On 06/28/2014 01:57 AM, Louigi Verona wrote: > Hey Tres! > > I've read your responses and to you and other participants of the list > I'd like to explain where I am coming from. Please bear with me, I > tried to not make this text unnecessarily long, but it is. > > First, because I do program as an amateur from time to time and I'd > worked as a professional web developer, I do know that programming is > tough. So I do appreciate that programming in general is a very tough > thing and putting out a serious product is very, very difficult and > takes a lot of time and dedication.
So, why are you not helping program better features - or better plugins - for LMMS? You don't have to be a professional codemonkey to do it. Find a bug and beat it into submission. You'll learn it as you go... You say you know at least some programming, and you have ideas for how to improve LMMS... we have too few developers as is, so chances are, if you don't step up when you see something that can be improved, it's going to stay unimproved... Not saying it's the ideal situation, I really wish it were different, but that's pretty much how it is for now... > > Second, in my own creative work I find that honest criticism is best > at improving. And because I really care about the state of Linux > Audio, I am always an honest critic. However, when it comes to Linux > Audio, I am not a programmer, but a musician. And so I give musician's > perspective. That's very good and nice and all, but... see above. Many of us are musicians, more or less, and many of us are programmers, more or less. At this point, we don't really need criticism as much as we need some helping hands. Nothing wrong with giving your opinion, but it doesn't help much if we don't have the manpower to address the issues. > > LADSPA plugins are very different in quality offering. However, most > of these 200 LADSPA are basically uninteresting. I would be surprised > if many musicians disagree. Countless limiters and countless > compressors and very basic eqs. And there are hardly any interesting > effects that can be used for actual music making. Well that's the thing here... compressors, limiters and eqs ARE the effects that are used for *actual music making* .... the most useful tools are often not that interesting, they could even be characterized as "boring" because they're stable and reliable. Furthermore, even for something as basic as an eq or limiter, there are differences - sometimes substantial ones, not necessary just in quality, but sometimes the variation in the characteristics of their effects make some suitable for different tasks. > First of all, many of them are very basic. And I mean - basic. As in > being coding exercises. See those 42 filters? Well, more than half of > them is just 2-3 knobs, sometimes even one, like in Vowel filter. The > sound is nothing special - standard and usually of very low quality. One of the best, most useful plugins ever has zero knobs: DC offset remover. That's another of those "boring" and "uninteresting" plugins... which is absolutely a lifesaver and a necessity, when you happen to need it. And it works flawlessly. > > Many of then simply don't work. Just do nothing, no matter what knobs > you turn. That's a problem, but many are simply incompatible with LMMS and don't work because of that... if you compose a list of all such plugins, we can maybe see if there's a way to fix them so they work, or remove them from the LMMS source tree otherwise. Or you could take a look at them yourself to see if you can spot why they don't work. Then you could submit a patch... that'd be very helpful and very much appreciated. > Take delays. Apart from Vintage Delay, all of them are almost unusable > as they have delay in ms. Musicians do not work in ms, they work in > bpm. I have to take a calculator each time I want to use a delay? No. What you do have to do is right-click the delay knob, select "tempo sync" and set it to whatever note length you want. Works for almost all ms/s knobs. > Some of them are literally "delay", meaning they delay the incoming > sound a certain amount of seconds. Yes, because that's what a delay does - it delays a signal. You can then adjust the wet level to get the effect you desire. Not every effect needs to be huge and complex. Sometimes if you only need a simple effect, so it's pointless to waste CPU power in a complex plugin... maybe you want to layer several effects on a synth, and for that you have to conserve CPU power where you can, and at that point you'll only want to use the "minimal" plugin that is needed to perform the job adequately... > > What is the conclusion? > The conclusion is that I propose to not try to focus on the quantity > of plugins and rather talk about quality. If LMMS would have 1 good > Chorus, 1 good Flanger, 1 good Phaser, 1 good Filter, 1 good EQ, 1 > good Delay and 1 good Reverb - this would be enough. We don't need 200 > low quality stuff that you have to sort for hours to find something > that works. So what stops you from using whatever good effects you find and using them with LMMS? LMMS has plenty of good filters... the native RC filters are quite good quality, Calf Flanger & Phaser are decent, there are several good EQs... furthermore, if you look at other LADSPA plugins that are not offered with LMMS, there are plenty of good ones that work with LMMS. We could get even more good plugins, if someone would help us implement LinuxVST support... or even LV2 or DSSI... if you know anyone who knows their way around LinuxVST, please direct them towards our mailing list :) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Open source business process management suite built on Java and Eclipse Turn processes into business applications with Bonita BPM Community Edition Quickly connect people, data, and systems into organized workflows Winner of BOSSIE, CODIE, OW2 and Gartner awards http://p.sf.net/sfu/Bonitasoft _______________________________________________ LMMS-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/lmms-devel
