[LAD] LV2 "isn't well thought out ?" LV2 in the Reaper sequencer

[Paul Davis]

On Tue, 2008-01-22 at 12:25 -0500, Darren Landrum wrote:

> * Ardour looks, behaves, and has almost the exact same feature set as it 
> did two years ago.

Really? I guess I forgot to read all the press releases for a bunch of
commercial apps that are so full of new features. Oh yes, PT 7.4 added
"elastic time". I'll tell you what: after 7 years of hanging around
music tech trade shows, that is the first impressive new feature I've
seen since the debut of Melodyne. Everything I've seen in years from
Cakewalk, Musix and Steinberg has been "tweaking". What new feature does
Sonar have that it didn't have 2 years ago? Free routing abilities?
Gosh, Ardour had those 7 years ago! 

Your criticism of Ardour is not entirely without merit. However, it
ignores a couple of rather important issues. First is the existence of
the 3.0 branch of Ardour, which it appears that you know nothing about.
Second is the fact that I am entirely comfortable (and so are my
commercial sponsors) with the idea that the feature set for a useful DAW
is *well defined*, and that Ardour is asymptotically closing in upon it.
PT (and to a lesser extent Sonar) have moved the goalposts recently with
their incorporation of timestretch/pitchshift technology into the normal
workflow of a DAW (PT have done this *brilliantly*). However, this is
technology that is really only useful to producers of contemporary pop
music. People who want to do the old thing: record people playing
instruments or singing, edit the results a little, maybe overdub a few
times, possibly add a few effects - i.e. the overwhelming majority of
DAW users - don't need or want a rapidly evolving tool. 

>  (Nobody in the commercial world is still using a 
> 32-bit mixing engine, not even Pro-Tools.)

really?

PT never used a floating bit mixing engine to start with, and it still
doesn't today. it uses 56 bit fixed point. there are many very
experienced audio engineers who believe and/or feel very strongly that
PT's mix bus sounds horrible.

meanwhile, thanks to the legacy installs of all those existing apps,
there are millions of people worldwide using 32 bit mixing engines.

oh, I guess you mean *new* versions don't use 32 bit floats? Well sure.
Let me know when you have a URL of a double blind test that shows any
benefits to a double-based mixing engine. We'll change jack_sample_t to
double instead of float, and get back to you in a week.

FWIW, most people think that 32 bit flaoting point mix engines sound
better than PT, and yet PT is still the industry standard. its not clear
that this issue is of any significance other than marketing fluff.

> I came to here from Reaper, hoping to have seen the whole idea of audio 
> production on Linux advance. And it has, to a point, but now you're at a 
> crossroads: Do you want an elite club, or do you want to see the world 
> of Linux audio spread far and wide?

Maybe we just want to see it NOT get caught up wasting time endlessly
impressing people with "new features". Maybe we'd rather focus on making
what is already thought to be the most stable multi-track recorder on
any platform *more* stable, more workflow-efficient and yes,
occasionally, we'll toss in a new feature (*cough*
set-tempo-from-edit-range *cough*) when we get time, amidst trying to
save face from comments by people who don't actually track development
processes.

> Open source doesn't do anybody any good if nobody wants to use it.

Digidesign boasted that in the first month of PT7.4, they had 10k
downloads. They issued press releases about this. It got onto websites,
into trade journals.

Ardour has 15k downloads on OS X alone, every single month. Thats a
crusty X11 version that requires installing an app that Apple seems to
bend over backwards to cripple (it was totally broken when Leopard first
came out - now they seem to have turned it over to an open source
development group, funny that).  There are another 5-6k downloads of the
freakin' *SOURCE CODE*. God knows how many downloads from distribution
repositories.

And yet you show up here saying "its no good if nobody wants to use it".
Pfft.

--p

p.s. of course, it is true that every single one of those PT7.4
downloads put cash into Digi's bank account. If I got just US$1 per
download of Ardour, I'd be paying developers and making every single one
of the Linux Audio Sucks constituency eat crow on a daily basis.