On Sun, February 10, 2013 1:59 am, Dan MacDonald wrote:
> I don't think Linux audio sucks at all when you compare it to whats
> available for free on the other platforms - they suck in comparison if we
> take commercial software out of it. If we're talking about commercial apps
> and plugins then indeed Linux still has a long way to go.
>
> My main issues with Linux Audio are mainly JACK related:
I agree with most, and they will just take time. (though "sucks" is rather
strong in this case)
>
> * JACK needs to become more plug-and-play. I think its a shame it still
> offers no way to auto-detect optimal settings on any given setup and
> instead the user has to find out what options to tweak then find the best
> settings through trial and error.
There are some settings that I feel should be user controlled. The SW
can't know what use you are going to use it for. There are already some
settings that do work with pretty much anything already and they are
default. They are a longer latency and just fine for many things. But even
one app may use more than one latency setting. For example, when tracking
with ardour, I use low latency. Then, when I start mixdown, I relax
latency so I have room to add effects, eq etc. Now ardour does allow
changing Jack's latency on the fly (guitarix does too) so maybe that is
ok. The thing is jack does so many different things, making it plug and
play would be easy if we made it dumber... for example take out the
firewire interface and the chances of grabbing the right audio device goes
way up... especially if the DE sets a correct default device. But then no
firewire. The way around this is to make ALSA drivers for FW :) but then
no net backend.
How about auto select HW monitor based on the card supporting it? No
thanks. My card does support it but it also has its own interface for
dealing with HW monitoring that includes an (almost) no latency mixer
(ice1712). So in my case PnP would be wrong. The reason an analog studio
has patch bays is for flexibility. A professional studio is not plug and
play. Flexibility is probably one of the number one reasons people like
Linux and jack.
Some of the things I would like to see in Linux... an ALSA driver for all
sound cards. The ability to use any onboard DSP of all sound cards. Pie in
the sky stuff right now, but if manufactures used a standard way of a)
interfacing with their on board DSP modules (midi/OSC for example) and b)
a standard way of loading their proprietary code blocks into their
interfaces (MIDI sysexec, whatever OSC uses, one of the old modem file
transfer protocols like xmodem that many MBs use for loading firmware) It
would actually be easier for the manufacture to maintain support for
win/mac let alone linux which would then take care of itself.
Yes it would be nicer to know more about the DSP in there so we could do
our own code and make even more use of the onboard DSP, but just getting
what we paid for without having to give up the flexibility of the linux
platform would be nice.
> * JACK can't hot swap audio devices and so if the user wants this feature
> they have to integrate PA with JACK which sadly still isn't
> straightforward
> under many popular distros and then the user has to learn about how ALSA,
> PA and JACK interact.
Pulse does not allow proper hot swapping of devices, use ALSA_in or
zita_a2j to do this. True it is not automated, but then my DE doesn't
implement focus follows mind either. UbuntuStudio does not auto open a USB
stick just because you plug it in even though xfce has this feature
available... because someone (idiot) may have plugged it in during the
perfect take. We do try to set things up to work right with the internal
audio IF, because that is what most newbies will try first.
> In fact, I'm a bit concerned that if Bitwig leads to an explosion of
> commercial apps and plugins for Linux and LA busts out of its niche that
> LA* will suffer a kinda Ubuntu/Android effect where these lists will get
> swamped with newb questions and cause many of our valued members to
> unsubscribe.
My experience with this is that as people use all in one apps first (LMMS
is popular with windows users) they learn about the flexibility of other
linux apps and switch. And if they don't, they are at least enjoying
themselves. Bitwig questions would get redirected to the Bitwig site
anyway. Things change. So far it has been mostly for the better.
-- Len Ovens www.OvenWerks.net _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@email-addr-hidden http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-userReceived on Sun Feb 10 20:15:05 2013
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