[LAU] Re: DAW usability

David Baron d_baron at 012.net.il
Thu Jun 14 09:16:04 EDT 2007


On Thursday 14 June 2007, carmen wrote:
> >  And yes, I must admit I have a small agenda too, against Ardour. I don't
> >  think ardour's user interface is very efficient [1]. Ardour is great,
> > but it
>
> why hasnt ardour been fixed. is it because the GUI is written in C++ with
> GnomeCanvas or something and only 2 people now how its written and theyre
> both too busy to do anything about the TODO list? ive never needed a
> digital tapedeck (when i do, arecord is fine) so i havent used ardour but
> if a usable daw really has millions of these little corner cases in the UI
> design and workflow features (which i believe it does, as using samplitude
> or abletonlive after struggling with ardour or protools will attest), then
> do we really need all the effort spread out between traverso, qtractor,
> ardour, and jokosher?
>
> is ardour significantly better than the others for things like realtime
> recording track-counts? thats mostly a disk thing unless your coding is
> _really_ bad, right? which puts us back into UI space (which is why i'll be
> porting thomas grill's xsample~ to lv2 and writing guis in JS/Lua rather
> than attempting to add to ardour)

I come from Cakewalk Home Studio, Sonar's little sister and much more bang for 
the buck. This interface is good, single screen, no flim-flam. I would love 
to see Tracktion (based on Opensource JUCE) go opensource. (CW upgrades do 
not work in Win98 and my older pro-soundcard dman2044 has no ALSA or newer 
windows support. A discarded en1371  works in both but I do not consider this 
one good enough for quality work. Notwithstanding, I wish to go over to 
Linux, at least for new projects. My MIDI tools work with Wine enough to give 
it a try.)

Opensource is about freedom of choice. I have installed every one of them, 
Ardour, Taverso, Qtrackor, LMMS, etc. Once tried an older Ardour and could 
not figure out how to use it. Rejected a protools freebie for similar 
reasons. I do like integrated MIDI and Cakewalk was the only one in Windows 
that kept MIDI and audio sync'ed correctly, compensates for any latency 
differences, etc. Solid--digitize to audio from a MIDI track--right on. When 
MIDI goes into Ardour, we'll see how well this works.

My pet peave, as I have repeated, is interoperabilty. There will be pieces of 
projects where ardour is the only way to go, others best in traverso, others 
best is smaller jacked pieces. Unfortunately, never the 'twain do meet, not 
in Windows, not in Linux, certainly not between them. If aaf-xml or my 
proposed openDAWS xml could be supported in a variety of software, we would 
all benefit (even those who insist upon competition and selling).



More information about the Linux-audio-user mailing list