--- Joe Hartley <jh@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > The first is that the Ardour folks have approached the project in a > manner that's on par with commercial software developers. I'm well-aware of what it's like to work for large software companies. I've been with the same company for 6 yrs now and worked on about as many projects. Not a signle one of those products has ever been sold and implemented for a customer. Most projects have been cancelled within a month of completion. I've implemented more code in six months of "on the side" consulting than 6 yrs of working for a corporate software company. However, the reason the projects at my company fail are because of bad requirements, bad design, fanciful timelines, bad project managment, and sure, our inability as developers to turn over what we're given into a satisfactory product. To me, it seems the main reason for Ardour's development pace is the same as all other open source projects. There's not a level of accountability that says we "have" to at least make it appear that something got done in a certain timeframe. Having said that, it's probably not a bad thing, and I'll never question the committedness of the developers without spending some time contributing myself. > The big difference is that the process is open and visible to the public, > and > we were able to start using the tools long before we could have in > a > closed development environment. I'll give you that. > there's been a feature freeze on for a while, See I understood there was a feature freeze some time ago, but new releases kept coming out with what I saw as new features. Again, it's the open source way. People add things as they have an itch for them. That's fine as long as there is a process for it and a level of stability can be reached. > You said that "Release 1.0 should've come out a long time ago, like > after real-time multitrack recording, editing, and mixing were > available." > The goal of Ardour is to be a professional-grade DAW, and I believe > that > they are approaching that goal. I don't think it would have done > them > any good to have released something without a certain minimum > number of > features above and beyond the barebones recording, mixing and > editing > functions. You may be right, and maybe what I suggested is exactly what they are trying to do: wait until a set of features is rock-solid before releasing. Perhaps, in hindsight, Ardour developers would've done it differently, but as an outside, interested onlooker, it looks like a bit of scope creep occured. But I could be wrong. > Regarding the stability, I've found it to be much more stable now > than > ever before. I use it on a regular basis now, and while I still > run > into problems, I've never lost more than a single take in Ardour, > even > when it crashed and burned badly. Now that I've made my voice heard about it, I'm going to bring my planet up to date and see if I can get it working again. I should clarify, when I lost work, the loss was recoverable. I was able to import the tracks into audacity and remix them. The work I lost was mixing, which is much more difficult in audacity than in ardour. > > As for usability, I agree that it's complex, but given what it > does, I > can't see how you'd avoid that. All DAWs I've ever worked with > have a > similar problem. I'm not sure I completely agree. In most DAWs I've worked with, using the left mouse button and dragging selects data. Then you can right click and see a menu of what you can do with your selection. If you click "Split", it splits the track. With ardour, I have trouble determining whether some of my problems are because I don't understand how the interface works or because of a bug in the system. Sometimes "selecting" something doesn't really select it, or "cutting" doesn't really cut. Is that a problem with my understanding or with Ardour? Thanks for your responses. Greg _______________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Declare Yourself - Register online to vote today! http://vote.yahoo.com
