Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] plug-in mania and the sound editor du jour
From: Kai Vehmanen (kaiv_AT_wakkanet.fi)
Date: Fri Apr 07 2000 - 19:41:58 EEST
On Fri, 7 Apr 2000, Dave Phillips wrote:
> So then I decided to see how the most recent stack of soundfile
> editors was coming along. I decided to look at these apps:
Btw; I must quickly mention my ecawave project as I'm currently
working on the 0.2.x dev-series. It doesn't directly compete with
the big boys (snd et al), but it does have a few advantages:
The fundamental idea behind ecawave is to convert all user visible
tasks into ecasound events. So when you push 'Start', ecawave basicly
just executes "ecasound -i editor_temp.wav -o /dev/dsp". It doesn't
know about effect, audio file and device types ... it just passes
around formatted strings between the GUI and libecasound.
What I like best about this design, is that even if I don't
have time to develop ecawave (which I probably won't have), it
will still get better as I develop libecasound.
Here's a screenshot (includes a LADSPA widget!):
http://eca.cx/screenshots/ecawave-1.jpg
> Right now, the winner sound editors for Linux are Snd, WaveSurfer, and
> Nick Bailey's Studio. I really like DAP and MiXViews too, but they have
Yep, same here, Snd is still my favorite. For random use, it's a bit
difficult to use, but it's stable and it works.
> So I see a lot of duplicated and wasted effort. I've been observing
> the development of Linux audio software for a few years now, and I see a
> certain "project life cycle" at work. Ideas are easy, planning is easy,
> talk is easy, even getting a distributable prototype is easy. But
> building a solid application is not easy, and maintaining it over years
Yep, this is definitely true. And I guess LADSPA kind of explains why
it is so difficult. We have spent 10 months discussing about what
should go into a (simple) plugin API. Imagine what it would be like to
develop a whole application this way! :) In the commercial world, we
could just hire some people to implement our designs, but in OSS world,
it doesn't work this way. Nobody wants to be "a dumb coder" who just
implements what other people design.
Anyway, before I started to write ecawave, I took a close look at Kwave,
but its design was just too far away from what I was aiming at. And to
continue a project, you first have to learn how it works, and this takes
time. In many cases, it's faster to start from scratch. With ecawave,
I was able to reuse much of libecasound codebase. That's nearly
30000 lines of code... I'm glad I didn't have to rewrite it all.
-- Kai Vehmanen <k_AT_eca.cx> ---------------- CS, University of Turku . . audio software for linux ... http://www.eca.cx . . armchair-tunes mp3/wav/ra .. http://www.wakkanet.fi/sculpcave .
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