[Neil Gould]

dawhead wrote:
On Dec 23, 12:13 pm, Moshe Goldfarb wrote:
Maybe this sounds like a cop out but all I want to do is make music.

Then why are you using computers? What is it that leads you to expect
that a general purpose operating system (windows/OSX/linux) on a
general purpose CPU on a general purpose motherboard is a sensible way
to build a tool that will let you "just make music" ?

What leads ME to expect it is that I've been able to do just that for a
couple of decades using DOS then Windows systems, all on the professional
level. So, if one CAN'T do that with Linux, what does it tell you?

--
Best,

Neil




--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: ---

[Les Cargill[_2_]]

dawhead wrote:
On Dec 23, 12:13 pm, Moshe Goldfarb wrote:
However, you raise the point which is my personal reason why audio
under Linux is a mess.
Too many sound systems, and too much needed interaction by the user.

one person's "too much interaction" is another person's "not enough
control". maybe we should pay more attention to the fact that there
are probably more people in the first situation than the second, or
maybe we're interested in a niche market of audio professionals who
actually want control.


There really needs to be somebody doing value added, to cover up
the "control" from those who don't need it.

Where Windows was a win was the various phases of the multimedia
API, which gave people pretty finely-grained control. It's a
*sad* API, but by the time N-Track 2.0 was available, you could
get real work done.

With Windows this stuff is almost totally transparent.
Choose ASIO or WDM and that's it.

Really. A fascinating assesment of the windows situation. You know
that WDM is deprecated in Windows7, yes?

Does that mean it no longer works, or that it's not actively
supported any more? Got link?

That ASIO was never provided
by Microsoft and always relied on 3rd party drivers which didn't
always track the latest version of Windows precisely? That before WDM,
there was no reasonable "out of the box" low latency solution on that
platform?

WDM isn't that low latency anyway... latency is a nonstarter... er,
it's nice if you can get it, but it's pretty easy to design workflows
that go around it.

That most windows consumer desktop applications used MME,
not ASIO, for playback and capture, which could often conflict with
ASIO use of the audio interface? The situation is certainly cleaner
than Linux, but it hardly gets close to the cleanliness (for the user)
of CoreAudio.

With Linux it's a mess.
Also, OSS, Arts, eSound, and now Pulse Audio the current prom queen of
the Linux world, comes along to confuse things even more.

What's a mess is that so many people, including you, have read so much
stuff that has led them to completely misunderstand the role of these
things in the Linux "audio stack".
For a report on my perspective, this is useful: http://lwn.net/Articles/355542/


Thanks for that. Wow, 1998, huh?

Yes Jack, which is kind of like Rewire coupled with Steinberg's
Control Room, allows you to do a lot of things but it assumes you know
what you are doing, or are willing to scour the net to figure out how.

If I could control the entire Linux "audio experience" of every JACK
user, you would never have this perspective. But Linux is not a
company. If you want a smooth experience with Linux audio, do you
randomly pick some distro, some machine, some audio interface and put
them together and expect that it will all just work? It appears that
many existing or potential Linux users do indeed expect this to be
possible. Sorry, its not.

But that's a defining difference between Dozers and Penguins.

Its unfortunate that so many people believe
that it is, or even more irritatingly, believe that it should be. Its
not possible on Windows (you just have a higher success rate with
random selections of (windows-version,hardware,audio-interface) - many
audio forums for Windows DAWs are full of testimonies to problems that
people have with particularly bad combinations of choices.

True! Various Firewire chips have been discussed here ad nauseum.

If you
want that kind of experience, you need to get your system from a
company that controls everything end-to-end, which means either Apple
or a company that specializes in building machines for media work that
run Linux. Unfortunately, I can't recommend any of them at this
particular point in time.


Or you can selectively buy known-good stuff for Doze.

Maybe this sounds like a cop out but all I want to do is make music.

Then why are you using computers? What is it that leads you to expect
that a general purpose operating system (windows/OSX/linux) on a
general purpose CPU on a general purpose motherboard is a sensible way
to build a tool that will let you "just make music" ?

FWIW, Mike frequently touts using units like the Alesis HD2424
plus a good, analog console for getting real work done. But DAW
stuff has been more-or-less possible for ten years now, and
we all pretty much know those will go by the wayside.

http://www.alesis.com/hd24

And what I am seeing is that virtualization seems to be able
to make the point moot - one may be able to run a Doze DAW on an
otherwise Linux box. I'm still researching this myself.

--
Les Cargill

[LittleShitt]

On Wed, 23 Dec 2009 14:20:18 -0800 (PST), dawhead wrote:


one person's "too much interaction" is another person's "not enough
control". maybe we should pay more attention to the fact that there
are probably more people in the first situation than the second, or
maybe we're interested in a niche market of audio professionals who
actually want control.

They want control of their music and the applications that record their
music.

They most certainly do not want to be playing with operating systems like
Linux forces the user to do.

With Windows this stuff is almost totally transparent.
Choose ASIO or WDM and that's it.

Really. A fascinating assesment of the windows situation. You know
that WDM is deprecated in Windows7, yes? That ASIO was never provided
by Microsoft and always relied on 3rd party drivers which didn't
always track the latest version of Windows precisely? That before WDM,
there was no reasonable "out of the box" low latency solution on that
platform? That most windows consumer desktop applications used MME,
not ASIO, for playback and capture, which could often conflict with
ASIO use of the audio interface? The situation is certainly cleaner
than Linux, but it hardly gets close to the cleanliness (for the user)
of CoreAudio.

You're kidding right?

What I *do know* is that I plug in my audio interface, under Windows 7 x64
BTW, my control surface, select ASIO (my choice) and it all works.
I never have to touch a single thing other than latency.

I fire up Nuendo 4, Reaper, Sonar 8.5 and it all works.

All my plugins, well most of my plugins work.
Some, like Toontrack are having some growing pains with Windows 7 x64, but
that's coming shortly.

Linux doesn't even support this stuff.

And you are deluding yourself if you think for one instant that a
professional, like myself or Mike or Scott or Hank or Fletcher will for
even an instant claim that the Linux solution is "cleaner".

Maybe it's cleaner from a programmer perspective, a developer perspective
and maybe in theory ie: crunchy code and all that gibberish.
However I can tell you that if Linux were the only software choice for a
DAW we would all still be using tape and a razor blade.


Try that under Linux.
Oh yea, if you have SoundBlaster, it will probably work fine.


With Linux it's a mess.
Also, OSS, Arts, eSound, and now Pulse Audio the current prom queen of
the Linux world, comes along to confuse things even more.

What's a mess is that so many people, including you, have read so much
stuff that has led them to completely misunderstand the role of these
things in the Linux "audio stack".

Why should I have to even read?
The reason is none of this crap works correctly.

Mike's venture into this is a prime example.

You Linux developers are all doing your own thing and apparently nobody is
talking to the other people.

Example: Pulseaudio.

Yea, I know Ardour etc doesn't deal with it because it's ALSA based.
So why is that?
If ALSA works fine, and it does IMHO, why all the others?

Oh yea, "choice"...
No, it's not choice.
It's a cluster****.

Take a look a the Ubuntu forums and see how many Pulseaudio problems you
will find.



For a report on my perspective, this is useful: http://lwn.net/Articles/355542/

Fair enough...

My personal feeling is ALSA should be tightly integrated with the kernel
(I'm not a programmer so please excuse the simple language) and the others
should disappear.

Yes Jack, which is kind of like Rewire coupled with Steinberg's
Control Room, allows you to do a lot of things but it assumes you know
what you are doing, or are willing to scour the net to figure out how.

If I could control the entire Linux "audio experience" of every JACK
user, you would never have this perspective. But Linux is not a
company. If you want a smooth experience with Linux audio, do you
randomly pick some distro, some machine, some audio interface and put
them together and expect that it will all just work? It appears that
many existing or potential Linux users do indeed expect this to be
possible. Sorry, its not. Its unfortunate that so many people believe
that it is, or even more irritatingly, believe that it should be. Its
not possible on Windows (you just have a higher success rate with
random selections of (windows-version,hardware,audio-interface) - many
audio forums for Windows DAWs are full of testimonies to problems that
people have with particularly bad combinations of choices. If you
want that kind of experience, you need to get your system from a
company that controls everything end-to-end, which means either Apple
or a company that specializes in building machines for media work that
run Linux. Unfortunately, I can't recommend any of them at this
particular point in time.

Bit that's exactly the problem!
Too many hands in the pot and too many "solutions".

Put it this way, if I had you in my studio for a couple of hours, I am
certain you could show me things that Jack/ALSA etc can do, that I could
not even in my wildest imagination conceive.

But I don't have you and documentation is poor so I am left to mostly fend
on my own, like most people.

The closest example I can give is Linux Konqueror.
How many people really realize how powerful that application is?
It goes far, far beyond a browser.



Maybe this sounds like a cop out but all I want to do is make music.

Then why are you using computers? What is it that leads you to expect
that a general purpose operating system (windows/OSX/linux) on a
general purpose CPU on a general purpose motherboard is a sensible way
to build a tool that will let you "just make music" ?

Ivory.
Garritan
Addictive Drums
UAD
Sonnex
Nuendo.
ProTools.

Do they run under Linux?

That's where Linux loses, at least for me.

You see, you look at the computer from a programming POV.

I look at it from a musician's POV.

Big difference.

For me, the computer is a gigantic tape drive and the editing is the mother
of all splicing blocks.
The effects are the racks of equipment I used to have (I still have some
BTW) or the units I could not afford back in the 70's.

Ivory is the Steinway, Bosendorfer, Yammy etc I cannot fit in my living
room as well as the superb mics needed to record such fine instruments I
could not afford.

Actually I have a Steinway B now and some very nice mics, but the acoustics
in my living room where the piano is are marginal.

Ivory or Garritan is a much better choice in MOST situations.

It goes on and on.

I leave you with one thought, Linux is free and a lot of musicians and
engineers know about it.

Why are so very few using it at a professional level?

[Moshe goldfarb]

On Wed, 23 Dec 2009 18:18:02 -0500, Little****t wrote:

On Wed, 23 Dec 2009 14:20:18 -0800 (PST), dawhead wrote:


I leave you with one thought, Linux is free and a lot of musicians and
engineers know about it.

Why are so very few using it at a professional level?

You need to try an audio tageted Linux distribution instead of using a
generic one.

Try UbuntuStudio which will eliminate many of the problems you are talking
about.

Just my 2 cents.

[Anahata]

On Wed, 23 Dec 2009 18:11:19 -0500, Neil Gould wrote:

What leads ME to expect it is that I've been able to do just that for a
couple of decades using DOS then Windows systems, all on the
professional level. So, if one CAN'T do that with Linux, what does it
tell you?

DAWs are just one example of speciality applications (CAD is another)
where there'll only ever be a small population of users but the software
itself is very complex. Consequently anybody investing development time
on such software commercially is only going to go for the most widely
used platform, or their already tiny market will become even smaller.

Actually if Pro Tools, Nuendo or whatever were ported to Linux, I'm sure
it would run like a champ, but there just isn't the commercial incentive
to do it.

--
Anahata
-+- http://www.treewind.co.uk
Home: 01638 720444 Mob: 07976 263827

[Scott Dorsey]

Neil Gould wrote:
Meanwhile, "professional" means that one can make a living in their area of
expertise, which rules out most applications under Linux. From what I've
seen, Open Office is about as good as it gets, and it isn't very competitive
with MS Office 2000 w/r/t user features. I've found some glaring errors in
its documentation that could not have persisted in a commercial app. I can
only conclude that the users don't care that it doesn't work as the
documentation says it does.

Open Office is interesting, because the technical documentation is better
than the user documentation. Contrast that to MS Office, where the user
documentation is excellent but the technical documentation is nonexistent.

This is probably the best example of what I mean when I say that there is
a lot of excellent open source stuff out there which is poorly documented.

But then, I'm a guy who would say that what is -wrong- with MS Office is
that Microsoft keeps burdening it down with more and more useless "user
features."
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

[dawhead[_2_]]

On Dec 23, 6:18*pm, Little****t wrote:
They most certainly do not want to be playing with operating systems like
Linux forces the user to do.

Then for the time being, at least, they probably shouldn't bother.

What I *do know* is that I plug in my audio interface, under Windows 7 x64
BTW, my control surface, select ASIO (my choice) and it all works.
I never have to touch a single thing other than latency.

What I do know is that I plug in my audio interface (an RME hdsp9652)
under Linux (Fedora 11 x86_64), plugin in my control surfaces, start
JACK and it all works. I never have to touch anything except hdspmixer
to reset the initial matrix mixer settings for the hdsp, and JACK to
adjust latency.

I fire up Nuendo 4, Reaper, Sonar 8.5 and it all works.

I fire up Ardour and it all works.

All my plugins, well most of my plugins work.

All of my plugins, well most of my plugins work.

