2011 is very nearly over - I was kinda hoping Ardour 3 would have had a stable release by now which obviously hasn't happened but at least it has made huge leaps in stability and functionality this year; I wasn't hedging my bets on it being done by now to be honest but congrats to all involved for their continued hard work anyway! Apart from A3 going beta, other notable FLOSS audio highlights for me this year have been the release of OpenOctave MIDI which would seem to have forked MuSE to very rapidly become the most professional FLOSS MIDI sequencer and TYOQA actually happened! Whoop! Things are really starting to heat up in the FLOSS DAW world and we have a few real good choices now! This year also saw a stable JACK release complete with JACK session support and Nedko has just released v1 of LADISH - both of these technologies are much needed for having a nice workflow when using multiple standalone JACK apps to create music but I hope that in 2012 JACK session managers such as these will become a largely unrequired, legacy aspect of Linux audio because instead we will hopefully have a good selection of LV2 plugins to do what currently requires standalone JACK apps. There will no doubt continue to be valid uses for LADISH and JS in a post-LV2 world but such session managers add yet another layer of complexity to creating music with free software, raising both the learning curve and resource requirements and it is yet another aspect of Linux audio that is likely to scare off potential converts from other platforms and frankly puts me off using and advocating it too. When I discovered that falktx was working on porting his fantastic DISTRHO plugin repo to LV2 I was overjoyed. The Highlife sampler is still missing from DISTRHO but once I can load quality, useful LV2 plugins such as NoiseMaker and Highlife and have them work as you'd expect VSTi's or AU instruments to then I will truly think Linux Audio has arrived and will be ready to be adopted beyond the hardcore trailblazers and devs already present on this list. It should then be possible to create all free software Linux audio distros that will finally be able to offer most of the functionality and a comparable workflow to that enjoyed by Windows and OSX users for so long now - hallefookinlujah! :) So, poor falktx has been continually bugged by me since I found out his plans- turns out he has been prevented from completing his plugin ports due to a couple of missing and/or incomplete LV2 extensions that are required for such plugins to function- namely the X11 UI extension, most importantly, needs finalising and also another extension is needed to handle VST-style programs/presets. I realise I could've just mailed drobilla directly to find out where he's up to with this but I've just explained why I think this is of the utmost importance to the Linux Audio community so I thought I'd ask him publicly so we all know where we're up to. Drobilla? Happy Christmas Linux Audio land! _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
