On Tuesday, November 29, 2011, Richard Bown wrote: > Rosegarden has always been a compromise between a notation editor and MIDI > editor and latterly an audio workstation too. The whole design is > therefore a compromise and we've done nothing more or less than any other > piece of software that has to deal with.
Rosegarden is really unique in its abilities, and there's nothing in either the commercial or free software realms quite like it. I think on some level that's because the Rosegarden Experiment has proven how crazy it is to try to merge all of these features together under the same roof. The thing I was getting at with controllers is one good example. They're Events that belong to a Segment, which is a paradigm that works pretty well for MIDI events that double as music notation artifacts, but it just sucks for controllers when I think about it. I wish I'd thought of this 10 years ago, when it would have been easy to do something about it. Today, we have a long legacy of file compatibility behind us, and we're stuck supporting the original design for the rest of Rosegarden's life, even if we tack on some new design to support from here on. Rosegarden is just full of this kind of stuff, but there isn't much to do about it now. Obviously, the person who is still using Rosegarden today is the person who isn't limited too severely by all these weird quirks and oddities. > The tricky part has always been maintaining a balance while introducing new > features. It's not one person's vision - it's several - therefore stuff > gets funky. We never could keep a clear view of the forest for the trees, and this applies to all of us over the course of development. I certainly don't want to sound like I'm singling anyone out, because I'm due plenty of criticism for short- sightedness and bad decisions along the way, and I've done my share of things to add to the problem instead of solving it. > BTW has anyone considered splitting RG up? I've considered it many, many times. You reach a point where it seems like the only sane thing to do is turn Rosegarden into a notation editor and a sequencer that are divorced from each other, and dump the audio support entirely, because the world clearly voted for Audacity and Ardour on that front. The thing is, if you do that, you've really made Rosegarden a pretty pointless "me too" application in a full field. The ONE thing Rosegarden absolutely kicks ass at is being the one application that does a decent job with MIDI, notation, and audio. You can (and I have) prototype a composition with MIDI, make sheet music with it, record real people playing the sheet music, and mix it all down to a .wav file, all in the same application. Nothing else can do that. If you take that away, what's the point of Rosegarden even existing? But if you leave it, Rosegarden will always find some way to constrain your creativity, no matter which of the three directions your creativity is inclined towards. It's amazing the problems you can work around with this thing, and it's amazing the problems this thing forces you to work around. -- D. Michael McIntyre ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ All the data continuously generated in your IT infrastructure contains a definitive record of customers, application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity, and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. IT sense. And common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-novd2d _______________________________________________ Rosegarden-devel mailing list Rosegarden-devel@lists.sourceforge.net - use the link below to unsubscribe https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rosegarden-devel
