LinuxMusicians

Posted: **Tue Mar 15, 2022 9:34 pm**

tavasti wrote: ↑Wed Mar 09, 2022 8:50 pm But ok, I just made Eurojackpot-lottery, if I get jackpot I'll put few million euros to make things better.

That's pretty much what Justin Frankel did with Reaper, albeit through selling WinAmp rather than winning a lottery.

Posted: **Wed Mar 16, 2022 12:36 am**

j_e_f_f_g wrote: ↑Tue Mar 15, 2022 2:34 pm
Basslint wrote: there are valid, even cross-platform abstractions over GNU/Linux audio.
I have no problem with abstractions (ie code that gets linked into your app, and affects only your app). For example, something like rtAudio is hunky dory.

I get annoyed when someone makes software that sucks up all the sound devices because the software wants to take over device management from the operating system. Because that usually affects my apps (which allow the operating system to do its job). And I typically have to add code to push the overreaching software out of the way. (Because the offending software never releases those devices until/unless your app tells it to.)

And I get really pissed off after a half dozen developers keep recreating this crap, all of it doing the same (wrong) thing in a different way (while claiming to be "compatible replacements" for the earlier crap), and requiring yet another incompatible method to push it aside.

I am starting to wonder what cubsase and albeton do on windows.
Will they also highjack all audio ?
Not sure I want to go looking for cubase though, just to find out how this stuff works on the other side.

The thing as non coder, what I am wondering about for years now, is why not fix / change add stuff to alsa instead of adding another layer?
Pulse audio, jack and or pipewire.

Alsa patchbay is not available for openSUSE, I would have to compile it from source, I checked.
For what its worth LMMS can be set to about all. Pulse audio , Jack, Alsa, and some more.
I never tested all, I just use pulse audio, and have tried ALSA but did not notice any difference, then there is another setting sdl, which also works fine.

Posted: **Wed Mar 16, 2022 12:40 am**

barbouze wrote: Just bridge Alsa to Jack

I've alerted Santa that you need to be put on the naughty list.

Oh, and I also hacked into the World Health Organization server, and listed you as having no vaccine shots. Your travel is now restricted to between your home and the local convenience store to purchase stale potato chips. Enjoy your lockdown, punk.

Posted: **Wed Mar 16, 2022 1:16 am**

Gps wrote: why not fix / change add stuff to alsa instead of adding another layer?

Oh, oh! I have that answer!

The ALSA source code is extremely complicated. If someone dared to start changing code without knowing how it all worked, he would almost certainly break it so that it no longer even worked.

And unfortunately, like far too much open source code, the code has barely any comments in it. So one has to study it, and analyze it, and figure out what the code is doing. He doesn't have nice, plain english explanations (ie, comments) to quickly/easily get upto speed. And the documentation for the code is even less than the comments in the code. So, that's no help whatsoever. I did a code review of both ALSA and JACK, and it took months of study. (But now I have profusely commented source code, albeit out of date by now, of both ALSA and JACK because I commented the hell out of it as soon as figured out what each bit was doing. Whenever I need to refresh my memory how something works, I go back to my commented sources. Saves a ton of time and effort).

But OSS developers (generally) don't get paid to write software (especially music software). So they'll do it only for the fun/accomplishment. You don't have fun spending a lot of time studying someone else's code. And you certainly don't accomplish anything if you aren't writing code yourself. So a typical developer says to himself:

"You know, I could get to work faster if I just pretend this other guy's code doesn't exist, and I instead start writing my own version of what I think it should do. Sure, I'm reinventing the wheel. Sure, I'm making something that will probably fight for resources with this guy's code. Sure, his code is part of the operating system, and I shouldn't undermine its authority to manage access to the hardware.

But I'm not gonna spend months studying his code. I don't get paid to do that shit. I'm NOT!! F' it. I'm gonna write my own sound server, and do all of those things I shouldn't do. And it ain't fun having to take the time to write lots of comments in the code, nor write detailed docs, just so in the future, someone else can more easily maintain/improve my code. I don't get paid to do that shit. F' it. I'm writing it, so I know how it works without comments/docs."

And a sound server is created.

One year later, that dev has lost interest in his server, and moves on to find fun elsewhere. So some developer (with a name like Nils or Filippe) comes along to take over the code. It has no comments/docs, so he thinks:

"You know, I could get to work faster if I just pretend...

