Linux music as a major player...

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glowrak guy
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Re: Linux music as a major player...

Post by glowrak guy »

Petra-Sue wrote: In my struggle to arrive at a viable, explicitly Linux-based solution I never arrived at this point, apart from the unexpressive sound fonts (but that is another point). If someone could teach me: I am really eager to learn. But no excuses please w/r/to "special hardware configurations that need to be manually taken care of individually".
You probably require the scripted instrument articulations provided by Kontakt. A bitter pill,
if one is a diehard linux partisan. Are you such a partisan, at the expense of your musicianship?
I don't know.

If you are not a partisan, and you are fast, there is a sale this month: you can buy a light version of Guitar Rig,
upgrade to the full version for $50, then upgrade that to Kontakt5 or Komplete9. So for a modest
combined investment, I think totals $350 or less, you can join the ranks of those with widely accepted
professional capabilities.
Cheers
diizy
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Re: Linux music as a major player...

Post by diizy »

tatch wrote:It's also disappointing when devs tell you something you think is pretty beneficial won't be implemented but you obviously can't blame them, repeat the "it's free so be grateful" mantra.)
As a developer, I can tell you that it's not so much a question of "it's free, take it or leave it" rather than barely having enough manpower to test, fix and maintain the already implemented/planned features. We need more developers who are like serious programmer gurus...
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GMaq
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Re: Linux music as a major player...

Post by GMaq »

"All the audio/media distros I know of just shove all the LAU software ever into a box, tack on an rt or lowlatency kernel and call it a day."

Well yes, we serve a niche community that are far more informed than the general Linux desktop community and have an unlimited number of workflows and itches they want scratched, You think AV Linux is stuffed to the gunnels with applications because that's what I think is best?! It's what the user demands, KXStudio comes out with Carla, AVL users expect Carla, AVL comes with linuxDSP demos, KXStudio users want a repo for them...

If you think falkTX or I want to just 'shove' any old application into a distro as some sort of 'I-know-more-Linux-Audio-apps-than-you-do' competition you're dead wrong... Distributors give the users what they want, it isn't up to us to decide if beta-grade plugin 'X' is better than beta-grade plugin 'Y'... I have my own opinions just like everyone does, when you serve as discerning a user base as Linux Audio has you have to put your own opinions aside about what software is cutting it or not.

This is why current Linux media distros are as they are, making them commercial wouldn't make any difference at all, Commercial developers will be using all the same building blocks (kernels and D.E's) and feeling pressure to provide the same apps. You think anything Commercial could be better than KXStudio?! I don't think so...
tatch
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Re: Linux music as a major player...

Post by tatch »

If you think falkTX or I want to just 'shove' any old application into a distro as some sort of 'I-know-more-Linux-Audio-apps-than-you-do' competition you're dead wrong... Distributors give the users what they want, it isn't up to us to decide if beta-grade plugin 'X' is better than beta-grade plugin 'Y'...
It's useful that AVL represents what LAU users want and for some people that may be fine. It's just that some people have mentioned the possibility of creating another distribution and I don't see the point in repeating what has already been done or even catering to the same audience as AVL.
falkTX wrote: The KXStudio repositories include a little bit of everything yes, but that's the intention.
You never have to install what you don't need. :wink:
I do appreciate that the KXStudio repositories contain most current LAU software and I mentioned (perhaps not clearly enough) that the ability to download things easily after initial installation is also quite valuable. I'm just talking about how the initial installation could be refined to mimic in some ways a traditional monolithic DAW by carefully selecting the preinstalled plugins. Instead of having calf-compressor, gxcompressor, invada-compressor and c**compressor just have calf-compressor. It's like how distros will often choose a single web browser to preinstall; it isn't necessarily better and maybe another browser does something better but for the experienced user it should be trivial to install other plugins via repositories and for new users they don't have to puzzle over which plugin to choose.
This is why current Linux media distros are as they are, making them commercial wouldn't make any difference at all, Commercial developers will be using all the same building blocks (kernels and D.E's) and feeling pressure to provide the same apps. You think anything Commercial could be better than KXStudio?! I don't think so...
I'm not sure I agree with the idea of a "commercial" distro either but I think there is potential in a distro (as well as a LAU box) refined by the community rather than one maintained by 1-2 people and randomly occasionally contributed to by others. If KXStudio is willing to take on that role then all the better but I think it could be critical to work consciously towards more community involvement and contribution. Of course this requires an extra layer of planning which may not be possible for us but I think it's worth discussing if as a result we could polish a distro and a box worth a dime to the rest of the audio world.
glowrak guy
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Re: Linux music as a major player...

