Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] Re: image problem [was Re: [Alsa-devel] help for a levelmeter]
From: David Gerard Matthews (dgm4+@pitt.edu)
Date: Wed Oct 23 2002 - 02:15:39 EEST
Paul Davis wrote:
>
>i do know what RTcmix is. i've used it. its a really cool program. its
>not the sort of thing i would use for RTP. if you do, thats great, but
>most of the people who are buying software for RTP are also not
>looking for software like RTcmix.
>
>>LADSPA plugin out there... Yet you say it's no good for commercial
>>market... Hmmm...
>>
>
>csound is massively more capable of generating interesting sounds and
>music than reaktor and unity-ds1 put together. yet which one is "good
>for the commercial market"? a lot of good work has gone into making
>csound more useful to people without a background in assembler/fortran
>programming, and the core program continues to be extremely
>capable. that doesn't make it a good tool for "the commercial market".
>
Ah, so what it all boils down to is a cultural difference. :)
Seriously, Ico, Paul's right on this one.
I'm also involved with the creation of academic/experimental/avant-garde
electronic music, and I
love and use CSound and PD and things of that ilk. But I would never
recommend trying those
tools to anyone running a commercial (better word than "professional",
IMHO) studio. You
want to talk about a steep learning curve? The commercial audio world
always prefers convenience
over flexibility. I don't doubt for a second that a RTCmix wizard can
probably do things with just
a RTCmix that would require a "pro" audio engineer to use a dozen racks
of outboard gear. But
different trades have different tools. (Personally, the music I'm
working with these days would
probably be best served by a big ol' analog modular synth with 128 sine
wave oscilators. I can't
afford such a beast, so I use software synthesis.)
>
>>If you knew anything about the market, then you'd realize that as many
>>SOPME/RTP studios there are in the world, they don't stack up to the
>>amount of money educational institutions spend on building their
>>electronic music studios, and this is where apps like RTcmix are an
>>equal concern as Protools (even the university this list is hosted on
>>
True. It is only in such places that audio on *nix has ever had any
impact until recently, and it's
also true that we had digital audio and synthesis when the rest of the
world still thought C64's were
neat. (Disclaimer: I thought my C64 was pretty neat in 1982.
Disclaimer to above: It was 1982,
and I was 6 years old.)
>
>i defined my market as the SOPME/RTP world. if you want to point out
>that educational institutions are a bigger financial pie, thats
>great. the problem is that their needs and goals don't align with
>those of the SOPME/RTP world all that much. there are several computer
>music and audio technology departments and institutions around the
>country that do amazing work, both from a software and a musical
>perspective, but just like the stuff that emerges from computer
>science departments, very little of it ever sees the light of day in
>the rest of the world without a serious mangling, if not a complete
>rewrite. its an interesting market, full of a lot of smart and good
>people. so smart, in fact, that they have really smart people like
>fernando around who can not only compile and install ardour (as well
>as send patches), but also build the whole of planet ccrma in his
>copious spare time. such institutions might have reasons to send some
>grant money toward the LAD community, but they have lots of reasons to
>save money when they can, and they can save a lot by using their own
>inhouse expertise when it comes to free software. "hmm, we can spend
>US$8K on this ardour-based prebuilt DAW, or fernando can put on one of
>our stock audio-configured intel PC's and we pay nothing?"
>
If anything, at this point the academics are more likely to use
commercial stuff than vice versa, by
a large margin. There may still be a few departments without ProTools
systems, but they're
pretty rare. I've gone on record on this list saying that midi is
pretty much useless to me,
but I do want and need a good multitrack DAW and some good plugins.
To draw a parallel: only a small portion of all computer users have use
for a text editor like
vi or emacs, but most of the people who use such things also want a
WSYWIG word processor.
>>of the INDIVIDUAL University studios in the US spend over $100,000/year
>>for the new equipment/software. How much do the SOPME/RTP spend once
>>they equip it for the first time?
>>
Depends upon how profitable they are. Also, I don't know which
universities you've been hanging around,
but music departments around the world are suffering budget cuts. Yes,
this is more likely to incline them
to Linux as a possible solution, but that would entail Linux-based
machines actually costing less to deploy.
>
>if you stick with the first clause of that sentence, i agree with
>you. but the second part: i have *never* seen anything but
>commemorative recordings of music that were made within education
>institutions. professional music making is done outside of such
>institutions, fostered by the education and research that is performed
>inside of them. the musical pieces that do emerge from the media lab,
>from ccrma and other places flutter briefly in the thin air of
>academic music appreciation, and then vanish back into the ether from
>which they came. meanwhile, hundreds of small studios around the
>country are recording jazz, country, blues, pop, rock, mesopotamian,
>carnatic, electronic, opera ... some of which will end up being sold
>to pay someone's salary. and a few times a week, some large halls and
>many more smaller ones will echo (sorry, reverberate) with the sounds
>of orchestras and smaller ensembles keeping alive the "serious" music
>of the past and the present. occasionally someone will use a computer
>in some capacity at one of these concerts, and occasionally what they
>do with might end up resulting in some kind of financial exchange that
>underlies "professional music making".
>
Sadly (for me) true. It's one of those things you need to accept if you
live in the academic music
world. It is also, incidentally, the main reason I tend to sympathize
with open-source software
developers, because I've never main anything substantial from what I
consider to be my most
rewarding and important work.
>>Because most people who perform their music on concert venues DO NOT
>>WANT TO LUG ARROUND A TOWER, but rather have a laptop!!! Give me one
>>
>
>ah, so that's a new constraint.
>
I can certainly sympathize with that one. Supposedly there is some work
being done on supporting
USB audio devices under ALSA; that may be our best hope. (Yes, I know
USB has potentially
horrible latency. ) Another possibility is to use a 1 or 2 unit
rackmount box with a good
PCI audio card, and then talk to the box via a remote X session going on
on a low-end laptop.
I've considered this myself, but rackmount cases are kind of pricy.
-dgm
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