[LAU] off topic (was: Re: ableton live in vmware)

[Patrick Shirkey]

On 09/01/2009 10:44 AM, Paul Davis wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 6:23 PM, Rui Nuno Capela<rncbc at rncbc.org>  wrote:
>    
>> on my own confession, during lac2007 presentation, making a live clone
>> was indeed my initial goal for qtractor. it still is, as much of a
>> foundation it can be.
>>      
> it might be worth you knowing that the heart of live is realtime
> granular (re)synthesis, all the time, everywhere (or at least it was a
> while ago). i suspect that you cannot do what live does without this
> as the basic model of audio output. i could be wrong.
>    


This is interesting info but imo the question is whether it is necessary 
to completely emulate the AL system in order to enable AL like live 
performance or is it more a case of taking their ui model and 
integrating it with our existing apps to provide a similar experience 
that AL users can easily grok? One of the things that AL users are 
attached to is the ability to quickly get up and running.  I think we 
have a lot of that ground covered already but from a n00b pov it's a 
daunting task to get started with a pure jack'ed setup using multiple 
apps each designed for a specific purpose.  Mostly because they have 
been taught a unified approach from using the dominant monolithic 
products like AL, Pro Tools, Logic etc.

I feel that cleanly integrating a sampler interface with existing apps 
will provide a competitive Linux based solution.

However this raises the question of is the jack system flexible enough 
to allow one app to control multiple apps asyncronously. Should a 
controller app be pure midi/osc based and bypass jack completely so that 
all integrated apps are just receiving trigger commands and dealing with 
playback through jack independantly? This would still allow for jack 
transport control and sync when required.

I guess the time stretching functionality of AL is built on the 
synthesis engine but does it have a trade off for cpu cycles? In my 
experience AL is incredibly stable. It would be interesting to know how 
many people use the time stretching functionality in AL and if they 
apply it across the board or just to sample based loops.

Is there another way to enable the time stretching on the fly?

BTW, Rui I will try to find some time to get an overview of qtractor 
codebase as some of the work I intend to do for hydrogen may also apply 
there since both apps are using qt4.




Cheers.


Patrick Shirkey
Boost Hardware Ltd