[linux-audio-dev] discussion about development overlap

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Subject: [linux-audio-dev] discussion about development overlap
From: Kai Vehmanen (k_AT_eca.cx)
Date: Tue Sep 26 2000 - 20:49:53 EEST


It's a well-known fact that there is lots of development overlap in the
Linux audio-dev scene. Still, there has been relatively little discussion
about specific cases here on LAD. Maybe it would be a good thing to try to
talk about these issues publically. I admit that in many cases, people
just want to do it their own way, and of course, nothing wrong in
that. But this isn't always the case...

Why I'm writing is that during the last few weeks, I've managed to come up
with a _huge_ list of audio-related items to my todo-list. Unfortunately I
know for sure, that I will only have time to implement a few of them. So
it would make sense to concentrate my energy on items, which don't overlap
with other people's doings. And I'm sure I'm not the only one in this
position.

For instance, I try to close follow Ardour development. At least now, Paul
and I clearly have different target audiences. I take this into account
when doing ecasound design decisions. Ardour-like features have very low
priority.

Another issue important to me is audio editors. I'm still a happy Snd
user, but at the same time, there clearly is a market for a more
straigthforward (=simple) editor. My ecawave project started as an
experiment. Mainly I wanted to show that it's easy to write a standalone
audio app on top of ecasound libraries. But lot has happened since, and
with the latest dev-release of ecawave, it's starting to be usable for
much more than playing around with LADPSA plugins. But, but, I'm not sure
what the current sound editor situation is... what editors are you using?
Should I continue to work on ecawave, or should I concentrate on other
projects? Anyone interested to join the project?

One especially wild area seems to be soft-synths, or more generally, audio
apps that fall under "reads MIDI-input -> generates sound". EVO clearly
fills a gap here, but otherwise, there's so much stuff out there, that
I've lost count. Do any specific cases come to mind, that might benefit
from co-operation?

Audio servers are another issue. One thing that I find curious is that
aRts still hasn't gained much support outside the KDE world. Why is this?
Looking at the other canditates, esd is still dead, X-audioserver list has
been silent for a while now, ALSA people are busy with 0.6.x release,
Benno is busy with EVO (any other people working on the totally
plugin-based, hard-rt-capable approach)...

-- 
 . http://www.eca.cx ... [ audio software for linux ] /\ . 
 . http://www.eca.cx/aivastus ... [ aivastus net radio ] /\ . 
 . http://www.eca.cx/sculpscape [ my armchair-tunes mp3/ra/wav ]


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