On Sunday 02 March 2008 00:54, Lee Revell wrote: > > It's true that people using free software make the software > > better, eventually, when the developers care, but it's also true > > that some people using non-free software are meeting deadlines and > > making money. > > Disagree. Many, many Linux enthusiasts take your point of view > seriously. The whole point of the Ubuntu distro is solving this > problem. Zillions of man hours have gone into it. Of course it's > still often a problem especially if your needs fall out in the long > tail of the demand curve. Unfortunately, even after almost 10 years of serious development activity, audio and especially MIDI production falls squarely into that "long tail" category. And it's not the fault of the Linux audio developers. None of the major distributors take it seriously, causing a situation where you need to either do a lot of manual tweaking or boot into a different distro (or OS) altogether if you want to make music beyond recording waveforms from stereo inputs. I've used Linux exclusively for 8 or 9 years, both for my business and for leisure, and my music has suffered as a result. I'm not on LAU as someone who loves Linux audio software, but as someone who finds Linux more than usable in every other way, watching the list in hopes that someday the promises of JACK and LASH will be fulfilled like those of Firefox and Openoffice, KDE and GNOME, ffmpeg and mplayer were, a day when I'll be able to, after doing nothing but installing my choice of programs out of the software manager applet, double click an icon on my desktop and have everything I need start up and work without "xruns" or the sound server dying or one of the main programs throwing a segv because most audio programs are consigned to unsupported "contrib" status (looking at Mandriva as I say that.) The free time I have to spend on music, which on Windows even 12 years ago resulted in something actually being recorded, is now spent downloading ISOs of limited use, building kernels, and poring over mail archives for clues on what I'm doing wrong. I understand it's working for a lot of people on this list, but as long as the distros treat it as a fringe activity -- what, they're still evaluating the stability of low latency kernels after 7 years? -- it's going to stay in the domain of people who have time for tweaking or who basically just need a tape deck replacement. I will probably convert one of my servers into a Linux audio box running Ubuntu Studio, with the keyboards and USB audio box hooked up and JACK running permanently. Sitting at a desk isn't really how I do music (I only switched to Linux fulltime when it became possible to run it on my laptop, which is my main machine, and before laptops were practical I used the Korg M1 sequencer and took sysex backups on my old Amiga), but I'm running out of options. If that fails to give me some productive weekends after the initial setup, I'll probably have to suck it up and invest in a used Macbook or whatever they're called, and all that goes with it, facing a learning curve of a different kind. Having done network support for a recording studio, I already know I dislike the Mac interface almost as much as I dislike Windows. But I have dozens of songs in pieces contained in notes and voicemails to myself, and I would very much like to get them arranged and recorded in my lifetime. Rob _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-audio-user
