[linux-audio-user] RE: ecasound interactive mode

Hi Joel,

> > With regards to frontends for eca, I am working on one
> myself. I hope to
> > have the first release in a month or so. It will try to
> preserve as much
> > of ecasound's semantics as possible, and even give you
> interactive mode
> > access. I'll try and get a screenshot of the current version up
> > somewhere for people to look at and make suggestions on.
>
> I'm curious what motivates your design, having spent a
> long time writing one of my own using perl and tk.
>
> http://ecmdr.infogami.com
>
> Did you ever have a chance to have a look?? Any feedback??

Ecmdr looks good, but just doesn't suit my purposes, and I started work
on my frontend quite a while ago. I generally create ecs files by hand,
them run ecasound in interactive mode and use the command line to tweak
parameters while the song is playing. What I wanted was to be able to
see, and tweak in real time, as many params as possible, and still have
access to the command line. I wrote an early version in python/tkinter
that worked okay but I found tk a bit limiting. I recently rewrote it
from scratch in python/qt and it's getting close to what I want.

>
> But then why did I write a front end of my when a rather mature
> Tkeca is available??
>
> - I had (and have) a few problems getting it to work.
>
> - By allowing many of the possibilities for Ecasound
> there seemed lots of ways to get errors.

Ooooh yep. There certainly are. I'm trusting ecasound to report any
problems. The hardest part is keeping the gui in synch with ecasound,
but I think Ive got that under control.

>
> - Too many windows makes my eyes glaze over, I
> find it hard to keep the big picture.

Me too, so I've tried to make as much visible at one time as humanly
possible.

>
> - Ditto, with dialog boxes, for which I
> have a special dislike.

They have their uses, but I think that making the user shift their
attention a lot is usually a bad thing.
>
> - I'm not used to reading/hacking tcl

Me neither. Nor am I a regular perl hacker, so modifying ecmdr was not
an option for me.

>
> - I wanted an autoincrement function for
> recording several songs with the same
> setup.

I basically write songs using muse or rosegarden, then record the live
parts using ecasound. Then I record the midi tracks to audio files and
use ecasound to do the mixing. So I'm trying to make ecasound look like
a mixing desk (sort of) more than a multi-track recorder.

>
> Are people's requirements and expectations really so
> different?

Looks that way :)

Cheers,

Stuart
Received on Fri May 26 04:15:02 2006