Post by glowrak guy »

GMaq wrote: You think anything Commercial could be better than KXStudio?! I don't think so...
The idea would be for full-time developement, by a team with leadership, employees,
communication with the outside world, and a business plan to follow. Look at public
response to the Bitwig release. There were many expected features missing,
many bugs reported, and issues with workflow reported. The team responded quickly,
with numerous updates and fixes, I doubt they slept much the first two weeks.
It is a startup venture, without guarantees, much like tomorrows breakfast.

Not to imply there is a lack of planning, or man hours, in any given linux endeavor,
but reading only ones own headlines, tends to obviscate the greater realities.
The status-quo may look fine in the mirror, but display a far different reflection,
when seen from those outside, looking in. There are 12 working hours per day.
How many current linux devs can afford using them on their projects,
before needing income for survival?
Cheers
kawliga
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Re: Linux music as a major player...

Post by kawliga »

GMaq wrote:If you think falkTX or I want to just 'shove' any old application into a distro as some sort of 'I-know-more-Linux-Audio-apps-than-you-do' competition you're dead wrong...
I agree that the "shove" comment is a bit harsh and I can understand why GMaq and FalkTX might feel a bit offended.

I think perhaps a fairer way of looking at it would be to make an analogy with the BSD v Linux debate.

When you install BSD, the base system is developed entirely in house. The same people who develop the kernel also develop the system utilities. By contrast, Linux is just a kernel. The userland tools are from elsewhere.

Essentially, all Linux distros are, for want of a better word, contrived. Please don't misunderstand me - I don't use this in a pejorative sense or as a criticism of GMaq or FalkTX - who both do inspirational work, but distros are, for the most part, put together from preexisting applications. This is different to the way things work on other platforms. Someone might write an application specifically for Mac OS X. No one (other than Glen himself) writes applications specifically for AV Linux. Glen takes programs that others have already written and makes them part of AV Linux, so it is a different approach.

The merits of the two approaches are debatable.

One could argue, however, that, because Linux distros are the result of lots of little bits combined together from different sources, often using different toolkits and by folks with different goals and motivations, that this could make them seem somewhat unpolished and lacking in integration compared to something like Mac OS, where there is more of a unified vision because Apple call all the shots.

Please don't misunderstand me - I am not a BSD or Apple fanboy :mrgreen: - I am merely trying to play devil's advocate and look at things from a different perspective.
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GMaq
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Re: Linux music as a major player...

Post by GMaq »

kawliga wrote:
GMaq wrote:If you think falkTX or I want to just 'shove' any old application into a distro as some sort of 'I-know-more-Linux-Audio-apps-than-you-do' competition you're dead wrong...

Essentially, all Linux distros are, for want of a better word, contrived. Please don't misunderstand me - I don't use this in a pejorative sense or as a criticism of GMaq or FalkTX - who both do inspirational work, but distros are, for the most part, put together from preexisting applications.
Absolutely true, Couldn't agree more. My role is as facilitator and 'evangelist' not as creator... falkTX has the envious distinction of being some of both which is why I promote his project over mine as an example of 'doing it right' :wink:
kawliga wrote: One could argue, however, that, because Linux distros are the result of lots of little bits combined together from different sources, often using different toolkits and by folks with different goals and motivations, that this could make them seem somewhat unpolished and lacking in integration compared to something like Mac OS, where there is more of a unified vision because Apple call all the shots.

