[LAU] Some thoughts on making electronic music

[Simon Wise]

alex stone wrote:
> I'd also add that quite a few of my fellow orchestral colleagues use a
> second midi keyboard, as do i, as a control/keystroke device. Having
> the ability to assign CC midi as keystroke action is a real added
> bonus. I've only seen this once in a Linux Audio related app, and that
> was Livemix. (Please correct me if there are others, that i haven't
> encountered, or been unaware of this capability within existing apps)

I guess a lot of the effort put into workflow in linux audio is focussed 
on studio recording/mixing or assembling custom live performance tools 
rather than editing or setting things up. Ardour now has a quite 
flexible and quick method of binding midi to app controls, but it is 
best with a reasonably recent version and you do need to dig around a 
bit to find out that it even exists, let alone which keystrokes to use. 
It is quite new and understandably getting it working has been more 
important to the developers than documenting it, but I'd guess that 
anyone who offered to write good documentation would be very welcome.

Like most efficient shortcut systems you won't stumble across them by 
just bashing away - what is efficient and ergonomic is probably not the 
most obvious and find-able method. That is one of the reasons that the 
point-and-click interfaces, while wildly inefficient, are so widely 
used. Often a potential user will open an app, poke around for a while, 
open a menu or two, click on the icons that they can see. If they can't 
get it going that way they often drop it as too obscure, too hard to 
use. Lots of users choose their tools based on a pretty screen and an 
easily discoverable mouse-menu interface, and those interfaces take a 
lot of work to build. By contrast the initial learning curve for Blender 
is very steep, you are very likely to get frustrated and give up if you 
just bash away hoping to get something happening. Lots of users won't 
touch command line tools at all - looking at an empty terminal window 
can be daunting at first and it takes quite a lot of practice before a 
new user has learnt enough of the vocabulary to be efficient.

It is a big choice for a developer - spend big efforts in making an 
attractive and immediately usable point-and-click gui or expect 
potential users to climb a steeper learning curve before they can start 
making music, and focus instead on making an efficient text/keyboard 
interface? An app with a steep learning curve needs a very keen, vocal 
and enthusiastic user base prepared to offer lots of support to new users.


Simon