On Fri, 14 Dec 2001, Paul Davis wrote: > i feel that live performance is quite difference from editing and > composition. linux is particularly weak in these areas - the tools we > have for manipulating audio (and MIDI) are rudimentary and they also > tend to have no notion of musical time (everything is in samples or > seconds).
True, but these are quite new areas. Even on very, very expensive analog recording gear, temporal editing was not an option (unless you take "you can cut the tape" as a feature). Of course nowadays every wannabe electronic musician needs to have acid, fruity loops and other trendy sw for creating "real" music. On the other hand, the real beat masters did the editing with early samplers which had very limited editing power when compared to todays software. > the problem is: go ahead and produce that exciting and wonderful live > performance, and then, assuming it was so great you'd like to make a > CD from it ponder: how do i record it? how do i edit all the tracks? > etc. ... the gaps start to appear fairly immediately, as i'm sure you > know. With shitty material you'll get a shitty result. In other words, it's much easier to fix the problem at the source (better players, more careful recording, etc). Of course nowadays protools allows recording engineers to "fix" errors, but you just go from shitty to mediocre. And just to make sure, I'm not against better editing software; my tracks certainly have a lot of stuff I'd want to protoolize away, but still, this is just a new tool for the engineers. >> all multitrack apps, currently there are plenty for non-real-time >> mixing out there which do job more than adequately (obviously including snd). > yes and no: do you think you could do even just a 16 track edit and > mixdown with snd, or any other available tool? Slab, ecasound, ... what's the problem? > If i *did* believed that, i would be sitting here at 4am working on > developing apps that can bring ease and power to working with gobs of > audio data, recording it, editing it, arranging them, mixing and > processing them :) Now this I don't disagree with. :) Even though I claim that current Linux software _is_ enough for making music, it's also a fact that the current selection of apps cannot feature-wise compete with latest win&mac software. But yes, Ardour is changing this in a _major_ way... -- http://www.eca.cx Audio software for Linux!
