5 Feb
2013
5 Feb
'13
6:21 p.m.
Short reply to you Devin. I agree with everything you write. A couple of
thoughts on how to adress some of the issues you raise:
User feedback. I always try and provide feedback and suggestions for
whatever I use, and I enjoy doing it too. I think alot of users would like
to do this too, but two general things is kind of lacking in this sense.
These are all general thoughts and nothing to you personally. I remember us
talking about synthclone and I appreciated that very much, so any negatives
shouldn't be taken personally by you ;) :
1. An easy way to provide this feedback, and encouragement to do so.
There's IRC, mailinglists and forums for this, but most apps actually lack
encouragement for feedback. Something as simple as writing "If you like
this software and have ideas/suggestions, please use [insert_method_here]
to contact us, all suggestions are appreciated!". The worst thing that
could happen is that the suggestion isn't used, but I think tons can be
gained by making the user feel more involved.
2. Appreciation for the feedback. Some devs are better then others on
this, but I sadly think it's fairly common that users who try and provide
feedback either get treated as complete idiots, or that the dev takes it as
some form of personal insult.
On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 6:09 PM, Devin Anderson <surfacepatterns(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:
Hi Dave,
On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 6:58 AM, Dave Phillips <dlphillips(a)woh.rr.com>
wrote:
Not enough native plugins, esp. instruments.
I think this is one of the key problems with Linux audio. Part of the
problem is that there is no clear mechanism for (non-developer) users
to create their own instruments. Many VSTs are constructed with
modular DSP programs like synthedit and flowstone (formerly
synthmaker). There's probably an opportunity here for Ingen or a new
graphical DSP program based on Faust to fill this hole.
In general, I think that Linux audio has a lot of tools that help
users to create music, but not a lot of tools that help users create
their own tools (e.g. instruments, plugins, sample libraries, etc.) to
help others to create music.
On the development side, I think Aurélien and others like him have the
right idea in taking instruments/plugins that are specific to a Linux
audio application and porting them to LV2. There's a lot of awesome
instruments that are specific to applications (e.g. ALSA Modular
Synth, LMMS, etc.) that would generally be more useful if they were
LV2 plugins.
Poor external/internal session management.
Interacting with external hardware can be frustrating. Commercial
programs like Renoise account for external hardware in their workflows
(e.g. latency management, MIDI clock, MMC, etc.). Most Linux Audio
apps don't do this.
Too much conflict/fragmentation within the
development community.
I've been trying to write something about conflict and fragmentation
for the past 10 minutes. I think this is a complex issue. I'm not
able to find the words to communicate about it right now.
So, in your honest and bold opinion as user
and/or developer, what do we
lack most and what can we do without that we already have ?
As a developer, I'm missing a couple things:
1.) User feedback.
I can't stress this enough. I watch the download counts increase on
the applications I create, but I hardly ever get feedback. I'm
discouraged and frustrated by the lack of feedback.
2.) Non-code developers
We have a lot of dedicated open source developers writing Linux audio
apps, plugins, etc., but I have yet to meet an open source UI
designer, or an open source graphic artist. I think a lot of the apps
we create could benefit from the feedback of a user interface
experience expert.
There's probably more, but these are the two things that occur to me now.
Dave, this is an important topic. Thanks for taking it on.
--
Devin Anderson
surfacepatterns (at) gmail (dot) com
blog - http://surfacepatterns.blogspot.com/
midisnoop - http://midisnoop.googlecode.com/
psinsights - http://psinsights.googlecode.com/
synthclone - http://synthclone.googlecode.com/
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