And yet another sound server is created.

Posted: **Wed Mar 16, 2022 1:56 am**

Gps wrote: what cubsase and albeton do on windows.
Will they also highjack all audio ?

While it's technically/theoretically possible to burrow into Windows' audio system enough to hijack every other app's audio, it isn't done in practice.

Microsoft is a big, bad corporation that does not take kindly to messing with the operating system. If you attempt that, MS will snap your neck like you're a baby bird. (And you don't want to know what Apple does if you mess with iOS.)

A day after your Windows "audio server" appears, it will be given a new name like TROJAN-AUDIO-2020, and every anti-virus program will wipe it out of existence.

Posted: **Wed Mar 16, 2022 2:36 am**

Lets say, I understand enough of coding, to totally understand how this works and happens.

Been wondering for years if I should try to help out LMMS development.

Besides my coding experience, being limited to some BASIC, not much beyond this:

10 print "Linux rulez"
rem (this does nothing) and is mend for comments
20 goto 10

run

That rem part, is only use full for others, not the guy writing the program.
I can totally see how that gets put off indefinitely.

And what I learned from coding with basic. The computer does exactly what I tell it to do, but it often not totally what I was expecting....

Posted: **Wed Mar 16, 2022 10:31 am**

j_e_f_f_g wrote: ↑Tue Mar 15, 2022 2:34 pm And I get really pissed off after a half dozen developers keep recreating this crap, all of it doing the same (wrong) thing in a different way (while claiming to be "compatible replacements" for the earlier crap), and requiring yet another incompatible method to push it aside.

Sorry to tell you this jeff, and it may come as a shock, but the Linux audio stack isn't there solely to put you in a good mood.

Posted: **Wed Mar 16, 2022 11:08 am**

merlyn wrote: it may come as a shock

Your posts have gotten so repetitiously vapid and contentless, that what would really come as a shock to me is if you weren't a bot.

Posted: **Wed Mar 16, 2022 11:56 am**

Gps wrote: my coding experience is some BASIC

BASIC. Now there's a truly horrible, dead language. Line numbers instead of labels. And every line had to be manually numbered. Plus, the line numbers determined the execution order. So say you wrote the following:

2 print "Linux rulez"
1 print "But not for audio."

The BASIC interpreter would either tell you your lines are out of order (if it was smart). Or more likely run the program to display the following:

Code: Select all

But not for audio.
Linux rulez

That's right. Even though "But not for audio" is clearly written as your second line (and "Linux rulez" is your first line), BASIC executes the second line first. Because it has a lower line number.

Oh the pain.

And notice how Gps numbered his two lines 10 and 20. What happened to numbers 1 to 9, and 11 to 19? Well, if he later needs to add some more instructions to the beginning of his program, he'll need to use those numbers 1 to 9. So, he's "saving" them for future updates. And if he wants to add some instructions inbetween "But not for audio" and "Linux rulez", he'll need to have numbers 11 to 19 available.

So what if he needs to add 15 lines to the beginning of his program? Well, now he has to go through the rest of his program and renumber every line. Oh the pain! THE PAIN!

Why would a language impose such a horrendous sequential line numbering scheme??

Well, I'm-a-gonna tell you.

BASIC's heyday was the late 1960's and early 1970's. Back then they didn't have fancy technology like magnetic spinning platter hard drives like the stuff you can buy today on EBay for about 2 dollars. They didn't even have floppy discs. Actually, big tech companies like IBM were just starting to come out with such advanced "floppy" technology. I think they had a floppy drive which could hold a fraction of the files you can put on a modern flash/pen drive. And it only cost about $10,000. I'm not joking this time.

So how did most computers save their program files? They were printed out on "punch cards". One instruction per punch card. So if you wrote a 100 line BASIC program, you literally saved it as a stack of 100 punch cards (that you later physically scanned back into the computer whenever you wanted to run your program. Yep. Scanning 100 punch cards). And those punch cards had to be in the exact same sequential order as when you wrote the program.

So one day you're late for work. You're rushing to get your stack of 100 punch cards to the scanner, and you trip, scattering the punch cards all over the floor. Now the only way to put your program back together is if each punch card is numbered.

And that's why BASIC requires those line numbers.

THE HORROR!

