[linux-audio-user] DAW Dillema -- Seeking Advice

[Peter Lutek]

thanks for your thoughts, greg!

i am in a very similar position to you, and agree with most of what you
have to say. irrespective of ardour's current status, it IS a shame that
there is not at least one other viable professional
multitracking/editing package nearing completion. 

as for ardour itself, i HAVE seen quite substantial leaps in its
stability and usefulness over the last 6 months, (and my current machine
-- only a pIII at 500 MHz) demands efficient and well-written software.
i CAN get things done with it now. HOWEVER, there have been a few
disasters, and, as you point out, when things are not rock-solid, it IS
very hard to really put your trust in it enough to use it in "prime
time". i still have hope that ardour will get sorted out, but i suspect
i will have to throw better hardware at it to make it really happy.

that brings me to the question of options -- even if ardour was fully
reliable, there are things about how it operates which would make me
want to look for alternatives. the only one i have found with real
potential is protux. it is a beautiful and thoroughly alternative
concept, but still in its infancy. currently, the developers are in the
process of building the primitives of which it will, finally, be
constituted. it does a few things, but is not useful yet and is not
scheduled to reach v1 until 2006. http://www.nongnu.org/protux/

as far as i can see, there is still nothing which offers a "three-point"
editing solution, advanced dithering, and impulse response convolution
reverb (three features which are important to me in particular).

having said all that, if one adopts a different working methodology
linux may, even now, offer a more flexible overall solution. there are
numerous, varied, tools available, with various strengths, weaknesses,
and styles. i've begun to come around to the idea of using a variety of
tools in any given project, rather than expecting any single, big
application to be the "virtual studio" which does it all. think more in
terms of the OS as the virtual studio. 

one package which i must not leave unnamed is bill schottstaedt's SND.
it is an extremely rich and robust tool which CAN do just about
everything i'm looking for. HOWEVER (and so far i have not come to terms
with this) it is a destructive editor -- sounds are loaded into RAM,
worked on, and then saved in their modified form back to disk. it is
near-impossible to step back and tweak an EQ you adjusted a few days ago
on a particular component of your mix. but still, take a look if you're
not familiar with it. http://ccrma.stanford.edu/software/snd/

another one that's very much worth investigating, especially if you are
into some coding (just to provide a friendlier UI if you need it) is
ecasound. it is deeper than a lot of people realize.

well, my response has been almost as long as your question.... i look
forward to others' thoughts!

best-
-p