[linux-audio-user] Re: [linux-audio-dev] music engine

[Albert Graef]

carmen wrote:
>>Freewheeling is *so* unlike Live its hard to even link the two. Just for
>>a start, Live is organized around a timeline, Freewheeling is not.
> 
> Live does have a freewheeling mode.where you can basically turn on and off loops and fx, McMusic style. you can record the actions in this mode, and view them on the timeline..

Yes, and don't forget the session interface organized like a spreadsheet 
(rows = scenes, columns = instruments, cells = MIDI or audio clips) 
which works just great both for live improvisation and experimental 
compositional work. Might also be neat to have something like this as a 
frontend for SuperCollider, where the clips may be snippets of SC code 
to be executed...

BTW, regarding the original question: SuperCollider might well be the 
realtime audio engine you're looking for, it's programmable and 
extensible (via plugins) and thus very versatile. And it's controlled 
via OSC. Of course you'll have to add the necessary plugins to do the 
time stretching/pitch shifting stuff... ;-)

Anyway, having something like Ableton Live on Linux would be a great 
boon, it's the one single program that I still run Windows for. But IMHO 
recreating that from scratch as open source for Linux is a HUGE project, 
something of the order of Ardour's complexity. It might be a better idea 
to add full MIDI support to Ardour and work on the internal data 
structures so that a session/freewheeling interface could be added to 
it. (If that's even possible, Paul didn't seem to think that the current 
architecture would support this when we discussed this question at last 
year's LAC.)

Albert

-- 
Dr. Albert Gr"af
Dept. of Music-Informatics, University of Mainz, Germany
Email:  Dr.Graef at t-online.de, ag at muwiinfa.geschichte.uni-mainz.de
WWW:    http://www.musikinformatik.uni-mainz.de/ag