Linux doesn't even support this stuff.

Wrong way around. The developers of those plugins don't support Linux.
Can you run Ardour on Windows? Same deal. Linux' job isn't to support
pre-existing software, just like OS X's job isn't to support Windows
software. Clear thinking about where responsibilities lie here would
help.

And you are deluding yourself if you think for one instant that a
professional, like myself or Mike or Scott or Hank or Fletcher will for
even an instant claim that the Linux solution is "cleaner".

Fortunately, I am not deluding myself for one moment into thinking
that any professionals like yourself, Mike or the other people you
mention (the last 3 I do not know) will claim that the Linux solution
is "cleaner". I'm not even sure that I am claiming that. However, I
can point you in the direction of a roughly equal number of people,
all audio engineering professionals, who find the Linux solution
compelling for a variety of reasons. Whose vote wins? Who even cares?
Certainly not me.

Maybe it's cleaner from a programmer perspective, a developer perspective
and maybe in theory ie: crunchy code and all that gibberish.
However I can tell you that if Linux were the only software choice for a
DAW we would all still be using tape and a razor blade.

On this point, you're sadly delusional. There are many valid
criticisms to be made of Linux as a platform for audio engineering
professionals. Many. This is not even close to one of them.

Try that under Linux.
Oh yea, if you have *SoundBlaster, it will probably work fine.

Or any RME interface except the Fireface's (coming soon), or any
ice1712/1724 device, or any of the following firewire devices:

ECHO AudioFire 2
ECHO AudioFire 4
ECHO AudioFire 8
ECHO AudioFire 12
Edirol FA-101
Edirol FA-66
ESI Quatafire 610
Focusrite Saffire
Focusrite Saffire LE
Focusrite Saffire Pro 26 I/O
Focusrite Saffire Pro 10 I/O
Mackie Onyx Mixer FireWire Option
Terratec Producer Phase 88 Rack FireWire
TerraTec Producer Phase24
TerraTec Producer Phase X24
TerraTec Producer MIC 2/MIC 8 FireWire

Of course, that is subject to my previous comments about choosing the
right linux distribution. And if that's confusing to you, that is
because you don't understand that "Linux" isn't a unitary thing. If
you can't deal with this idea, then give up.

Mike's venture into this is a prime example.

I followed Mike's venture into this and interacted with him a lot on
r.a.p as it happened. Mike went into his venture with a particular set
of expectations and prior experience. His goals and requirements were
not met, that was clear. However, his prior experience and his model
of how things should be made it very much harder for it to work. I've
had that discussion once (I think I wrote at least 20 posts on this at
the time)

You Linux developers are all doing your own thing and apparently nobody is
talking to the other people.

You have no idea who I talk to, how or where. Why do you insist on
speculating, no *asserting* stuff that you simply don't know?

Example: Pulseaudio.

PulseAudio is a consumer/desktop audio architecture targetting
consumer media workflows and applications. It is also very focused on
low power/mobile devices, a market where Linux is growing increasingly
dominant, and the requirements for the audio infrastructure are
entirely different.

If you are attempting to do pro-audio or music creation using
PulseAudio, then you've already done way down the wrong track. Is it a
problem that this is not more obvious from the outset? Sure. Is it
partly related to what I said earlier about Linux not being a unitary
thing in the way that Windows or OS X is? Absolutely.

Yea, I know Ardour etc doesn't deal with it because it's ALSA based.

Ardour doesn't use anything except JACK. Which is why it works on OS X
(and has, historically been built and run on Windows).

So why is that?
If ALSA works fine, and it does IMHO, why all the others?

ALSA is primarily a set of device drivers and a thin abstraction over
them. That doesn't make it (necessarily) the appropriate API for
developers to use when writing applications.

Oh yea, "choice"...
No, it's not choice.
It's a cluster****.

Sure. That's why people who are using ALSA drivers they created for
data collection (i.e. non-pro-audio, just massively high sample rates)
are finding it a cluster****. Once again, you fail to grasp that linux
isn't a unitary thing. Its a way for people to put together systems
that can do certain tasks much better than most other operating
systems. Does that mean that when you install J. Random Linux Distro
on your J. Random Hardware that it will make a superb DAW? It most
certainly does not.

For a report on my perspective, this is useful:http://lwn.net/Articles/355542/

Fair enough...

My personal feeling is ALSA should be tightly integrated with the kernel

It is.

(I'm not a programmer so please excuse the simple language) and the others
should disappear.

If you talk to any audio developer who has written applications for
JACK, CoreAudio, ASIO, WDM and ALSA (to name a few), I am fairly
confident that they will tell you that JACK provides the simplest,
easiest to use and most powerful abstraction for audio of any of them.
None of these other systems provides the same kinds of capabilities,
or the same ease of development. They don't make it possible to make
arbitrary applications do arbitrary things. Ergo, unless ALSA were to
incorporate all these things, its not likely that JACK is going to go
away, for the same reason that JACK doesn't "go away" on OS X -
CoreAudio just doesn't provide the same stuff. Same with any Windows
audio API.

Put it this way, if I had you in my studio for a couple of hours, I am
certain you could show me things that Jack/ALSA etc can do, that I could
not even in my wildest imagination conceive.

But I don't have you and documentation is poor so I am left to mostly fend
on my own, like most people.

Sure, the documentation is not good. But its improving, and unlike the
code, is an area where actual audio engineers could contribute a lot.
Do they? A few.

Ivory.
Garritan
Addictive Drums
UAD
Sonnex
Nuendo.
ProTools.

Do they run under Linux?

Sample libraries that use Gigasampler and a few other formats: yes.
Pianoteq (a physically modelled piano that to my ears is more powerful
than any sample library): yes (and windows and OS X too)
Ardour: yes
many VST plugins: actually yes. i helped make this possible, but i
can't say i recommend it.

so, your chosen tools don't support Linux (see notes above). how is
this linux' fault? does it make an unsuitable platform for you?
probably. but so what?

I leave you with one thought, Linux is free and a lot of musicians and
engineers know about it.

Why are so very few using it at a professional level?

Because most of them are as confused and ignorant about it as you.
Their/your fault? Not entirely, no.

[Geoff]

dawhead wrote:

Really. A fascinating assesment of the windows situation. You know
that WDM is deprecated in Windows7, yes? That ASIO was never provided
by Microsoft and always relied on 3rd party drivers which didn't
always track the latest version of Windows precisely? That before WDM,
there was no reasonable "out of the box" low latency solution on that
platform? That most windows consumer desktop applications used MME,
not ASIO, for playback and capture, which could often conflict with
ASIO use of the audio interface? The situation is certainly cleaner
than Linux, but it hardly gets close to the cleanliness (for the user)
of CoreAudio.

Well WDM and ASIO are real and work, for the most part, just fine now and
for the last 5 years.

geoff

[Moshe goldfarb]

On Wed, 23 Dec 2009 15:53:27 -0800 (PST), dawhead wrote:

On Dec 23, 6:18*pm, Little****t wrote:
They most certainly do not want to be playing with operating systems like
Linux forces the user to do.

Then for the time being, at least, they probably shouldn't bother.


Most don't, hence the popularity of the Mac.

What I *do know* is that I plug in my audio interface, under Windows 7 x64
BTW, my control surface, select ASIO (my choice) and it all works.
I never have to touch a single thing other than latency.

What I do know is that I plug in my audio interface (an RME hdsp9652)
under Linux (Fedora 11 x86_64), plugin in my control surfaces, start
JACK and it all works. I never have to touch anything except hdspmixer
to reset the initial matrix mixer settings for the hdsp, and JACK to
adjust latency.

You are cherry picking.
Try a Euphonix.
Try an Alesis.
Try the Cakewalk/Roland V7xx systems.


I fire up Nuendo 4, Reaper, Sonar 8.5 and it all works.

I fire up Ardour and it all works.

My 10 year old Soundblaster Live! works with Linux as well.
Your point?

All my plugins, well most of my plugins work.

All of my plugins, well most of my plugins work.

Linux doesn't even support this stuff.

Wrong way around. The developers of those plugins don't support Linux.
Can you run Ardour on Windows? Same deal. Linux' job isn't to support
pre-existing software, just like OS X's job isn't to support Windows
software. Clear thinking about where responsibilities lie here would
help.

Doesn't matter to the end user.
The end user wants the stuff he reads about in the trade rags to work.
While some of this stuff is hyped junk, I agree, a lot of it is very useful
and used every single day to produce what you hear in the media.

And you are deluding yourself if you think for one instant that a
professional, like myself or Mike or Scott or Hank or Fletcher will for
even an instant claim that the Linux solution is "cleaner".

Fortunately, I am not deluding myself for one moment into thinking
that any professionals like yourself, Mike or the other people you
mention (the last 3 I do not know) will claim that the Linux solution
is "cleaner". I'm not even sure that I am claiming that. However, I
can point you in the direction of a roughly equal number of people,
all audio engineering professionals, who find the Linux solution
compelling for a variety of reasons. Whose vote wins? Who even cares?
Certainly not me.

I've yet to work in a studio that is running Linux other than as a back up
system/server or in a Receptor module which I believe (correct me if I am
wrong) runs Linux as it's base system.

I work in NYC mostly and it's all ProTools or Nuendo.
Smaller studios, like jingle houses are running everything from Cubase to
Logic to Reaper and even Sonar.



Maybe it's cleaner from a programmer perspective, a developer perspective
and maybe in theory ie: crunchy code and all that gibberish.
However I can tell you that if Linux were the only software choice for a
DAW we would all still be using tape and a razor blade.

On this point, you're sadly delusional. There are many valid
criticisms to be made of Linux as a platform for audio engineering
professionals. Many. This is not even close to one of them.

So then why aren't people flocking to Linux?
The OP makes a valid point.

Try that under Linux.
Oh yea, if you have *SoundBlaster, it will probably work fine.

Or any RME interface except the Fireface's (coming soon), or any
ice1712/1724 device, or any of the following firewire devices:

ECHO AudioFire 2
ECHO AudioFire 4
ECHO AudioFire 8
ECHO AudioFire 12
Edirol FA-101
Edirol FA-66
ESI Quatafire 610
Focusrite Saffire
Focusrite Saffire LE
Focusrite Saffire Pro 26 I/O
Focusrite Saffire Pro 10 I/O
Mackie Onyx Mixer FireWire Option
Terratec Producer Phase 88 Rack FireWire
TerraTec Producer Phase24
TerraTec Producer Phase X24
TerraTec Producer MIC 2/MIC 8 FireWire

Of course, that is subject to my previous comments about choosing the
right linux distribution. And if that's confusing to you, that is
because you don't understand that "Linux" isn't a unitary thing. If
you can't deal with this idea, then give up.

That's a small subset of what is out there and again what level of support
is given and how well is it documented?
Do all of the features work?

Mike's venture into this is a prime example.

I followed Mike's venture into this and interacted with him a lot on
r.a.p as it happened. Mike went into his venture with a particular set
of expectations and prior experience. His goals and requirements were
not met, that was clear. However, his prior experience and his model
of how things should be made it very much harder for it to work. I've
had that discussion once (I think I wrote at least 20 posts on this at
the time)

I read it in Google after the fact so some stuff might have been missing,
but I would classify Mike as your poster child for Linux acceptance.

He is very, very typical of the genre.


You Linux developers are all doing your own thing and apparently nobody is
talking to the other people.

You have no idea who I talk to, how or where. Why do you insist on
speculating, no *asserting* stuff that you simply don't know?

He makes a point.
Why so many versions of Linux?
Why doesn't one work with the other?
Why 5 different package manageers?
Why do some systems use Xorg.conf and others do not?
Why real time kernels?
etc.

It's a mess.
And it's hindering Linux.

You see only your little world, and that's ok but Joe user sees it a
different way.


Example: Pulseaudio.

PulseAudio is a consumer/desktop audio architecture targetting
consumer media workflows and applications. It is also very focused on
low power/mobile devices, a market where Linux is growing increasingly
dominant, and the requirements for the audio infrastructure are
entirely different.

But it's still there.
When Joe user installs his Ubuntu, he sees Pulseaudio and I can almost
assure you that he will have troubles.

In fact, with Ubuntu, he will have troubles with 9.10 and ICE1712 right
from the start because one of the config files is missing a line.

I can't believe they even test that garbage and pleas don't get me going on
Ubuntu because it sucks IMHO.
Debian great.
Redhat great.
Fedora, not bad.
SuSue pretty good.
Ubuntu,,,sucks...


If you are attempting to do pro-audio or music creation using
PulseAudio, then you've already done way down the wrong track. Is it a
problem that this is not more obvious from the outset? Sure. Is it
partly related to what I said earlier about Linux not being a unitary
thing in the way that Windows or OS X is? Absolutely.

And how is Joe user supposed to know this?
He installs "Linux" whatever Linux it may be, tries to run Ardour and is
baffled.



