[LAD] aBLETON lINK

Patrick Shirkey pshirkey at boosthardware.com
Fri Sep 23 11:00:08 UTC 2016


> On Thu, 2016-09-22 at 19:58 +0200, Robin Gareus wrote:
>> That's pretty cool IMHO and I wish more companies would do that!
>>
>> Also coming up with a protocol is the easier part. Documenting it,
>> pushing it out to users, gaining traction in the industry etc is the
>> hard part.
>
> I agree with this. This thread has been a little bit agressive and I
> don't really understand why.
>
> From my point of view, integration with AL will probably have
> interesting side effects among all musical applications. Imagine
> jam/performance sessions with musicians combining many different DAWs
> and loopers running on multiple platforms.
>
> The whole point of such a protocol as they've developed it is to
> increase creativity and to open up possibilities for collaboration and
> new musical ideas. Isn't that one of the reasons we like to hangout on
> mailing lists like this one?
>

Some us us disagree that this IS the "whole point" of Link.

IMO anyone who doesn't know about JACK and claims to be a professional
audio developer has dubious credentials. In addition there are other
existing API's as Tito has explained that predate Link.

Given the fractured history that Ableton has with Open Source development
and Linux support it should not come as a surprise to anyone on this list
that there is some disagreement over the validity of their release process
/ marketing campaign.

I suppose that their marketing department has decided that Linux
Developers/Users don't represent a big enough share of the market to
justify committing more resources to the platform.

However JACK also runs on the other two main platforms so what is their
rational behind completely ignoring it altogether while committing
resources to creating a competing API?

Keep in mind that they have explicitly stated that Ableton Live will NEVER
run on Linux. It seems a bit hypocritical to me that highly regarded
people from this community are proposing to add support for the new
protocol and at the same time questioning why there is (still) antagonism
towards Ableton.

Other proprietary companies have no problems releasing their software to
run on Linux. For example Flame (Autodesk) runs perfectly fine on Linux as
does Vmware, Oracle, etc...  Even the Tesla cars are running Linux for
their multimedia systems.  Steam has their own Linux Distribution. It's
not like it there is no precedence for Ableton to release a binary only
Linux port.  More so if they genuinely want Linux Audio Developers to
support their profit margins and integrate our software/platform with
their product(s) at our expense/time/resources.

Of course everyone is free to do what they want but don't try to pretend
that it's a shock that some of us are not enthused about this new product.
That comes across as lack of insight or outright BS.



-- 
Patrick Shirkey
Boost Hardware Ltd



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