LinuxMusicians

bunyi wrote:Why only those two manufacturers? Personally I'm not interested in any Steinborg stuff, but I would buy immediately native Chipsounds, Serum, some FabFilter or iZotope plugins. Please update the petition and add more manufacturers: Plogue, Xfer Records, FabFilter, iZotope, Cytomic, Ample Sound, IK Multimedia, Rob Papen, Spectrasonics, MeldaProduction, Cakewalk, Waves, Arturia, Synapse Audio, Image-Line, UVI, LennarDigital, AAS (Applied Acoustics Systems), Toontrack and others.

Makes sense.

But a reality check here from my personal view.
Will I buy them?
Probably not because I simply don't need them even though they are awesome (from what I've heard).
I only buy stuff that makes me money.
I 'bought' ardour because I use it to record students.

I signed it... It wouldn't be bad to see this happening (although perhaps there should be more manufactures involved, as previously mentioned), although I don't use any of the commercial plugins (not a moral/ethical thing: I just don't like most of them).

However, I don't believe petitions are right for this sort of things. The fact is that commercial companies are moved by commercial interest, not by public opinion (although the two things can intersect). If more plugin will be written for Linux will ultimately depend on its profitability.

Also, I am not expert in software developing, but I believe that the devs of the companies that would receive the petition would at least smile at it, mainly for the friendly suggestions about how to make Linux plugins. I would imagine these companies to have already set up long ago their own environments, wrappers and tools. They might allow easy extension/modification to write Linux code or not, and I don't think it will be easy for them to scrap their own development environment, which for sure allows a lot of technical and commercial versatility, in favour of, say, JUCE which I doubt is free to use for commercial purposes (plus, it would mean to sign an agreement with another company... and hope they can keep up with it in terms of support and commercial services...).

So, yeah... I have mixed feelings about this petition, its targets and how it is presented... But good luck nevertheless!

42low wrote: With all do respect, never ever understood the plugin quest and probably never will.

Well, Linux helps in making this quest very, very, very short. I also have everything I need for software, what I need more is knowledge. Sure, there are cool Windows plugins that maybe does Magic, although I still think that a 'sound' knowledge of mixing, synths, recording, and creation can work with a minimal set of tools and achieve very good results. That minimal set of tools for me in Linux includes commercial plugins developed for Linux.

The word 'plugin' is misleading. It's a software term, not an action. Eg. it is not by 'plugging' something somewhere that Wonderful Sound happens, but by understanding how audio, frequencies, harmonies, and their interoperability, work and combine to give the result.

42low wrote: With all due respect, never ever understood the plugin quest and probably never will.

A writer might study a wall of classic literature, and master the thesaurus, hoping to bring excellence
to the writing craft.

'But why puruse the works of masters and experts, when one can already write with
proper grammar, and make a point with some intelligence?'

Music composers vary wildly in their motivations, goals, and productivity.
The 'plugin quest', for some, is the search for beauty yet unseen, persuasion yet unleashed,
the sublime yet to be imagined, and audio software, regardless of how it is presented,
is eagerly pursued by composers, some of whom are artisans, some are hobbyists,
some are attention-seekers, and some compose to earn money.

The sound designer, and the software designer are symbiotic,
one provides a versatile tool, the other provides usable examples
of said tool's capabilities. Together, they provide the composer with potential.

Pricing is another concern. Market forces carve out niches of expectation.
Composers know what to expect for a $50 purchase, compared to spending $200.
Timing of purchases also is a factor. You can buy tons of software when
a bargain or solid value presents itself, knowing that it will take years
to become familiar and fluent with such a trove, and the seller hopes your purchase
will hinder your interest in competing products. There are 'group buys',
'no-brainer' sales, and deep bundles at discounts, to attract our dollars.
Each driven buy what's happening in the broader market, and a businesses
current needs.

'Buyer beware' is a clause in the fine print. A composer might need or want just one sound
out of a thousand sold with a software intrument, without regard to price, and another composer
might dutifully compare all the bundled sounds from several competing instruments,
before deciding on one, and yet another composer might buy them all, knowing each
will find use at some point. Some composers will only use software that costs no money,
for a variety of reasons. (Notice that I do not use the term 'free'. Intellectual property
is expensive to create, and has always cost someone, the most fundamental of all currencies,
their hours of life on earth.)

So the 'plugin quest', is really just a personal pursuit of things like excellence, happiness, and satisfaction,
which translate across our many endeavours, be they artistic, professional, or personal.
There is no right or wrong, better or worse. We are free to pursue.
Cheers

42low wrote:No need for much more (yet), so at least for sure not those virus-cariers.

You don't usually get viruses from buying commercial software from reputable companies.

My take on the whole is that the best way would be to work on the plugin bridges and Wine to make windows VSTs load and work perfectly in a Linux host. I'm convinced that this is an achievable goal. One could infact see Wine like something similar to gtk, juce or any other toolkit.

Whether more stuff gets ported from the Windows world will mostly depend on whether devs/software publishers see commercial viability in doing so.

What's the status of the encryption stuff in wine. I once got a freebee from izotope but couldn't get it to work because of the registering stuff. I believe this had to do with encryption or something.

I'm afraid I just don't 'get' this whole thing with accumulating synths, plugins etc. It seems rather like stamp collecting.