Yea, I know Ardour etc doesn't deal with it because it's ALSA based.

Ardour doesn't use anything except JACK. Which is why it works on OS X
(and has, historically been built and run on Windows).


So it will work without ALSa installed?
Will you get the same latency specs?
Performance?
etc?


So why is that?
If ALSA works fine, and it does IMHO, why all the others?

ALSA is primarily a set of device drivers and a thin abstraction over
them. That doesn't make it (necessarily) the appropriate API for
developers to use when writing applications.

From and end user perspective, ALSA works.
Pulseaudio does not, in many cases.
The net is full of problems with sound that disabling Pulseaudio fixes.



Oh yea, "choice"...
No, it's not choice.
It's a cluster****.

Sure. That's why people who are using ALSA drivers they created for
data collection (i.e. non-pro-audio, just massively high sample rates)
are finding it a cluster****. Once again, you fail to grasp that linux
isn't a unitary thing. Its a way for people to put together systems
that can do certain tasks much better than most other operating
systems. Does that mean that when you install J. Random Linux Distro
on your J. Random Hardware that it will make a superb DAW? It most
certainly does not.

I'm talking about professional audio/DAW work.
IOW recording the next Aerosmith CD.

Not some scientist in a lab recording the sounds of carpenter ants mating.
Wonder if they can do "Close to You", hahaha!



For a report on my perspective, this is useful:http://lwn.net/Articles/355542/

Fair enough...

My personal feeling is ALSA should be tightly integrated with the kernel

It is.

Yes, but why RT kernels and normal kernels.
More confusion.


(I'm not a programmer so please excuse the simple language) and the others
should disappear.

If you talk to any audio developer who has written applications for
JACK, CoreAudio, ASIO, WDM and ALSA (to name a few), I am fairly
confident that they will tell you that JACK provides the simplest,
easiest to use and most powerful abstraction for audio of any of them.
None of these other systems provides the same kinds of capabilities,
or the same ease of development. They don't make it possible to make
arbitrary applications do arbitrary things. Ergo, unless ALSA were to
incorporate all these things, its not likely that JACK is going to go
away, for the same reason that JACK doesn't "go away" on OS X -
CoreAudio just doesn't provide the same stuff. Same with any Windows
audio API.

The problem is the end user can't figure out how to make it work.


Put it this way, if I had you in my studio for a couple of hours, I am
certain you could show me things that Jack/ALSA etc can do, that I could
not even in my wildest imagination conceive.

But I don't have you and documentation is poor so I am left to mostly fend
on my own, like most people.

Sure, the documentation is not good. But its improving, and unlike the
code, is an area where actual audio engineers could contribute a lot.
Do they? A few.


Point taken!


Ivory.
Garritan
Addictive Drums
UAD
Sonnex
Nuendo.
ProTools.

Do they run under Linux?

Sample libraries that use Gigasampler and a few other formats: yes.
Pianoteq (a physically modelled piano that to my ears is more powerful
than any sample library): yes (and windows and OS X too)
Ardour: yes
many VST plugins: actually yes. i helped make this possible, but i
can't say i recommend it.

Giga is dead....

so, your chosen tools don't support Linux (see notes above). how is
this linux' fault? does it make an unsuitable platform for you?
probably. but so what?

These are tools I can assure you are found in 99 percent of professional
studios and only scratch the surface.


I leave you with one thought, Linux is free and a lot of musicians and
engineers know about it.

Why are so very few using it at a professional level?

Because most of them are as confused and ignorant about it as you.
Their/your fault? Not entirely, no.

I'm not confused.
I'm speaking from a layperson's POV.

You are speaking from a programmer/developer's POV.
It's obvious.

I would suggest you spend some time talking to real musicians, engineers
etc who are making the music you hear on the radio.
Ask them what they need.
Spend some time on Gearslutz, KVR and other sites.

The Harrison Mixbus IMHO is a great start and is getting pretty decent
reviews from the masses.
This is great for you.
Keep the momentum going, improve the doc and release a Windows version and
if it catches on, you very well might have the next Presonous Studio One
which is also surprising a lot of people with it's ease of use and quality.

That's my 2 cents.

[Moshe goldfarb]

On Thu, 24 Dec 2009 13:19:57 +1300, geoff wrote:

dawhead wrote:

Really. A fascinating assesment of the windows situation. You know
that WDM is deprecated in Windows7, yes? That ASIO was never provided
by Microsoft and always relied on 3rd party drivers which didn't
always track the latest version of Windows precisely? That before WDM,
there was no reasonable "out of the box" low latency solution on that
platform? That most windows consumer desktop applications used MME,
not ASIO, for playback and capture, which could often conflict with
ASIO use of the audio interface? The situation is certainly cleaner
than Linux, but it hardly gets close to the cleanliness (for the user)
of CoreAudio.

Well WDM and ASIO are real and work, for the most part, just fine now and
for the last 5 years.

geoff

It's more programming crap while ignoring the practical end of things.
These people seem to ignore the fact that currently this stuff does work
and probably will for some time to come.

So what if WDM is depreciated?
One mouse click and I am running ASIO.

No big deal to me.

[High Plains Thumper[_2_]]

Little****t wrote:
On Wed, 23 Dec 2009 14:20:18 -0800 (PST), dawhead wrote:

Really. A fascinating assesment of the windows situation. You know
that WDM is deprecated in Windows7, yes? That ASIO was never
provided by Microsoft and always relied on 3rd party drivers which
didn't always track the latest version of Windows precisely? That
before WDM, there was no reasonable "out of the box" low latency
solution on that platform? That most windows consumer desktop
applications used MME, not ASIO, for playback and capture, which
could often conflict with ASIO use of the audio interface? The
situation is certainly cleaner than Linux, but it hardly gets close
to the cleanliness (for the user) of CoreAudio.

You're kidding right?

What I *do know* is that I plug in my audio interface, under Windows
7 x64
BTW, my control surface, select ASIO (my choice) and it all works.
I never have to touch a single thing other than latency.

I fire up Nuendo 4, Reaper, Sonar 8.5 and it all works.

All my plugins, well most of my plugins work.
Some, like Toontrack are having some growing pains with Windows 7
x64, but that's coming shortly.

Linux doesn't even support this stuff.

And you are deluding yourself if you think for one instant that a
professional, like myself or Mike or Scott or Hank or Fletcher will
for even an instant claim that the Linux solution is "cleaner".

Maybe it's cleaner from a programmer perspective, a developer
perspective and maybe in theory ie: crunchy code and all that
gibberish.
However I can tell you that if Linux were the only software choice
for a DAW we would all still be using tape and a razor blade.

Try that under Linux.
Oh yea, if you have SoundBlaster, it will probably work fine.

SNIP

Then why are you using computers? What is it that leads you to
expect that a general purpose operating system (windows/OSX/linux)
on a general purpose CPU on a general purpose motherboard is a
sensible way to build a tool that will let you "just make music" ?

Ivory.
Garritan
Addictive Drums
UAD
Sonnex
Nuendo.
ProTools.

Do they run under Linux?

That's where Linux loses, at least for me.

You see, you look at the computer from a programming POV.

I look at it from a musician's POV.

Big difference.

For me, the computer is a gigantic tape drive and the editing is the
mother of all splicing blocks.
The effects are the racks of equipment I used to have (I still have
some BTW) or the units I could not afford back in the 70's.

Ivory is the Steinway, Bosendorfer, Yammy etc I cannot fit in my
living room as well as the superb mics needed to record such fine
instruments I could not afford.

Actually I have a Steinway B now and some very nice mics, but the
acoustics in my living room where the piano is are marginal.

Ivory or Garritan is a much better choice in MOST situations.

It goes on and on.

I leave you with one thought, Linux is free and a lot of musicians
and engineers know about it.

Why are so very few using it at a professional level?

Hello, Flatfish.

--
HPT

[Mike Rivers]

dawhead wrote:

This is not the case.

Is this Ben?

We worried a great deal about the reliance on JACK. It turns out to
have been a boon to many of the initial Mixbus users because rather
than grappling with the full DAW capabilities it has (because its
based on Ardour), they were able to route directly out of Logic (or
whatever other CoreAudio compatible software they were using) into
Mixbus and just use it "as a console".

That's sort of what I said, isn't it? The promo material describes it as
a mixing console, though I do recognize Ardour in there, and that's
just from the screen shots. (I don't have a Mac)

However, this was purely a (positive) side effect of our use of JACK -
Mixbus was not ever conceived as some kind of "addon" or "frontend"
for other DAWs. Its just that the kind of modular environment that
I've worked at developing for the last 10 years makes this particular
workflow possible.

Now you're talking like a Linux booster. What's wrong with the workflow
that's been pretty well established over the past ten years for a DAW?
People know how to do that. Why hand them a construction set when
most potential users would just want to set it up like a conventional DAW
anyway?

Users who have bothered to read the documentation, or even more so,
watch the video on Mixbus, have understood that its actually a full-
featured DAW (without MIDI editing/recording/playback), not just a mix
engine. The fact that it is usable as "just" the latter is a side
effect of Ardour's design, not a design decision.

I was actually looking for that, and I'm not surprised to find that it's
the
case. However, the PERCEPTION based on the introductory material
is that it's a mixing console that's more intuitive to use than what's
typically found in a DAW. I think that's a great idea, but it's really a
pretty small step to add a recorder to it, particularly when it's already
in the basic code.

This is just another example of the confusion about Linux audio
software that's a result of its flexibility and the lack of focus toward
a functional task-oriented end product by the purveyors.

there is no hardware supported on OS X that does not work with JACK on
OS X. If it doesn't work well with JACK (e.g. digidesign I/O) then it
doesn't work well with Logic (if at all - digi's coreaudio driver for
their h/w is just almost laughably non-standard in how it does just
about everything.)

Maybe there's been some progress since I looked at Ardour nearly a
year ago. At the time, I found a very limited number of multichannel
interfaces that could be used. Surely you can use the large number
of interfaces that are supported by Core Audio to record in Logic and
then mix those tracks in Mixbus. My impression, and perhaps this is
misguided, is that Jack, which talks to Logic and Mixbus, can route
the audio stream coming into Logic out to Mixbus. If this is the case,
it would allow me to use any audio hardware that can talk to Logic
as a front end for the recording portion of Mixbus.

Ardour doesn't support hardware. Ardour doesn't interact with hardware
directly at all. ALSA is the HAL for audio devices on a platform
(linux) that has seen many manufacturers deliberately refuse to make
driver support possible.

Oh, no! Here we go again.

I suggest you read it again before passing your judgement. The parts
that "look like linux documentation" probably refer to aggregate
devices

Nope, that's the part that I understood. I wish Windows had a similar
capability. CEntrance tried to come up with a universal driver that could
aggregate multiple hardware devices into a single hardware device but
they couldn't deal with all the testing necessary to make it into a reliable
commercial product. At least Apple seems to have something that works.

a lamentable state of affairs on Intel OS X caused by Apple's
curious refusal to provide duplex (simultaneous playback & capture)
capabilities for the builtin audio device on these systems

Is that what "aggregate" is all about? My impression, and the way I've
seen it applied, is when you have a collection of external audio devices
and want to use them together to get more channels.

[Scott Dorsey]

Neil Gould wrote:
Moshe Goldfarb wrote:
however the time required to make some of them work properly is all
on your own dime.

I think the problem is managing people's expectations. Those who think
they'll get the same "appliance" level of functionality by going the Linux
route are likely to be disappointed.

The problem is that when people take the attitude that a computer is an
appliance that they don't have to look inside and they can just accept
as a black box, they are on the road toward disaster. And it might not be
a disaster today, it might be a disaster many years down the road, but it
will happen.

If you want an appliance, buy an appliance. There are plenty of standalone
recording devices out there, from a 2" Ampex through a RADAR and on down to
a bunch of little portastudios from Roland and Korg. They do what they're
expected to do for the most part.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

[Scott Dorsey]

Little****t wrote:
On Wed, 23 Dec 2009 14:20:18 -0800 (PST), dawhead wrote:

one person's "too much interaction" is another person's "not enough
control". maybe we should pay more attention to the fact that there
are probably more people in the first situation than the second, or
maybe we're interested in a niche market of audio professionals who
actually want control.

They want control of their music and the applications that record their
music.

They most certainly do not want to be playing with operating systems like
Linux forces the user to do.

They should try an Ampex, then. It works great for me, and it's billable.
For the most part it doesn't break, and when it does break the documentation
is exceptionally complete.

Why are so very few using it at a professional level?

I'm using NetBSD in the studio. It runs all the billing systems. And when
it all comes down to it, accounts payable is the most important studio system
there is.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

[dawhead[_2_]]

On Dec 23, 7:29*pm, Moshe Goldfarb wrote:
You are cherry picking.
Try a Euphonix.

They were very enthusiastic about getting support for their protocol
into Ardour. Then they just dropped the ball. It may get picked up
again with the advent of mixbus.

