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

[Joe Hartley]

On Wed, 29 Sep 2004 19:09:43 -0700 (PDT)
Greg Reddin <gtreddin at yahoo.com> wrote:

> I'm well-aware of what it's like to work for large software
> companies.  I've been with the same company for 6 yrs now and worked
> on about as many projects.  Not a signle one of those products has
> ever been sold and implemented for a customer.  Most projects have
> been cancelled within a month of completion. 

!!!!  Has management realized software companies actually need to
release something occasionally to make some money?  (That's supposed
to be a joke, but I've seen management kill a software company's 
flagship line of products in favor of the next generation...  which
was still at least a year away from release!)

> To me, it seems the main
> reason for Ardour's development pace is the same as all other open
> source projects.  There's not a level of accountability that says we
> "have" to at least make it appear that something got done in a
> certain timeframe.  Having said that, it's probably not a bad thing,
> and I'll never question the committedness of the developers without
> spending some time contributing myself.

Well, Paul & co. don't have any sort of marketing or sales group
pushing for a release date, so there are no artificial deadlines, so
there's less liklihood of something pushed out as a release to make an
arbitrary release date.

As someone else said, in the development process, the first 90% takes
10% of the time.  For a while, the focus has been on that last 10%,
stomping as many bugs as possible. 

> Now that I've made my voice heard about it, I'm going to bring my
> planet up to date and see if I can get it working again.  I should
> clarify, when I lost work, the loss was recoverable.  I was able to
> import the tracks into audacity and remix them.  The work I lost was
> mixing, which is much more difficult in audacity than in ardour.

I'm surprised that you couldn't continue in Ardour at all, again, I've
never had a project foul up badly enough to bring things to a halt like
that.  There was one time that I had to edit the XML file to remove a
track that couldn't be loaded, but because the sessions are defined
in XML, that was trivial to do.

> With ardour, I have
> trouble determining whether some of my problems are because I don't
> understand how the interface works or because of a bug in the system.
> Sometimes "selecting" something doesn't really select it, or
> "cutting" doesn't really cut.  Is that a problem with my
> understanding or with Ardour?

Maybe a little of both.  It sounds like you might be in the wrong "mode"
to do an operation; I found Ardour much easier to use once I'd grasped the
concept of the object and range modes (which are selected by the buttons
in the upper right of the editor window).  You might also be getting bitten
by the need to have the NumLock key off - many systems have that defined in
a way that conflicts with one of the ALT key definitions used by Ardour,
so that a control-click is interpreted as something else.

The only way I've found some of these things is through the Ardour
user list, either by digging in the archives or posting a question to the
list.  I have confidence that the need for that will diminish a great
deal once the documentation is released!

So maybe Ardour's learning curve is a bit steep at the moment; whether it's
too much of a climb at the moment is a decision each user has to make.

Good luck!

-- 
======================================================================
       Joe Hartley - UNIX/network Consultant - jh at brainiac.com
Without deviation from the norm, "progress" is not possible. - FZappa