[LAD] [LAU] Linux Audio 2012: Is Linux Audio moving forward?

[Nils Gey]

There are good things as well.

For music notation Linux is at least equal to any other system except the handwriting of a 19th century professional.

For the advanced stuff and music that is really meant to be published as print product there is of course Lilypond which still beats all other products in quality, the only category that matters here.

And for the consumer and amateur market there is Musescore.

Both those programs absolutely suck at playback functionality compared to a typical midi sequencer with a piano roll editor. Windows world has Notion, which seems to be made by educated and intelligent people, because that is how their program is desinged and presented.
With Laborejo I am working on a program for exactly that usecase, creating great playback through notation, without the need for a piano roll sequencer. Except I base it on Lilypond and they don't, so in terms of printout-quality the match is already won here for the open source side.

As you may know from other messages here and my blog www.nilsgey.de a "great Playback" also requires good sound creating programs such as Samples, Synthesizers or Physical Modelling, which are drastically underrepresented in the Linux Audio World and the best option is still to slave a win/osx machine or to rely on Wine/VST, unsupported and unstable as it is, unable to load the newest copy protection years after their release or never. 

I see this as a pattern: Nearly all of us work on host programms and connection tools. Obviously this it the right choice because who needs the best synth when you can't play it? Could it be that we are so far behind that our brightest and most creative minds still have to concentrate on the underlying general purpose tools instead on specialized short-term software? (such as synths and samplers. These follow a trend and are still driven by technological innovation, so each orchestral lib really sounds better than another one two years earlier)

Nils