Try an Alesis.

An Alesis *what* ?

Try the Cakewalk/Roland V7xx systems.

If it generates generic MIDI CC messages or Mackie/Logic Control, it
works with Ardour. If not - then sure, someone has to implement
support for it.

I fire up Nuendo 4, Reaper, Sonar 8.5 and it all works.

I fire up Ardour and it all works.

My 10 year old Soundblaster Live! works with Linux as well.
Your point?

The same as the OP's point - citing a list of things that "just work
for me" is really just anecdotal and beside the point. I could cite a
long list of equipment that will work with Ardour and other lInux
apps. Its not the equipment you use? Oh dear ... what does that mean?

Wrong way around. The developers of those plugins don't support Linux.
Can you run Ardour on Windows? Same deal. Linux' job isn't to support
pre-existing software, just like OS X's *job isn't to support Windows
software. Clear thinking about where responsibilities lie here would
help.

Doesn't matter to the end user.

The problem is that enduser is mis-informed about how this stuff
works, and so they form expectations. "Linux won't run my plugins".
That much is true. "Linux should run my plugins". That should perhaps
be true. "The responsibility to fix this rests with Linux and the
communist hippie software hackers types who use it since no audio guys
do". False.

I've yet to work in a studio that is running Linux other than as a back up
system/server or in a Receptor module which I believe (correct me if I am
wrong) runs Linux as it's base system.

So once again, we have your anecdotes versus someone else's versus
mine. Yes, *MASSIVELY* more studios run non-Linux DAWs. But so what?
MASSIVELY more studios run ProTools over Logic ... does this mean that
Logic is crap? That it can't do anything? That nobody in their right
mind would use it? That it does everything that ProTools does? That it
has no capabilities that ProTools is lacking? No, no, no, no and no.
Now substitute a specific app like Ardour in ... the answers are the
same.


So then why aren't people flocking to Linux?
The OP makes a valid point.

As I noted at the end of my last post: most of them have faulty
knowledge, shallow knowlege or both about Linux. Moreover, audio
engineering professionals do not FLOCK to anything. They did't flock
to Pyramix, they didn't flock to Paris, they didn't flock to the
Mackie HDR, they didn't flock to Nuendo - they have technological
inertia to a greater extent than almost any niche user community of
computer software, mostly thanks to the abject failure of the audio
tech industry to ever develop adequate open standards for data
interchange and the laughable proliferation of plugin APIs.

(list of support audio interfaces)

That's a small subset of what is out there and again what level of support
is given and how well is it documented?
Do all of the features work?

My list was for illustrative purposes, it was not exhaustive.
Sometimes, you r.a.p folk complain that you can only use soundblasters
on linux - not true. Are there devices that don't work? Sure. Should
you know this before trying to use one on a linux system? Probably. Is
it all adequately documented? Not really.


I read it in Google after the fact so some stuff might have been missing,
but I would classify Mike as your poster child for Linux acceptance.

He is very, very typical of the genre.

I do not wish to discuss Mike's thread again. I made a lot of
commentary on it in that thread, and I think I stand by everything I
said there.

He makes a point.
Why so many versions of Linux?
Why doesn't one work with the other?
Why 5 different package manageers?
Why do some systems use Xorg.conf and others do not?
Why real time kernels?

Why do you care? You care because you are expecting a certain kind of
product. Right now, nobody offers the kind of product that you think
you want. There, said it.
Does this mean that Linux is useless as a platform for a DAW? no.

It's a mess.
And it's hindering Linux.

You see only your little world, and that's ok but Joe user sees it a
different way.

I'm afraid its the other way around. *You* see only the world of pro-
audio, and when someone says you can do some cool stuff with Linux,
you imagine that Linux is there to cater "off the shelf" to "your
little world". The problem is that Linux isn't about just "this little
world", its about a lot of things. The fact that its such a massively
superior technology for audio technology has a lot to do with why its
so good for mobile devices and data servers - it can be made to do all
these tasks well because it can be *customized*. Can you buy the
customized version you want for pro-audio off the shelf? Right now,
you cannot. Does this mean it can't do the job? Does this mean that
those of us who do, in fact, use it for such things are delusional?
no. Does this help people who might want to "just use it" ? not
really.



Example: Pulseaudio.

PulseAudio is a consumer/desktop audio architecture targetting
consumer media workflows and applications. It is also very focused on
low power/mobile devices, a market where Linux is growing increasingly
dominant, and the requirements for the audio infrastructure are
entirely different.

But it's still there.
When Joe user installs his Ubuntu, he sees Pulseaudio and I can almost
assure you that he will have troubles.

Right, and Ubuntu is not an appropriate distribution for people who
want to do pro-audio, partly (but far from entirely) for this very
reason.

I can't believe they even test that garbage and pleas don't get me going on
Ubuntu because it sucks IMHO.
Debian great.
Redhat great.
Fedora, not bad.
SuSue pretty good.
Ubuntu,,,sucks...

Not of the above are appropriate base platforms for pro-audio work.

If you are attempting to do pro-audio or music creation using
PulseAudio, then you've already done way down the wrong track. Is it a
problem that this is not more obvious from the outset? Sure. Is it
partly related to what *I said earlier about Linux not being a unitary
thing in the way that Windows or OS X is? Absolutely.

And how is Joe user supposed to know this?
He installs "Linux" whatever Linux it may be, tries to run Ardour and is
baffled.

Are you complaining about the technology, or the documentation?

Yea, I know Ardour etc doesn't deal with it because it's ALSA based.

Ardour doesn't use anything except JACK. Which is why it works on OS X
(and has, historically been built and run on Windows).

So it will work without ALSa installed?

Sure.

Will you get the same latency specs?

Depends on the hardware. All other things being equal, sure.

Performance?

Ditto.

ALSA is primarily a set of device drivers and a thin abstraction over
them. That doesn't make it (necessarily) the appropriate API for
developers to use when writing applications.

From and end user perspective, ALSA works.
Pulseaudio does not, in many cases.
The net is full of problems with sound that disabling Pulseaudio fixes.

Did I suggest PulseAudio as an alternative API to ALSA?


My personal feeling is ALSA should be tightly integrated with the kernel

It is.

Yes, but why RT kernels and normal kernels.
More confusion.

Only for people who have read the wrong documentation or not
understood what they read. Can we stop the flood of misinformed user
posts on forums about this sort of thing? Its rather hard. Even on
this thread alone, I've read some fundamentally wrong claims about the
way Linux audio works, and I'm sure have walked away believing them.

The problem is the end user can't figure out how to make it work.

The problem is that a particular class of end user can't figure out
how to make it work. Thats a different (though important) issue.

[Scott Dorsey]

Anahata wrote:
DAWs are just one example of speciality applications (CAD is another)
where there'll only ever be a small population of users but the software
itself is very complex. Consequently anybody investing development time
on such software commercially is only going to go for the most widely
used platform, or their already tiny market will become even smaller.

Actually if Pro Tools, Nuendo or whatever were ported to Linux, I'm sure
it would run like a champ, but there just isn't the commercial incentive
to do it.

What's worse is that the systems that are really designed to do this kind
of job are systems that are niche products even in the Unix world. What
you really want is a realtime operating system where, when you make a call
to the OS, you can tell the OS how long you're willing to wait before
something is completed. A true realtime operating system (and RTLinux
comes reasonably close) allows you to do proper realtime stuff in a reliable
fashion, and in such a way that when you run out of resources you are
immediately told there is a problem instead of later discovering insidious
clicks in your file.

The only time anyone is ever going to develop a DAW system based on a realtime
base is going to be in an environment where they can design the system as
a whole. Oh, did I mention RADAR?
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

[dawhead[_2_]]

On Dec 23, 7:29*pm, Moshe Goldfarb wrote:
I would suggest you spend some time talking to real musicians, engineers
etc who are making the music you hear on the radio.
Ask them what they need.
Spend some time on Gearslutz, KVR and other sites.

As noted above, I put it to you that you have little idea how I spend
time communicating with (actual or potential) users. If you visit
gearslutz and read the mixbus thread(s), check the poster nicks.
compare. ditto on KVR. you might ponder what i'm even doing on this
thread.

The Harrison Mixbus IMHO is a great start and is getting pretty decent
reviews from the masses.
This is great for you.
Keep the momentum going, improve the doc and release a Windows version and

there are no plans for a windows version.

if it catches on, you very well might have the next Presonous Studio One
which is also surprising a lot of people with it's ease of use and quality.

as is mixbus, without the windows masses. a problem for us? perhaps.
we'll see.

[Moshe goldfarb]

On 23 Dec 2009 20:46:21 -0500, Scott Dorsey wrote:

Neil Gould wrote:
Moshe Goldfarb wrote:
however the time required to make some of them work properly is all
on your own dime.

I think the problem is managing people's expectations. Those who think
they'll get the same "appliance" level of functionality by going the Linux
route are likely to be disappointed.

The problem is that when people take the attitude that a computer is an
appliance that they don't have to look inside and they can just accept
as a black box, they are on the road toward disaster. And it might not be
a disaster today, it might be a disaster many years down the road, but it
will happen.

Ten years ago I might have agreed, hell even now *my philosophy* is the
same as yours Scott.
Times have changed.
For better or worse.
It's called a throw away society.

How many engineers really know what is going on behind their PTHD system?
Very few.
They are interested in tracking.
How man artists know what is going on with autotune?
They sing off key and it gets "fixed" that's all they care about.

This can be extrapolated to just about anything, for better or worse.
Who cares how an iPod works?
We plug it in and it syncs...who really cares?
Most people do not.

If you want an appliance, buy an appliance. There are plenty of standalone
recording devices out there, from a 2" Ampex through a RADAR and on down to
a bunch of little portastudios from Roland and Korg. They do what they're
expected to do for the most part.
--scott

The PC *IS* an appliance.
It has reached that level, like it or not.

The days of nuts and bolts are long gone.

Example: I can build you a stellar computer for your DAW.
Guess what?
You can buy one already made for less.
Sure you are getting lower quality components, say China sys board vs Asus,
but in reality it will work as well as your custom job and in a couple of
years, or less, both will be obsolete so who cares?

Understand, I am a person who has built systems since 1981 whien the
original IBM PC was released.

Sure, my build is of higher quality, but in reality what does that really
mean?
Most hardware will last it's useful life.


The computer has become an appliance, like it or not.
People run applications not chips and bits and their off brand system will
in most cases run them just as good as your custom built high end brand for
the life of the hardware.

[Moshe goldfarb]

On 23 Dec 2009 20:49:16 -0500, Scott Dorsey wrote:

Little****t wrote:
On Wed, 23 Dec 2009 14:20:18 -0800 (PST), dawhead wrote:

one person's "too much interaction" is another person's "not enough
control". maybe we should pay more attention to the fact that there
are probably more people in the first situation than the second, or
maybe we're interested in a niche market of audio professionals who
actually want control.

They want control of their music and the applications that record their
music.

They most certainly do not want to be playing with operating systems like
Linux forces the user to do.

They should try an Ampex, then. It works great for me, and it's billable.
For the most part it doesn't break, and when it does break the documentation
is exceptionally complete.

As long as it it isn't vintage 456 bg !
Unless they have an oven of course!

Why are so very few using it at a professional level?

I'm using NetBSD in the studio. It runs all the billing systems. And when
it all comes down to it, accounts payable is the most important studio system
there is.
--scott

And many people do.
I run Linux in my studio as well as my back up system.
My home systems are tied to a Linux server.

My DAW runs Nuendo and PTHD.

[High Plains Thumper[_2_]]

Moshe Goldfarb wrote:

However, Ivory is the "best" piano sound/playability out there IMHO
although I hear the new Steinberg Grand 3 is supposed to be
outstanding.
Then there is my UAD card.
So I'm kind of out of luck with Linux.

I get great piano and organ sounds out of my GeneralMusic WK2HD Midi
Arranger and Roland GW-7 keyboard. Why would I want to go UAD?

--
HPT

[Moshe goldfarb]

On 23 Dec 2009 20:53:02 -0500, Scott Dorsey wrote:

Anahata wrote:
DAWs are just one example of speciality applications (CAD is another)
where there'll only ever be a small population of users but the software
itself is very complex. Consequently anybody investing development time
on such software commercially is only going to go for the most widely
used platform, or their already tiny market will become even smaller.

Actually if Pro Tools, Nuendo or whatever were ported to Linux, I'm sure
it would run like a champ, but there just isn't the commercial incentive
to do it.

What's worse is that the systems that are really designed to do this kind
of job are systems that are niche products even in the Unix world. What
you really want is a realtime operating system where, when you make a call
to the OS, you can tell the OS how long you're willing to wait before
something is completed. A true realtime operating system (and RTLinux
comes reasonably close) allows you to do proper realtime stuff in a reliable
fashion, and in such a way that when you run out of resources you are
immediately told there is a problem instead of later discovering insidious
clicks in your file.

