For those supporting OpenOctave...

[studio32]

Everybody is evil, except for the OOM developers themselves. They can rudely fork Muse and being disrespectful at (one of) the developers. They can say whatever they want about Ardour. But there is no short moment they'll evaluate and think about their own disrespectful behavior. They've a 'higher aim' (Gott mit uns) and nothing can stop them, even if that means they have to be evil.

If the project was more realistic about it's goals and about people on the Internet (be aware of the Windows mass and Mac fanboys! ) and did communicate a bit more professional and less emotional, then we where talking about a nice software project with skilled developers instead...

[slowpick]

Less drama, more comedy. Fewer rants, more thankyous.

But it might require serious chemical intervention

[SR]

FWIW, I had read the criticisms of OOM in the past but I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. OOM looked like it was on its way to becoming a great piece of software and I was truly excited about it.

However, after reading the comments in this thread, I could care less if they take their ball and go home. I could never allow myself to depend on a tool developed by someone who's ego is so fragile that they'll yank support based on some anonymous comments on a message board. And even if that weren't the case, the attitude conveyed in this thread speaks for itself.

I may just be an enthusiast, but I say go ahead and move your program to Windows or Mac where you can become "Just Another DAW (TM)". You may think the attitudes in Linux Audio stink but the attitudes on the other platforms are the reason I will never use them. You'll fit in great.

[wolftune]

See, Chris? I believe in your inherent capability to see some reason and logic here. Tell people you are a self-righteous person who knows absolute truth, never apologize for any of your disrespectful comments, dismiss even a friendly person like me who is trying to help people get along, and the result is everyone continues posting dismissive rejecting comments.

As a simple matter of understanding the ways of the world, if you just get past your ego, maybe just call on Jesus for strength to allow you to be kind and forgiving or something, and actually say kind forgiving things to people here (maybe not to the guy who really took you down but to everyone else at least), and just see if I'm right… I predict you'd get a much better response.

The way you express yourself comes across as though you feel it is everyone else's responsibility to show that they are good people who want to work with you respectfully but you don't have any responsibility because you are proven to be on the right side of every exchange. I'm not going to say that you believe this, but it appears that way from your communication.

I myself am going to have to say that I am not going to try to promote OOM, work with you on PR, nor donate to your project, if after all the effort I've made to be fair and try to bring people together, you remain unwilling to even take the tiniest look at how you can improve. It's not functional to work with people who don't listen and don't have any humility. That's why people are reacting negatively to you. Most people just express their feelings less carefully than I — maybe because they don't want to waste the time I waste trying to get self-righteous people to be more reasonable. If I succeed 1 out of 10 times in helping people get along better, it's worth it to me, I think… At least I get practice trying to communicate well, which is something we can all use practice with.

Regardless of the issues if we were to discuss your faith, I'm pretty sure Christ taught forgiveness, kindness, seeing virtue in others, patience, and such… Folks who swear at you should be recognized as flawed people who are not necessarily evil. If you see everyone you ever offend as persecuting you, then how will you ever recognize that you actually might be at fault for communicating in a way that caused confusion? If everything that goes wrong is bad people who are against you, how can you learn to improve? If you're a true Christian, you surely mustn't believe that you are perfect… But you've carefully avoided ever admitting even the idea that you could improve your communication or that you are ever at fault in any way for any problem here…

[jeffh]

I base this idea off of the Bible. I would hardly call it baseless. I am promised through the word of God that I will suffer persecution.

OK, I couldn't sit out for this one... Really? Seriously?

Assuming that the your religion is correct, and not somebody else's like the Hindus, Mormons, Muslims, Jew, Scientologists or "none of the above"; Wasn't that Jesus bloke supposed to be the poster child for compassion, forgiveness, and "turning the other cheek"? What would Jesus do in your situation right now?

All the same, that comment convinced me that you and your developer cult aren't mentally stable enough to write the greatest DAW of all time. Personally, I'd rather you completely exit the Linux community. It's questionable if you would've been missed in the first place, but you certainly won't be missed now. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

[studio32]

Hmm any extra comments might do more harm then good. It has been explosive... I suggest to let it rest (and take some extra sleep...).

For myself I'll keep an eye on the project, cause the software has potential and it looks nice. And of course it will be a loss for Linux if they wouldn't support it. But on the other hand, we're by no means dependent on this project. I'll keep an eye on how the devs will maintain their project and how they communicate. If the latter doesn't change, I think it will be not much fun as a user to communicate with that dev team), and the project will not be reliable. Future will tell.

Sleep well!

[falkTX]

All religious and fud aside, I still believe OpenOctave can get to be a great DAW - it certainly has the bases for it, and already works quite fine.

