Re: [LAD] LV2 "isn't well thought out ?" LV2 in the Reaper sequencer

On Tue, 2008-01-22 at 12:25 -0500, Darren Landrum wrote: Really? I guess I forgot to read all the press releases for a bunch of commercial apps that are so full of new features. Oh yes, PT 7.4 added "elastic time". I'll tell you what: after 7 years of hanging around music tech trade shows, that is the first impressive new feature I've seen since the debut of Melodyne. Everything I've seen in years from Cakewalk, Musix and Steinberg has been "tweaking". What new feature does Sonar have that it didn't have 2 years ago? Free routing abilities? Gosh, Ardour had those 7 years ago! Your criticism of Ardour is not entirely without merit. However, it ignores a couple of rather important issues. First is the existence of the 3.0 branch of Ardour, which it appears that you know nothing about. Second is the fact that I am entirely comfortable (and so are my commercial sponsors) with the idea that the feature set for a useful DAW is *well defined*, and that Ardour is asymptotically closing in upon it. PT (and to a lesser extent Sonar) have moved the goalposts recently with their incorporation of timestretch/pitchshift technology into the normal workflow of a DAW (PT have done this *brilliantly*). However, this is technology that is really only useful to producers of contemporary pop music. People who want to do the old thing: record people playing instruments or singing, edit the results a little, maybe overdub a few times, possibly add a few effects - i.e. the overwhelming majority of DAW users - don't need or want a rapidly evolving tool. really? PT never used a floating bit mixing engine to start with, and it still doesn't today. it uses 56 bit fixed point. there are many very experienced audio engineers who believe and/or feel very strongly that PT's mix bus sounds horrible. meanwhile, thanks to the legacy installs of all those existing apps, there are millions of people worldwide using 32 bit mixing engines. oh, I guess you mean *new* versions don't use 32 bit floats? Well sure. Let me know when you have a URL of a double blind test that shows any benefits to a double-based mixing engine. We'll change jack_sample_t to double instead of float, and get back to you in a week. FWIW, most people think that 32 bit flaoting point mix engines sound better than PT, and yet PT is still the industry standard. its not clear that this issue is of any significance other than marketing fluff. Maybe we just want to see it NOT get caught up wasting time endlessly impressing people with "new features". Maybe we'd rather focus on making what is already thought to be the most stable multi-track recorder on any platform *more* stable, more workflow-efficient and yes, occasionally, we'll toss in a new feature (*cough* set-tempo-from-edit-range *cough*) when we get time, amidst trying to save face from comments by people who don't actually track development processes. Digidesign boasted that in the first month of PT7.4, they had 10k downloads. They issued press releases about this. It got onto websites, into trade journals. Ardour has 15k downloads on OS X alone, every single month. Thats a crusty X11 version that requires installing an app that Apple seems to bend over backwards to cripple (it was totally broken when Leopard first came out - now they seem to have turned it over to an open source development group, funny that). There are another 5-6k downloads of the freakin' *SOURCE CODE*. God knows how many downloads from distribution repositories. And yet you show up here saying "its no good if nobody wants to use it". Pfft. --p p.s. of course, it is true that every single one of those PT7.4 downloads put cash into Digi's bank account. If I got just US$1 per download of Ardour, I'd be paying developers and making every single one of the Linux Audio Sucks constituency eat crow on a daily basis.