Please don't misunderstand me - I am not a BSD or Apple fanboy :mrgreen: - I am merely trying to play devil's advocate and look at things from a different perspective.
Another great point, I always laugh especially about Video NLE's on Linux... Kdenlive has to haul most of KDE4's fat-ass runtime stuff along just to work and Cinelerra is completely toolkit agnostic with it's own self contained UI components... good luck getting that shiny unified Apple look with two projects that different :roll:

Anyway tatch's comment did touch a nerve but it's all good... back to the original discussion... :wink:
glowrak guy
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Re: Linux music as a major player...

Post by glowrak guy »

I think AristX distro team made it clear that they were attempting to load up
their release with 'everything'. After taking the synaptic chainsaw to it,
and putting it on an ssd, it wasn't bad. Which implies that many linux apps are
well coded, with some degree of interoperability, despite such diverse origens.

I seem to recall that many windows distro musicians loath the shovelware often
imposed on them when a new computer is purchased. I've never used
the mac i-distro apps myself, it seems both apple and microsoft are content
to dominate their market of corporate low-information computer users,
trapped at work, with what the pointy haired boss has deemed appropriate.

The well informed/power users of those platforms, could do well using linux,
if it were demanded in their workplace, or they saw a really excellent reason
to add a linux setup to their studio/business. It's a hard sell, so far.

Seems artistx web account has been suspended :( perhaps they shovelled in too much content,
for the allotted bandwidth :lol:
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GMaq
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Re: Linux music as a major player...

Post by GMaq »

glowrak guy wrote:I think AristX distro team made it clear that they were attempting to load up
their release with 'everything'. After taking the synaptic chainsaw to it,
and putting it on an ssd, it wasn't bad. Which implies that many linux apps are
well coded, with some degree of interoperability, despite such diverse origens.

I seem to recall that many windows distro musicians loath the shovelware often
imposed on them when a new computer is purchased. I've never used
the mac i-distro apps myself, it seems both apple and microsoft are content
to dominate their market of corporate low-information computer users,
trapped at work, with what the pointy haired boss has deemed appropriate.

The well informed/power users of those platforms, could do well using linux,
if it were demanded in their workplace, or they saw a really excellent reason
to add a linux setup to their studio/business. It's a hard sell, so far.

Seems artistx web account has been suspended :( perhaps they shovelled in too much content,
for the allotted bandwidth :lol:
Hi glowrak guy

Actually I think the ArtistX maintainer is dealing with a brain tumour (I realize your comment was intended as a joke). I hope that the web account being suspended means he is recuperating or taking some time off rather than the other possibility...

You actually bring up another important point though... The idea that anyone using the defacto repository packages to create a specialized media distro is somewhat hit and miss and rather unlikely... For example Ubuntu Studio MUST use only official Ubuntu repo packages submitted or at least overseen by a Ubuntu MOTU (no not 'Mark of the Unicorn'). Unfortunately this in the long run has not been terribly successful because quite often the packages are point releases with known bugs, slightly old and often not being built by someone who actually produces media with them which means missing extra compilation configurations unnecessary debug builds and all sorts of oversights. Hence the need for something like the KXStudio repos just to get these potential showstopping bugs worked out and things to work in a synergistic way..

The reason I took some offense to tatch's remark is that to have a workstation platform that is reliable enough to even get a second look from Windows and OSX users has little to do with grabbing a bunch of repo packages and combining them with a peppier kernel. I would say that almost 75% of the AVL Audio packages are custom built from upstream GIT in close consultation with the developers themselves or close scrutiny of mailing lists and GIT commit logs, I'm sure falkTX would agree that is the case with KXStudio as well..

The devil is always in the details with this stuff and often times detail, attention and focus is missing from most the mainstream distros especially with regard to multimedia. I don't know who can create the ultimate Linux Media distribution but it won't be the mainline distros... their attention is elsewhere...
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Re: Linux music as a major player...