Don't worry about non-linux support. Being based on muse means it's GPL and it will always be. Linux is my platform of choice and will be for a long time (unless Haiku gets a release soon ). If they decide to drop Linux support for good and move on to something else, the code will still be open and I'll still be around, so you know what that means...

[i2productions]

Let me start by saying, whatever tool or OS you use to meet your audio ends is your business as a user and should be respected. Now, I don't understand why OO is asking for donations from a linux user base to fund Mac/Windows development. Most of these users have abandoned Windows and Mac for a reason.

And all this other stuff on here from the developers just seems silly. Need less Jesus and more PR!

[wolftune]

I finally figured out how to get the latest beta OOM 2012 working (thanks to gracious help from the developers). It's really great. The easy set-up was running ostudio-2012 from the command line to run the auto-downloader. After that, OOMidi automatically set up instruments and such. What a pleasure.

I encourage everyone to continue supporting this project. It has real promise and is already very satisfying to use.

[slowpick]

Most of these users have abandoned Windows and Mac for a reason.

To keep some things in perspective, there aren't very many linux musicians, period.
If counting those that have fully abandoned the 'dark empires', you're down to
a few hundred, mostly lurkers, and if those all had the money, for modern
computers and commercial software, you'd be counting the rest by by dozens.

A fair number of newbies to ALL computers, wind up with useless boxes,
and then a few begin learning linux, and at some point are savvy enough to deal with
malware and driver issues etc and can return to use the other systems in varying degrees.

There is also a large group of musicians who tried linux, and gave up,
due to incompatible hardware, failure to utilize the search engines,
lacking patience to think through long support threads, or lacking a
friend or co-worker willing to help.

Potential linux users will read this thread, even some potential employers
they do get very thorough these days, more than just a facebook check,
with only enough jobs for the best of the best.

[slowpick]

doublepost removed

[zettberlin]

Since we are on a software-forum why not set aside personal musings about religions and psychology for a while and talk about software?

I checked out OO-Studio the last 3 days and this is my conclusion so far:

there are very good ideas in its design and concept I have not seen before in any Linux Audio Suite except LMMS. Using the Orchestra-Template I had a realistic sounding movie-score song whithin 1h -- outstanding!

On the other hand:

1: the audiotracks are the same as in Muse: a joke. Barely usable for recording but I did not found a way to assign two jack-ports as inputs for a single track so not even recording from guitarix or H2 is possible in a decent way. Plus: editing is experimantal at best and I have seen much much more precision and comfort in Samplitude in 1999.

2: much more severe than 1: the application is not reliable. After reloading the aforementioned projects all (sic!) tracks where set to the sampleroutput for solo-violin. Reassigning them to percussion, horns, cellos etc took me 1h clicking around in the GUI that is filled up with elements, that may be interesting ideas but are not there yet to say the least.

I could critisize more things I encountered but let me emphasize the good part also: the orchester-template is a grand idea and I would love to see this grow into a really usable application.

On the founding/communication thing:

Everybody who runs OOM will feel upset if not s´cheated when he or she compares the experience with the bold promises to be found in the screenshots and text on the website. This is a guarranty for trouble. Especially in a community that has a bit more technical understanding and a bit less tolerance to advertizement-style communication.

And BTW: I do not know, who complicated it would be to port the Muse Codebase to MacOSX or even Windows but I think I remember, that projects with lesser ambitions needed about a year to have an initial alpha. So if OOM for Linux is abandoned, OOM itself is abandoned for many months and when it arrives on Mac or Win it would be get into a competition with Reaper that is much much more mature. Not to mention the software that is indeed considered to be the "greatest DAW" on the planet such as ProTools or Nuendo.

I' d recommend all to tone down the discussion a bit and the OOM-devs to cut their promises back to size, talk openly about problems and please, for your own good: rewrite the texts on your website in the state of absolute sobriety.

You have Remon in your team, ask him, he did a great job in rethinking his concepts and communication for Traverso and gained great respect whith that.

[jeffh]

I' d recommend all to tone down the discussion a bit and the OOM-devs to cut their promises back to size, talk openly about problems and please, for your own good: rewrite the texts on your website in the state of absolute sobriety.

I think you're a little late to the party, I'm pretty sure that the OOM devs abandoned this thread a week ago, it's time to let it sink into oblivion

If I may perpetuate the conversation a little longer, I don't think Linux needs people like the OOM developers. Here's my take on the DAW situation in Linux:

Ardour3: It's vapor-ware. Sorry, but I can't wait another 10 years for a stable 3.0 release to materialize. For a project that does such an excellent job of funding itself, I would have expected proper MIDI support a long time ago, but instead it's always "we may not be able to finish Ardour3 at all, because $5000/month donations just isn't enough". I've earmarked thousands of dollars to donate to projects this year, why should I give any to them when they don't have MIDI yet and others do?

