22 Oct
2002
22 Oct
'02
9:06 p.m.
Paul Davis wrote:
I can certainly sympathize with that one. Supposedly there is some work
being done on supporting
USB audio devices under ALSA; that may be our best hope. (Yes, I know
USB has potentially
horrible latency. ) Another possibility is to use a 1 or 2 unit
rackmount box with a good
PCI audio card, and then talk to the box via a remote X session going on
on a low-end laptop.
I've considered this myself, but rackmount cases are kind of pricy.
-dgm
i do know what RTcmix is. i've used it. its a really cool program. its
not the sort of thing i would use for RTP. if you do, thats great, but
most of the people who are buying software for RTP are also not
looking for software like RTcmix.
Ah, so what it all boils down to is a cultural difference. :)
Seriously, Ico, Paul's right on this one.
I'm also involved with the creation of academic/experimental/avant-garde
electronic music, and I
love and use CSound and PD and things of that ilk. But I would never
recommend trying those
tools to anyone running a commercial (better word than "professional",
IMHO) studio. You
want to talk about a steep learning curve? The commercial audio world
always prefers convenience
over flexibility. I don't doubt for a second that a RTCmix wizard can
probably do things with just
a RTCmix that would require a "pro" audio engineer to use a dozen racks
of outboard gear. But
different trades have different tools. (Personally, the music I'm
working with these days would
probably be best served by a big ol' analog modular synth with 128 sine
wave oscilators. I can't
afford such a beast, so I use software synthesis.)
LADSPA plugin out there... Yet you say it's no
good for commercial
market... Hmmm...
csound is massively more capable of generating interesting sounds and
music than reaktor and unity-ds1 put together. yet which one is "good
for the commercial market"? a lot of good work has gone into making
csound more useful to people without a background in assembler/fortran
programming, and the core program continues to be extremely
capable. that doesn't make it a good tool for "the commercial market".
>If you knew anything about the market, then you'd realize that as many
>SOPME/RTP studios there are in the world, they don't stack up to the
>amount of money educational institutions spend on building their
>electronic music studios, and this is where apps like RTcmix are an
>equal concern as Protools (even the university this list is hosted on
>
True. It is only in such places that audio on *nix has ever had any
impact until recently, and it's
also true that we had digital audio and synthesis when the rest of the
world still thought C64's were
neat. (Disclaimer: I thought my C64 was pretty neat in 1982.
Disclaimer to above: It was 1982,
and I was 6 years old.)
i defined my market as the SOPME/RTP world. if you want to point out
that educational institutions are a bigger financial pie, thats
great. the problem is that their needs and goals don't align with
those of the SOPME/RTP world all that much. there are several computer
music and audio technology departments and institutions around the
country that do amazing work, both from a software and a musical
perspective, but just like the stuff that emerges from computer
science departments, very little of it ever sees the light of day in
the rest of the world without a serious mangling, if not a complete
rewrite. its an interesting market, full of a lot of smart and good
people. so smart, in fact, that they have really smart people like
fernando around who can not only compile and install ardour (as well
as send patches), but also build the whole of planet ccrma in his
copious spare time. such institutions might have reasons to send some
grant money toward the LAD community, but they have lots of reasons to
save money when they can, and they can save a lot by using their own
inhouse expertise when it comes to free software. "hmm, we can spend
US$8K on this ardour-based prebuilt DAW, or fernando can put on one of
our stock audio-configured intel PC's and we pay nothing?"
If anything, at this point the academics are more likely to use
commercial stuff than vice versa, by
a large margin. There may still be a few departments without ProTools
systems, but they're
pretty rare. I've gone on record on this list saying that midi is
pretty much useless to me,
but I do want and need a good multitrack DAW and some good plugins.
To draw a parallel: only a small portion of all computer users have use
for a text editor like
vi or emacs, but most of the people who use such things also want a
WSYWIG word processor.
>of the INDIVIDUAL University studios in the US
spend over $100,000/year
>for the new equipment/software. How much do the SOPME/RTP spend once
>they equip it for the first time?
>
Depends upon how profitable they are. Also, I don't know which
universities you've been hanging around,
but music departments around the world are suffering budget cuts. Yes,
this is more likely to incline them
to Linux as a possible solution, but that would entail Linux-based
machines actually costing less to deploy.
if you stick with the first clause of that sentence, i agree with
you. but the second part: i have *never* seen anything but
commemorative recordings of music that were made within education
institutions. professional music making is done outside of such
institutions, fostered by the education and research that is performed
inside of them. the musical pieces that do emerge from the media lab,
from ccrma and other places flutter briefly in the thin air of
academic music appreciation, and then vanish back into the ether from
which they came. meanwhile, hundreds of small studios around the
country are recording jazz, country, blues, pop, rock, mesopotamian,
carnatic, electronic, opera ... some of which will end up being sold
to pay someone's salary. and a few times a week, some large halls and
many more smaller ones will echo (sorry, reverberate) with the sounds
of orchestras and smaller ensembles keeping alive the "serious" music
of the past and the present. occasionally someone will use a computer
in some capacity at one of these concerts, and occasionally what they
do with might end up resulting in some kind of financial exchange that
underlies "professional music making".
Sadly (for me) true. It's one of those things you need to accept if you
live in the academic music
world. It is also, incidentally, the main reason I tend to sympathize
with open-source software
developers, because I've never main anything substantial from what I
consider to be my most
rewarding and important work.
Because most
people who perform their music on concert venues DO NOT
WANT TO LUG ARROUND A TOWER, but rather have a laptop!!! Give me one
ah, so that's a new constraint.