Post by kawliga »

GMaq wrote:I always laugh especially about Video NLE's on Linux... Kdenlive has to haul most of KDE4's fat-ass runtime stuff along just to work and Cinelerra is completely toolkit agnostic with it's own self contained UI components... good luck getting that shiny unified Apple look with two projects that different :roll:
Spot on Glen. If there is one thing that Apple have shown it is that having an elegant, uniform symmetry of design and an attention to detail in terms of presentation is very appealing to the average end user.

Some may say that looks are superficial and shouldn't matter and this may be correct but, eventhough we may be wrong to judge a book by its cover, most of us do a lot of the time.

It is human nature to admire something that is aesthetically pleasing.

However, I don't think it's just about cosmetic things - its about integration too.

I think where Apple are also clever is how they design their apps to operate together as a suite.

I haven't used OS X since Leopard, but, if I remember correctly, when you used iMovie there was a media browser which allowed you to browse and search your iTunes library and your iPhoto library from inside iMovie and drag music and images straight on to the timeline easy as pie.

Could you search your rhythmbox and shotwell libraries from inside pitivi (don't mean to have a go at pitivi - just using that as an example)?

Historically, in the Unix world, there has been this philosophy that apps should "do one thing and do it well". However, when this philosophy came into vogue was in the 1970s when everything was command line based. It is easy for the user to combine different command line apps together using pipes, but how can a user do that with GUI apps?

If devs believe in the Unix philosophy that is fine but, if so, then it is imperative that integration with other apps and the system as a whole is top notch.

KDE has this nice idea of KParts whereby part of one KDE app can be embedded in another KDE app, however not all Linux apps are KDE apps.

I do a bit of photography as a hobby. I use Raw Therapee for RAW processing, Digikam for Photo Management and GIMP for editing. All these apps do a fine job at the task I use them for, however they do not integrate well together and the workflow is not as good as it could be. For instance, Digikam has automatic versioning built in but this only works for edits made with its own editor. I, and many, if not most, others, use GIMP for editing. You can select an image from within Digikam and choose to open it with GIMP but edits made with GIMP are not saved in the Digikam version history - you have to manually save the edited version under a different filename or overwrite your original. The end result is that it shows up in digikam as a completely different photo rather than as a different version of the same photo thus making the versioning feature redundant unless you do all of your editing within digikam itself, which I don't believe is the case for most users.

I sometimes wonder how desktop Linux might be today if the great schism between KDE and Gnome had never happened and everyone was still using the same desktop environment and all development was focused on that one desktop environment and all applications were written with that desktop environment in mind. I find it sad that KDE and Gnome both complain of a shortage of developers and yet cannot pool their resources and work together. I know folks will say that choice is what matters, but would you rather have 1 really polished DE or 2 that aren't as good? There is only 1 Linux kernel but I don't hear people complaining about a lack of choice in this regard and that we'd be better off if there were a number of independently developed forks of the Linux kernel to choose from. In fact, I firmly believe one of the main reasons why Linux has been so successful is precisely because there has only ever been one version of the kernel that everyone has used.

Desktop Linux has so much potential but what holds it back, in my humble opinion (speaking as a longtime user rather than developer), is a lack of organisation. People tend to do their own little thing instead of working together. The whole idea of the free software movement was that folks could see the source code of a program someone else had written and add a feature and improve it but 9 times out of 10 developers seem to prefer to start their own project from scratch instead of improving an existing one. I appreciate it may be difficult for developers to work together at times as their code means a lot to them and they may not always see eye to eye on the direction a project should go in, but ultimately we have to compromise to some extent or we'll get nowhere because one person can't do it all on their own.

Okay I'll stop moaning now. :mrgreen:
diizy
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Re: Linux music as a major player...

