On 2/19/07, Lars Luthman <lars.luthman(a)gmail.com> wrote: I say FUD... __________________ Marc-Olivier Barre, Markinoko.

Ivica Ico Bukvic wrote: Autopackage - arguably superior? Not in my experience. I use an application that uses Autopackage. My first discovery was that *autopackage simply didn't work.* After a couple of fixes, they got it to work. Whoopee!! My reaction to that was "Why?" From my use, autopackage didn't do anything more, or anything better, than the existing Debian package managers already did ... -- David gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community

Chris McCormick wrote: Hmm, I see no need for 0install.net. If you're someone who can be allowed to install software on a system, what's so hard about remember root's password? -- David gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community

Chris McCormick wrote: But if you're able to create a Debian package for it, you can easily distribute that from your website. You don't need to get it into the Debian distribution. -- David gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community

On Mon, 2007-02-19 at 12:54 -0500, Ivica Ico Bukvic wrote: ok, but discussions is a sign of progress. this is not a permanent situation? -- Leonard Ritter -- Freelance Art & Logic -- http://www.leonard-ritter.com

On Tue, 2007-02-20 at 08:35 -0500, Ivica Ico Bukvic wrote: Ico, its a pleasure to finally agree with you without any qualifications :) The situation isn't dire, but it isn't getting better and it might be getting worse. --p

On Tue, 2007-02-20 at 16:02 +0100, Leonard Ritter wrote: i don't have one, but it will be part of the focus of my keynote at LAC2007.

On Tue, 2007-02-20 at 20:32 +0000, Tim Orford wrote: Nasty reading, but thanks anyway. It confirm at I was wrong: Gnome will be even worst as what I was thinking. But I am not surprised from a society that have its biggest complex outside the US in the little apartheid state of Israël. ... i'm sorry, this is a stupid insider http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-audio-dev@music.columbia.edu/msg22782.html -- Leonard Ritter -- Freelance Art & Logic -- http://www.leonard-ritter.com

Damon Chaplin wrote: Yes, it is, and I'm sorry you can't get things going. However, I checked the LAD and LAU mail lists, apparently you didn't post messages regarding your troubles. It's tough to give you any meaningful response if we don't know which synths didn't work for you and what distro you're using. Did you contact the developers directly ? And please, *of course* everything works in Windows. We know this, we've heard it a gazillion times, and it remains eminently unhelpful. (Sorry, Damon, I'm already in a bad mood: LJ won't fund my trip to LAC2007). Given the interest and respect shown towards LAD by the GNOME and KDE devels, I'd say we're more likely to witness pigs in self-powered flight. The LAD community probably already has agreed on an ideal server (JACK). What we need is good old industry clout, and we ain't got none. Not very much anyway: Hardware manufacturers continue to ignore our existence, the major publications see no reason to cover the Linux audio scene, and even general Linux devels and users seem content and happy with the fact that the music they like is almost entirely produced on proprietary platforms and closed-source software. The Linux sound & music communities have grown with virtually *no* assistance from any commercial source, i.e., nothing from the distro manufacturers or anywhere else. I don't like hyperbole, but in this case it's justified: The work taken on by Linux audio developers is Herculean, they're doing it with virtually no support anywhere, including damned little from the general Linux community. For instance, Slashdot recently ran an article on a new "OSS music composer", for Windows, natch. It's as though they've simply decided there's no future in Linux audio, so they'll just ignore it until it goes away. [insert unfriendly suggestion to /. here] Hell and damnation, I can't even get the Linux Journal to help out with a trip to LAC, which implies to me that *it's just not important enough*. We're talking about mere hundreds of dollars, not even close to a grand, but they're not interested. Again I say, hell and damnation. Whatever, it should be based on JACK or its design principles, else we'll just get more or less workable replacements for artsd and esd. Today I have no good hopes for an audio-optimized general Linux desktop. Tomorrow I might feel better about it all, but right now I really don't see any organized effort to change the current situation. Best, dp

