On Sat March 11 2006 03:45, Frank Barknecht wrote: > With Common Music, Lilypond, Pd, Csound, Supercollider, every > programming languange you want, and with the ability, to run > the occasional foreign software through Wine, Linux is a very > good platform for Composers IMO. And by "composers", of course, you mean "composers who are also computer programmers". None of the people I know in real life who compose music are going to be writing Csound, CM or Supercollider code to do what they want. The programs they do use, like Live, Fruityloops and Cakewalk, are still way beyond any compositional tools we have available to us under Linux, with all apologies to the Pd, SSM and Rosegarden guys. I might use code-based compositional tools (well, the ones that can be programmed without using Lisp-like languages, which are evil and must be destroyed), but then, I'm a composer who's also a computer programmer. My advice to the parent poster is to get an Intel Mac (either a Macbook or one of the new Mac Minis) unless one of your specific goals as a musician is to create your music using free software. That's one of my own goals, or I'd already have a Mac myself. Even then, some popular compositional tools (like Fruityloops) are Windows-only at this point. The musicians I know who work professionally are about a 50/50 split between OSX and Windows. I'm the only fool I know who's trying to do everything under Linux. Rob