Post by diizy »

kawliga wrote:I sometimes wonder how desktop Linux might be today if the great schism between KDE and Gnome had never happened and everyone was still using the same desktop environment and all development was focused on that one desktop environment and all applications were written with that desktop environment in mind. I find it sad that KDE and Gnome both complain of a shortage of developers and yet cannot pool their resources and work together. I know folks will say that choice is what matters, but would you rather have 1 really polished DE or 2 that aren't as good?
The idea that there exists some kind of ideal "super desktop" that could exist if all the desktops pooled their resources together is a bit fallacious... even if all KDE-developers were to quit developing KDE, they wouldn't automatically transfer into the GNOME camp. People will always work on what they want to work on... one project gaining developers isn't taken directly away from another project, because there are more than two projects.
kawliga wrote: There is only 1 Linux kernel but I don't hear people complaining about a lack of choice in this regard and that we'd be better off if there were a number of independently developed forks of the Linux kernel to choose from. In fact, I firmly believe one of the main reasons why Linux has been so successful is precisely because there has only ever been one version of the kernel that everyone has used.
There are many versions and forks of the Linux kernel. We have RT-kernels (several versions of them), Libre-kernels with binary blobs removed, and all kinds of special-application kernels - especially on the embedded side... for a long while, the Android kernel was a completely separate and incompatible fork of the Linux kernel. And that's not even getting to all the patches and modifications made to stock kernels by distros...

Maybe you meant that all the existing Linux kernels are all based on the same common upstream? But then, on the other hand, all the desktop environments also have a common base they all rely on - Xorg, and in the future: Wayland.
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Re: Linux music as a major player...

Post by kawliga »

diizy wrote:Maybe you meant that all the existing Linux kernels are all based on the same common upstream?
Yeah, you're right - that is what I meant. I'm aware that different distros may compile the kernel with different options and patch the kernel differently but it is the same kernel that they patch. Everyone starts off with the kernel from kernel.org. As for the thing about Gnome and KDE - I was not a linux user then, but my understanding is that the reason the Gnome developers created Gnome was not because they did not like KDE as a Desktop but because they did not consider it to be free software at the time. ie. it was because of licensing reasons (which are no longer an issue - the FSF now recognises KDE as free software).
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Re: Linux music as a major player...

Post by funkmuscle »

Guys I know already how the opensource thing works I think but I've brought this up before and was almost executed for mentioning it but I'll try to again. :?

Yes opensource means you can port or do whatever you want with the software (I think that's how it works, correct me if I'm wrong please) but aren't the devs spreading themselves too thin once the Windows and Mac users get wind of a great app on Linux and want it ported and now that dev or devs are now supporting 3 platforms?

I know many devs say if you can port it, feel free but then I see them supporting the Mac and Windows users in forums. Shouldn't they do their own thing and have the Linux dev speak to the Mac or Windows dev privately and those users use their own forum for help?

REMEMBER, I'M NOT SURE HOW THIS WORKS SO DON'T SHOOT ME.. :mrgreen:
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Re: Linux music as a major player...

Post by tramp »

funkmuscle wrote:I know many devs say if you can port it, feel free but then I see them supporting the Mac and Windows users in forums. Shouldn't they do their own thing and have the Linux dev speak to the Mac or Windows dev privately and those users use their own forum for help?
Why, isn't that what we linux users ask several audio developers from other platforms as well to do? So the best habit is to show that it work well.
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Re: Linux music as a major player...

Post by ssj71 »

funkmuscle wrote:Yes opensource means you can port or do whatever you want with the software (I think that's how it works, correct me if I'm wrong please) but aren't the devs spreading themselves too thin once the Windows and Mac users get wind of a great app on Linux and want it ported and now that dev or devs are now supporting 3 platforms?

I know many devs say if you can port it, feel free but then I see them supporting the Mac and Windows users in forums. Shouldn't they do their own thing and have the Linux dev speak to the Mac or Windows dev privately and those users use their own forum for help?
Tramp has a good point, and additionally, some bugs are common between platforms, and typically the support time is somewhat proportional to the number of users, (so for ardour its very very little time supporting non-linux users, Paul has said IIRC).
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