Gps, don't ever mention BASIC to another programmer. That's a part of history that is too barbaric and painful to revisit. Like the holocaust.

Believe it or not, there actually was a worse computer language. It was called COBOL. It was supposed to be for ordinary businessmen to use, rather than programmers. You can probably imagine how well that worked. I forget what the letters C O B O L stood for. Something like:

Chimps, Orangutans, and Babboons Official Language

Or maybe not.

Posted: **Wed Mar 16, 2022 12:07 pm**

You're not getting the form, man. You're playing a blues over rhythm changes. You use rhetoric where the more appropriate form is dialectic, and in dialectic ad hominem can be ignored.

j_e_f_f_g wrote: ↑Wed Mar 16, 2022 1:16 am So a typical developer says to himself:

"You know, I could get to work faster if I just pretend this other guy's code doesn't exist, and I instead start writing my own version of what I think it should do. Sure, I'm reinventing the wheel. Sure, I'm making something that will probably fight for resources with this guy's code. Sure, his code is part of the operating system, and I shouldn't undermine its authority to manage access to the hardware.

But I'm not gonna spend months studying his code. I don't get paid to do that shit. I'm NOT!! F' it. I'm gonna write my own sound server, and do all of those things I shouldn't do. And it ain't fun having to take the time to write lots of comments in the code, nor write detailed docs, just so in the future, someone else can more easily maintain/improve my code. I don't get paid to do that shit. F' it. I'm writing it, so I know how it works without comments/docs."

And a sound server is created.

That story is rhetoric. It's not implausible, but it doesn't prove anything. If you have actual evidence please post it.

j_e_f_f_g wrote: ↑Tue Mar 15, 2022 1:59 pm 'You're wrong because... I say so."

That's a telling statement. Who is right or wrong is less important than what is right and wrong. It appears you are presenting the case that you are right, and therefore everything you post is right, when some of what you post is right, spun to fit your anti-Pulse-JACK-Pipewire axe grinding.

Posted: **Wed Mar 16, 2022 12:20 pm**

merlyn wrote: Who is right or wrong is less important than what is right and wrong.

You say that only because you've been wrong in every one of your posts.

It appears you are presenting the case that you are right

Actually, you are presenting that case that I'm right. And you're doing that by consistently being so wrong in every one of your posts.

Posted: **Wed Mar 16, 2022 12:30 pm**

You must be a nightmare on a gig. I've told you it's rhythm changes and you're still playing a blues.

Posted: **Wed Mar 16, 2022 1:09 pm**

merlyn wrote: it's rhythm changes

Are you implying that you're going through menopause?

Posted: **Wed Mar 16, 2022 2:05 pm**

I think this conversation has quickly become useless. We don't even have a good definition of "serious music enthusiast", so the original question is completely subjective, and it has degenerated into slinging personal attacks. @raboof, is there a way to lock a topic?

Posted: **Wed Mar 16, 2022 3:10 pm**

Michael Willis wrote: ↑Wed Mar 16, 2022 2:05 pm I think this conversation has quickly become useless. We don't even have a good definition of "serious music enthusiast", so the original question is completely subjective, and it has degenerated into slinging personal attacks. @raboof, is there a way to lock a topic?

I agree on the uselessness. And I apologize for the term "serious music enthousiast". Like I said a few replies before: maybe I should have asked "Why do I see so many non-Linux general music questions here?". Some have given me a useful answer here. Useful to me at least...

LinuxMusicians

Do any serious music enthusiasts use Linux?

Re: Do any serious music enthusiasts use Linux?

Re: Do any serious music enthusiasts use Linux?

Re: Do any serious music enthusiasts use Linux?

Re: Do any serious music enthusiasts use Linux?

Re: Do any serious music enthusiasts use Linux?

Re: Do any serious music enthusiasts use Linux?

Re: Do any serious music enthusiasts use Linux?

Re: Do any serious music enthusiasts use Linux?

Re: Do any serious music enthusiasts use Linux?

Re: Do any serious music enthusiasts use Linux?

Re: Do any serious music enthusiasts use Linux?

Re: Do any serious music enthusiasts use Linux?

Re: Do any serious music enthusiasts use Linux?

Re: Do any serious music enthusiasts use Linux?

Re: Do any serious music enthusiasts use Linux?