Ivica Ico Bukvic wrote: Only one mouth here. ;) Linuxaudio.org is indeed a hopeful light, but it's a small light, probably hard to see from the vantage of GNOME/KDE/whatever desktop development. My apologies, Ico, I didn't intend to critique the community's efforts (or your own work). What dismays me is the lack of any energy from *outside* the LA community directed *towards* the community. And considering some of the heavy weights connected to Linux today, I really have to wonder why this status remains quo. Example: IBM does audio hardware, they also do Linux in a big way, and they have real industry clout. IBM can offer real material assistance to Linux audio devs, but afaik they don't. Why not ? They can deal with SCO's nonsense but can't fund a Linux audio project ? While I'm pleased that IBM does support the general community, I have to wonder just how aware they are of the LA communities. Any lurkers from IBM who want to add to these comments ? Curmudgeonly, dp

Russell Hanaghan wrote: Got the coffee, still need the sack. Hmm, I think I've said something very similar, at another time. :) I apologize for writing something that reads like a selfish whine (my estimation), I really didn't mean it to come off like that. I'm not dependent upon the magazine, I'm sure the decision was made for perfectly legitimate reasons, and I can look elsewhere for funding. In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have read Matt Taibbi's analysis of Bush's 2008 budget before entering this thread ... :( Best, dp

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Wed, Feb 21, 2007 at 01:03:15PM -0600, Josh Lawrence wrote: WTF?? I can't stand either Gnome or KDE. I would never willingly use either. I love my ion3 setup. There are dozens of other really good window managers too, like larswm, icewm, ratpoison, etc. And for flashy/GUI stuff, I'm told that Beryl rocks/rules/owns/etc., so there will be plenty of innovative new stuff for Linux users who like their GUI's all gooey. Perhaps it's good news for all camps if Gnome/KDE die off. For audio work, I view both Gnome and KDE as irrelevant. I have seen some gorgeous screenshots of Ardour runnign under Beryl but it's really not my kind of work environment. Sure the QT and libglib wiget sets are great, and I'm glad that audio apps use them, and I expect they'll continue to be maintained and extended, but the *desktop* is in my view completely tangential to that. I can't imagine Linux Audio's fate being tied to any particular windowmanager or desktop. It seems absurd. - -ken

Rob wrote: redefine death - there's perl code popping up everywhere! aparently you can formulate QM with it's regexps: http://xkcd.com/c224.html ;-) Same goes for gnome - ok seriously IMHO they've influenced good Desktop development and even if the current gnome-desktop-software has several issues or drops in popularity(?!),.. their spirit will linger longer than most flashy icons.. - anyway right now I prefer the gnome-terminal with xfce. To each his/her own windowmanager - only question we could ask in our glass house is which Features of a window-manager would improve linux-audio popularity & usability: Ideas range from session management and easy window re-arrangement to extending drag-n-drop features or display-information abstraction: inter-app-exchange methods.. MIDI-WM :-) - there'll always be different kinds for a window environments, so the API should rather be at glib (or similar lebvel) rather than associating linux-audio with some DE or live-distro. I hope(d) that linux-audio and linux-desktop popularity are quite uncorrelated. Although an open source software can; an open-source community does not seem to be able to support [non-caring|paying]+ End-Users in a satisfactory way - "uuh - do I need to type? I just want to click?" - ok I kid. Who would agree that someone who wants to record audio should learn how to use a keyboard first? - OTOH it's a feat I would expect from every audio-engineer, even if only to label analog cables :-) Of course everyone is welcome to support Linus's Law, but I rather think that the average Audio-Software-Desktop-User will not add much to Linux Audio, apart from the need that it must co-exist with gaming sound libs on any distro (poor packagers!) - This does not mean one should exclude those users or applications, on the contrary! - just don't expect them to be .. greatful(?) or push them. - is it the latter what companies are trying to do? - YaSTC (yet another side o[fn] the coin) - anyway the Linuxaudio community is not doing that bad, is it? anyway as the default VISTA license seems to only allow one DVD drive per system and with other various DRM hardware cooking up,.. de-evolution leads to revolution! - well scatch that last, enough OT chat tonight, - looking forward to the LAC keynote! cheers, robin

