[LAD] Interoperability between session management systems

[Johannes Kroll]

On Sat, 23 Feb 2013 19:15:16 -0800
"J. Liles" <malnourite at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> I'm not starting a war. Many of the other SM protocols were designed with
> full knowledge of their limitations and compromises (that is to say, the
> authors don't believe they are the best solution by any means, just a
> workable one). In fact, the differences between the different SM protocols
> are great, and in the case of NSM even greater. Drobilla, with mention of
> shell scripts, was speaking only of a session disk format that could used
> to port existing sessions from one SM to another. 

OK, that makes sense. Porting existing sessions would be a good first
step, but still, it sounds cumbersome. I'm not sure if it would be much
easier than starting the apps by hand.


>If we add NSM support to
> LADISH, that will be exactly what you desire. One SM front end that
> supports every extant protocol. However, I believe this will hardly make
> the situation any easier on the *user* than it is now (and since when are
> people happy with LASH etc?). LASH, jack-session and LADISH Level 1 are
> extremely limited, and, IMHO inadequate protocols. 

In what way? I don't know much about LASH and LADISH, but I'm looking
at the jack-session api docs [1] right now. From what I can see, it
does everything it needs to do. There is also a GUI available in
qjackctl which I use anyway. I think that I, as a user, would be happy
with jack-session, if only my favourite apps would support it!


>Continuing support for
> them does nothing to enhance the user experience. And it isn't as if we're
> talking about 100s of client applications here, there are only a handful
> that support any kind of SM protocol period. I may have the desire to patch
> everything to support NSM, but what I do not have is the time (and the time
> I might spend adding NSM support to LADISH might better be spent converting
> jack-session and LASH clients over to NSM). In any case, patching will do
> far more good than talking!

True, but patching to what? NSM? I like NSM but I'm not convinced that
it is "the best" possible SM. Others may think similar. Some people may
still want to support jack-session, simply because they think it is the
way to go, even if you think it is inadequate or obsolete. 

You won't win everyone over to use NSM. Or *any* particular SM, for that
matter. It's cat herding. For this reason, I still think an
interoperability layer would be a good thing. If it is technically
feasible I'm not sure.

[1]
http://jackaudio.org/files/docs/html/group__SessionClientFunctions.html