The only plugin I use with any regularity is the fast look-ahead limiter in Audacity when doing a final tidy up. On the rare occasions I do any singing I might add some reverb, but often don't.

As for synths, I doubt anybody here is unaware of the one I use almost exclusively, and I have no problem admitting that after many years, I still only understand and use a fraction of its capabilities.

It's not about collecting but the windows vsts are far more advanced than what we have in linux. That is changing but there is still nothing on par with fabfilter and izotope, for example.

There are quite a few free linux vsts that are very capable, but to date,
have not had a professional or world-class sound designer from mac/win confines,
create full collections* of sounds for any of them. I have about 40 free and commercial vsti's that i use
to find inspirational sounds, and of these 40, zynaddsubfx/yoshimi is the only one
whose sound collection is created primarily by people familiar with linux.

Few people have the skill or inclination to design sounds, and of those,
many lack the hours in a day, or years in a lifetime, to actively pursue
such an activity, especially when there are a hundred thousand examples
to draw from, within affordable grasp.

I agree with Jack Winter, about perfecting wine and vst wrappers.
being a high priority. Great progress has been made, and is ongoing.

* A 'full' collection can be defined generally, as containing pads, leads, plucks, keys. strings,
brass, woodwinds, basses seqs/arps, etc, as presented with U-he Zebra2, for example,
and made with a variety of waveforms and effects.

Instruments that are more focussed in purpose, like a monosynth, ePiano,
or string machine, will still have a large number of examples for use and exploration
Cheers

sysrqer wrote:It's not about collecting but the windows vsts are far more advanced than what we have in linux. That is changing but there is still nothing on par with fabfilter and izotope, for example.

I am not too sure about this. I believe that if we could make a double blind comparison of plugins (which might actually be impossible for synths) we would end up finding out that there isn't actually a higher quality margin in commercial ones (or a not very significant one).

The reasons I think this is (I never did any experiment/survey/whatever, so I could be utterly wrong on this):

• It is a staple to have this sort of surprises in psychoacoustics. For example, when I was at uni a coursemate made a dissertation on the perceptual quality of guitar amplifiers. Long story short: guitarists were asked to rate various different amplifiers by playing their own guitar with them. First time in a semi-anecoic chamber, very casually, in front of the amplifers. The second time (I reckon a day later) in the same chamber, the same amplifiers hidden by a curtain, only the switch-box under their control. It shown a remarkable difference between the judgments for most test subjects. I was one of the subjects. In the first experiment I was like "yeah, the orange is so much better... warmer, creamy distortion". In the second I ended up ranking a marshal model as favouirte. This to say that there are many confounding factors that make us give judgments even if the underlying quality of the things we jduge is actually much different from what we think. And one of them is their look. In fact, this is taken into account in proper assessment of audio quality of, say, codecs, media formats, loudspeakers, headphones etc...
• I think that most commercial plugins developer actually play safe, implementing (very) refined version of classical DSP algorithms. There are few sparkles of innovation in Open Source that I think are pushing the boundary. Few of them are more or less toys/proofs-of-concepts (like fastbreeder), others, like guitarix, are real state of the art of particular techniques (physical modelling). On top of this, a lot of researchers in acoustics and DSP release their code, which could be used with some creativity to make plugins too.

So, in few words, I think that quality wise we have very good stuff. But I also believe that we are missing some plugins family. For example, there isn't any open source Pianoteq lookalike (or I am not aware of it). Physical modelling synths are something very cool and very practical that it would be nice to have. Bad example for this thread tho, Moddart releases Pianoteq for Linux.

Following on from that, I frequently post music to soundcloud. I've lost count of the number of times I've been asked if a particular patch has come from a-n-nother commercial synth

CrocoDuck wrote:I believe that if we could make a double blind comparison of plugins (which might actually be impossible for synths) we would end up finding out that there isn't actually a higher quality margin in commercial ones (or a not very significant one)

Along those lines, the more tracks that join a mix, the busier they are, the more that fill the mid-range bands,
the harder it will be to distinguish the excellence. When you're in the neighborhood of 4 or 5 tracks/sounds,
the high quality of plugins, wielded well, commercial or not, will be easier to discover and appreciate.
Cheers

folderol wrote:Following on from that, I frequently post music to soundcloud. I've lost count of the number of times I've been asked if a particular patch has come from a-n-nother commercial synth

Zynaddsub/fx/yoshimi are definitely among the best sounding instruments,
and the 16 part layering makes them among the most useful.
Your 'Collection' bank is also extremely enjoyable, and in the proverbial
'if you were stranded on a desert island?' scenario, I'd be hard pressed
not to choose it. If zebra2 had layering, and presented presets in the same way,
a set from Howard Scarr or BigTone might be in the running.
Same for a couple of Synth1 banks. But..._they don't_have_layering
Cheers

42low wrote:

sysrqer wrote:It's not about collecting but the windows vsts are far more advanced than what we have in linux.

I don't agree either.

Show me something that comes even close to izotope ozone. Show me a mastering grade multiband saturation plugin with mid/side ability and multiple saturation types. How about a multiband stereo expander? A spring reverb (not an impulse response plugin)?
I don't see how there is anything to agree on really. If you're talking about just open source then the list gets much bigger.