It appears that there is a usual rich variety of opinions on this matter, which pretty much reflects the general state of the Linux scene (for better or worse). What follows is an *incredibly* long rant. Please do not take this against me--I simply feel very strongly about this matter and as such FWIW I feel compelled to share my thoughts with you. Having used many different WMs over the years and eventually settling for KDE which I used exclusively until very recently, I now prefer Gnome simply because I am tired of endless customizations. I simply want things to look moderately appealing out-of-box without having to mess with them too much (perhaps not having an ability to customize too much in the first place was the needed catalyst to prevent me from wasting my precious time on endless tweaking of my desktop experience ;-). Yes, Gnome does have its own share of stupid limitations and on top of that in many places looks inconsistent and/or incomplete, but for me (as subjective as this sounds) it does what I want it to do today. Call me a sucker for eye-candy or simply someone who prefers to have well-rounded user experience. But the way I see it is that I can always open a console full-screen, which more often than not I do (all right, not in full-screen, but definitely in a window ;-), yet if the rest of the UI sucks, then advocating Rat Poison et al is usually seen (at least from the outside) as a poor attempt at rationalizing current deficiencies of the Linux desktop rather than a choice made on a level playing field. Add to this the fact that we live in a predominantly oculocentric culture (at least the Western culture, including its ubiquitous sphere of influence), and you'll quickly realize that no matter how good the backend of a framework is, most "users" (and that still includes a vast majority of artists) will opt for the UI which looks prettier, even if that is at the expense of usability. This means that WMs and Linux audio are inseparable whether you like it or not. So, what of it? FWIW, I think Linux audio will remain a research/enthusiast platform no matter how cool tools end-up being produced by the LAD community, as long as we'll have incompatibilities (Robin mentioned one feature that both XP and OSX are ahead in, and that is a drag-n-drop feature) and inconsistencies plaguing the desktop experience, and perhaps more importantly fragmentation due to endless pursuit of new approaches to existing solutions (i.e. how much energy has been already wasted on redundant sound servers?). Add to that the current dubious state of GTK+, whose potential demise, regardless whether you like this toolkit or not and/or whether such demise is imminent, will bring about tremendous overhead upon us as well (think how many different audio apps rely upon this framework and if it becomes obsolete how much time will it take to port something like Ardour to a different toolkit). I might be simply getting older and thus more conservative. Back when I started using Linux, I probably would've found Rat Poison the coolest concept on the planet. Today, I am a mouse/UI junkie who finds Rat Poison et al to be a noteworthy experiment, with my hope and attention turned almost exclusively on AIGLX and Xgl. But with this newfound conservative outlook on technology and supporting philosophy of GNU/Linux, I am beginning to believe that this endless choice (anarchy?) of solutions and/or options inherent to our platform/doctrine of choice, as wondrous as it is, is now beyond its zenith. I see us now speeding along on a downhill path with several generations of enthusiasts/programmers/hackers who have gotten burned out by this endless pursuit of superfluous yet for the most part incomplete solutions (whose incompleteness was often a byproduct of our resources, namely manpower, being spread too thin). The irony of this situation is that, just like in the cutthroat corporate market, in part due to resulting saturation not every time the best technology has prevailed (think JACK and desktop sound servers). So, now we have incomplete Gnome desktop (at least IMHO), over-customizable KDE desktop (again IMHO), bunch of other WMs all of which have their advantages and drawbacks, but more importantly most of which are so foreign to a common user that their mainstream adoption seems very unlikely, dubious future of GTK+ upon which a volume of audio apps depend, and overall a fragmented community and resources. Is it possible to unite the army of volunteers to focus their cumulative energy on a unified framework even if that offends some, simply because their preferred toolkit was not chosen for this purpose (can you imagine all WM developers focusing their energy on one singular WM--now that would be a miracle!)? Does the community have the courage to make that decision within our community and take the plunge (of course many lingering questions remain, i.e. who will be granted the jurisdiction to make such a decision on behalf of the community, as well as many other logistical and/or authority-based nightmares)? Can the community learn from the successes of the companies and/or non-profit organizations who have ventured in the world of open source and turned profitable, or if not profitable, then at least leaders in their respective domains? IMHO all of those entities have shown a strong sense of focus and direction which ultimately empowered them to maintain the course and brave the narrow path of success. My hope is that one day the community will reach such a consensus, although a volume of history suggests unfortunately otherwise. To offer you some perspective on this one, consider LADSPA plugin framework. I might be spreading total FUD here, and if so, please do correct me as it is not my intention to offend. My understanding is that LADSPA was implemented as a GUI-less standard to offer flexibility for developers, to some extent end-users, and perhaps also to attract developers from other platforms. Yet, in retrospect, of all the apps that have resorted to using LADSPA, we've probably encountered no more than 3-4 different toolkits being utilized for the LADSPA gui (with GTK+ and Qt being two predominant options). Needless to mention that reaching out to other platforms has resulted in very little return (again, please correct me if I am wrong). Although I am aware that it is easy to sell wisdom now that it has been all said and done, FWIW wouldn't it have been better to simply bite the bullet and endorse a single toolkit (perhaps also making sure that it is open-source and cross-platform to minimize restrictions in its adoption, even though I personally do not care much for cross-platform capability since that has not gotten us much of anything even after all these years of dealing with the additional overhead due to such architectural decisions)? This way, today we would have had at least a small contingent of LADSPA plugins which would have looked as cool if not cooler than today's VSTs, AUs, etc. IMHO, we would've been much better off, at least as far as the widespread adoption of the Linux audio is concerned. But, as I already said, I am very much aware that selling wisdom after the fact is cheap. However, what I hope can be learned from this is that perhaps now is a new chance to revisit this issue and try to use this as a catalyst for a discussion whose purpose would be to agree within our little community what will be endorsed across the board, so that at least drag-n-drop, midi files, DAW session files, etc., are compatible across different apps. We could simply do a study of all available options and settle for that one which seems to have the greatest longevity potential and go from there... I am sure that some will feel an urge to reply to this rant with an "I don't care about wider adoption, I only care about how Linux affects my own work." And I say, all the power to you for making what is IMHO the right *personal* decision. Yet, whether I like it or not, the power is in the numbers, and Linux as an audio platform will only persist if there is support for audio hardware, and if there are software packages which will continue to be maintained. All this is a lot easier if there are more of us. So whether I like it or not, I am convinced that the success of Linux audio by and large resides in the widespread adoption. At any rate, time to shut up and go back to work... FWIW, I have no intentions on giving up on Linux audio, for as long as I am able to run it. I am simply hoping that my rant (apart from wasting everyone's bandwidth and for those few brave souls who opt for reading this long e-mail, for wasting their time) may at least get us to start thinking about these challenges (or perhaps should I say opportunities?). Best wishes, Ico

