Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] testing the waters
From: Paul Barton-Davis (pbd_AT_Op.Net)
Date: Mon Jun 26 2000 - 21:36:55 EEST
Benno wrote:
>Waves, welcome to the Linux world !
Indeed, welcome.
Above all else, if you have not done so, you should check out the
Linux Sound+MIDI pages:
http://www.bright.net/~dlphilp/linuxsound/
This is a fantastic collection and categorization of just about every
piece of existing Audio+MIDI software for Linux (and a few other OS's
as well).
>(note that the ALSA 6.0 API has not been finalized yet )
Small correction: ALSA stands on the edge of version 0.6.0, not 6.0.
>Steinberg seems interested to "port" VST2.0 on Linux too.
>("port" is more a graphical issue (like porting the VST widget lib) since the
>DSP part is in C/C++ , therefore fully portable
Indeed, and some of us on LAD have written small proto-VST hosts. I
have been discussing VST support on Linux with Steinberg (a
conversation they initiated with me), but our talks have stalled for a
while. Licensing issues are a critical problem for many of us who
write GPL-ed software.
Things i can think of that Linux needs desperately that nobody is
working on:
* a (multichannel) soundfile editor with the capabilities of
Bias Peak or Vegas Pro, but with the extensibility that we
Unix-ish folk have come to expect. Take a look, for
example, at the use of the Guile (LISP) language as an
extension for the snd editor from Bill Schottstaedt at
CCRMA.
* a full VST2.0 and/or DirectX plugin host
* convincing developers of VST2.0, MAS, TDM and DirectX plugins
to either:
a) recompile their stuff for Linux, with the same
plugin API
OR
b) port their stuff to LADSPA (sometimes trivial,
sometimes tricky)
There is a lot of development going on here, and you'll tend to find
many of us skeptical of, though not adamantly against, closed-source
solutions. I don't want to sound negative, but in the light of several
high-profile cases of open-source license infringement, its only fair
to warn you that the majority of existing Linux audio+MIDI software is
licensed under the GPL. So please, if you don't plan on using the GPL
for your Linux adventures, don't think of the existing source base
as a resource for anything except inspiration.
I sincerely hope that you will join our efforts to use the qualities
of Linux in the audio+MIDI domain. If we can get Linus to agree to
incorporate a set of low-latency patches, you can forget all about the
pain with latency issues that tend to dog real-time work on Windows
and the Mac, especially those that cause a great deal of pain for
developers on those platforms. Instead, you would be working on a
phenomenally robust system, which is fully documented in the most
reliable way possible: source code for everything.
I would also encourage you to use the ALSA API wherever possible in
any Linux development that you do. As Benno has noted, the OSS API
that is "standard" right now cannot handle multichannel cards
efficiently, and as we all know, the falling price of such cards will
cripple applications that use this API in the not-too-distant future.
sincerely,
Paul Barton-Davis
Linux Audio Systems
ps. it seems to self-promoting, but in terms of a "who are you" ...
* Developer of no-cost open-source software for audio+MIDI on Linux:
Ardour: 32bit/96kHz 24+ HDR for Linux
Quasimodo: real-time, modular audio+MIDI synthesis+processing
SoftWerk: MIDI pattern sequencing without limits
* ALSA contributor:
RME Hammerfall device driver
Turtle Beach Tropez, Tropez+ device driver
Mid-level code contributions and patches
* Recording studio Linux consultant
Building the world's first (?) all-linux pro studio
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b28 : Mon Jun 26 2000 - 22:10:57 EEST