Just noticed
about this recent release of JUCE 1.10:
You might remember then, that I've brought
this very subject into
attention to the Linux Audio Developers and USers (LAD/LAU) mailing
list, and to put a long story short: help is being here reiterated to
write the native Linux Audio and MIDI implementations of the JUCE C++
framework, which among other things, may bring a native Tracktion Linux
port into light :P
and if a developer adds native linux audio/MIDI to JUCE, they will still
have to pay for the linux version of tracktion, no?
That is probably one question that should be better addressed to Mackie,
but I would guess that the answer is yes. To my knowledge, Tracktion has a
price tag attached to it. Period. However, it is IMNSHO that I would
rather buy it, knowing that it is a native linux application than running
it on wine (which I don't even know whether it really does, besides the
fact I don't care either :).
The catch here, or so I think, is about raising a heads up on Mackie,
which is mainly an hardware company, not software. If it can bundle a
linux capable Tracktion with some of its hardware, I would (and will)
think twice before bargaining from any other hardware competitor. And
certainly one thing that you cannot do without it's audio hardware isn't
it?
OTOH, leaving Tracktion to the side, JUCE is a awesome toolkit (it's
author calls it a framework, but software-engineering purists may disagree
:). The GUI features are remarkable, with support for raster and vector
graphics, alpha-blending, anti-aliased, scaled and rotated text, standard
widgets, networking, multi-threading, yadda, yadda, all over the place.
It's cross-platform (Win, Mac and as of this latest, Linux). It's GPL. And
it also looks pretty damn good on the screen too :)
Currently, it lacks core Linux Audio and MIDI support, but all the
abstraction layer and groundwork is already standing there. It's just a
matter of pouring some JACK and ALSA interface code on it.
Is this considered harmful? That is, having yet another option on Linux
for a complete, and pretty modern looking GUI toolkit, but this time with
top-notch Audio/MIDI integration? ;)
Cheers.
--
rncbc aka Rui Nuno Capela
rncbc(a)rncbc.org
