From: D. M. M. <ros...@gm...> - 2008-10-20 14:31:30
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On Monday 20 October 2008, Kevin Donnelly wrote: > Well, sorry to rain on Guillaume's parade, but my son has a Mac. :) > valid for most users, most days. But then so is Linux sound, if you use > (as you sensibly suggested in another post) a distro tweaked for that (eg > 64 Studio, Musix, etc). So far it's working for me, but I do get tired of going through the same song and dance with new people. I've been thinking about that. What Rosegarden needs is an Official Designated Sound Question Answer Person who isn't me. If I'm free to blithely ignore this whole issue except for how it pertains to my own personal life (where I am largely successful at solving my own problems) then I'm free of this hated albatross once and for all, and can just forget the problem exists. None of this would make the problem go away, but if I felt completely free to ignore it, then I could concentrate on the work around here I'm actually good at doing. Of course I'm always free to ignore anything, and I'm here on a strictly voluntary basis, but let's face it, I see this as a job the same as any other job I've ever had. I've always been terrible at keeping my real life from getting mixed up with Rosegarden. That's why I'm the guy who doesn't disappear for weeks or months at a stretch with no explanation. But yes, I'm making it official as of now. The Official Designated Sound Question Answer Person's seat is now vacant, and if it doesn't get filled, it doesn't get filled. I quit. I'll do my best to ignore all of that, and stay out of any future discussions. If I don't lose my happy thought, maybe I can keep plodding on with this sucker for another six years and beyond, but the two words "Linux" and "audio" put side by side make me lose my happy thought very quickly. I'm not kidding when I say I hate Linux audio. I totally despise Linux audio. It's nothing more than an obstacle I keep having to overcome again and again. A bottomless bucket, as Guillaume puts it. A truly Sisyphean task. I would gladly trade all the cool jabbedyblubbers all these Linux audio geeks drool over for something simple that just worked. Mega ultra super duper low realtime preemptive decibel latency glibby blibbly blathersplarf who really cares anyway? I'm not running a studio here, except to the extent that I HAVE to run a studio just to get anything to work at all. I got started off on the wrong foot from day 1. OSS was the norm, and the only way I could get my particular MIDI setup to work was to compile ALSA 0.5.x from source. It has been up-hill ever since, because every time I get everything working, everything changes again. I don't know how many times I've had a working system wrecked by the next upgrade, and I don't know how many upgrades I've made that were pretty much compulsory. Trying to stand still with one working setup just isn't a practical choice in a world where you have to upgrade the entire interconnected system just to get a single point-of-no-return upgrade to work. I stand still as long as I can, but I inevitably wind up upgrading sooner or later. It's virtually inescapable when you do what I do. I have to experience what my users are experiencing, and I can't do that running KDE 3.1 on some old distro that was working fine in 2004, can I? I mean Windows ME was a complete and total pile of crap for doing audio work (and basically anything else,) but I still managed to get "Ambulation" done ( http://www.myspace.com/arborvitian #4 on the list ) with such rude tools, in spite of Pro Tools FREE whining periodically to the effect of "I was written for a Mac, and I don't like it here at all." It took me years of struggling with Linux audio just to get back to that low bar. I can do much better things now, but I've been hacking through brambles the whole way, and haven't enjoyed the journey at all. OK, OK, rant mode off. Rant mode off. :) -- D. Michael McIntyre |