Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] Linux Audio/Music CD: Where things stand now...
From: Adam Zygmunt (azygmun_AT_bgnet.bgsu.edu)
Date: ti elo 10 1999 - 14:25:22 EDT
On Tue, 10 Aug 1999, Dave Phillips wrote:
> Juhana Sadeharju wrote:
>
> 1. It wasn't meant to indicate what I thought should go on the disc,
> only to show what I actually have running here. No, not everything
> listed works absolutely perfectly (like everything on Windows does...),
> but everything there works well for my applications. I had received mail
> concerning the actual number of usable programs, so I wrote the list.
>
I've already written back to you on my progress on these, and I'm still
working on the challenge of getting them all to run without breaking the
rest of my system. The one nice advantage of preparing these as a distro
or better yet, supplimental disks for a particular package system or two,
is that if would force the issue of compilation to be resolved. If it
can't be compiled with reasonably recent, stable libraries, it wouldn't
get included. It might also help us, as a group, decide what basics to
include in the system. It's reasonable to expect a program to have some
trouble with compilation - a bad include, an undefined #define, etc. - but
this library/compiler pickiness is getting out of hand IMHO. Even if
something compiles, does it segfault because it's a bug in the program or
because I've got libxxx-2.0.7.3 instead of libxxx-2.0.7.2? You see my
point.
> 2. Yes, it does show where we're short. IMO, Linux excels at the more
> experimental types of audio and music apps, and it falls short in the
> domains of MIDI sequencing, wave editing, and software more oriented
> towards making music in popular styles
I'd like to counter and say that tools like these are necessary for ANY
type of composition. Without them, output from "experimental" music
programs (I'm thinking of fractal music in particular) usually doesn't
rise above the level of sonic curiosity. Unless there's some way to add
human judgement, provided in the form of choosing/assembling the good
bits, layering, processing, or mastering a final piece, it's hard to cross
that line between composing and simply messing around. Same thing with all
the wonderful FFT/PVOC sound-altering programs. It'd be nice to have
something you can do with the output.
> 3. Bill Schottstaedt pointed out that it lacked notation progs, so he
> would add CMN (Common Music Notation) and LilyPond to the list.
I haven't really tried either of these, though I installed them both.
Quite frankly, I don't have the patience to learn them (although the
output from CMN does look workable from the manual), even though I've
bothered to learn the notorious Score. I've already expressed my views on
notation a couple of messages ago. Because notation is such a tricky
thing, even the minimum level of interactivity is a must (see Score for
example, where at least every page and usually every system is in its own
file, but you can at least bump objects without having to type a few lines
of code.)
> 4. There are dozens of smaller, excellent applications not on the
> list. For instance, I've been using Mike Oliphant's GRip, a nice
> front-end for cdparanoia (a ripper), BladeEnc, (an MP3 encoder), and
> Mike's own GCD (a CD player). GRip utilizes the cddb, an on-line
> database of CD titles and their contents, very handy when grabbing
Agreed. Nice programs (don't know Mike's own, though). LAME produces
better files, but BladeEnc is good and license-friendly.
> tracks. Then there's Maurizio Puxeddu's PitchTracker suite, a neat new
> GUI for Oyvind Hammer's PTPS code, which Maurizio revisedand updated
> using the FFTW library. Kai Vehmanen's powerful ecasound is now equipped
> with a Qt interface, but is perfectly happy at the command-line. And so
> and so forth...
>
Don't know about ecasound (what is it?), but these others seem to me do be
more intermediate steps in the sound-creation process (see above).
Pitchtracker is neat and all, but it's the sort of thing
ethnomusicologists got a kick out of 40 years ago. A pitch-to-MIDI or
pitch-to-frequency converter for csound, on the other hand...
I'll stop complaining now for the time being,
Adam Zygmunt
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