Re: [LAU] The age old question... open source vs the other...

On Sun, 13 Sep 2009 16:36:05 -0700
Russell Hanaghan <hanaghan.osaudio@email-addr-hidden> wrote:

> Hi folks,
>
> As briefly mentioned in another post by myself, I have started a
> business. Among the the services offered, we are providing demo
> production and recording services. In a couple of small projects, and
> also getting reacquainted with my DAW stuff, it has dawned on me that
> Sonar Producer 8 (x64) and Windows Vista (x64) has become very
> complicated for what I want to do. While it's great to claim the
> availability of all those bells n whistles, they dont serve the
> purpose, art or business necessarily other than to make it cumbersome
> and complicated to use. I am running a Delta 1010LT, which is hardly
> a pro card, yet capable of reasonable sound and flexibility. The box
> is an AMD x64 3ghz dual core, ASUS mobo with 2g RAM and Nvidia
> graphics card. Not exactly a heavy weight pro DAW either but also,
> not without balls!
>
> The thought has entered my mind that maybe I go full Open source. I'm
> reminded from my time with Ardour that the routing layout is a LOT
> more conducive to how I like to work, as is JACK. I have the need
> for solid midi playback and flexible editing also and Muse was my
> preference because of the layout. I'm eager to see how Ardour 3
> unfolds on this end...but the main focus is to try and simplify
> things and focus on better work flow and less learning curve, more
> art! I have spent a reasonable amount of time with Linux and open
> source as some of you know. I'm a single, small gradient above "basic
> user", not a dev of any kind. While I expect to have bugs and issues,
> I need it to be a reliable platform just the same. If you have a
> recommendation, tell me what distro and version you have Ardour,
> Jack, etc running on that you can trust your art to! What version of
> Ardour / JACK is running stable...do you have Wine / VST working
> reliably? If you had a single shot at recording an all time super hit
> piece of ART, would you trust your platform to capture it safely and
> recreate it cleanly?
>
> There is a chance this business may seek a grant based on an
> educational foundation...to teach kids, etc how to record, produce,
> etc. It would be a nice thought to tell them "We use Open source
> platforms". It is a noble gesture if nothing else, but help me to see
> if it's reasonable to make it a reality. If this part of the business
> is successful, I assure you the proceeds get shared in the donation
> buckets of those who put all the effort into writing and improving
> the applications that even make this conversation possible!
>
> thanks for your thoughts and input.
>
> Russell

Take my experience with a grain of salt since I'm (sadly) more of a
tester than actual user. This is not because of a lack of capability or
reliability of the software but .. I haven't quite figured that out yet.
That being said, I always run the latest version of everything, which
is made quite easy with the distribution I use (arch linux).
My experience with ardour 2.8.x was quite good, the bugs I encountered
are minor, annoying at most. 2.8.3 should fix some, but it seems
development is focused on 3.0.
The more serious problems like crashes can likely be attributed to
broken plug-ins. Some tests going on recently might help you identify
those, but to make sure you should test those that you intend to use.
Note that I neither use nor care about VST.
Ardour 3 is not yet in the testing phase, so it will likely take a
while until it's ready for production use.
Personally I trust ardour 2.8.x for the audio part.

If you are happy with muse for midi, go with it. I hardly even tried
muse, it always seemed antiquated.
New on the playing field is openoctave midi (openoctave.org).
The project focuses on a workflow for orchestral composition and
openoctave midi is the application used for the midi part.
It's based on rosegarden but everything but midi got removed, the midi
part got some love, and the focus there is on a good keyboard driven
workflow. I heard there should be a demonstration video out soon, oom
is available through a git repository so far.

I don't know for how long you've been out of the loop, so I'll also tell
you that there's jack midi which should be able to improve midi timing.
Not many applications support it yet, but there's a2jmidid which helps
with that, and while not perfect it still reduces midi jitter in my
limited experience.

Hope that helps a bit,

Philipp
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Received on Mon Sep 14 12:15:06 2009