Le 21 Feb à 20:09, terrence(a)terrencevak.net ecrivait: [...] The most simple thing is to use qsynth as a graphical frontend. THe virmidi module is of absolutely no use to talk to fluidsynth. You just have to connect your sequencer to the MIDI ports in qjackctl. http://qsynth.sourceforge.net/qsynth-index.html AFAIK, the virmidi module is used to get more MIDI ports than the soundcards provide. You *must*, first, see the native MIDI ports of your soundcard (without this module) in order to obtain more, eventually. HTH, Y.

On Thu, Feb 22, 2007 at 02:53:06AM -0900, terrence(a)terrencevak.net wrote: You can connect it using aconnect aconnect -lo lists all the available alsa midi devices.. for example on my system I get: client 14: 'Midi Through' [type=kernel] 0 'Midi Through Port-0' client 16: 'SBLive! Value [CT4832]' [type=kernel] 0 'EMU10K1 MPU-401 (UART)' client 17: 'Emu10k1 WaveTable' [type=kernel] 0 'Emu10k1 Port 0 ' 1 'Emu10k1 Port 1 ' 2 'Emu10k1 Port 2 ' 3 'Emu10k1 Port 3 ' client 24: 'MK-249C USB MIDI keyboard' [type=kernel] 0 'MK-249C USB MIDI keyboard MIDI ' client 28: 'Virtual Raw MIDI 3-0' [type=kernel] 0 'VirMIDI 3-0 ' client 29: 'Virtual Raw MIDI 3-1' [type=kernel] 0 'VirMIDI 3-1 ' client 30: 'Virtual Raw MIDI 3-2' [type=kernel] 0 'VirMIDI 3-2 ' client 31: 'Virtual Raw MIDI 3-3' [type=kernel] 0 'VirMIDI 3-3 ' client 128: 'FLUID Synth (7620)' [type=user] 0 'Synth input port (7620:0) To connect two alsa devices together I do (for example): aconnect 24 128 Best wishes, James

