On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 12:25 PM, Andrew C <countfuzzball(a)gmail.com> wrote: OS X, a unix based OS, would tend to disagree with you. And has done a fairly successful job doing so at that. The majority of the time that it is easier to troubleshoot something on #ardour-osx by using the console output, or using the terminal to enter a command, I have to tell users exactly how to get to the terminal, many of them don't even know it exists. Seablade

On 03/04/2011 10:05 AM, Renato wrote: bringing Linux audio to a pro level instead of it remaining a hobbyist-geek platform? just a guess

On 03/04/2011 10:30 AM, Thomas Vecchione wrote: this was the main drawback to SynthBuilder which was a product I worked with/on while I was Director of Content at Staccato Systems back in the late 90's we tried to interest the game sound community in using SynthBuilder for algorithmic event synthesis for use in their games but the UI (which was very much like Max/MSP or Pd) was WAY too geek-ware for them. After laughing us out of the room we went back to the drawing board and designed a dumbed down UI for them to use. Trust me when I say that in a pro-audio environment Linux command line tweaking and chasing down xruns will not fly. Even laptop electronica producers and studio owners will shun the command line. Can you imagine having a client sitting in the studio watching as an engineer minimizes a sudden flock of xruns by dicking around on the command line? Dunno about you but if I were a client I'd run, not walk, out of that studio. I watched a product demo of the new version of Ableton Live and Max for Live in Barcelona last year and the main emphasis was 'making a tune in real-time' & 'not letting the app get in the way of workflow' etc etc. These are pro needs in a pro environment that don't apply to sitting in a bedroom and uploading your pieces to Soundcloud which allows one to tweak around on the command line and groom .conf files. Other than Mixbus which is an amazing leap forward in light years for Linux audio most other apps are NOT ready for a serious pro environment. Case in point: Linux Sampler. same here - Ardour and Pd are my weapons of choice as an electro-acoustic music composer!

Renato wrote: And you don't even have to do that anymore if you install Rosegarden 10 or 11. During installation, it checks and offers to make the appropriate permission changes for you. -- David gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community

Kim Cascone wrote: Because the FLOSS philosophy gives you all the options, while Windows and Mac OS X don't. Works fine here, with or without an RT kernel. But I use Debian, not Ubuntu. xruns can also come from hardware that seems to be unrelated to audio. For example, a laptop's wireless network driver that frequently checks to see if there's a wireless connection to make, even when the wireless adapter's antenna is turned off. (Mine does that. I guess the real option there is to blacklist the wireless driver.) Or shared hardware interrupts. Or the presence of binary blobs in the kernel, like NVidia's proprietary driver. -- David gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community

On 03/05/2011 02:57 AM, Robin Gareus wrote: I should not have said the last 8 words; file-systems, mount-options, disabling services, irq balancing etc etc do matter [sometimes :)].

On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 2:20 PM, Renato <rennabh(a)gmail.com> wrote: This really depends. This is related to another phenomenon I see pop up often when newcomers switch to Linux, and that is the desire to stay on the bleeding edge to get the newest features. The problem is this doesn't fit into the, if it ain't broke don't fix it philosophy, and what would be common sense thoughts(Don't update your studio computer without testing first) get thrown out the window. I haven't quite put my finger on why exactly this happens, but believe it or not, I tihnk the perception of the lack of release cycles plays into this. I have been a strong proponent of Ardour adopting a binary distribution independant package format, which has been done. There are a variety of benefits to this(And some disadvantages for the record), but one thing I didn't think of until now is how that could affect perceptions and release cycles. I think many people get confused by the lack of a true release cycle for much of open source development, and as a result assume they need to update as soon as possible. A binary distribution can encourage a more stable release cycle instead I think(At least at my first thought, which means it may change in a day or two;). As a result it might help with people that switch to Linux not to fall into the trap to assume you always have to update to the newest version as soon as possible instead of waiting for it to be packaged into a 'release'. At any rate, this is enough rambling on that topic from me, my point being that you are absolutely correct, that often times you don't HAVE to update or tweak your OS much. When you do update is when things tend to break, and because of this perception you have to stay up to date it means a not insignificant amount of time fooling with the OS when something breaks, as it always does eventually. Seablade

