On Tuesday 11 December 2007 00:54, Robert Persson wrote: > important features. Therefore it just isn't true that LMMS can do > the kind of job that FL Studio can do, yet it seems that many > people in the Linux audio world think that it is. There is a lot of > this kind of over-optimism within the Linux audio world and this is > dangerous because it can lead to complacency. Developers need to Longtime Linux users do sometimes get complacent because they think some Linux application has reached the state of the art, when meanwhile the state of the art has moved on. How many years was it that people were holding up Tux Racer with its 1995 graphics as an example of how Linux could compete as a gaming OS? (And it was a great game that didn't deserve to be called something it wasn't.) How often have you heard "Oh, don't bother trying to get Visio working under Wine, because Dia is better anyway?" Telling people that kind of stuff and having them switch to Linux -- which takes probably more effort than a lifelong Unix nerd trying to switch to Windows -- and be disappointed, is far worse than saying "Yeah, we have some programs that are sort of like Visio, but nothing with the same variety of stencils and templates for network management" and letting them try it with more realistic expectations. But when it comes to Linux audio in particular, I think things have been moving faster in the last couple of years, not settling into complacency. I have some of the same complaints as you (Rosegarden won't let me manipulate note data as flexibly as the shovelware Windows 3.1 sequencer that came with my sound card 12 years ago; it takes hours for me just to get Jack and the ALSA sequencer, my MIDI keyboard and my desired client programs working together, let alone LASH, and by then I've run out of time to compose or record, and the next time I can look forward to going through the exact same ordeal) but I do see forward progress here every week, if not every day. And a couple years ago I wouldn't have even dreamed of trying an audio-oriented live Linux CD, if any of the current ones even existed then. (No offense intended to whomever was working on Agnula/Demudi/Rehmudi, but none of them really filled me with much confidence.) While the whole free-software-CC-licensed-music culture is still a drop in the bucket, it's a bigger drop. I was still far more productive musically in Windows 98 or even 95 than I am in Linux, but then, I had a lot more free time in those days. At least some of it was probably just a matter of familiarity and staying in practice. There are definitely gaps, and the "many little programs that you have to connect together" philosophy that works so well on the command line is utterly baffling to me in the GUI, but I feel pretty confident that once I make it up the learning curve I might end up being more productive someday. Even if I have to write my own .rg batch processor in perl or something. And yes, after all these years, "suspend to RAM" is still largely broken. I feel pretty lucky that "suspend to disk" works on my laptop and have probably become a little complacent about how my notebook works under Linux versus how it would have worked under XP. Maybe a lot of people making music with Linux are just making do because they can't afford the 2 or 3 grand involved in getting a decent Mac notebook and the commercial software required to make music at a level beyond GarageBand, but the truth is, much of the music I've heard here is pretty uncompromising. Rob _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-audio-user
