Re: [LAU] Editing zynadsuxfx/yoshimi patches?

On Mon, Apr 18, 2011 at 01:30:44PM +0100, linuxdsp wrote:
> Julien Claassen wrote:
> >Hello Cal!
> > Thanks a lot. Being on the "of interest" list is a good thing to
> >start with. Especially seeing, that there aren't many people, who
> >actually NEED it. That's what I really love about open source
> >development. You stand a chance.
> > Warm regards
> > Julien
> >
> >--------
> >Music was my first love and it will be my last (John Miles)
> >
> >======== FIND MY WEB-PROJECT AT: ========
> >http://ltsb.sourceforge.net
> >the Linux TextBased Studio guide
> >======= AND MY PERSONAL PAGES AT: =======
> >http://www.juliencoder.de
> >_______________________________________________
> >Linux-audio-user mailing list
> >Linux-audio-user@email-addr-hidden
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> >
>
> "That's what I really love about open source development. You stand
> a chance."
>
> - Not really true, at least, not as a sweeping general statement
> about open vs closed source, it depends on the developer, in this
No sweeping general statement is ever true. :)

> case you are fortunate that the developer will listen to and
> consider requests for features, but sometimes this is true of closed
> projects too (I'm always happy to listen to feature requests, bug
> reports etc etc, there are just other reasons why its not possible
> to open source my code). Equally, you may find an open source
> project driven by developers who simply don't want to consider
> feature requests if they don't fit with their own priorities of
> what is needed - its obviously true that open source allows you to
> add those features yourself if you have the skills, but I would
> expect the vast majority of open source *users* don't have the
> skills (or time) required to pick up a project and just start coding
> effective solutions to all the features they require.

True. But, even so, if one has time and energy enough, it is not
impossible to muster a group of skilled people interested enough to get
the job done. In this case "have the opportunity" would probably be more
accurate than "stand a chance". With an open-source project, you're
never quite stuck in a hole the way you are with commercial software, if
the incentive to do something about it is strong enough, anyway.

I am *not* a zealot of the RMS temple, so please understand that this is
not an attack on commercial software as such, but a judgement based on
my personal experience as related to accessibility. About a year and a
half ago, I decided to get back to audio, and because of circumstances
which would be too long and too tedious to relate here, I decided to
depart from the Linux environment I'd been using for years and buy a
Mac, which is advertised as having accessibility "built-in". Well, I
have nothing bad to say about the general accessibility, but things go
sour pretty quickly when trying to do anything audio related. I
contacted a fellow I had come across on the internet who has a Mac based
pro studio and is blind, asking him for advice. He told me, in essence,
not to get my hopes up. He said he had been nagging at Apple (he used
Logic, which was the same DAW I was trying to use) for over a year and
had been trying to work with them to improve accessibility with very
mixed results. I believe he also said that Steinberg politely, but
fairly flatly refused to do anything about accessibility. The result was
that, after spending a lot of money on software and a fancy tactile
console, he still needed to route out to an analogue mixer/rack for
certain applications and felt he still could not be as efficient as a
sighted engineer.

That's the point at which I decided to dual-boot my Mac and see what
Linux had to offer, since it couldn't be much worse than the odds I had
to deal with. Now, I can use Joel Roth's excellent ecasound front-end,
nama, which is good enough for most needs, not to mention all the other
command apps I already knew from before and some new ones that came
along while I was away. Synths like bristol, hexter, and aeolus even
have text interfaces, and some GUI apps, like Hermann's excellent
gx_head are even accessible through orca/gnome. As for a theoritically
inaccessible app, like yoshimi, I can still disable the GUI and use
existing patches, and, even if the midi control thing doesn't come
through, I can still get excited enough one night to bang together a
perl programme that will let me tweak parameters with relative ease.

So, in terms of personal experience, open-source wins in a big way.

Once again, I'm not saying proprietary software is "evil"; what I do
believe, however, is that it tends to be less suited to respond to the
specific needs of certain individuals, such as myself.

Apologies for the rambling.

Cheers,
S.M.

>
>
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