The only time anyone is ever going to develop a DAW system based on a realtime
base is going to be in an environment where they can design the system as
a whole. Oh, did I mention RADAR?
--scott

The problem is niche systems are yesterdays news.
Even PTHD or other hardware based systems, Creamware etc.

Let's face it, the hardware processing advantages of a PTHD system are
being eroded by the day by faster processing, cheaper software etc.

The only reason PTHD survives today is because of the installed base and
the fact it is the "defacto" standard in the biz.

Digi realizes their days are numbered henceforth all the trade up offers
they are offering.

[Mike Rivers]

dawhead wrote:

one person's "too much interaction" is another person's "not enough
control". maybe we should pay more attention to the fact that there
are probably more people in the first situation than the second, or
maybe we're interested in a niche market of audio professionals who
actually want control.

There's nothing at all wrong with Group #2. But you seem to have at least
initially grabbed the attention of those in Group #1. Even me, and I don't
even have a Mac.

Really. A fascinating assesment of the windows situation. You know
that WDM is deprecated in Windows7, yes?

"Deprecated" as in "stable, so soon to become obsolete?" But few
pro DAW users are using WDM drivers.

That ASIO was never provided
by Microsoft and always relied on 3rd party drivers which didn't
always track the latest version of Windows precisely?

That, indeed, is a problem, but it's as much a Microsoft problem as with
any other vendor. Why does Windows change in ways that affect the
hooks around which ASIO is built? Steinberg recognized that there was
a problem with WDM that stood in the way of their DAWs working as well
as they wanted them to, and they came up with a solution, along with
somewhat of a standard to which others could write drivers for their
hardware.

That before WDM,
there was no reasonable "out of the box" low latency solution on that
platform?

WDM is "low latency?" It's better than MME, but not as good as ASIO,
nor is it adjustable to take adavantage of a well tuned computer.

That most windows consumer desktop applications used MME,
not ASIO, for playback and capture, which could often conflict with
ASIO use of the audio interface?

We (the professional "we") recommend that a computer that's used as a DAW
be devoted to DAW use and not get corrupted with consumer desktop audio
applications. It's good advice, and a cheap solution to a lot of problems.

What's a mess is that so many people, including you, have read so much
stuff that has led them to completely misunderstand the role of these
things in the Linux "audio stack".

That's because nobody, not even you, has successfully related how Linux
does audio with what those working with other software understand. I've
tried,
really I have, but I just don't get it. There's something very
fundamental that I'm
missing, and I suspect that the Linux world figures "everybody knows
that." I'm no
expert in Windows audio connections either, but at least the terminology
and
user interface has always been pretty clear. Not so with Linux.

But Linux is not a company.

And this is part of the problem with trying to build a commercial
product around it.

If you want a smooth experience with Linux audio, do you
randomly pick some distro, some machine, some audio interface and put
them together and expect that it will all just work?

What other choice do you have? Maybe not random, but you need to learn
a lot about how the pieces fit together to make the right choice. For
better or
worse, Microsoft and Apple have made some of those choices for us and
limited
the scope of our choices to things that are pretty likely to work
together without
too much fooling around.

It appears that
many existing or potential Linux users do indeed expect this to be
possible. Sorry, its not. Its unfortunate that so many people believe
that it is, or even more irritatingly, believe that it should be.

Why not? Certainly a company who wants to sell a program can specify
a certain version of Linux, a certain distribution, and as long as the user
sets that up as the program vendor tells him, and doesn't muck with it,
it'll
work. It's just like Windows. If you have something working under XP, you
may indeed expect to have some problems when moving to Vista or Seven,
but that doesn't happen every few weeks. There's no configuration management
with a user's version of Linux, however.

This is why Linux will never be the operating system of choice for
people who
want to run an application and not fool around with things that nobody
else is doing.

audio forums for Windows DAWs are full of testimonies to problems that
people have with particularly bad combinations of choices. If you
want that kind of experience, you need to get your system from a
company that controls everything end-to-end, which means either Apple
or a company that specializes in building machines for media work that
run Linux. Unfortunately, I can't recommend any of them at this
particular point in time.

So how is it that you can buy a retail copy of Windows, load it up on
just about
any computer that meets a certain minimum specification, and have it all
work?
The CPU works, the hard drives work, the optical drives work, the USB ports
work, the networking works. Plug in a Firewire card and Windows knows
what it
is and how to talk to it. Connect a Firewire audio interface and, when
you install
the driver that's provided by the manufacturer (and you have the major
version
of Windows for which that driver is written) it'll work.

The only part of that game that's really different in Linux is that, for
example, when
you buy a PreSounus interface, you can't stick the CD that comes with it
into the
drive and have the driver for that interface installed magically. The
procedure is
different - it can be learned, but it's not documented with the new
purchase, you
need to know where to find it in the Linux world. And then your hardware
may
or may not be supported depending on whether someone got around to it.
And it
may be only halfway supported - like it'll pass audio but you won't have
a control
panel for the built-in mixer.

Maybe this sounds like a cop out but all I want to do is make music.

Then why are you using computers? What is it that leads you to expect
that a general purpose operating system (windows/OSX/linux) on a
general purpose CPU on a general purpose motherboard is a sensible way
to build a tool that will let you "just make music" ?

I've tried that argument. The brutal fact of life is that today,
recording has
become an integral part of the work of a hobbyist and even professional
musician. Musicians don't have a lot of money, and a computer is an
inexpensive
way to put together a functional recording system. If they could get it
cheaper
by using open source software that they didn't have to pay for in
dollars, they
would - but only if they could get the same results with about the same
level
of effort.

Many times, I've recommended a simple hardware workstation (some of them
cost less than a computer) but it's a hard sell.

[Geoff]

dawhead wrote:
On Dec 23, 7:29 pm, Moshe Goldfarb wrote:
I would suggest you spend some time talking to real musicians,
engineers etc who are making the music you hear on the radio.
Ask them what they need.
Spend some time on Gearslutz, KVR and other sites.

As noted above, I put it to you that you have little idea how I spend
time communicating with (actual or potential) users. If you visit
gearslutz and read the mixbus thread(s), check the poster nicks.
compare. ditto on KVR. you might ponder what i'm even doing on this
thread.

The Harrison Mixbus IMHO is a great start and is getting pretty
decent reviews from the masses.
This is great for you.
Keep the momentum going, improve the doc and release a Windows
version and

there are no plans for a windows version.

If it's any good you could be rich. Or if that's not important, have the
satisfaction of many satisfied users.


geoff

[Mike Rivers]

Les Cargill wrote:

There really needs to be somebody doing value added, to cover up
the "control" from those who don't need it.

I don't see any reason why someone couldn't come up with a whole
package dedicated to audio recording that was based on Linux. Just
bring your own computer (minimum configuration specified). But because
of all the variations in Linux that are around, in order for it to be
guaranteed successful, it would have to be essentially a closed system.
And not being a closed system is what sells people on Windows DAWs.

[Moshe goldfarb]

On Wed, 23 Dec 2009 17:52:00 -0800 (PST), dawhead wrote:

On Dec 23, 7:29*pm, Moshe Goldfarb wrote:
You are cherry picking.
Try a Euphonix.

They were very enthusiastic about getting support for their protocol
into Ardour. Then they just dropped the ball. It may get picked up
again with the advent of mixbus.

Try an Alesis.

An Alesis *what* ?


Mastercontrol

http://www.alesis.com/mastercontrol

Try the Cakewalk/Roland V7xx systems.

If it generates generic MIDI CC messages or Mackie/Logic Control, it
works with Ardour. If not - then sure, someone has to implement
support for it.

Point is, can someone plug it in and have it work?
That's the big question with Linux.


I fire up Nuendo 4, Reaper, Sonar 8.5 and it all works.

I fire up Ardour and it all works.

My 10 year old Soundblaster Live! works with Linux as well.
Your point?

The same as the OP's point - citing a list of things that "just work
for me" is really just anecdotal and beside the point. I could cite a
long list of equipment that will work with Ardour and other lInux
apps. Its not the equipment you use? Oh dear ... what does that mean?

The equipment, plugins etc I use are industry standards.
Do they work with Linux?
Most do not.

Linux loses before it even starts.


Wrong way around. The developers of those plugins don't support Linux.
Can you run Ardour on Windows? Same deal. Linux' job isn't to support
pre-existing software, just like OS X's *job isn't to support Windows
software. Clear thinking about where responsibilities lie here would
help.

Doesn't matter to the end user.

The problem is that enduser is mis-informed about how this stuff
works, and so they form expectations. "Linux won't run my plugins".
That much is true. "Linux should run my plugins". That should perhaps
be true. "The responsibility to fix this rests with Linux and the
communist hippie software hackers types who use it since no audio guys
do". False.


Who cares?
The programmers?

The users will go elsewhere.
And they do.

I see what you are saying but in reality it doesn't work that way for most
people.


I've yet to work in a studio that is running Linux other than as a back up
system/server or in a Receptor module which I believe (correct me if I am
wrong) runs Linux as it's base system.

So once again, we have your anecdotes versus someone else's versus
mine. Yes, *MASSIVELY* more studios run non-Linux DAWs. But so what?
MASSIVELY more studios run ProTools over Logic ... does this mean that
Logic is crap? That it can't do anything? That nobody in their right
mind would use it? That it does everything that ProTools does? That it
has no capabilities that ProTools is lacking? No, no, no, no and no.
Now substitute a specific app like Ardour in ... the answers are the
same.

Logic can run most if not all of the popular plugins.
So can Nuendo.
So can Sonar.
So can Reaper.
etc....

Can Linux/ardour?

If not, you lose.......

Any program, even the bargain basement ones included with low end sound
cards can record digital audio.
It goes, far beyond that in a professional situation.



So then why aren't people flocking to Linux?
The OP makes a valid point.

As I noted at the end of my last post: most of them have faulty
knowledge, shallow knowlege or both about Linux. Moreover, audio
engineering professionals do not FLOCK to anything. They did't flock
to Pyramix, they didn't flock to Paris, they didn't flock to the
Mackie HDR, they didn't flock to Nuendo - they have technological
inertia to a greater extent than almost any niche user community of
computer software, mostly thanks to the abject failure of the audio
tech industry to ever develop adequate open standards for data
interchange and the laughable proliferation of plugin APIs.

(list of support audio interfaces)

There is a tendency toward snobbery and most flock to Protools, but you
also have the Prosumer, amateur muscian types with project studios who
can't afford PTHD.

Why are they ignoring Linux?

Or better yet, why are they attempting to run Reaper under Wine/Linux?
And it runs rather well from what I have read.
Why not run ardour/audacity/Rosegarden natively?

Think about it.....


That's a small subset of what is out there and again what level of support
is given and how well is it documented?
Do all of the features work?

My list was for illustrative purposes, it was not exhaustive.
Sometimes, you r.a.p folk complain that you can only use soundblasters
on linux - not true. Are there devices that don't work? Sure. Should
you know this before trying to use one on a linux system? Probably. Is
it all adequately documented? Not really.

For the record my ICE1712 devices have had excellen Linux support.
RME is another example etc.

But support has been a long train running.

These cards are released with Windows and OSX support.
Linux always lags.

The one exception may be M-Audio which is going down the tank lately and
lagging badly in Windows 7 x64 support.
See their forums for the horror stories.
I will not buy another one of their products BTW.



I read it in Google after the fact so some stuff might have been missing,
but I would classify Mike as your poster child for Linux acceptance.

He is very, very typical of the genre.

I do not wish to discuss Mike's thread again. I made a lot of
commentary on it in that thread, and I think I stand by everything I
said there.

Fair enough.
I suspect the entire thread I read wasn't in Google.



He makes a point.
Why so many versions of Linux?
Why doesn't one work with the other?
Why 5 different package manageers?
Why do some systems use Xorg.conf and others do not?
Why real time kernels?

Why do you care? You care because you are expecting a certain kind of
product. Right now, nobody offers the kind of product that you think
you want. There, said it.
Does this mean that Linux is useless as a platform for a DAW? no.

I care because I expect things to just work.

I install Windows 7 and most everything just works.

For the Mac user it's even easier.


It's a mess.
And it's hindering Linux.

You see only your little world, and that's ok but Joe user sees it a
different way.

I'm afraid its the other way around. *You* see only the world of pro-
audio, and when someone says you can do some cool stuff with Linux,
you imagine that Linux is there to cater "off the shelf" to "your
little world". The problem is that Linux isn't about just "this little
world", its about a lot of things. The fact that its such a massively
superior technology for audio technology has a lot to do with why its
so good for mobile devices and data servers - it can be made to do all
these tasks well because it can be *customized*. Can you buy the
customized version you want for pro-audio off the shelf? Right now,
you cannot. Does this mean it can't do the job? Does this mean that
those of us who do, in fact, use it for such things are delusional?
no. Does this help people who might want to "just use it" ? not
really.


