[LAU] A year of Linux Audio revisited - would like to know your oppinion

Ken Restivo ken at restivo.org
Thu Dec 13 13:31:34 EST 2007


On Wed, Dec 12, 2007 at 10:44:45AM +0000, Chris Cannam wrote:
> On Wednesday 12 December 2007 05:50, Robert Persson wrote:
> > Here is a good explanation of how groove quantise works in protools:
> > http://www.audiomidi.com/classroom/protools_corner/ptcorner_63.cfm
> >
> > For some really fancy midi stuff going way further than groove quantise,
> > you could take a look at some of Ntonyx's products, such as StyleEnhancer
> > and StyleMorpher. If Rosegarden could implement some of those features that
> > would be very useful for composers.
> 
> Groove quantization is one of the oldest outstanding feature requests in the 
> Rosegarden tracker, submitted by me in 2002:
> 
> http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=633259&group_id=4932&atid=354932
> 
> Unfortunately, as for so many features, this has simply never percolated to 
> the top of my priority queue, or stack, or whatever my brain uses, and nobody 
> else has ever shown much interest in coding it.  And sadly I only have eight 
> hands and three heads and there are only 132 hours in the day.
> 
> Your remark about the unhelpfulness of comparing Rosegarden with Cubase 
> arrived on the same day that we removed an introductory note that made that 
> comparison from the Rosegarden website.  Although it's sometimes helpful as a 
> quick answer to "what the hell is this program with this meaningless name 
> supposed to be for?", it is certainly problematic, not just as a description 
> but as a statement of intent.  Rosegarden would probably have benefited over 
> the years from trying less hard to do absolutely everything: attempting 
> to "be Cubase" is arguably undesirable as well as unachievable.
> 
> A related point is that stronger "competition" might also have been 
> beneficial.  If other Linux sequencers were more widely recognised as the 
> obvious choice for certain sorts of users, we would have felt more free to 
> focus only on those use cases we were really comfortable with.  Being more 
> popular with users doesn't necessarily gain you a huge number of extra 
> developers.  In this world, as a developer you aren't really in competition 
> with other applications for user interest, except where it pains you that no 
> other application is providing a feature at all, or to please your ego.  But 
> it's more important to maintain your own interest by doing the things you 
> really want to see done.
> 
> Sorry, another unhelpful digression in this over-digressed thread.
> 
> For what it's worth, Rosegarden does support grid quantize (snapping events to 
> a grid), swing quantize (displacing the off-beat), and iterative quantize 
> (pulling events only part of the way to the grid lines), and it can construct 
> a tempo map from a MIDI segment based on the difference between the actual 
> beat timings in the segment and the expected timings at the current time 
> signature (sort of inside-out quantization).  But no groove quantize.
> 
> 

FWIW, I turn up the "Humanize Timing" and "Humanie Velocity" knobs in Hydrogen a lot, and that gets me all of the "groove" I need, other than what I can supply through my own imperfect playing.

Hydrogen is Free Software, so the code it uses to perform these features is available for anyone that wants to cut and paste it into another sequencer, such as Rosegarden or what have you. I haven't looked at it, but I'll bet it's just calls to rand().

-ken



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