Re: [linux-audio-dev] Developing a music editor/sequencer

On Wednesday 02 Feb 2005 19:02, Paul Davis wrote:
> I continue to think that this crazy.

So do I.

The design process at work here reminds me a lot of the way I approached
Rosegarden: look at how other applications work and what they do, and
then add in a few interesting generalisations to make it more
potentially flexible in ways that happen to meet my own preconceptions
about how people might use the system, thus resulting in something that
looks innovative and interesting to me, and just looks like another
sequencer or score editor to everyone else.

For example, Rosegarden contains structure intended to support things
like arbitrary layout engines for editing; multiple different layouts
on the same music data; event-based systems that are not MIDI, and so
on. Yet because it has taken so much development work just to do the
basic MIDI and audio support that people expect from a sequencer, and
because we are so few developers, most of this is still unused. It
would have been far better, for my own personal aims, to have worked on
something that was not so obviously a sequencer application and that
instead focused on the one or two experimental features I was really
interested in and ignored everything else.

Don't get me wrong: I think Rosegarden is a successful piece of work and
I'm very proud of it. But if I was starting out now, I wouldn't be
working on anything like it. You should see some of our planning
emails from five years ago, excitedly talking about how we just had to
do one or two generic bits and bobs and the rest would simply fall into
place. It's a very hard delusion to avoid, but it's always a delusion
anyway.

Chris
Received on Thu Feb 3 00:15:06 2005