When I think Pro-Audio the last thing that comes to mind is Linux.
Sorry, but that's how it is.

Millions of users, people who use DAW software every day, will tell you the
same thing.



Example: Pulseaudio.

PulseAudio is a consumer/desktop audio architecture targetting
consumer media workflows and applications. It is also very focused on
low power/mobile devices, a market where Linux is growing increasingly
dominant, and the requirements for the audio infrastructure are
entirely different.

But it's still there.
When Joe user installs his Ubuntu, he sees Pulseaudio and I can almost
assure you that he will have troubles.

Right, and Ubuntu is not an appropriate distribution for people who
want to do pro-audio, partly (but far from entirely) for this very
reason.

So why do they offer UbuntuStudio?




I can't believe they even test that garbage and pleas don't get me going on
Ubuntu because it sucks IMHO.
Debian great.
Redhat great.
Fedora, not bad.
SuSue pretty good.
Ubuntu,,,sucks...

Not of the above are appropriate base platforms for pro-audio work.

So what is?



If you are attempting to do pro-audio or music creation using
PulseAudio, then you've already done way down the wrong track. Is it a
problem that this is not more obvious from the outset? Sure. Is it
partly related to what *I said earlier about Linux not being a unitary
thing in the way that Windows or OS X is? Absolutely.

And how is Joe user supposed to know this?
He installs "Linux" whatever Linux it may be, tries to run Ardour and is
baffled.

Are you complaining about the technology, or the documentation?

In theory the technology may work but Joe will never figure out how to make
it work.


Yea, I know Ardour etc doesn't deal with it because it's ALSA based.

Ardour doesn't use anything except JACK. Which is why it works on OS X
(and has, historically been built and run on Windows).

So it will work without ALSa installed?

Sure.

So you can use Pulseaudio?
I did not know that.


Will you get the same latency specs?

Depends on the hardware. All other things being equal, sure.

Ok

Performance?

Ditto.

Ok


ALSA is primarily a set of device drivers and a thin abstraction over
them. That doesn't make it (necessarily) the appropriate API for
developers to use when writing applications.

From and end user perspective, ALSA works.
Pulseaudio does not, in many cases.
The net is full of problems with sound that disabling Pulseaudio fixes.

Did I suggest PulseAudio as an alternative API to ALSA?

No.
But that's what they are going to have installed when they install their
favorite Linux distribution.



My personal feeling is ALSA should be tightly integrated with the kernel

It is.

Yes, but why RT kernels and normal kernels.
More confusion.

Only for people who have read the wrong documentation or not
understood what they read. Can we stop the flood of misinformed user
posts on forums about this sort of thing? Its rather hard. Even on
this thread alone, I've read some fundamentally wrong claims about the
way Linux audio works, and I'm sure have walked away believing them.

When people search for solutions to their DAW Linux problems this is what
they will encounter.
Like it or not.



The problem is the end user can't figure out how to make it work.

The problem is that a particular class of end user can't figure out
how to make it work. Thats a different (though important) issue.

Yet these same people can install Windows, Nuendo, Ozone, Tracks etc and it
all just works for them.

Doesn't make sense.

[Moshe goldfarb]

On Wed, 23 Dec 2009 19:01:43 -0700, High Plains Thumper wrote:

Moshe Goldfarb wrote:

However, Ivory is the "best" piano sound/playability out there IMHO
although I hear the new Steinberg Grand 3 is supposed to be
outstanding.
Then there is my UAD card.
So I'm kind of out of luck with Linux.

I get great piano and organ sounds out of my GeneralMusic WK2HD Midi
Arranger and Roland GW-7 keyboard. Why would I want to go UAD?


UAD has nothing to do with piano sounds.

Look he
http://www.uaudio.com/

[dawhead[_2_]]

On Dec 23, 9:31*pm, Moshe Goldfarb wrote:
Yea, I know Ardour etc doesn't deal with it because it's ALSA based.

Ardour doesn't use anything except JACK. Which is why it works on OS X
(and has, historically been built and run on Windows).

So it will work without ALSa installed?

Sure.

So you can use Pulseaudio?
I did not know that.

This is just one example of what I mean when I talk about people
becoming confused by misleading and inaccurate information posted by
people who don't actually know what they are talking about.

Did anything that you have read suggest that PulseAudio is an
alternative to ALSA?

Do you not understand the relationship between Rewire and CoreAudio?
Or Rewire and WDM/ASIO? Or for that matter, JACK and CoreAudio?
Programming interfaces come in layers. ALSA is at one layer (a very
low one), just like WDM is. PulseAudio is at a higher layer. One is
not an alternative to the other, no more than running JACK on OS X
provides an alternative to CoreAudio.

I see speculation and misinformed commentaries on the linux audio
stack on r.a.p and forums everywhere. I wish I could stop it. I can't.
Its dismaying.

Did I suggest PulseAudio as an alternative API to ALSA?

No.
But that's what they are going to have installed when they install their
favorite Linux distribution.

As I've indicated above, you still fail to understand the basic
layering. Let me try to make this more clear, from the bottom up:

Driver level (inside the kernel): ALSA (alternatives include OSS
(deprecated for years) or FFADO which is firewire specific)
HAL(*) (for applications that want intimate relationships with the
hardware devices): ALSA
desktop/consumer media applications: PulseAudio
pro-audio/music creation: JACK

PulseAudio can talk to JACK for systems that really need to run both.
But as Mike Rivers noted, this is not really how you set up a DAW. In
addition, many consumer/desktop media apps use additional software
libraries that have different backends, enabling these apps to connect
to audio hardware either "directly" via ALSA, OSS etc., or via layers
like JACK or PulseAudio.

And for those wondering about PulseAudio and why it has to exist: the
current audio systems on Windows and OS X are totally inappropriate
for use in low power situations (the iPhone, for example, runs a
heavily modified version of CoreAudio for this very reason, in part at
least). They waste battery power by being too focused on latency,
which is not important on most low power mobile devices. Like it or
not, there is a LOT of money flowing into Linux development that is
focused on platforms where this kind of design consideration is not
optional. As a result, Pulse is going to grow in importance over time.
Does this mean that you need to run Pulse on a DAW system? Certainly
not. Does it mean that you have to? Certainly not. Does it mean that
Linux distributions that are focused on desktop/consumer users (i.e.
almost everyone) will continue to focus on Pulse as a key part of the
audio infrastructure of their systems? Yes, it almost certainly does.

(*) HAL stands for Hardware Abstraction Layer

[dawhead[_2_]]

On Dec 23, 9:09*pm, "geoff" wrote:
dawhead wrote:
On Dec 23, 7:29 pm, Moshe Goldfarb wrote:
I would suggest you spend some time talking to real musicians,
engineers etc who are making the music you hear on the radio.
Ask them what they need.
Spend some time on Gearslutz, KVR and other sites.

As noted above, I put it to you that you have little idea how I spend
time communicating with (actual or potential) users. If you visit
gearslutz and read the mixbus thread(s), check the poster nicks.
compare. ditto on KVR. you might ponder what i'm even doing on this
thread.

The Harrison Mixbus IMHO is a great start and is getting pretty
decent reviews from the masses.
This is great for you.
Keep the momentum going, improve the doc and release a Windows
version and

there are no plans for a windows version.

If it's any good you could be rich. *Or if that's not important, have the
satisfaction of many satisfied users.

To understand why a Windows version is not of much interest:
http://www2.bryceharrington.org:8080...ss-win-paradox

I've been rich. The satisfaction of the kind of Windows users that
have continued to verbally attack me for years for not developing my
software for Windows, let alone declaring that because it only runs on
Linux (which was true once) it must be ****, is not something that I'm
frankly all that interested in. Satisfying a user community that
understands why I value the kinds of technology that Linux represents
(and to a lesser extent OS X) and wants software to get the job done
on that kind of platform - thats important to me.

[dawhead[_2_]]

On Dec 23, 9:13*pm, Mike Rivers wrote:
Les Cargill wrote:
There really needs to be somebody doing value added, to cover up
the "control" from those who don't need it.

I don't see any reason why someone couldn't come up with a whole
package dedicated to audio recording that was based on Linux.

http://www.64studio.com/

(there are other examples. its just the best of the lot. alas, in my
opinion, not good enough (yet))

Just
bring your own computer (minimum configuration specified).

the configuration requirements for a DAW don't really consist of
minimums. they consist of things that most users don't know anything
about (and don't want to know anything about). IRQ sharing ... PCI(x|
e) chipset ... USB host chipset ... firewire bridge chipset ...
precise version of the video driver (yes, the last one was working,
the new one is broken, the next one will work again) ... the list goes
on.

But because
of all the variations in Linux that are around, in order for it to be
guaranteed successful, it would have to be essentially a closed system.

64studio is no more "closed" than any other distro. It just happens to
be focused on media production.

[Moshe goldfarb]

On Wed, 23 Dec 2009 19:11:10 -0800 (PST), dawhead wrote:

On Dec 23, 9:31*pm, Moshe Goldfarb wrote:
Yea, I know Ardour etc doesn't deal with it because it's ALSA based.

Ardour doesn't use anything except JACK. Which is why it works on OS X
(and has, historically been built and run on Windows).

So it will work without ALSa installed?

Sure.

So you can use Pulseaudio?
I did not know that.

This is just one example of what I mean when I talk about people
becoming confused by misleading and inaccurate information posted by
people who don't actually know what they are talking about.

Did anything that you have read suggest that PulseAudio is an
alternative to ALSA?


Just about everything I have read.
It's the default system in many distributions.


Do you not understand the relationship between Rewire and CoreAudio?
Or Rewire and WDM/ASIO? Or for that matter, JACK and CoreAudio?
Programming interfaces come in layers. ALSA is at one layer (a very
low one), just like WDM is. PulseAudio is at a higher layer. One is
not an alternative to the other, no more than running JACK on OS X
provides an alternative to CoreAudio.

I see speculation and misinformed commentaries on the linux audio
stack on r.a.p and forums everywhere. I wish I could stop it. I can't.
Its dismaying.


I don't care.
I want to boot the thing and have it work.
The minute you or any other Linux pundit starts talking core audio, you've
lost me and 99.99 percent of all musicians.


Did I suggest PulseAudio as an alternative API to ALSA?

No.
But that's what they are going to have installed when they install their
favorite Linux distribution.

As I've indicated above, you still fail to understand the basic
layering. Let me try to make this more clear, from the bottom up:

Driver level (inside the kernel): ALSA (alternatives include OSS
(deprecated for years) or FFADO which is firewire specific)
HAL(*) (for applications that want intimate relationships with the
hardware devices): ALSA
desktop/consumer media applications: PulseAudio
pro-audio/music creation: JACK

PulseAudio can talk to JACK for systems that really need to run both.
But as Mike Rivers noted, this is not really how you set up a DAW. In
addition, many consumer/desktop media apps use additional software
libraries that have different backends, enabling these apps to connect
to audio hardware either "directly" via ALSA, OSS etc., or via layers
like JACK or PulseAudio.

And for those wondering about PulseAudio and why it has to exist: the
current audio systems on Windows and OS X are totally inappropriate
for use in low power situations (the iPhone, for example, runs a
heavily modified version of CoreAudio for this very reason, in part at
least). They waste battery power by being too focused on latency,
which is not important on most low power mobile devices. Like it or
not, there is a LOT of money flowing into Linux development that is
focused on platforms where this kind of design consideration is not
optional. As a result, Pulse is going to grow in importance over time.
Does this mean that you need to run Pulse on a DAW system? Certainly
not. Does it mean that you have to? Certainly not. Does it mean that
Linux distributions that are focused on desktop/consumer users (i.e.
almost everyone) will continue to focus on Pulse as a key part of the
audio infrastructure of their systems? Yes, it almost certainly does.

(*) HAL stands for Hardware Abstraction Layer


I see, and appreciate what you are saying.
However, like I stated above, musicians just want this stuff to work.
We don't care about the details.
Just make it work and make it work better than the other guy and you have
our money.

[dawhead[_2_]]

On Dec 23, 9:05*pm, Mike Rivers wrote:
dawhead wrote:
That, indeed, is a problem, but it's as much a Microsoft problem as with
any other vendor. Why does Windows change in ways that affect the
hooks around which ASIO is built? Steinberg recognized that there was
a problem with WDM that stood in the way of their DAWs working as well
as they wanted them to, and they came up with a solution, along with
somewhat of a standard to which others could write drivers for their
hardware.

The difference on Linux is that they never need have done that. They
could have fixed the actual driver design.

Mentioning Steinberg is a segue into another important part of this
story. They were one of a number of companies who got very excited
about the promise of BeOS. Despite not really offering much more than
the best that Linux could back in the mid-to-late 1990's, many audio/
media tech companies were salivating at the prospect of an OS tailored
to their (and their users' needs). They had products lined up, new
marketing strategies waiting ... and then BeOS turned themselves into
an internet kiosk company and then folded.