Qtractor: It's a very decent DAW, it reminds me of Reaper on Windows. Rui is a very nice guy, but he doesn't seem interested in taking Qtractor to the next level to be competitive with "the big boys", it's more of a hobby for him. Maybe someday some team of developers will fork it into something amazing.

Rosegarden: It's a nice piece of software with a lot of potential, I'm interested to see what they do with it. I don't have any insights to offer about the developers themselves.

Muse2: I think this is a seriously under-rated piece of software. It's incredibly flexible and very smooth, and has a team of talented, motivated developers. In the past month or so I've been participating in their bug tracker and mailing list, those guys are on top of every bug the minute it comes in. I have no doubt that Muse2's final release is going to be something very special.

Seq24: Very interesting and unique. It appears that it's not being actively developed anymore, but it's a fun little piece of software like ye olden hardware sequencers. I'm even considering forking it to add a few features I think would put it over the top.


So, why should we care what the OOM developers do? Any future discussion of OOM will be tainted because of the way they've acted, I can't advise anybody in good faith to start relying on it now. Why not forget OOM and unite behind Qtractor, Rosegarden or Muse2? They're just as good or better than OOM, and they are developed by great people who are passionate about Linux.

[raboof]

Ardour3: It's vapor-ware. Sorry, but I can't wait another 10 years for a stable 3.0 release to materialize.

Well, they did release 3 beta versions in the past 6 months - there's probably plenty of projects that are less productive, though I haven't looked at how much actually changes between beta's.

For a project that does such an excellent job of funding itself, I would have expected proper MIDI support a long time ago, but instead it's always "we may not be able to finish Ardour3 at all, because $5000/month donations just isn't enough". I've earmarked thousands of dollars to donate to projects this year, why should I give any to them when they don't have MIDI yet and others do?

While I'm not entirely comfortable with fundraising, I'm definitely ready to cut them some slack here because Paul Davis is a prominent active member of the community, participating with insightful and reasonable posts on the LAD list and maintaining one of the main cornerstones of Linux audio, JACK.

Qtractor: (...) doesn't seem interested in taking Qtractor to the next level to be competitive with "the big boys", it's more of a hobby for him. Maybe someday some team of developers will fork it into something amazing.

Just because Rui doesn't pose such bold goals doesn't mean he will not reach them . If some developers would be interested in giving the project a boost, it's not unlikely they could contribute to the project without having to fork.

It's a nice piece of software with a lot of potential, I'm interested to see what they do with it. I don't have any insights to offer about the developers themselves.

I've made some minor contributions to Rosegarden. I've found the developers a friendly, civil and intelligent bunch, who unfortunately have too little time to devote to the project.

[jeffh]

Well, they did release 3 beta versions in the past 6 months - there's probably plenty of projects that are less productive, though I haven't looked at how much actually changes between beta's.

They've been developing Ardour3 for many years now, and here we are mid-2012, and the latest Ardour3 beta won't even launch on my PC...

Meanwhile, Windows and Mac DAWs continue to advance with regular updates and feature releases, while the Linux community continues to wait for Ardour3. They really need a faster development cycle, like 6-month time-based releases: Every 6 months, put together a stable release, and the features that aren't finished simply don't make it into the release.

While I'm not entirely comfortable with fundraising, I'm definitely ready to cut them some slack here because Paul Davis is a prominent active member of the community, participating with insightful and reasonable posts on the LAD list and maintaining one of the main cornerstones of Linux audio, JACK.

No doubt that he's a legend, but being a legend in-and-of-itself doesn't give me a usable DAW. I'm most inclined to support Muse2 because I think they are the ones with the desire, skill, passion and resources to deliver a truly professional-grade Linux DAW.

We need competition, developers competing with each other to deliver the best product, and the community should unite behind those who put out the best products. I don't believe that anybody should be given a free pass just out of respect for who they are or what they've done in the past.

Just because Rui doesn't pose such bold goals doesn't mean he will not reach them . If some developers would be interested in giving the project a boost, it's not unlikely they could contribute to the project without having to fork.

It's actually a bit more of a personal experience. Qtractor would be so good if Rui just fixed a few of the glaring flaws, but anything I've sent to him was met with a response of "it's supposed to be slow" or "I don't see a need to fix that, just use this workaround". I've even donated money to him, and dangled the carrot of more money if he would work on some of these things, but he doesn't seem interested. No disrespect to Rui, but unless something changes, I predict Qtractor will become a leading DAW some day, but only after somebody else forks it.

a friendly, civil and intelligent bunch

All the more reason to support them instead and tell the OOM devs to stick their code where the sun doesn't shine