terrence(a)terrencevak.net wrote: First, familiarize yourself with the aconnect utility. This program will let you make your MIDI connections without a GUI. Next, you can use virmidi to connect to fluidsynth, or any other ALSA MIDI client. I use it for connections in DOSemu and in XSteem, it's very handy. The MIDI Through module is not available to those applications (it has no device node in /dev/snd/), so virmidi is the only flexible option. Finally, fluidsynth can be run entirely from the prompt. Julian Claassen is the master of command-line Linux audio & MIDI, perhaps he'll join in this discussion and give some suggestions. Btw, 'man fluidsynth' and 'fluidsynth -h' are your friends. You should also look at the manual pages for the ALSA utilities (aconnect, alsamixer, etc.), they're quite helpful. Best, dp

I'm able to run midifiles through fluidsynth; what I'd like to be able to do is get tektracker going and use that for step-editing, being able to hear what I'm doing. The only port aconnect shows me is 62, a midi thru port. But that wouldn't let me do what I want, would it? Thanks again, Terrence

On Wed, 2007-02-21 at 23:46 -0500, Ivica Ico Bukvic wrote: <snip> I believe you're missing the major reason for the possible demise of GTK+ and that is - no business model. They have no marketable product thus, no funding. The funding that they did get was largesse from a few companies that wanted to use GNOME/GTK+. When the money got tight, that funding disappeared. Trolltech has a product that is marketable. IBM and other companies are dumping a bunch of money on them, not as a tax write off or charity but for the use of QT (under their proprietary license) in proprietary packages and devices. Qtopia appears to be a fairly large portion of their revenue stream. The funding that they receive from their commercial activities allows them to support the GPL version of QT. This is a two-way street though since they get very valuable beta-testing, feedback, and bug fixes from the GPL side. You can pick any WM you want but if it's not based on a toolkit that has long-term viability it will always be in danger of disappearing. From a more personal perspective, having used GTK/C and QT/C++ (both GPL and proprietary) I can say that the QT package is much easier to use and has better documentation and support. Not that GTK is terrible, it's just not as polished or professional. <snip> I'm with you there. I see absolutely no reason to go to Windows or Mac. Jan -- Jan 'Evil Twin' Depner http://myweb.cableone.net/eviltwin69 "Life should NOT be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, chardonnay in one hand, chocolate in the other, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and screaming 'WOO HOO, what a ride'"

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Mon, Feb 26, 2007 at 01:41:08PM +0100, Leonard Ritter wrote: I personally love the "LMAO" parameter. I want a real instrument with one of those! And I can just imagine the complex sounds produced by varying the "WTF" parameter. Seems to me like a cleaner version one of the Metasonix products, which has knobs labeled "fist", "ream", and "screw". Anyway, I loved this, it made my night. Looks pretty too. Nice work. Although I'm looking forward to leaving GUI's behind and using ChucK, SuperCollider, and Csound instead, possibly attached to a real control surface with real knobs. I have to say, though, by far the prettiest and slickest-looking graphics I've ever seen on a Linux softsynth is on Bristol. - -ken

