Re: [LAU] Going from window to linux

On Sunday 02 March 2008 00:54, Lee Revell wrote:
> > It's true that people using free software make the software
> > better, eventually, when the developers care, but it's also true
> > that some people using non-free software are meeting deadlines and
> > making money.
>
> Disagree. Many, many Linux enthusiasts take your point of view
> seriously. The whole point of the Ubuntu distro is solving this
> problem. Zillions of man hours have gone into it. Of course it's
> still often a problem especially if your needs fall out in the long
> tail of the demand curve.

Unfortunately, even after almost 10 years of serious development
activity, audio and especially MIDI production falls squarely into
that "long tail" category.

And it's not the fault of the Linux audio developers. None of the
major distributors take it seriously, causing a situation where you
need to either do a lot of manual tweaking or boot into a different
distro (or OS) altogether if you want to make music beyond recording
waveforms from stereo inputs.

I've used Linux exclusively for 8 or 9 years, both for my business and
for leisure, and my music has suffered as a result. I'm not on LAU
as someone who loves Linux audio software, but as someone who finds
Linux more than usable in every other way, watching the list in hopes
that someday the promises of JACK and LASH will be fulfilled like
those of Firefox and Openoffice, KDE and GNOME, ffmpeg and mplayer
were, a day when I'll be able to, after doing nothing but installing
my choice of programs out of the software manager applet, double
click an icon on my desktop and have everything I need start up and
work without "xruns" or the sound server dying or one of the main
programs throwing a segv because most audio programs are consigned to
unsupported "contrib" status (looking at Mandriva as I say that.)

The free time I have to spend on music, which on Windows even 12 years
ago resulted in something actually being recorded, is now spent
downloading ISOs of limited use, building kernels, and poring over
mail archives for clues on what I'm doing wrong. I understand it's
working for a lot of people on this list, but as long as the distros
treat it as a fringe activity -- what, they're still evaluating the
stability of low latency kernels after 7 years? -- it's going to stay
in the domain of people who have time for tweaking or who basically
just need a tape deck replacement.

I will probably convert one of my servers into a Linux audio box
running Ubuntu Studio, with the keyboards and USB audio box hooked up
and JACK running permanently. Sitting at a desk isn't really how I
do music (I only switched to Linux fulltime when it became possible
to run it on my laptop, which is my main machine, and before laptops
were practical I used the Korg M1 sequencer and took sysex backups on
my old Amiga), but I'm running out of options.

If that fails to give me some productive weekends after the initial
setup, I'll probably have to suck it up and invest in a used Macbook
or whatever they're called, and all that goes with it, facing a
learning curve of a different kind. Having done network support for
a recording studio, I already know I dislike the Mac interface almost
as much as I dislike Windows. But I have dozens of songs in pieces
contained in notes and voicemails to myself, and I would very much
like to get them arranged and recorded in my lifetime.

Rob
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Received on Sun Mar 2 20:15:05 2008