumers can benefit from the worthy work 
already done.

[...]

> yeah, and to be fair, i honestly don't think that distro's
> are the arena to solve this problem, yet.  distro's simply
> package whats there, get it working for their architecture
> ideology, and leave it at that.

Jep.

> its the coders who do the actual hard work who will have to
> start this effort.

[...]

> honestly, i don't think this is a distro problem, i think
> its a "Linux Audio Software Developers" problem, and as a
> group we ought to present the ideal solution, and convince
> the distro vendors to adopt it, because it works.

Ithink that there will be no much active help from members of 
this community. Most people here are interested in software 
synthesis or similar digital audio work...

[...]

> its too confusing, as it stands right now.  we need a big,
> overall picture of the scene:

...but this community is the right place to collect ideas and 
hopefully to design the big picture. If this community is not 
able to do it, noone will do it.

[...]

> i think this dicussion has borne a lot of fruit,
> personally.  we ought to build this 'big Audio App chart',
> though, to give us a better view of the current scene.

I guess that most people here do not want to spend time doing 
this work, and that's OK. Someone needs to do this work, and 
ask questions in this forum. That's all.

[...]


Best regards


    ce