On Fri, 4 Mar 2011 13:24:52 -0500 Thomas Vecchione <seablaede(a)gmail.com> wrote: I'm sorry, but saying that time spent reading a book or whatever is money because in that time you could have made money is really twisted reasoning IMHO. You could just as well say time is muffins (it's allmost dinner time here ;)) I didn't say that. Of course a base level of user friendliness is welcome, I would never bother with LFS, but here we were talking about no need to use a terminal, which is a way way way higher level of user friendliness. yes, you're right, user friendliness isn't evil and I don't actually dislike it, I just don't want it to get in my way. But again I never said "I don't want a user friendly system". I really think that yours was a knee-jerk response, you labeled me as the hardcore-terminal-only guy and went with that, without actually thinking of what I had written. Ok, that sounds as a reasonable answer. Coming to think of it again, a wider user-base does indeed have its benefits, and actually that may be the reason why open source software evolved so much. We all gained a little from the success of Ubuntu, even if we don't use it/like it. And after all there's choice and no one forces me to use bloated DEs, which I don't btw. cheers renato

On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 2:03 PM, Renato <rennabh(a)gmail.com> wrote: Actually believe it or not, time spent reading a book etc. IS money. Funny you should use that example as I just got emailed a book suggestion off list by someone participating in this conversation, my specific response? "I will have to read the book, but it may be a while as I am literally taking vacation from my full time work at the moment to catch up on my freelance work." (Paraphrase) Time IS Money. The time it would take me to read that book is quite literally an investment for me, and right now I need to invest that time into making money rather than spending it due to an upcoming financial situation I see in my near future. Actually I never labeled you as such, but in as far as you stating you did or did not want a user friendly system, here is exactly what I based my response you quoted off of... I allready stated more or less this, but I'd like to say it again, in other Which is exactly what you typed, and the way it is typed indicates that you are not using OS X because it is user friendly, which as I pointed out I don't think is what you actually meant. I never stated anything about you being a hardcore terminal user, whether you are or are not is not really part of my point anyways, but rather I stated that that specific statement is a fallacy for the reasons I gave. Just for the sake of clarity, I was picking on your response, not on you yourself;) Also for the record, I enjoy using the terminal myself in any OS often for various reasons. Seablade

Thomas Vecchione wrote: Learning ANYTHING is an investment. It's up to you to decide what you want to learn. If you don't want to learn something new, then stick with your previous way of doing it so you don't have to learn anything new, and quit complaining that something new doesn't work the same way you're used to. -- David gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community

On 03/05/2011 03:02 PM, Thomas Vecchione wrote: I tend to agree with Seablade and Kim Cascone. It's time to make the next step and to not (heavily) defend Linux(audio) by automatism anymore, but start to listening and to see what other OS are doing better then Linux. In a general discussion, every criticism on Linux(audio) is mostly countered by a statement which says why that criticism is false. This is probably somewhat logical cause we are a minority, we love our OS and we heavily involved in it most of the time (via time and/ or via our beliefs about freedom) and we see the strong points of it (which others don't see most of the time). But this strong defensive behavior makes it hard to see the real picture often and it is often not according the reality. I do agree that there is a distinction between a consumer tool and a professional tool and that the latter needs more investment to learn. But you can't argue that you need to invest if that investment is due to the fact that a GUI is clumsy or that tools have annoying little bugs, which make producing music time consuming or does need developer knowledge to solve. This isn't acknowledged often in the Linux(audio) world. A musician wants to make music, and don't want to waste it's precious time on finding it's way trough the GUI or searching for work around for annoying bugs. On other OSs this situation is sometimes better then on Linux. Tools are (not occasionally) more intuitive and more production ready. Some tools on Linux are just made to solve a problem, for one or a few persons. Other tools are aiming to serve a larger group of musicians and like their software to be used by those musicians. The latter group should take criticism on workflow and comments on user friendliness seriously. I believe they are doing that, but I tend to feel that things are seen from a technical / developer perspective often. The perspective of a user/ musician is different sometimes and maybe we have to learn to see that and take it more serious imo. There are projects who are trying to improve the interfaces of opensource tools. Iirc someone on LAU or LAD pointed to a conference about it a while ago. Also I do remember a scientific project that did research on the GUI of GIMP. That's being said, let's not forget the strong points of Linuxaudio. One example: a pipeline comparable with the openoctave.org project, with a huge amount of Gig files and more then 100 MIDI and audio tracks, would be much harder to accomplish on Windows and probably also on OSX, not to mention the extra $$ you have to pay (constantly) for it... Best, \r

The problem is that until the experience is much more standardized, no such guide can really exist that would help the majority of people. Heck just look at the differences needed between Ubuntu and RedHat in as far as tweaking the OS. Throw AVLinux in the mix, what if one of them doesn't launch on some hardware, etc. Seablade On Sat, Mar 5, 2011 at 12:28 PM, Alexandre Prokoudine < alexandre.prokoudine(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

