Re: [LAU] First impressions of MusE 2.0

Enough about MIDI, what about audio? Reading the Ardour forums and having spent much time in its irc channel, I know that one of the most frequent feature requests is integrated wave editing and I'm sure Rui has had more than a few requests for such a feature in qtractor too so I'd say one of the biggest selling points of MusE is that it would seem to be the only Linux DAW to offer integrated audio editing.

The editor is basic but it has the most commonly used audio editing features so chances are you won't have to use an external editor much, which is something else MusE supports, should the internal editor not cut it. At this point I'll mention that the only real bug I seem to have found in MusE so far is the audio editor doesn't work for me under 64 bit Deb Wheezy although it works fine under 32 bit Wheezy and Robert says it works for him under 64 bit Kubuntu too. I had trouble working out how to record audio into Muse at first as it wasn't documented at the time but the docs have been updated to cover this since I raised it as an issue. Just looking at this process, compared to Ardour and qtractor Muse is the least user friendly when trying to set up a track to record but once you know how its done its not a prob and this was the only aspect of the program that had me scratching my head. Otherwise I think MusE is the most user friendly Linux DAW and I didn't have to inquire about or refer to the manual for anything else. I was also disappointed that MusE 2.0 doesn't currently support the creation of mono audio tracks although you can change stereo to mono tracks and creating mono tracks is to be added soon. MusE allows the easy drawing of automation curves for gain, pan and LADSPA FX and apart from the two slight probs I've mentioned, it looks like I should enjoy working with MusE for audio as well as MIDI. Observant readers will have noticed that despite my praise for this new MusE I said "My Linux sequencer of choice at the moment is qtractor" because it supports native VST and LV2 plugins, it is more stable and lightweight than A3 and it will likely remain my choice until the big MusE showstopper gets resolved - plugin support. Like Rosegarden, MusE currently only supports LADSPA and DSSI plugins which is fine IF you don't use MIDI, you only use external MIDI sound modules OR you are happy with MusE's integrated synths / the very few DSSI plugins available / LASH sessions.

You could use Windows VST plugins via DSSI-VST with it but that isn't an option I'm interested in nor would anyone else who is concerned about plugin performance and stability care much for DSSI-VST.