Orcan Ogetbil wrote:
On Mon, 2009-05-04 at 16:24 -0400, Orcan Ogetbil wrote:
I will start writing the wiki page this week and report the status
once I have enough material that can benefit from feedback.
I did start writing the wiki page [1] last week but I got stuck at one point.
It is not easy to make a good and fair classification. If we just take
the AudioCreation software away and make a new group with them, and
leave all the Audio/Video players, Digital Media and Video production
software in Multimedia, it will be bad design. We need a better
solution, which is not that easy to find.
These are the types of software we have in the Multimedia group.
- Audio Player
- Video Player
- Both Audio and Video Player
- Digital (optical) Media Creation
- Digital (optical) Media Ripping
- Video Creation
- Subtitle software
- Audio Creation (which itself has many sub-categories)
So how shall we do the branching?
* A starting point would be separating Audio and Video. Then make
"Players" and "Creation" subgroups an each. But then where will the
CD/DVD creation/ripping stuff will go?
* Another starting point would be to separate Creation stuff
altogether, leaving all the players in Multimedia. Then the Creation
group will contain both Audio and Video stuff. This is not a bad thing
to do if the subgrouping is made logical.
* Yet another starting point is, do not create another main group.
Just do all the subgrouping inside Multimedia.
I really can't decide which of the three to pick. Can I get some
opinions here? In all the cases, we will have the issue of having some
packages that belong to multiple subgroups. How shall we handle this?
Good points, and David Timms also got a nice approach in another mail
thread (even though, maybe a bit too extensive maybe?)
Some software can be really difficult to categorise, especially if aligned
along these directions. I'm just thinking out loud here now, please shoot
these ideas down if they are useless.
We are serving segments, one is big already and the other segment has a
potential to be just as big: Consumer and Pro ... what do I mean here?
Consumer: The "normal" computer user who wants different players, sounds,
and video, and just playing with things just for fun.
Pro: Those who want to use the computer for serious production, like
composers, musicians, DJ's, whatever who needs high-quality experience.
To oversimplify it: Consumers will be more than satisfied enough with
PulseAudio, while Pro users who most probably want Jack instead.
Could this be a better path to help grouping the software? F.ex. Totem,
VLC, MPlayer - in this scheme, a reasonable place would be a "Consumer"
group. While Rosegarden, Audacity, QSynth, different DJ software, Video
editing, etc might fit better into a "Pro" group. But let's not call
anything "Consumer" to the user, but rather stick to the "Sound & Video"
group name as today.
These two groups could then have subgroups, like Video, Audio/MIDI ...
Maybe if more subgroups are wanted below this point, it should be
considered to have two main groups for the pro-segment, like "Pro-Audio",
"Pro-Video" and for consumer, a single "Sound & Video" group.
The reason for not splitting up "Sound & Video" is becuase: where would
VLC, MPlayer and Totem fit in, between audio and video ... For more single
directed applications in the "consumer" group, it could of course have
subcategories.
In this approach, the "Pro" categories could also show up in the menu when
Jack is installed. And as Jack most probably is a dependency to several
Pro-targeted software packages, you get everything in place at once.
Another thing for using the word "Pro" in these groups, is to emphasize
that Linux is not just for geeks and amateurs, and that even less (Linux?)
experienced pro-audio/video people will then catch the point - Linux might
also be something for them. For marketing people in the Linux world, using
the word "Pro" might be beneficial - as this description is still (I
believe) heavily used in the music and video world today.
But for a product to slip into the Pro-* groups, it really needs to be
high-quality piece of product - or else it can easily backfire again and
making Linux Pro-* effort a big joke.
Just my few cents
David S.
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