I've been told by more than one executive at some of these companies
that they will not get "burned again" by such ideas. This is despite
the fact that I was there in 1999 talking to these same people,
promoting a vision of using an operating system that has outlived (and
now dramatically outperforms) BeOS, and would have offered them
complete control over their own destiny because of its open source
development model. Sigh. If Steinberg had actually had the vision for
Linux that they were developing for BeOS, they (and others) would
still be following through on it today. But it appears that once
burned, twice shy applies here, even though almost everything about
the technology "committment" is different.

But Linux is not a company.

And this is part of the problem with trying to build a commercial
product around it.

There's absolute no evidence of this. There are lots of commercial
products built around Linux.

The actual "problem", such as it is, is people in threads like this
that talk about "Linux" as though *IT* was a product.

many existing or potential Linux users do indeed expect this to be
possible. Sorry, its not. Its unfortunate that so many people believe
that it is, or even more irritatingly, believe that it should be.

Why not? Certainly a company who wants to sell a program can specify
a certain version of Linux, a certain distribution, and as long as the user
sets that up as the program vendor tells him, and doesn't muck with it,
it'll
work.

and will attract even less of an audience that linux' already small
user base.

This is why Linux will never be the operating system of choice for
people who
want to run an application and not fool around with things that nobody
else is doing.

unfortunately, it already is the operating system of choice for quite
a few people who want *precisely* that. as many as run windows? does
it have to be that many to reveal how pointless your comment is?

So how is it that you can buy a retail copy of Windows, load it up on
just about
any computer that meets a certain minimum specification, and have it all
work?
The CPU works, the hard drives work, the optical drives work, the USB ports
work, the networking works. Plug in a Firewire card and Windows knows
what it
is and how to talk to it. Connect a Firewire audio interface and, when
you install
the driver that's provided by the manufacturer (and you have the major
version
of Windows for which that driver is written) it'll work.

with 5msec latency? I can find you forum posts for windows software
that will disprove almost every claim you've made in this paragraph,
except for the ones that are true for Linux too (the genera computing
stuff). Linux worked on x86_64 before (and always better than)
windows; it runs more hardware than windows (because it continues to
support legacy equipment), and it installs easier than windows, as
agreed by almost recent side-by-side install reviews in major
computing magazines. What it lacks, for this context, is out-of-the-
box support for pro-audio work, and this is indeed a deficiency that
is not trivially addressed. oh, and sure, some of the latest and
greatest gadgets that emerge without manufacturer support for linux
take 4-8 months to be supported (this is less and less true these days
though).

I've tried that argument. The brutal fact of life is that today,
recording has
become an integral part of the work of a hobbyist and even professional
musician. Musicians don't have a lot of money, and a computer is an
inexpensive
way to put together a functional recording system. If they could get it
cheaper
by using open source software that they didn't have to pay for in
dollars, they
would - but only if they could get the same results with about the same
level
of effort.

i'm not particularly interested in specifically catering to this crowd
(though if it happens, all the better). I consider audio engineering a
skill set that requires learning and dedication, and part of that
process involves understanding the toolset in just the same way that
you used to understand a studer. the fact that a lot more people are
doing this is in no way different than when desktop publishing first
emerged - the result was a gazillion people producing a gazillion and
a half dreadfully typeset documents. making the tools easy to use
doesn't lead to good results. and i've said hundreds of times before
(on usenet, going back to 1992) that i consider computers to be tools
more like woodworking tools than some kind of trivial button pressing
device. we've had this discussion before though, not much point in
rehashing it.

[Mike Rivers]

Neil Gould wrote:

I think the problem is managing people's expectations. Those who think
they'll get the same "appliance" level of functionality by going the Linux
route are likely to be disappointed.

Why can't we expect that? All it takes is someone who will manage the
system for us, or rather pre-manage it. I know that's not the normal
Linuxhead's view of how it should work, but someone could do it.

Though other than saving a few bucks, I don't really see the point when
we have affordable functionality right now. You can (I did) buy a
refurbished
ready-to-go computer with Windows installed, and a copy of Reaper for about
what a retail copy of Windows costs, what it can reasonably expected to do
is pretty clear, and it'll do it.

[Moshe goldfarb]

On Wed, 23 Dec 2009 22:38:45 -0500, Mike Rivers wrote:

Neil Gould wrote:

I think the problem is managing people's expectations. Those who think
they'll get the same "appliance" level of functionality by going the Linux
route are likely to be disappointed.

Why can't we expect that? All it takes is someone who will manage the
system for us, or rather pre-manage it. I know that's not the normal
Linuxhead's view of how it should work, but someone could do it.

It's actually happening already like dawhead mentioned.
Distributions like 64studio really do all the nuts and bolts for you.

Though other than saving a few bucks, I don't really see the point when
we have affordable functionality right now. You can (I did) buy a
refurbished
ready-to-go computer with Windows installed, and a copy of Reaper for about
what a retail copy of Windows costs, what it can reasonably expected to do
is pretty clear, and it'll do it.

And that is the problem that Linux faces.
A person can load up Reaper for little or no cost and it will support
all his VST plugins and he is ready to go.

[dawhead[_2_]]

On Dec 23, 10:53*pm, Moshe Goldfarb wrote:
And that is the problem that Linux faces.
A person can load up Reaper for little or no cost and it will support
all his VST plugins and he is ready to go.

How is this a problem for Linux? Why do you assume that in order to be
successful, "Linux" (which I reiterate is neither a product nor a
company) that it has to dominate everything else? Is it a problem for
Logic that most studios still use ProTools? Is it a problem for
Pyramix that hardly anyone uses their system?

My goals with Ardour are mostly centered on providing a high quality
DAW that puts audio quality and robustness just slightly ahead of
workflow perfection (that's a joke , and that leverages the
capabilities of excellent operating platforms to provide performance,
robustness and flexibility for its users. I believe that if these are
one's goals then Windows makes no sense as a target platform, and it
also means that the user requirements of the "i want to plugin and
make music" crowd are not particularly critical. If those are your
needs, then by all means use Reaper, Windows or whatever else floats
your boat.

I believe that original question in this thread was whether Linux
could be a feasible platform for "professional DAW work". Since nobody
has defined what that means precisely, I'll cite a point made by Ben
Loftis at Harrison: if you're doing contemporary pop production, with
its emphasis on FX processing, looping, sample-driven songs etc, then
Ardour is probably not the best tool for you. If you're tracking
musicians playing instruments with their bodies, and the finished
product relies less on production gloss and more on audio quality and
performance, then its hard to see what features Ardour-on-Linux is
lacking that will make your life easier.

[Moshe goldfarb]

On Wed, 23 Dec 2009 20:09:30 -0800 (PST), dawhead wrote:

On Dec 23, 10:53*pm, Moshe Goldfarb wrote:
And that is the problem that Linux faces.
A person can load up Reaper for little or no cost and it will support
all his VST plugins and he is ready to go.

How is this a problem for Linux? Why do you assume that in order to be
successful, "Linux" (which I reiterate is neither a product nor a
company) that it has to dominate everything else? Is it a problem for
Logic that most studios still use ProTools? Is it a problem for
Pyramix that hardly anyone uses their system?

What I am saying, is like it or not, there are some certain "defacto
standards" that the vast majority,and the number is not small, are
using.

Linux does not support these.
Reaper does.

It's not a problem for platforms unless they reach a point where they
realize people are not using their platform because of lack of support
for some of these products.

I think UAD, Sonnex, Sony Waves and many others qualify.
Walk into any professional studio and you will see one or all those
used.


My goals with Ardour are mostly centered on providing a high quality
DAW that puts audio quality and robustness just slightly ahead of
workflow perfection (that's a joke , and that leverages the
capabilities of excellent operating platforms to provide performance,
robustness and flexibility for its users. I believe that if these are
one's goals then Windows makes no sense as a target platform, and it
also means that the user requirements of the "i want to plugin and
make music" crowd are not particularly critical. If those are your
needs, then by all means use Reaper, Windows or whatever else floats
your boat.

I believe that original question in this thread was whether Linux
could be a feasible platform for "professional DAW work". Since nobody
has defined what that means precisely, I'll cite a point made by Ben
Loftis at Harrison: if you're doing contemporary pop production, with
its emphasis on FX processing, looping, sample-driven songs etc, then
Ardour is probably not the best tool for you. If you're tracking
musicians playing instruments with their bodies, and the finished
product relies less on production gloss and more on audio quality and
performance, then its hard to see what features Ardour-on-Linux is
lacking that will make your life easier.

Well you have hit a particular nerve with me wrt to loopers, cut and
pasters and other "semi talents" as I call them.
It does seem like the current crop of DAW software manufacturers are
catering to them.
Sonar in particular.

I do agree with you about tracking real musicians, but that is what
ProTools and Reaper accel at.
In fact just about any "try till you buy" software included even with
low end soundcards can do this.

I'm sitting here trying to get into the Xmas spirit listening to
Manilow's "In The Swing Of Christmas" and sorry but the whole thing
sounds highly sequenced to me.
Anyone know for sure?
I don't have the album notes as this is one of those "cough cough" mp3
rips

Too stiff on most tunes....
Maybe a combination.

I like Michael Buble's album although I swear he is auto tuning on a
couple of tracks.
Excellent piano playing and arrangements though.

OT...just thought I would share....

And BTW I like you dawhead...You do a lot of good....

[Mike Rivers]

dawhead wrote:

But Linux is not a company.

And this is part of the problem with trying to build a commercial
product around it.

There's absolute no evidence of this. There are lots of commercial
products built around Linux.

There are indeed commercial products built AROUND Linux. Harrison
has some. But when you buy a Harrison product recorder, you don't get
a package of software, you get a turnkey system. And when you need
support, you don't go to a newsgroup, you go to Harrison, and you get
your support, in the language you can understand (or else they don't
make the next sale to you).

The actual "problem", such as it is, is people in threads like this
that talk about "Linux" as though *IT* was a product.

No, I don't think they do. It's an operating system, just like Windows.
Now, nobody ever bragged about support from Microsoft, but for the
most part, end users don't need much support, because the system
pretty much configures itself when it's installed - and in fact most
people who use Windows are using a pre-installed version running
on off-the-shelf hardware. I know that you can buy Linux systems
that way, too. I wonder how well they work, and adapt to, say,
audio applications and interface hardware.

unfortunately, it already is the operating system of choice for quite
a few people who want *precisely* that. as many as run windows? does
it have to be that many to reveal how pointless your comment is?

Well, yes. "Quite a few" doesn't include anyone I know when it comes to
audio applications, and that's what we're discussing here.

So how is it that you can buy a retail copy of Windows, load it up on
just about
any computer that meets a certain minimum specification, and have it all
work?
The CPU works, the hard drives work, the optical drives work, the USB ports
work, the networking works. Plug in a Firewire card and Windows knows
what it
is and how to talk to it. Connect a Firewire audio interface and, when
you install
the driver that's provided by the manufacturer (and you have the major
version
of Windows for which that driver is written) it'll work.

with 5msec latency?

Is that all you have to say? Some hardware will give you 5 ms latency
(mic in
to monitor out) on Windows without too much fooling around. Besides, that's
not the only criteria for a workstation. In fact (and I'm writing an
article about it
right now) 1 ms latency is too much. DAWs that have to run audio through
software can't possibly work right. People put up with it because they
choose not to fix the problem with hardware.

But my point is that you can take the disks out of the box, plug them in,
punch a few keys, and start recording. It's intuitive. I have not seen a
Linux
based audio application that's intuitive to get started with. And if you
can't
get started quickly, you lose your audience.

I can find you forum posts for windows software
that will disprove almost every claim you've made in this paragraph,
except for the ones that are true for Linux too

Why bother? You can find forum posts proving that bees can't fly, too.
Sure, some people can never get anything to work, and some things, by
design, never will work. But your chances of getting off the ground without
specialized knowledge (bear in mind that few people "know" Windows) are
better with Windows than Linux.

it runs more hardware than windows (because it continues to
support legacy equipment), and it installs easier than windows, as
agreed by almost recent side-by-side install reviews in major
computing magazines.

I can argue about it installing easier than Windows. You can't start
a Windows installation and ignore it for a couple of hours like you can
with Linux, but you also get feedback along the way as to what it's doing.
The first time I tried to install Linux, it didn't, and I didn't have
any idea
why not. I tried it again and then it did. I think maybe the problem was
that I didn't have it connected to the Internet the first time around and it
wanted something and couldn't get it. But I didn't know I had to do that.

As far as supporting legacy equipment, that's not such a big deal these
days. In fact, most of the problems that people are having with Windows
and audio gear today is that they buy a new computer, it has Windows 7
installed, and they don't have Win7 drivers for the audio interface that
they bought last year. But Linux may not support that hardware at all.

