Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] Question to developers of sound editors.
From: Josh Green (jgreen_AT_users.sourceforge.net)
Date: Tue Jun 05 2001 - 02:28:12 EEST
Patrick Shirkey wrote:
>
> This is what I'm talking about. We've got all these competing apps but
> not one of them is entirely useful. It's really frustrating. Considering
> how much time and effort goes into writing them.
>
Perhaps concentrating on application interconnection standards would aid
in creating more complete functionality. Its hard to pack everything
into one application, doing so also leads to bloated programs and its
hard to justify downloading a huge package when all you want is a
virtual MIDI keyboard or something. But when you have a nice virtual
MIDI keyboard its nice to use it along with a MIDI sequencer. I'm sure
there are several things happening in this area that I don't know about,
but what I do know is that projects like ALSA and LADSPA are creating
app interconnection standards. In my own program the Smurf Sound Font
Editor I've implimented a rather crude (somewhat non-existent) sample
editor. It would be nice to have a way of plugging in a user's editor of
choice. This kind of functionality would seem like the job of a desktop,
but with 2 major desktop choices that don't really talk to each other it
makes things even more complex. I don't want to code something from a
desktop only to have to impliment a non-desktop version for those who
don't have GNOME or whatever.
A lot of the process of interconnecting apps is really just in how data
is fetched and stored (back to the old Unix pipe concept). It would be
nice to open up your audio enabled MIDI sequencer application's file
dialog and connect to your running audio editor, even though loading and
saving would be from the same shared memory. Or drag and drop an audio
track. When I think about it, thats really all I care about with a
desktop. I don't care for graphical file managers, menubars, etc. I want
my apps to talk to each other.
Personally I haven't really worked on applications with other people. It
seems like there is a lot of communication that must go on in order to
coordinate efforts. Communication with oneself is usually much better
(in theory) than with others. When I do work with others, I find it
easiest to divy out chunks of the project that have clear minimal
defined connections with each other. I think thats one reason we haven't
seen any complete sound applications, most of these projects I think are
one man (maybe woman) projects. Coding seems to be a long process (at
least for me) and you end up with a lot of complex code that has to be
maintained.
Okay.. Enough rambling. It would be nice if someone wrote a document on
current app interconnection standards in Linux. I guess this is the
place to kick around such ideas. There was a lot of discussion before
about LAAGA (sp?) does this enter into this subject? Or does it pertain
to audio data only? Lates..
Josh Green
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