On 3/5/11, Thomas Vecchione wrote: So what you are saying is that we will never be able to do it :) I heartily disagree. Tweaking OS to get things done comes *before* you start meddling with Ardour and isn't required all the time. That makes it possible to just write an Appendix that will cover several distributions, while bloody well focusing on Ardour. So what's the problem? Alexandre Prokoudine http://libregraphicsworld.org

Yes but then we are leaving the topic of evangelizing Linux, and now are on the topic of evangelizing Ardour;) Seablade PS PTLE ran on Windows as well;) On Sat, Mar 5, 2011 at 1:53 PM, Alexandre Prokoudine < alexandre.prokoudine(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

On Sat, Mar 5, 2011 at 1:50 PM, Alexandre Prokoudine < alexandre.prokoudine(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Oh come on, you should know me at least well enough to know I don't believe that and certainly didn't say it:) The problem is that most of the time it is. In that case you are writing a manual for Ardour, so wanna join the work already in progress that you just wrote about?;) Of course the appendixes would require constant maintenence and would be exceedinly numerous as there are numerous distributions used in pro audio on Linux. That, I think but am not certain, is why the FLOSS manual covered Ubuntu to a limited degree and left it there. Trying to cover all of them is quite challenging and requires much more time than they had. Of course that being said just triyng to cover all of what Ardour can do is challenging in itself, trust me:) Seablade

On Sat, 5 Mar 2011 20:28:04 +0300 Alexandre Prokoudine &lt;alexandre.prokoudine(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Ohhhhh, #5: import PTLE sessions into Ardour! I know at one point someone was looking at how to accomplish that, but I have no recollection of it ever coming together. It'd be superb to be able to pull existing PTLE sessions into Ardour. -- ====================================================================== Joe Hartley - UNIX/network Consultant - jh(a)brainiac.com Without deviation from the norm, "progress" is not possible. - FZappa

On 3/5/11, Joe Hartley wrote: WINE + AATranslator. Honestly, do I have to say again that reverse engineering is not a problem, if there are users to provide sample files and developers to implement support for r-e'ed file formats in their apps? :) Alexandre Prokoudine http://libregraphicsworld.org

On Friday 04 March 2011 12:25, Andrew C wrote: It isn't merely "not n00b friendly". It's n00b-hostile. Many such users, probably most of them, literally think command prompts are error messages, that they did something wrong to be presented with a featureless black rectangle that does nothing when you click it. You can say they just need education, but the thought processes involved in choosing something from a menu of options versus actively deciding what to type into an otherwise blank window are completely different, actually using different parts of the brain. I prefer the command line for most administrative tasks, but I haven't been either a n00b or a normal user since about 1983, and I'd guess few if any on this list are. Even then, I remember wishing for a couple of months that I'd gotten more console games instead of a computer, because the learning curve was a bitch. I've set up family members with Linux (Mandrake/Mandriva, and then Ubuntu) without them ever running a terminal app or typing anything but emails. I carefully chose which hardware I recommended to them based on how well it played with Linux, and made sure they were no more than two clicks away from anything they wanted to do. I stopped bothering with doing that several years ago, not because of the command line, but because my family lives hours away from me, and whenever they'd seek help from closer relatives because they didn't realize I could ssh into their systems and do what they needed done remotely, they'd end up with a pirated XP install and the next thing they'd be asking me was "Do I have a virus?" Advocating Linux audio to new, non-technical users (not people who live with you and therefore can get the benefit of your constant tweaking to fake a seamless experience, but people whose machines are outside of your control) isn't served by assertions like "it's not worse, it's just different". What would help would be flawless hardware detection, automatic system configuration, and everything needed to make music already running in the background when the user decides to get to work by making a selection from a menu or clicking an icon on the desktop. Even then, getting their computers to boot from a USB key or CD/DVD will likely involve more technical ability than most of them possess. I'm more optimistic about people buying Android phones than about the chances of getting them to run Linux on anything else. Many people involved in Linux audio seem to think it's a feature to have a separate low-latency kernel, or that the user has to launch an audio server and manually set up connections before running most audio applications. Far be it from me to argue with that... or to ever recommend such a setup to someone who just wants to record some professional-sounding music. Given all that, making statements like "the command line isn't n00b friendly" amount to little more than a state of denial, and it's not helpful. Not only has the user interface world moved on, but it moved on about 25 years ago. And this applies to creative users and multimedia applications about ten times more than it does to general computing tasks. Rob