The brutal fact of life is that today,
recording has
become an integral part of the work of a hobbyist and even professional
musician.

i'm not particularly interested in specifically catering to this crowd
(though if it happens, all the better).

Well, that's the largest potential customer base. But I guess as long
as you're not dealing a commercial product it doesn't matter if you have
20 or 200,000 customers. You make the same money either way.

I consider audio engineering a
skill set that requires learning and dedication, and part of that
process involves understanding the toolset in just the same way that
you used to understand a studer.

If I could understand Linux the same way I understand a tape deck, I'd
be happy. I can relate a schematic to wires, circuit board traces, and
voltmeter readings, and make adjustments and fix things that break. I can't
approach a software troubleshooting problem the same way. I don't relate
source code to anything physical. You don't have to know how to design
a tape deck in order to adjust or repair it. You need some understanding
of software design in order to troubleshoot software.

And you need an instruction manual - which even a lot of Windows
applications
doesn't have a good one of.

the fact that a lot more people are
doing this is in no way different than when desktop publishing first
emerged - the result was a gazillion people producing a gazillion and
a half dreadfully typeset documents. making the tools easy to use
doesn't lead to good results.

I say the same thing, and people always argue that SOME manage to
do it pretty well, and those may not have ever had the opportunity to
do it if they didn't have inexpensive tools. I don't think this is a
legitimate
point to argue. I wish it were. I've often said that if it cost $100,000 to
equip a facility for recording, we'd have less bad music, but that's really
not for me to say.

[Mike Rivers]

Moshe Goldfarb wrote:
On Wed, 23 Dec 2009 22:38:45 -0500, Mike Rivers wrote:

It's actually happening already like dawhead mentioned.
Distributions like 64studio really do all the nuts and bolts for you.

Is 64Studio suitable for "professional" audio production? Or is it
just a cool package to surround the sound card built into your computer?

That's a real question. I haven't looked at it. I never even heard of it
before about five minutes agao.

And that is the problem that Linux faces.
A person can load up Reaper for little or no cost and it will support
all his VST plugins and he is ready to go.

So 64Studio won't? And I suppose it won't support my Mackie 1200F
either?

[Mike Rivers]

dawhead wrote:

I don't see any reason why someone couldn't come up with a whole
package dedicated to audio recording that was based on Linux.

http://www.64studio.com/

Another fine example. I went to that web page and I didn't see anything that
actually told me what it is and what it will do. It mentions a lot of names
that I've heard before (Ubuntu, Debian, and the like) but where's the audio?

[Richard Mann]

dawhead writes:

On Dec 23, 6:18Â*pm, Little****t wrote:
They most certainly do not want to be playing with operating systems like
Linux forces the user to do.

Then for the time being, at least, they probably shouldn't bother.

What I *do know* is that I plug in my audio interface, under Windows 7 x64
BTW, my control surface, select ASIO (my choice) and it all works.
I never have to touch a single thing other than latency.

What I do know is that I plug in my audio interface (an RME hdsp9652)
under Linux (Fedora 11 x86_64), plugin in my control surfaces, start
JACK and it all works. I never have to touch anything except hdspmixer
to reset the initial matrix mixer settings for the hdsp, and JACK to
adjust latency.

I fire up Nuendo 4, Reaper, Sonar 8.5 and it all works.

I fire up Ardour and it all works.

All my plugins, well most of my plugins work.

All of my plugins, well most of my plugins work.

Linux doesn't even support this stuff.

Wrong way around. The developers of those plugins don't support Linux.
Can you run Ardour on Windows? Same deal. Linux' job isn't to support
pre-existing software, just like OS X's job isn't to support Windows
software. Clear thinking about where responsibilities lie here would
help.

And you are deluding yourself if you think for one instant that a
professional, like myself or Mike or Scott or Hank or Fletcher will for
even an instant claim that the Linux solution is "cleaner".

Fortunately, I am not deluding myself for one moment into thinking
that any professionals like yourself, Mike or the other people you
mention (the last 3 I do not know) will claim that the Linux solution
is "cleaner". I'm not even sure that I am claiming that. However, I
can point you in the direction of a roughly equal number of people,
all audio engineering professionals, who find the Linux solution
compelling for a variety of reasons. Whose vote wins? Who even cares?
Certainly not me.

Maybe it's cleaner from a programmer perspective, a developer perspective
and maybe in theory ie: crunchy code and all that gibberish.
However I can tell you that if Linux were the only software choice for a
DAW we would all still be using tape and a razor blade.

On this point, you're sadly delusional. There are many valid
criticisms to be made of Linux as a platform for audio engineering
professionals. Many. This is not even close to one of them.

Try that under Linux.
Oh yea, if you have Â*SoundBlaster, it will probably work fine.

Or any RME interface except the Fireface's (coming soon), or any
ice1712/1724 device, or any of the following firewire devices:

ECHO AudioFire 2
ECHO AudioFire 4
ECHO AudioFire 8
ECHO AudioFire 12
Edirol FA-101
Edirol FA-66
ESI Quatafire 610
Focusrite Saffire
Focusrite Saffire LE
Focusrite Saffire Pro 26 I/O
Focusrite Saffire Pro 10 I/O
Mackie Onyx Mixer FireWire Option
Terratec Producer Phase 88 Rack FireWire
TerraTec Producer Phase24
TerraTec Producer Phase X24
TerraTec Producer MIC 2/MIC 8 FireWire

Of course, that is subject to my previous comments about choosing the
right linux distribution. And if that's confusing to you, that is
because you don't understand that "Linux" isn't a unitary thing. If
you can't deal with this idea, then give up.

Mike's venture into this is a prime example.

I followed Mike's venture into this and interacted with him a lot on
r.a.p as it happened. Mike went into his venture with a particular set
of expectations and prior experience. His goals and requirements were
not met, that was clear. However, his prior experience and his model
of how things should be made it very much harder for it to work. I've
had that discussion once (I think I wrote at least 20 posts on this at
the time)

You Linux developers are all doing your own thing and apparently nobody is
talking to the other people.

You have no idea who I talk to, how or where. Why do you insist on
speculating, no *asserting* stuff that you simply don't know?

Example: Pulseaudio.

PulseAudio is a consumer/desktop audio architecture targetting
consumer media workflows and applications. It is also very focused on
low power/mobile devices, a market where Linux is growing increasingly
dominant, and the requirements for the audio infrastructure are
entirely different.

If you are attempting to do pro-audio or music creation using
PulseAudio, then you've already done way down the wrong track. Is it a
problem that this is not more obvious from the outset? Sure. Is it
partly related to what I said earlier about Linux not being a unitary
thing in the way that Windows or OS X is? Absolutely.

Yea, I know Ardour etc doesn't deal with it because it's ALSA based.

Ardour doesn't use anything except JACK. Which is why it works on OS X
(and has, historically been built and run on Windows).

So why is that?
If ALSA works fine, and it does IMHO, why all the others?

ALSA is primarily a set of device drivers and a thin abstraction over
them. That doesn't make it (necessarily) the appropriate API for
developers to use when writing applications.

Oh yea, "choice"...
No, it's not choice.
It's a cluster****.

Sure. That's why people who are using ALSA drivers they created for
data collection (i.e. non-pro-audio, just massively high sample rates)
are finding it a cluster****. Once again, you fail to grasp that linux
isn't a unitary thing. Its a way for people to put together systems
that can do certain tasks much better than most other operating
systems. Does that mean that when you install J. Random Linux Distro
on your J. Random Hardware that it will make a superb DAW? It most
certainly does not.

For a report on my perspective, this is useful:http://lwn.net/Articles/355542/

Fair enough...

My personal feeling is ALSA should be tightly integrated with the kernel

It is.

(I'm not a programmer so please excuse the simple language) and the others
should disappear.

If you talk to any audio developer who has written applications for
JACK, CoreAudio, ASIO, WDM and ALSA (to name a few), I am fairly
confident that they will tell you that JACK provides the simplest,
easiest to use and most powerful abstraction for audio of any of them.
None of these other systems provides the same kinds of capabilities,
or the same ease of development. They don't make it possible to make
arbitrary applications do arbitrary things. Ergo, unless ALSA were to
incorporate all these things, its not likely that JACK is going to go
away, for the same reason that JACK doesn't "go away" on OS X -
CoreAudio just doesn't provide the same stuff. Same with any Windows
audio API.

Put it this way, if I had you in my studio for a couple of hours, I am
certain you could show me things that Jack/ALSA etc can do, that I could
not even in my wildest imagination conceive.

But I don't have you and documentation is poor so I am left to mostly fend
on my own, like most people.

Sure, the documentation is not good. But its improving, and unlike the
code, is an area where actual audio engineers could contribute a lot.
Do they? A few.

Ivory.
Garritan
Addictive Drums
UAD
Sonnex
Nuendo.
ProTools.

Do they run under Linux?

Sample libraries that use Gigasampler and a few other formats: yes.
Pianoteq (a physically modelled piano that to my ears is more powerful
than any sample library): yes (and windows and OS X too)
Ardour: yes
many VST plugins: actually yes. i helped make this possible, but i
can't say i recommend it.

so, your chosen tools don't support Linux (see notes above). how is
this linux' fault? does it make an unsuitable platform for you?
probably. but so what?

I leave you with one thought, Linux is free and a lot of musicians and
engineers know about it.

Why are so very few using it at a professional level?

Because most of them are as confused and ignorant about it as you.
Their/your fault? Not entirely, no.

Dear Dawhead:

Thanks for your detailed replies. I know you're putting effort into this.
We may have corresponded in the past too, I'm not sure.

Anwway, I use both Linux and Windows, so maybe I can offer some perspective.

What I've noticed is Windows programs come with all the drivers and
configuration. I can do a clean Windows install (XP for now), get the
updates, then install my drivers for Presonus Firepod. Then I can install
Cubase or whatever DAW program I like. After that, I'm done. I don't know to
know what ASIO, MME, or whatever is. I just go ahead and start working.

Contrast that to Linux. I have to decide which distribution. OK, let's stick
with Debian because it has been around for a long time and I've used it
elsewhere. Then I try to install Ardour. When I install it says something
"do I want realtime kernel priority on Jack". WTF is Jack? I don't know. I
hear it is something great "under the hood" but I don't care really. Then I
try to get my Presonus gear working. I read something about needing firewire
drivers. So I load those. Then I'm not sure it works right. By this time I
go back to my Windows machine.

OK, I realize that Windows is a dog's breakfast under the hood. But thanks to
commerical vendors (Steinberg, Presonus), they've made Cubase work for me. If
it didn't work, noone would buy their software or hardware!

I think Linux is great for many things. I use it for servers. I also use it
for my research machine. In both of these cases Linux provides the
reliability and security I require. But I still rely on commercial software,
in my case, Matlab.

I think if someone comes out with Cubase (or Adobe Audition or Wavelab or ...)
for Linux it would catch on real fast. But, as others have said, the market
is not there. The DAW market is small enough already. Intersect DAW and
Linux and you've got an even smaller audience.

Richard

[Moshe goldfarb]

On 24 Dec 2009 00:45:29 -0500, Richard Mann wrote:


Dear Dawhead:

Thanks for your detailed replies. I know you're putting effort into this.
We may have corresponded in the past too, I'm not sure.

Anwway, I use both Linux and Windows, so maybe I can offer some perspective.

What I've noticed is Windows programs come with all the drivers and
configuration. I can do a clean Windows install (XP for now), get the
updates, then install my drivers for Presonus Firepod. Then I can install
Cubase or whatever DAW program I like. After that, I'm done. I don't know to
know what ASIO, MME, or whatever is. I just go ahead and start working.

Contrast that to Linux. I have to decide which distribution. OK, let's stick
with Debian because it has been around for a long time and I've used it
elsewhere. Then I try to install Ardour. When I install it says something
"do I want realtime kernel priority on Jack". WTF is Jack? I don't know. I
hear it is something great "under the hood" but I don't care really. Then I
try to get my Presonus gear working. I read something about needing firewire
drivers. So I load those. Then I'm not sure it works right. By this time I
go back to my Windows machine.

OK, I realize that Windows is a dog's breakfast under the hood. But thanks to
commerical vendors (Steinberg, Presonus), they've made Cubase work for me. If
it didn't work, noone would buy their software or hardware!

I think Linux is great for many things. I use it for servers. I also use it
for my research machine. In both of these cases Linux provides the
reliability and security I require. But I still rely on commercial software,
in my case, Matlab.

I think if someone comes out with Cubase (or Adobe Audition or Wavelab or ...)
for Linux it would catch on real fast. But, as others have said, the market
is not there. The DAW market is small enough already. Intersect DAW and
Linux and you've got an even smaller audience.

Richard
Well stated Richard!!

Yes dawhead is a good person and despite our differences I respect
his opinion and I truly appreciate all his hard work in the open
source world.
There is no denying he is making an impact.

I really have nothing to add to what you have already stated Richard.
I agree with you.