On 02/06/2013 03:19 AM, Raffaele Morelli wrote:

2013/2/5 Dave Phillips

Greetings,

I've been reading a lot of negative (read: vitriolic) commentary
about the world of Linux audio development and applications. I won't
bother to say where, just "the usual places" will have to suffice.
Of greater interest to me is the commentary itself - it seems to
boil down to the following plaints and lamentations (in no
particular order) :

Too many distros.
Too many audio-optimized distros.
Not enough native plugins, esp. instruments.
Inconsistent support for VST/VSTi plugins.
Too many unstable/unfinished applications.
Too many "standards" (esp. wrt plugins).
Poor external/internal session management.
Poor support for certain modes of composition (think Ableton Live).
Lack of support for contemporary hardware.
Confusion re: desktops, and GUI toolkits.
Too difficult to set up audio system.
JACK is a pain.
Too much conflict/fragmentation within the development community.

One could be a professional with/without skills and/or an hobbyist
with/without skills, no matter who you are you need apps which doesn't
turn sound engineer or a guitar player or composer into a *nix OS student.

I'm sorry, but if you're a professional, *you know how to use your tools*. Would you hire a carpenter who didn't know which end of a hammer to use for driving a nail, or hauled out a chainsaw for doing some fine veneer work while building a cabinet? What would you think of a guitarist who never learned to set up their Fancy Big Stomp Box because of all those "technical" things like sustain or reverb, etc? "I just want to make sounds! Why do I have to know the difference between sustain and reverb? I should be able to get what I want without having to do anything!" ;-)

Disagree, good musicians know or not how to use a fuzz box, a compressor, eq, delay or even learn the workflow of a console.

On the opposite, the knowledge of these things doesn't turn you in a good guitarist, and many good ones don't need/use this stuff at all.

Your carpenter is the equivalent of a bad musician... I would never get in touch with him, but he should learn music first (not an OS).

There's absolutely no relation in being professional musician and the knowledge of the "standard" linux audio workflow (setup jack, understand the client/server thing, get rid of pulse, write .asoundrc, MIDI stuff...).

We must admit that win and mac "music-woriking-curve" is musch easier than our penguin.

-r