Re: [Rosegarden-user] anything but a failure

[Gunhild A. <gun...@gm...>]

This book has been INCREDIBLY helpful for me. Before I started using
Rosegarden I had been using lots of proprietary sequencers but never
really understood much of how MIDI actually works, and I had always
depended on my husband's help for every little thing that went wrong. I
was used to what I thought was the fact of life that learning to use a
new music sequencer is an incredibly frustrating task.

So I can't possibly begin to explain just how amazed I was when I sat
down with the Free Companion (only non-material support from this user
so far I'm afraid) only to discover that I actually understood how to do
stuff, and was able to set up Rosegarden with all the sounds I wanted
ALL BY MYSELF just from reading that book. It's hard to express how
amazed I was. For me, this was the turning point where I went from the
general feeling of not really "understanding computers" to the much more
pleasant feeling of having a chanse of actually being able to figure
things out myself, without having to ask my husband everytime I get
stuck. And not just that, I also learned more about what MIDI actually
is from reading that book than from having had music technology as a
subject both at high school and at the university.

Perhaps the one thing I like the most about the book is the incredibly
friendly and helpful tone it is written in. It can describe things that
seemingly go way above my head, but it does so in a such a patient and
encouraging way that I'm inspired to try to understand it anyway.

The fact that Rosegarden does not produce sound by itself bummed me out
a bit as well to begin with, before I learned what that means and how to
deal with it. But I don't think it is fair to criticize the book for
explaining JACK and QSynth and what have you when any newcomer would be
completely lost without that info.

It's no exaggeration to say that you did make the world (at least my
world) a better place by writing that book. The fact that not everyone
understands Everything just from reading it does not make it a failure.

Happy new year's eve, everyone!

Gunhild.


su den 31.12.2006 klokka 01:25 (-0500) skreiv D. Michael McIntyre:
> On Saturday 30 December 2006 6:44 pm, jott27 wrote:
> 
> > My 12year old grandson could come up with a better response to my well
> > meaning comments.
> > Hope the New Year will find you in a better mood.
> 
> I'm not in a bad mood, I just can't take yet another person complaining that 
> my best effort is an abysmal failure.
> 
> It haunts me like you can't possibly imagine.  I HATE failure, and this book 
> was a failure.
> 
> I tried, dammit, I tried.  I tried, and failed.  I didn't make the world a 
> better place, and I didn't even earn enough money to remotely justify the 
> time spent (works out to $0.32 an hour).  The whole misadventure was a tragic 
> waste of good breathing hours, and deeply regretable on so many levels.
> 
> Such a pointless waste of time, that book.  So pointless.
>