Lots of interesting points both ways. My experience is uniquely twisted I would guess. Making money is still in the future (if at all). But still my first recording was for someone else. I have been making music for years and even done some recording years ago. My experiences with MS software has always been so bad I have used other things. I started off running a BBS (actually helping someone who was already running one) on win3.1... it was really bad, unstable, slow etc. The guy had a mechanical timer to shut the thing off and on once a day just so he go on holidays. OS/2 (in text mode) solved that just fine. I was not making money on the project and so when internet started to show up and adsl was available I found out that NIC drivers for OS/2 were costly (more than the cards) and started looking at Linux (pre 1.0 kernel). I moved the BBS there. At the same time I also had an Atari Mega which I was using for playing on. The audio was no use for recording and disks were still small 40 Meg was still normal size HD. But I did find a sequencing program with 1024 tracks onto 16 channels. (shareware) It may not have been the greatest, but I found it easy to use and edit with... but most of all, it was rock solid time wise which at that time none of the windows sequencers were, even commercial products. I got a 1/4inch 8 track and that is how I started recording. No computer anything aside from the sequencer. Anyway, live set some of that aside and while I did play live, I set recording aside and didn't do that much with computers. That was twice for me MS did not have a usable product. I worked at work with NT systems (Gag!) and found other problems... I ended up using a morphix variant (itself a variant of knoppix) for NT backup/restore/trouble shooting (yet another MS fail). I also developed a Linux standalone training station during that time. By the way, the reason the company I worked for used MS software was "support", I found out that in company speak that meant we want to have someone we can sue. My wife had a windows computer for a while... till our friends started getting really disgusting emails that I traced to that machine... she started using Linux after that... took her about 15 minutes (if that) to switch. More MS fails. In the mean time I was using slackware on my desktop and home server. and found audioslack. I thought I would try that and used it with a 2 channel 16bit pci card (ensoniq) but found it was still not stable enough/ did not have the software to replace my 8track. My machine was probably not up to it either. This was somewhere in the DX100 to P333 days... so it sat there till I got myself a "real" sound card (D66.. and no I will not argue about how good or bad it is) and found that I could not get it to work with the version of audioslack I had and audioslack was not there any more. I started playing with various linux audio distros and with a more capable machine (P4 2.6Ghz old by todays standards) am finding I can replace my tape machine. I realize MS stuff has come a long ways since win95, but win7 which came on my netbook was slow and full of advertising... stink ware... so I guess I still have issues with windows... that is the learning curve to go to windows is too steep. Audio. I have different needs than most it seems (by what has been said). I like to record acoustic sounds. I'm not a keyboard player and don't have access to one (KB player that is, I do have an old DX7) at this point and as stated I am not selling time yet either. Audacity does everything I need so far, I use very few plugins, maybe a bit of EQ or reverb... a tube emulator if the guitar is too clean. Looping is not something that appeals to me. I expect each verse to have a different feel and each chorus too. I generally try for whole song length tracks, though I have fixed botches on otherwise good takes. Sequencing might be something I would use for drums, but not likely a beatbox. I would expect to record a drum performance on pads and play it back at mix time. But, as can be seen in a commercial situation loops and synths are more to be expected. My hope is that the linux audio world keeps up with my needs... learning windows is too much work. Having said all that, I can understand why audio distros might be dying. I have been helping develop Ubuntu studio the last cycle or so. Understand, this is not coding development, this is just assembling packages onto an existing distro. It is hard time consuming work still and every time someone says great stuff someone else doesn't like it. I can understand why there are not a lot of audio devs in the linux world. It can get discouraging very quickly. I just imagine what it is like for those doing coding. You all have my personal thanks. Is Linux Audio moving forward? Yes. Can it do everything? Maybe not. Is windows or OSX the greatest thing? Maybe not either. For now Linux does do anything I need... better than the old 8track :) -- Len Ovens www.OvenWerks.net _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
