23 Jul
2005
23 Jul
'05
10:42 p.m.
On Sun, Jul 24, 2005 at 01:11:23AM +0100, Jono Bacon wrote:
To direct the discussion further, I would be
interested in your
thoughts on the following things:
- do you all feel that it is fairly simple to get stated with Linux
and recording? Am I smoking crack? :)
That depends on your distribution and hardware. It can be, it can also be
a right pig.
- do you feel there is a seperation between a
professional and an
amateur? So, the software would 'just work' for the amateur, but the
professional should really know the specifics of the system and how to
set it up.
Yes, definatly, though I wouldn't use those terms. Someone who has a
PC set up for studio use is generally prepared to go to more extreme
lengths to get audio working (using patched kernels, running jackd etc.),
someone who just wants apps to be able to make bong noises doesnt have
to.
Obviously the ideal is that all audio systems should be zero-effort setup,
but relaisticly the RT systems we run have some impact on the rest of the
system, and are not going to be accepted by everyone. This is a continual
source of disagreement between audio developers and kernel maintainers.
Things are getting better though, we finally got ALSA as the standard
audio drivers, and the recent ulimit RT stuff is promising.
Thinking of the applications, yes, some of them are quite complicated, but
thats partly because its complicated problem, comparing Ardour to Cubase
itsn't really reasonable as Ardour is a lot more sophisitcated. Comparing
it to Protools is much more reasonable, and it compares reasonably, ie.
both are confusing at first, and logical when you understand them, but
protool's manual is more complete.
Also you talked about the difficulty of multiple audio backends, but we
only use JACK round 'ere :)
- if you do feel it is a bit tough to get up and
running without
reading up on all of this, what do you feel are the barriers, both
technical and socially? I am curious to see whether these barriers
could be solved.
Running a dedicated disto (eg. Demudi, Planet CCRMA) makes a lot of
difference.
- Steve