[linux-audio-user] Re: prebuilt tools (long!)

[Jonathan Segel]

	i'd like to chime in here, just to give a completely 
different perspective, and the problems i have encountered. this is 
long personal history, feel free to delete (those not on digest!)


	first thing that is majorly different is that i am a 
macintosh user, and have been for some 15 years now. that's not where 
i started in computers, but it is in computers used for music. i have 
always enjoyed the usability and abaility to individually configure 
the platform and, for a long time, felt like the attitude of the 
software makers and users of this platform was in line with my own 
attitudes on computers and music; which is to say: an ideal of 
futurism and creativity, extending from xerox PARC to the 21st 
century.
	of course things changed. apple has become a very strange 
company (and slightly greedy - though now i hear they are below 3% of 
the market share, so maybe i would be too...) and MS windows has 
become ubiquitous as a non-business platform simply by virtue of the 
fact that once so many people were indoctrinated into its use via 
work-related computing it was easier for them to move to a home PC in 
that same realm.
	luckily for me, working in california in music and film 
production, i have been able to stay in the macintosh arena - despite 
what the european music software manufacturers would have us believe, 
most film and cd media manufactured and sold around the world during 
the 1990s was ultimately made, assembled, mixed or produced in its 
entirety in some combination of avid-controlled software running on 
macs.
	i say luckily, because i came to really dislike working in 
any microsoft software: it seems opaque to me, and the organization 
is diffcult. plus it's so obvious that the window interface is a poor 
copy of the macintosh's direct descendent of the dynabook ideal. like 
the start-from-below as opposed to from-above. (plus i like a command 
key under my thumb..)  so it's not about GUI (though i am partial now 
to mac after much accustomization) so much as organization.
	anyway, that's just where MY brain is at. several years ago i 
split the full time entertainment industry for academia and the avant 
garde (back to my roots! although i am still a professional musician 
and tour and record several months out of a year.) so i finally took 
the time to reeducate myself in the computer world, to get beyond 
sequencers and digital-audio workstations. that brought me back to 
synthesis, which for the intervening years--post buchla-and-moog--had 
been rack-mount yamaha or emu items. (although it should be noted 
that when i was working on film sound design i did use maany 
manipualation tools like soundhack or metasynth...)
	my present main arsenal for making music on mac, both for 
studio and live performance, shows: max/msp, supercollider (2 and 3), 
reaktor (see reviews i have written for MIT CMJ) and protools.  as 
well, there are several other apps of course, but less usage on the 
whole. i run mac os X almost exclusively (unless i need to do 
something in supercollider 2). i like OS X. really! sadly, the gui is 
taking more cpu and causing things like max/msp to have timing 
problems! things like this are being ironed out slowly, and with new 
computers, we hope we get the chance to have things work properly. 
more sadly than that, however, is the wholesale abandonment of the 
platform by various manufacturers - clavia's synth patch editor for 
example, has no OS X version, nor is there one planned. so if i need 
to edit patches in the hardware, i need another OS. and RME, well, 
they're just so self righteously anti-macintosh that i feel bad for 
having bought the multiface.

	so... linux. why, you may ask? there are several reason for 
me. one is that i like computers. a lot. it seems like linux users do 
too. another is that the aformentioned "idealistic attitude" of 
futurism, creativity and also cooperativity exists in the linux 
community, where it is becoming lost elsewhere. this attitude, as it 
were, is extremely important to me in choosing what i work with, 
perhaps despite difficulties in doing so. still another reason is 
that i fear the macintosh being put out of business by microsoft (or 
apple shooting themselves in the foot), in which case i want an 
alternative. as for the price, well. that seems less important.  a 
cheap system is cheap, but a good system is still expensive. the 
points about market-driven development of software are well taken - 
if you want to use the same thing as everybody else. i have some itch 
to make my  own patches in modular synths (though i really appreciate 
looking at other people's code/patches to learn how to. great thanks 
to ssm and ams - especially after i found out about the 
/usr/share/ams folder was and what it contained, for example.)

	so i started by converting old ppcs to yellowdog. i 
immediately realized that the makers of the linux desktop gui 
environments were coming from PC backgrounds! almost all remind me of 
windows parodies. and while PD is probably beautiful and powerful, it 
sure is ugly compared to max/msp (sorry if that is offensive to 
anyone). anyway, i moved from there to a debian-ppc system, which i 
liked better, got alsa to work (!) and it made noise so i finally 
bought a pieced together pentium system and installed planet-ccrma. 
easy install, difficult to make it work with its built in sound chip 
- still haven't made sound without digital clicks (the final problem: 
can't change the IRQ of the VIA82xx snd card from it's position where 
it lives with a usb hci and eth0 -- is this really information that a 
studio user/musician needs to be aware of...?*), but at least i am 
now much more familiar with what's available and what applications i 
will use. next time i have several hours, i'm going to reread the 
archives of this list to figure out how to reconfigure my system for 
the rme multiface. -anybody write up the final how-to?

(to the above list i should mention that i burned a july '03 iso of 
knoppix-ppc to check on my powerbook and it's really good! very 
impressive interface and immediate hardware and file system 
accessibility. very nice. still having a hard time with getting the 
ccrma-redhat networked to see the hfs+ files..)

	so, i can see that the massive amounts of configuration 
needed to make a linux system work in a studio environment will be 
daunting to most users. i don't think anybody in *my* immediate 
working environment (band, studio, college) would be able to do it**. 
that combined with learning the new structure of the file system 
(where is this app? where are its libraries? where are the 
files/patches for it kept? how do i make it work?) make it a daunting 
task for any lay user of the more popular windows/mac 
softsynths/sequencers etc. to navigate. i really don't see how this 
could be made any easier immediately. the result is that it is going 
to take determined individuals to use the audio applications for the 
time being. but this means people that actually care enough to use 
them and help out other to do so as well! and hopefully that attitude 
will gather more users, but the people on the inside have got to 
realize how far they are from the people on the outside in terms of 
familiarity with the system in general. even i take some of these 
things for granted, once they are learned. zero-conf is probably the 
only way to get the masses to do anything!

anyway, so here you have another perspective of somebody burrowing 
into linux audio from another route. thanks for reading and 
considering another's perspective.

-jonathan



*this is rhetorical of course, but...
** when i mentioned that i had a linux computer at home in my studio, 
a student asked me "isn't that only black and white?" so you can 
guess where the general populace is at.. of course, this is the same 
state that keepes electing actors to be politicians, so on the whole 
we ain't that smart.
-- 
_________________________________________________________________
Jonathan Segel  -- MAGNETIC -- PO Box 460816 S.F. CA. 94146-0816
               4014 Brookdale Ave. Oakland, CA 94619
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