On Friday 18 October 2002 15:49, Steve Harris wrote: > Notice the future tense. I dont think its a good idea now, better to > wait 'til we have a nice bunch of jack'd (+ alsa midi/whatever), > stable, documented apps, all playing well together than put people > off with the kind of stuff we're prepared to use.
Well, there's a line at which you have to decide if you're ready. Our demo of RG last week sufficiently convinced me that we're just about ready and a lot of the other stuff is ready too. Out of the box ALSA/LADPSA support in SuSE and Mandrake helps a lot, JACK aside (not a big packaging problem) what else do you need? > Something I think is important is mouse launched applications We launched RG from a desktop icon all last week. It now has Logic-style status messages on the splash screen while you're waiting for it to start and (while they can be a little naff) touches like that are give it a professional air if nothing else. I was also showing off Sweep (because you have to) and Audacity (again..) and indeed RG was launching both those too. I was recording random punters playing the guitar, editing what they'd played, cutting it up, bunging it through a plugin and adding a drum track etc.and then burning it onto CD. The average person with money to spend on music tech doesn't really want to do too much more than that. In fact if they can get that far then they're really chuffed. It's probably up to the bread and butter products to drive the bespoke, studio-end products. The complete, finished solution that does both ends sufficiently well will take a while to arrive (ardour releasing tarballs may be a start). Perhaps you can't really apply the logic that we see in the rest of the music-tech industry to Linux. Once again we'll get there in the end but we'll probably end up doing it our own way. I've was canvassing people's opinions last week and asking them how they could see us progressing from here - it pretty much seems that there is no One True Path, it'll take something to start it all off. I'm pretty convinced it is going to go somewhere too. > That said, I think Patrick is right to start thinking about this now. I think he's completely right - I'm not sure about this bank account thing but I do think that now is the time to be demoing, talking up and generally approaching people and companies about Linux music software. I wrote us up (and mentioned a few other apps) in the latest edition of Linux User - John at mstation.org has been very kind so far as well. Now is the right time to be talking to people and getting the "products" out there. If it works - why not tell people about it? B
