Re: [LAU] Editing zynadsuxfx/yoshimi patches?

On Mon, Apr 18, 2011 at 01:30:44PM +0100, linuxdsp wrote: No sweeping general statement is ever true. :) True. But, even so, if one has time and energy enough, it is not impossible to muster a group of skilled people interested enough to get the job done. In this case "have the opportunity" would probably be more accurate than "stand a chance". With an open-source project, you're never quite stuck in a hole the way you are with commercial software, if the incentive to do something about it is strong enough, anyway. I am *not* a zealot of the RMS temple, so please understand that this is not an attack on commercial software as such, but a judgement based on my personal experience as related to accessibility. About a year and a half ago, I decided to get back to audio, and because of circumstances which would be too long and too tedious to relate here, I decided to depart from the Linux environment I'd been using for years and buy a Mac, which is advertised as having accessibility "built-in". Well, I have nothing bad to say about the general accessibility, but things go sour pretty quickly when trying to do anything audio related. I contacted a fellow I had come across on the internet who has a Mac based pro studio and is blind, asking him for advice. He told me, in essence, not to get my hopes up. He said he had been nagging at Apple (he used Logic, which was the same DAW I was trying to use) for over a year and had been trying to work with them to improve accessibility with very mixed results. I believe he also said that Steinberg politely, but fairly flatly refused to do anything about accessibility. The result was that, after spending a lot of money on software and a fancy tactile console, he still needed to route out to an analogue mixer/rack for certain applications and felt he still could not be as efficient as a sighted engineer. That's the point at which I decided to dual-boot my Mac and see what Linux had to offer, since it couldn't be much worse than the odds I had to deal with. Now, I can use Joel Roth's excellent ecasound front-end, nama, which is good enough for most needs, not to mention all the other command apps I already knew from before and some new ones that came along while I was away. Synths like bristol, hexter, and aeolus even have text interfaces, and some GUI apps, like Hermann's excellent gx_head are even accessible through orca/gnome. As for a theoritically inaccessible app, like yoshimi, I can still disable the GUI and use existing patches, and, even if the midi control thing doesn't come through, I can still get excited enough one night to bang together a perl programme that will let me tweak parameters with relative ease. So, in terms of personal experience, open-source wins in a big way. Once again, I'm not saying proprietary software is "evil"; what I do believe, however, is that it tends to be less suited to respond to the specific needs of certain individuals, such as myself. Apologies for the rambling. Cheers, S.M. --