[linux-audio-user] Some music made with Linux

[Erik de Castro Lopo]

On Sun, 22 Feb 2004 12:42:31 +0900
Patrick Shirkey <pshirkey at boosthardware.com> wrote:

> Pete Bessman wrote:

> > Fsck that.  They can come help Specimen, which is fully usable now, if
> > not feature rich.  Or they can work on SimSam (simsam.sf.net).  Not to
> > be a polemicist, but I predict this will go the way of Octal
> > (www.gnu.org/software/octal).  Too much planning, too little product.
> > Failing that, when it does reach maturity in a few years, I'll just
> > whore the read-from-disk and network control code from 'em.
> > 
> 
> Nice attitude. While this ethic is understandable it doesn't help 
> progressions very much. Maybe now you've had a couple of days to think 
> rationally about it you have changed your mind anyway.

Sorry Patrick, but I tend to agree with Peter. The projects that 
actually make progress are the ones where one or more people sit down 
and start cutting code with very little planning. That is the same 
for small projects like Peter's Specimen and larger projects like 
JACK, Ardour, ecasound or anything else. 

In the case of JACK, there was a whole bunch of talk on the LAD list 
about how it should be done. Paul contibuted to that, but then went 
away and wrote an implementation. Once there was something that at 
least worked, others joined the effort and Paul is now one of about 
5 or 6 people contributing to it. I strongly believe that without 
Paul's implementation, we would still be discussing it on this list 
and there would be no working code.

Another case in point is libsample:

    http://libsample.sourceforge.net/

I told Dominic Mazzonni (Audacity) that I was working on a sample 
rate converter quite early on and he suggested that I join the 
libsample effort which was also working on doing sample rate 
conversion. I looked at the web page and saw that they had 
the web page, a header file, a mailing list (with zero traffic) 
and some ideas along the lines of "lets use the JOS resample code". 
When I looked the page, the project had already been dormant for 
a number of months. I decided to press ahead with my own efforts 
which resulted in Secret Rabbit Code being released in Nov 2002. 
There has been zero progress on libsample since May of 2002.

In the Free Software world code talks and bullshit walks. Working
code, however simplistic, is worth 1000000 web pages with project 
plans. My guess is that if Pete wanted to take Specimen into more
advanced areas he will get there long before the LinuxSampler 
project and along the way he will have a useful tool that he and 
others enjoy.


Erik
-- 
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  Erik de Castro Lopo  nospam at mega-nerd.com (Yes it's valid)
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Windows NT : An evolutionary dead end.