8 Feb
2013
8 Feb
'13
8:38 a.m.
On 02/06/2013 10:30 PM, Raffaele Morelli wrote:
2013/2/7 david <gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com
<mailto:gnome@hawaii.rr.com>>
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.
Because they've set out to learn it. They've learned to use their tools.
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...).
They're part of the tool set. Just like a Windows user might have to
learn to do some arcane non-music thing to make it work. A professional
learns how to do them. A smart professional learns how to do them in
such a way that they don't have to do them again. ;-)
A lot of that setup stuff is already dealt with by audio distributions
now. The only "setup" I had to do with Musix on my little effects box
was tell JACK which audio interface I wanted it to use. I fiddled with
period and such settings until I got a latency that works for me without
xruns. That was just experimenting a bit. Gave me an excuse to play with
stuff along the way. ;-)
We must admit that win and mac
"music-woriking-curve" is musch easier
than our penguin.
Having watched my musically-capable but technologically-inept friend try
three times to get and keep professionally-setup Windows audio systems
working ... no. It's not easy on the other platforms, either.
--
David
gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com
authenticity, honesty, community
http://clanjones.org/david/
http://dancing-treefrog.deviantart.com/