An Intro To Editing Audio On Linux

An Intro To Editing Audio On Linux


Re:Warning: rant approaching at high speeds
(Score:5, Insightful)
by RatBastard (949) Alter Relationship on Thursday October 13, @04:49PM (#13785742)
(http://www.trilobite.org/)
Agreed. Most users are NOT programmers and wouldn't know a function if it bit them on the ass. This whole "do it yourself" mantra is just justification for things not being finished. I have used so many "0.9x" versions of software on Linux that never get to 1.0 it makes me sick. Is it too much to ask that a developement team actually finish a release before sending it out in a non-dev package? Or is it assumed that everything Linux is a developer release? If that's the case Linux is doomed as the vast majority of users don't want to program, don't give a damn about programming and wouldn't be good at it in the first place.

After years of being sick of Windows and repeatedly trying to get into Linux I finally bailed last year and bought a Mac.
--
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.

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Also, another easy way -- next to Debian -- to use Ardour, Audacity, Jack, LADSPA or anything else, is to use Stanford's Planet.CCRMA [stanford.edu] project for Fedora.

It contains just about any decent audio app for GNU/Linux, including the ones mentioned in TFA, but also has custom kernels with the real-time patches and everything.

Definitely worth checking out!!
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life, n: The whim of several billion cells to be you for a while.

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Hmm...
(Score:5, Insightful)
by MaestroSartori (146297) Alter Relationship on Thursday October 13, @04:48PM (#13785729)
(http://www.cubo.co.uk/)
I spend a great deal of time doing home audio stuff, and I was interested to read the article. I've used Ardour and Audacity for a little while in the past, but I find I'm still using my Windows audio apps (Ableton and Soundforge, if you're interested). Why?

Well, the article itself touches on a few of my reasons. Ardour, specifially, is very "Linuxy" in its interface layout and design, reminding me in many ways of the old Dos version of 3D Studio. It definitely looks like a programmer-designed UI, it's very stark and bare-bones, and things are never quite where you expect them to be. It's clearly a Cubase/Logic inspired design and layout, but without the years of fine-tuning those have had to get to their current states. I prefer Ableton's more unorthodox approach anyway, but that's just me :)

The other is, as always, hardware support. Getting less important now in some ways, for some uses (I use quite a lot of virtual instruments, so not a huge deal for me) the lack of hardware DSP support is a killer. Proprietary developers are to blame here, in fairness, but it's still a problem.

Probably most importantly for me is the real killer, and I suspect the reason most audio folks won't move to Linux for some time to come (and coincidentally the reason so many of them use Apple machines): we don't want the software to get in the way of the creation of music any more than it has to. At the moment, many parts of Linux are unhelpfully complicated, especially to non-technical people.

A final thought, based on the quote from the article repeated in the summary:

If Ardour doesn't have a feature I need, I can code it myself. With this possibility, the software no longer defines what I can do - it's just a point of departure.



Quite apart from ignoring the fact that almost every major audio app can use various forms of plugin, which have relatively easy to obtain SDKs, and that various generic programmable plugins (like MaxDSP) exist for which one can do the same, it ignores maybe the most obvious point of all: not all musicians are programmers.

--
"What is now real was once only imagined...
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Ardour's UI is based almost entirely on ProTools, which most casual users of audio s/w have never used, and many have never even seen. The people who use ardour professionally (and there are a few!) comment that its UI is the most efficient they have used, including ProTools, which most people say is the most efficient in the proprietary world because of its extensive use of keyboard shortcuts. Ardour's development and design has been geared toward learning as much as possible from the years of fine tuning done with other DAWs, although we have been a little hampered by some issues with our GUI toolkit (GTK+ v1). We are currently about 60% done porting ardour to GTK2, and plan to be quite focused on usability issues after that (among many other things).

Re: h/w DSP support: first, DAC's don't have anything to do with this, and even when they are internal to the audio interface, they use no CPU cycles - they are always h/w! But more generally, see: my position [ardour.org] on this issue.

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