On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 12:37 AM, Robin Paulson
<robin.paulson@gmail.com> wrote:
there are so many examples from history of people being told "that
won't work, don't do it", that i'm amazed people still say this any
more.
in other news, apparently people can't create decent
software/encyclopedias/maps/music unless they are professional, work
in close knit teams overseen by professional managers who give out
work to them as they see fit
> But what can and and should be improved is the sfz file, which of course can be edited through git.
> What can be done with the sfz:
> Loop points (hard)
> Extended range (very easy)
> Remove the transposition from some instruments (medium)
> Probably tweaking release times (technically easy, a lot of trial and error)
> Make paths linux compatible (already done by someone I can't remember but probably reads this list as well)
great, useful suggestions
> Creation of new instrument is a huge effort and even then it has been all done already. Until you are a really good recording enginner, specialized in sample recording, and have pro level musicians, and most important: a vision how you want to create this virtual instrument the project is already doomed to the lower level of quality, only sticking out because it has an open source lisence.
see above regarding "professionals", and remember that the original
meaning of the word amateur was "one who loves what they do", from the
french word for love, amour [1].
by contrast:
1784, "one who has a taste for (something)," from Fr.
amateur "lover of,"
from L.
amatorem (nom.
amator) "lover," agent noun from
amatus,
pp. of
amare "to love" (see
Amy). Meaning "dabbler" (as opposed to
professional)
is from 1786. As an adjective, by 1838.
money is not the only
motivator/measure of quality, and suggesting it is propagates an
ideology. centralised planning, or a "vision" is not the only way to
organise
this has nothing to do with organization. to be skilled enough at performing a stringed instrument that its worth sampling the notes you play requires hours and hours and hours of practice, along with a huge amount of feedback from other musicians. its not impossible to be this good without doing it for at least part of your income, but its rare.
its important to distinguish between those parts of a "problem" that are essentially coordination problems, and those that are issues with skill level (including ineffable stuff that we can hand-wavingly call "intuition"). further, it is worth remembering that even the coordination problems have a subset of "motivation issues" - writing a full reference manual for ardour isn't exactly a deeply hard problem, and its FLOSS tutorial manual process showed how a coordination problem could be solved. but the motivation issue isn't.
similarly for sample libraries. ignoring the skill and coordination issues, there have to be enough people motivated to do the amount of work involved, and this is tough all by itself. the beauty of something like wikipedia is that you only have to find someone motivated enough to do a very small thing (write a first version of a page, or edit a detail) and you've already got something that is better than you had before. sample libraries don't really become useful until they are done - getting a really good sample of A3 legato doesn't do much until you've got them all (and as noted, its generally accepted that you want the same instrument and hands for all of them).
--p