Re: [linux-audio-dev] prof multitrack studio

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Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] prof multitrack studio
From: Paul Davis (pbd_AT_Op.Net)
Date: Thu Jul 19 2001 - 17:49:35 EEST


>Slightly oversimplified,
>
>Ardor is a multitrack recorder.

slightly oversimplified :)

Ardour is a Digital Audio Workstation. It supports
multitrack+multichannel recording, editing and mixing, as well as
things like plugin support, MMC and MTC sync.

>AFAIK, there is nothing like any of those on Linux yet, and Paul
>Davis seems to not care much about adding MIDI support to either
>Ardour or LAAGA.

I have not said that, strictly speaking. I have considered integrating
MidiMountain into Ardour. However, I prefer a different solution (see
below for more details).

LAAGA already has implicit support for any port type, including
MIDI. MIDI is not, however, a builtin port type. My sample
implementation doesn't fully work for non-builtins right now, but
thats an implementation issue, not a design one. I won't fix it till
there is more of a consensus around the API design (which seems to be
emerging, but Richard Furse is holding out on us, and since he was the
designer of the quite successful LADSPA API, I think it would be
respectful to see what he has to contribute).

>> Paul Davis presented Ardour as an equivalant of the Mackie hardware
>> recorder which complement their digital mixing desk.

That was the original design goal of Ardour, and it accomplished that
goal about a year ago. However, there is very little point in
recording stuff to disk if you can't edit it, and there are/were no
audiofile editors for Linux that could handle the recordings that
Ardour produced. This was because of some combination of:

  1) they store data as 32 bit floats (quite legal for WAV, but
      unhandled by 98% of all apps)
  2) they store data in a 1 mono-file-per-channel arrangement
      rather than in interleaved format. this makes
      editing+playback more efficient in the long run.
  3) they are too big. these are real *recordings*, not just
      short snips of audio data. try using snd or sweep on
      a 1GB audio file sometime, and you'll get the idea.

As a result, Ardour has had to evolve into a fully-fledged DAW in
order to be useful.

>> It seems to me that Ardour is nice for this task but what kind of
>> editing does it offer?
>
>An interesting comment, considering that just earlier I was thinking
>it would be nice to have a decent audio file editor for Linux, similar
>to Wavelab or Sound Forge.

Ardour already has a multitrack wave editor that has lots of
capabilities. Unfortunately, they are the wrong capabilities.

Ardour's editor was modelled on snd, which is a phenomenally powerful
*wave* editor. Its much more powerful than Wavelab or SoundForge,
though its interface is much less novice-friendly and it doesn't have
the same set of "plugins" that those tools do.

However, a Digital Audio Workstation isn't about editing waves as much
as it is about arranging chunks of data with semantic properties
(think "the first 2 bars of the that sax intro", "the bass riff", "the
door squeak", "that vibrato C# from the tenor"). It also requires
support for *musical* notions like "measures", "tempo", "bars",
"beats" and so forth that are not part of many audio file editors.

Ardour's current editor *can* be used to do this, but its
extraordinarily painful to do, just as it is in snd, gnoise, DAP,
sweep or any of the other existing "wave" editors for Linux.

Consequently, Ardour's editing capabilities are currently undergoing a
dramatic redesign to be like the "audio sequencing" windows of tools
like ProTools, Samplitude, Cubase and many others.

There will still be facilities for "wave editing" (and in fact, some
of the operations in the arranger are just that), but such operations
will be performed on "Regions", not entire Playlists (think "tracks"),
and in a dedicated window with tools optimized for "wave editing", not
"arranging audio in time".

>What I *am* concerned about is that in many (most?) modern studio
>environments, MIDI sequencing is essential, and it is very important
>to integrate that with the audio recording process. Also, for various
>reasons, many plugins must have MIDI timing and other MIDI information.
>I don't know of any Linux applications that pretend to solve this issue.

LAAGA is designed in part to handle such things.

MusE is a very powerful MIDI sequencer, capable of most MIDI-related
editing and sequencing that any of the "big guys" can do. OTOH, its
audio capabilities are very limited, and will likely never approach
those of Ardour.

Rather than force the integration of two applications that have
evolved some considerable distance along their intended directions,
LAAGA will allow them to both be run in sample-sync with each other.

I consider this a *vastly* superior solution to the "everything in one
application", though thats not to say that there is no case for
integration into a single application as well. It may be that if and
when we get Ardour and MusE to use LAAGA to drive them, I might still
feel that it would be better to have MIDI sequencing within Ardour
itself. But I do not wish to waste my time at this moment with
attempting to duplicate the excellent work Werner has been doing on
MusE (and I also feel that he should avoid doing the same on the audio
side of MusE; that's his decision, however, and not mine)

Do not imagine that I am blind to the need for MIDI sequencing and
integration. I wrote the first implementation of MMC and MTC for
Linux, I think (Werner may have beaten me to it with MTC :). But the
right way to do this on a platform that offers us extraordinary
performance is not completely clear at this time, and I prefer modular
solutions in they are usable.

--p


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