On Monday 31 August 2009 01:27 pm, cunnilinux himself wrote: > people in linux audio scene always DESPERATELY need something just > like a copy of some fancy (commercial) app on win/mac. > that's the main and only reason why linux is (semi-)deficient in the > pro audio world. That's exactly the same argument people were making about Linux office applications 8 or 9 years ago, and while some may dislike their choices now (essentially OpenOffice, Gnumeric/Abiword, Koffice and Google Docs) or find an obscure feature missing here and there, the only ones who can't get anything at all done with them are essentially the dimmer bulbs. Meanwhile, back in those days, the people who claimed Linux didn't need all those monolithic office applications espoused tools like LaTeX. There were others, but that's the only one whose name I remember and they were all basically the same idea, having the user insert codes into the text to tell the processor about its structure and format during printing. Some people referred to Emacs as a "word processor", as well. While they may very well be technically superior in some ways to Microsoft Office or the alternatives available to Linux (only used LaTeX once and only use emacs for writing code), tools like LaTeX and Emacs have a hell of a learning curve. Ardour has a hell of a learning curve too, and is dependent upon things like JACK and low-latency kernels. I used to have time to deal with things like that, but it's been a long time since those days. I've never gotten a single note recorded in Ardour. Luckily for me, there's LMMS (with inbuilt Zyn and a bunch of soundfonts) for composition and arrangement, and Audacity for editing and mixing, and the only thing I was unable to do when I finally got a song done earlier this year was use a mastering compressor, which I faked with some harmonics and a limiter. I explained my process to a friend of mine and he basically said, "Dude, all that stuff you just spent days on I can do in Ableton in like half an hour." Maybe that's true, and certainly my friend is very prolific, but I've never used Ableton so I still don't really know what I'm missing. (Of course, what he thinks of is "Ableton" is actually Ableton plus a bunch of other plugins, instruments and sample sets, whose cost would have been in the five figure range if he hadn't pirated them.) But I've also been using Linux since 1994, and exclusively since around 2002. Someone from another operating system doesn't care about a bunch of little virtual sound boxes connected by a bunch of little virtual cables to get everything exactly the way they want. They want to double click on an icon and be off to the races. They want sensible defaults. They want the equivalent of a blank MS Word document with the cursor blinking and inviting them to type in 12- point Times New Roman, and worry about adjusting it later. Essentially, Ableton Live is MS Word. I think the LMMS guys are the closest to that sort of thing now with all their presets and the way their default project is set up (and the fact that it actually *has* a default project), but I'm told it's still closer to Fruityloops than Ableton. Doesn't matter to me since I haven't played live in 21 years and I'd be okay never playing live again. I'd like the automagical stretching and beat matching stuff I hear Ableton does. But other people do play live and might want more of that functionality, and it sounds to me like no current single Linux audio app is going to provide it. If it can be provided by a number of different Linux programs, someone who makes that kind of claim needs to write a howto and put it out there on the web, and users who have never seen the inside of a recording booth and never seen a bash prompt will need to be able to follow the howto without ever taking their hands off their mice. It really doesn't matter whether it works for people who already have a Linux solution they're happy with. It needs to work for the people who aren't getting anything done using Linux audio because they don't know where to start. Rob _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-audio-user
