[linux-audio-user] Linux DAW FX box how to for noobs...New Link...

[Eric Dantan Rzewnicki]

On Tue, Sep 14, 2004 at 10:29:03AM +0100, tim hall wrote:
> Last Monday 13 September 2004 20:20, R Parker was like:
> Having just started to get my head round Ardour, I can understand exactly why 
> anyone would choose it over Jack-Rack. J-R can be a bit of a resource hog and 
> I find the interface bewildering. That's not a dis on Bob's excellent work, 
> rather an affirmation of what a fine tool Ardour is. We all have different 
> needs, I have personally found multitracking apps to be excellent LADSPA 
> hosts, ecasound does equally well in a profoundly less intuitive manner. ;)

Less intuitive?!?! that can only possibly be the case if your preferred
GUI is not your favorite text editor. >:-)

But, seriously, I was going to suggest ecasound earlier in this thread
as a less CPU intensive alternative to Jack-Rack. (Based soley on my
assumption that if you aren't drawing a GUI you have more cycles for
DSP. I have never actually used Jack-Rack so I may be out of line.) 

I have very little experience in the old world of hardware audio mixers 
and such. Because of that the whole mixer strip paradigm ardour uses 
doesn't  really help me understand how audio passes through a system. 
Also, for most of my work I am purposely avoiding visual representations
of sound. I'm really trying to learn to hear the actual sound, rather 
than see it represented. I want to avoid working on how the sound looks
rather than working on how the sound sounds.

Don't get me wrong, I will eventually use ardour for some projects. I'm
sure I'll love it for laying out more structured compositions,
especially once it has midi and OSC sequencing support in a couple 
years. There will be times when I want to work from a visual layout. 
But, I want to first spend significant time working without any kind of 
waveform display -- just listening. For this alone, I think ecsound's
approach has merit, at least for me. 

I'm not sure that it is really true that ecasound's textual syntax is 
less intuitive than a complex GUI like ardour's. Of course we all have
different minds that all work differently. But, I think the dominance of
GUI-ness mouse-clickiness in the commercial software world of 
xerox-apple-microsoft and the free software world of gnome-kde is at 
least in part a false supremacy. Though it may be the way the majority 
of computer users have been shepherded into thinking of what it is to 
interact with a computer, I don't think that is necessarily because the 
GUI+mouse paradigm is the best or even the most natural. At least not
for everyone.

Anyway ... I've gotten off on a bit of rant that I didn't intend. 

-Eric Rz.

PS apologies if the above is incoherent. I got woken up at 2:22 EDT with
a DNS problem at work and haven't been back to bed yet. -edrz