I've been thinking about this for a while. Most folks I know who are "power users" of nonLinux OS environments will hesitate to do anything that might jeopardize the stability of their tweaked home OS. This is why the Live CD and various virtualization systems are so powerful in terms of acquiring converts to the linux platform.

I'd love to be able to distribute a USB thumb drive loaded with a lightweight (i.e. not Ubuntu Studio) audio environment built around an RT kernel that's boot-ready and enables the user to access the other drives on their machine. Target audience would be anyone with a computer and a midi controller, and at the very least it should come with a bunch of open-licensed soundfonts and some synths. The user experience would be: 1. plug in your USB drive, 2. reboot, 3. plug in your headphones and your MIDI controller 4. rock out with some new sounds and new audio control that your existing device (be it a hardware synth or another PC or Mac-based softsynth) isn't capable of producing/handling. The best part is, this new set of tools is completely open source. And to get back to your home environment, you simply remove the USB drive after you've shut down.

I think from a musician perspective, you can get a number of new users to at least understand that the platform has arrived and is not as scary as the MS and Mac music production conglomerate would have you believe (nor is it anywhere near as resource-intensive!).

A musician buddy of mine who runs Logic on a 2-year-old Macbook Pro was absolutely shocked at the near-lack of latency I experience with fluidsynth and bristol on my netbook. He was told he'd have to buy a new computer or perform significant upgrades if he wanted to approach the same performance with his rig. Just that argument alone should get some set of users to dip their toes in the water, especially if all the custom configuration steps are eliminated for them.

I played a gig last Friday and a guy come up to me afterwards asking about my rig: after I explained what I was using, he began to describe money and time he'd spent on his PC-based system, saying he was afraid to leave the house with it let alone bring it to a dingy club and risk frying it with a spilt beer.

I don't know what an engineer would need to have to start cheating on his/her protools environment, but "easy, cheap, reliable, and good-sounding" seems to be a good path to the heart of a performing musician.

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Luke Peterson