19 Jun
2005
19 Jun
'05
4:09 a.m.
On Sun, 19 Jun 2005 01:57:27 +0200, fons adriaensen
<fons.adriaensen(a)skynet.be> wrote:
A number of issues have been mixed up in this debate:
1. 'cheap' vs. 'pro' audio cards.
I do agree there is a large category in between, usually named
'prosumer', and that these are used by 'professional' (as defined
below) people.
As a profesional by anybodies standard , a few observations.
Setting up a studio with jack and a well supported mutlichannel soundcard
is at the moment easier than configuring a multimedia desktop. It is not a
big effort, especially compared to the amount of time it takes to attach
up your hardware mixer, figuring out the perfect placement of the
monitors, the room accoustics, etc. etc.
Any problems with proaudio on linux are very minor compared to the problem
of proper grounding a studio to avoid ground-loops.
The fact is that it is not just the audio part that makes setting up a
multimedia desktop
hard on linux. Getting your browser to support all the media types,
choosing between a zillion players and codecs, proprietary plugins lagging
behind their Windows or OSX counterparts etc.etc. And here is where the
distributions should get their act together.
Less choice, better configurations.
Now given the two following options:
A. Extend Jack to accomodate all the diverse needs of the
desktop developers, and request them to use it for all
applications,
B. Provide a layer on top of both Jack and ALSA (as for
example the jackified artsd), and recommend that for
desktop apps,
then for me it's clear that I would prefer B. It would
provide a solution for at least three types of users:
- desktop audio only: run the server on top of ALSA and
don't bother with Jack.
- audio production workstation (no 'desktop entertainment'):
just run Jack as we already do.
- those in between: run the server on top of Jack.
Exactly.
That is what I do. In the studio I run jack. In the office just KDE with
artsd on alsa.
No problems.
And since when is switching the audio engine to change from reading your
email to doing your audio editing a big issue?
Prior to osX that is what you would do on the mac. There are a lot of
studios still using os9 hardware with ProTools.
Gerard