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

[Brent Busby]

On Tue, 1 Sep 2009, Patrick Shirkey wrote:

> 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.

Probably the only thing that's confusing to them is the process of 
starting everything up and getting it communicating.  I can't imagine 
that having multiple apps running on the same desktop is that 
confounding to the average Windows user.

Maybe what's needed isn't so much an app with an integrated UI as some 
kind of wrapper that launches everything and offers some sane default 
profiles (which can be saved and edited also)?  It's nothing that 
someone familiar with scripting couldn't do themselves, but maybe that's 
the assumption that's causing trouble -- that all of this is so simple 
to do in a 5-minute bash script that it'd be silly to provide as a 
package?  It might not be silly to some users.  That package could 
depend or recommend others through dependency.  Installing it could 
trigger everything necessary to get up and running for a new user.

These are just suggestions, just in case someone here feels on the verge 
of writing some Live-like program that tries to roll all of the common 
tools into one GUI...maybe it's not necessary for some purposes.

Of course, a realtime-enabled kernel should also be part of that 
recommended set of packages that get triggered.  In theory, that's 
already being done by music-oriented distros, but after seeing Ubuntu 
Studio get that so horribly wrong, it can't be taken for granted.  It's 
the other hindrance:  In 2009, realtime is still an issue.  It shouldn't 
be, but it is.  I even have a tendency to want to consider it solved 
myself now that I've got my own system working (someone else's problem 
now for me...buhahaha!), but if you look at the forum posts over the 
years, it's the one subject that keeps coming up.  If it wasn't true, 
talking about latency would be boring, but instead it's almost all LAU 
is about.  People come here and they talk about achieving low 
latency...still.

Give them a out-of-the-box realtime kernel and a GUI launch/interconnect 
manager for their audio apps and they will come...

-- 
+ Brent A. Busby	 + "We've all heard that a million monkeys
+ UNIX Systems Admin	 +  banging on a million typewriters will
+ University of Chicago	 +  eventually reproduce the entire works of
+ Physical Sciences Div. +  Shakespeare.  Now, thanks to the Internet,
+ James Franck Institute +  we know this is not true." -Robert Wilensky