Re: [LAU] chord in trackers

From: Len Ovens <len@email-addr-hidden>
Date: Sat Apr 19 2014 - 19:36:43 EEST

On Sat, 19 Apr 2014, Atte wrote:

> On 04/19/2014 11:59 AM, rosea grammostola wrote:
>
>> It just feels stupid to start working with an app on linux which doesn't
>> support native plugins. Is Qtractor so bad?
>
> I'm not gonna speak bad about fine FLOSS. I'd hoped you (and hopefully many
> others here, including some of the great developers) would try reaper (and
> other commercial applications), so that discussions here would be based on
> experience...

Speaking as a guitarist first... so sequencing is less interesting to me
(though I do have an old DX7) than it might be to others. But I have an
extremely tight budget. For many years my hardware has been what others
have cast off... I have just not had the money to buy computer hardware,
let alone a pricey OS (I did use a copy of OS/2 I actually paid for at one
time) or even more pricey applications (which is what finally killed OS/2
for me).

Things have gotten better and I am finally getting a replacement for my 10
plus year old P4. A xeon based system would be wonderful I am sure, but
the cost is still too much. None of the MB out there seem to have PCI
slots at all or much in the way of on board video. So besides the added
expense of replacing my audio IF (One thing at a time please) at $500 plus
I have everything else to get as well. So I have ordered an asus z87 board
with 3 PCI slots (to give me some choice of irq) with an i5 processer. The
only real difference I could see between the i5 and i7 is that the i7 has
hyperthreading which I would have to turn off anyway. I did also look at
the atom boards. There is a very nice 8 core atom out these days tha would
probably run circles around what I am getting, but again nothing with pci
slots... or enough of any slots, and the video is not there for a desktop.
Atoms are made for notepads and servers. They work great headless.

All that to say, I don't have the resources to try out comercial apps. SO
I haven't. Ardour for me (even 2) has everything I need and I can't
imagine needing something more. I have looked at other daws in Linux and
just the time to learn to use them has been difficult to find. I did DL
bitwig to try. It seems to work ok, but did not grab me with a "I gotta
have this" feeling or anything. It was not enough for me to spend my time
learning it. Quite honestly I had a sequencer program on my Atari mega2
way back before digital recording that was better than anything I have
seen since (and it was shareware). Though to be honest some of that glow
may have more to do with it being my first and memory dimming things :)
Back then, midi was the only way I could do a drum track because the other
7 audio tracks on tape were required for other more important things. Even
bass was recorded that way sometimes.

So really, I use Linux audio first, because I can afford it. Second
because every experience I have had with wondows has been bad or at least
less than impressive. Win 3.1 against OS/2 2.1 then Linux against win 95,
98, ME, NT, xp, win7... apple stuff is just out of my range to even try.

So it would be really easy for me to say FOSS is it, because that is about
all I use, but the reality is that I would pay for sw if I felt it was
better and I could afford it. The other reality is that FOSS SW does
everything I need right now, gives me enough info to tune my system, and
just works. Trying stuff that costs money just to try it, for me, and
perhaps others, is just pie in the sky stuff. While demos try to be
complete enough to try everything without giving the whole thing away, to
really try something, I would need to do at least one (but probably more)
project with it. I am not going to waste my time learning something that
well where I can't save my work, so trying means buying. A demo just
allows someone to figure out that something just won't work for them, not
if it will work.

So some of us are "handicapped" when it comes to commenting on commercial
SW.

--
Len Ovens
www.ovenwerks.net
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Received on Sat Apr 19 20:15:04 2014

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