carmen wrote: just forget about OS or DE or distro names for a while - John still wonders if we can :-) that exactly hits the spot! - Imagine s.o who is only makes a living by open-source development without wanting to supporting it's Ideology! (some out there sells/buys hippie-wigs in wal-mart.) OTOH everyone not wishing to learn sth. new; is still free to waive his/her GPL user-rights and join the open-source outlaws or the plugin-mafia :-) along these lines: There's nothing wrong with old tape recorders that have few big mechanical buttons (my favorites). They always work, one can even open them - advanced users can even tweak the flange or motor-speed... In that saying: Ubuntu brings the mechanical audio age to the digital open-source desktop. obviously Pro-Audio has more knobs than the guys on the Ubuntu-CD Cover are going to handle in near future (sorry - couldn't resist - lol. ) :back with a new coffee: ok it's not just fun making up desktop utopia allutions; what I gather from this discussion is that end-user support is (again?) becoming increasingly important, especially for open-source! One of the worst case scenarios is that rapid development and increasing disk-space will undo the shared open library concept, as the latter usually has long turnaround times and also misses proper dependency tracking/logistics.. The GPL in general releases tension of the programmer. - and it's not unheared of it transforming angry-users into productive coders - so the actual bottom line question is: What can linux-audio do to support gnu/Linux? Ico seems to be right there, that it boils down to the user-interface and community look&feel. There's already lots of great backend software, and also good work in packaging those for various distos. - maybe the LA-Consortium should think about a task-force to recommend or delegate missing integration features: both for library development (LASH rocks!) and/or desktop-integration: eg. mapping some limits.conf magic to a desktop-prefs check-button is easy; the trick is to compose an informative mouse-over hint! but it's more subtle than that, now is it? "make the world as simple as possible, but not any simpler!" (A.E.=mc2 ) It might be a topic that Linux-Audio Developers (busy as they are already) should pay more attention to. - what do you guys think? s/pay/be paid to pay/ ?! lol As for a community [web] interface there is ongoing work and more discussion to come on this list pre+post LAC2007. i don't follow you there. personally I'm always astonished how well various live CDs detect video cards! but if you mean that tweaking high performance video hardware on linux compares to obscure voodoo magic, I quite agree ;-) - or were you hinting upcoming DRM (not Direct-Rendering but Digital-Rights) hardware issues? what can *we* do about it ?

On 2/21/07, Dave Phillips &lt;dlphillips(a)woh.rr.com&gt; wrote: I've no hope pro audio stuff will work "out of the box" on Linux... but then again, for the typical Windows DAW, while the software may install and run 'out of the box', you still have to do some tweaking. optimization and reconfiguration if you want to have a decent low-latency desktop DAW... even for Sonar Home Studio 4. But I will say, I have had very little trouble getting audio to run on Linux, consumer level or pro level... it does require some work and knowledge, but so does doing *any* kind of pro-level audio work. Once jack & ardour all the other goodies are running, I am always amazed at how well they work together. And not only that, you know the system pretty much inside and out at that point... how many Pro Tools users can say that? I can't tell you how many times I've heard someone say, in reference to a shoddy sounding homestudio produced CD -- "Sheesh, why does everyone think all you need to do is install Pro Tools and you can make a CD?" -- Brett ------------------------------------------------------------ "In the rhythm of music a secret is hidden; If I were to divulge it, it would overturn the world." -- Jelaleddin Rumi

On Thu, 22 Feb 2007 23:02:10 +0000 Damon Chaplin &lt;damon(a)karuna.eclipse.co.uk&gt; wrote: <snippety snip> I'm sort of optimistic but frustrated. I very much want to contribute, but when I had a proper look at the source of ZynAddSubFX I found that the level of programming is *far* beyond what I used to some 15 odd years ago. I'd probably be more of a hindrance than a help, having to keep asking damn fool questions that 'anyone' knows the answers to :( -- Will J G

On Fri, 23 Feb 2007 12:53:11 +0200 Nedko Arnaudov &lt;nedko(a)arnaudov.name&gt; wrote: Where do I get lv2 from? The home page says a lot about it but I can't find where to download from. Is there a simple list of dependencies somewhere, and what order they need to be compiled/installed? I'm not clear on what is going on here. Does this need ZynAddSubFX installed and running or is there code that directly replaces Zyn's synth engines? If it needs Zyn, what version does this work with? -- Will J G

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Mon, Feb 19, 2007 at 06:31:54PM +0100, Leonard Ritter wrote: [snip] Heh. That assessment, and the earlier comment by someone else, "Everyone complains on the Internet, that's what it's for!" would be my choice for "Wise and Clever Quips of the Week"-- and both from the same list, same thread even. - -ken