[linux-audio-user] Poor Schmuck...

[Brett McCoy]

Jan Depner wrote:

>     One of the comments was pretty nice too - "Just getting your instant
> messager to notify you of a message while you are playing music from
> XMMS".  Are we interested in doing serious recording here or are we just
> wanking around on the box?  Pick one.

I don't know about other people doing serious audio work using Jack, 
Ardour, etc., but I'm not using instant messenger and Skye or RealPlayer 
at the same time I am tracking or mixing (in fact, my DAW is, in normal 
usage, not even connected to a network) ... and I assume someone 
seriously using ProTools or Nuendo also isn't worried about this issue 
either... their audio workstation does one thing and one thing only -- 
it is used to record and mix high-end audio, it's not used for 
'desktoppy' stuff like instant messenger, web surfing, etc.  ESD and 
similar are more appropriate for that kind of environment.  I wanted to 
ask this guy if he ever ran a Windows DAW right out of the box without 
any tuning, reconfiguration, etc.  The Gimp or Firefox might run just 
fine for a beginning user... but high-end audio production on any 
platform isn't something for beginners to just 'pick up' by going click 
click click.

Now, I know it's not fair to tell people to use stuff like Ardour and 
Jack on a machine dedicated to that purpose alone: not everyone can 
afford multiple machines.  When I used to use Windows & Cakewalk stuff, 
it was no big deal to use multiple hardware profiles for audio 
processing versus regular desktop stuff (you still had to tune your 
machine to optimise it's use for audio production, Windows didn't do 
well either right out of the box)... and if you are using Linux for 
serious audio production, you need to adopt a similar philosophy... if 
you want to use high-end audio on a Linux machine, you can't use it 
simultaneously as a desktop/enduser machine, you need to keep the two 
separate with different accounts/profiles/hardware configurations (have 
one login for playing MP3s/web surfing/word processing, another for 
audio stuff with Ardour/Jack/LADSPA).

meh, enough rantng....

Everyone have a good weekend.

-- Brett
-- 
Programmer by Day, Guitarist by Night
http://www.chapelperilous.net
http://www.alhazred.com
http://www.revelmoon.com