Needs for some sharing in the GPL communities

Community Ideas for Ardour
#1

I just read different audio editing communities forums, trying to understand which audio editors/sequencers to use.

I had just started to read Ardour’s, when I saw someone asking for a feature a lot of sound editors/sequencers already had : cross platform support (even JACK got it! dont believe me just go see Audacity). The demand for feature became a dog fight of Linux VS Windows VS Mac (happily no BSD and Solaris people joined in).

What a terrible mistake I made!
It seems there is barely no inter community work together, I understand everyone are competing to be “THE” GPL audio editor/sequencer, but I didnt even had the endurance to look the GPL video editors, that I’ve been tired of reading stuff like : (lets not go on Windows, Lets not do Mac OSX, Working on this (this already ben made in at least 5 different GPL audio editors/sequencers), …

Thats not the worst, it seems most communities are completely isolated from other communities’ works. I’ve seen some exception like JACK, being used by tons of different softwares, or Audacity using Lame’s librairy for mp3, or video editors making themselves easy to use with most of sound editors. I aint speaking of all the synths, recorders.

Thats without saying that some features are inexistant in most of them, like being able to record streaming medias.

Another bad thing is many new non-free softwares that got more features often just use the best parts of code from the different GPL editors/sequencers, while they often ignore the very existence of the other’s communities, of course, everyone is doing GPL working…

I were unable to get a good review/comparison of all the editors/sequencers, one of the best I found was only for editors, with for the only 2 comparison points had “is it GPL or no?”, and “which OS supports it”.

Some people should seek to make some
cooperation between the communities. The communities that will stay isolated might get eliminated by those who’s working together to get more and more features.

#2

I’m not quite sure I really understand what you are saying here? Are you trying to make people at ardour cranky or start a flame war?
Ardour does support OSX as well as linux by the way. The developers have stated MANY times that for them to support Windows would take much more time and effort than they can give. They are dedicated to making a world class open source solution for a platform that really needs one. Windows doesn’t NEED ardour, there are many other options for Windows users. That all being said there is someone working on a port to Windows, but because it is such a huge task, I think it is going somewhat slowly. Maybe you could join them in making ardour cross platform.
As for me I’d prefer it if the developers continued to use their time wisely like they have been, in making a stable and professional DAW for linux, and good on them for taking the time to support those who have ported it over to OSX.
I think those who benefit from free open source software should make LESS demands…and make MORE contributions.

#3

There is already other GPL audio programs thats doing that, the people whos working on hat here could just ask them questions, or read the codes a bit. Passing on PortAudio also help on it.

The thing I said is that there is a lot of parallel GPL sound programs in development, that including the video editors whos working to be ableto work simultanously with a sound editor, I meant that:
JACK, PortAudio, ALSA, RoseGarden, MusE, Audacity, Ardour, LMMS, Hydrogen, Timidity++, LAME, ReZound, … communities seems to have noconnection, even when often you need to work with many of those applications together. And I’m no speaking of Chuck/SuperCollider,Csound,pure data, trackers, synth emulators,and stream readers, recorders, you often need to use. Thats what make JACK so useful, but to a certain point, needing to have 10 softwares to generate music and sequence/edit it…

I also think that each of those communities have, or will work on codes that might already exist in other GPL softwares. I have to tell however that JACK’s community is being more informedabout the other communities, since they’re managing everyone’s inputs and outputs…

Plz in your next answer, post the link to the windows’ developper corner, so I can see where they’re at.

#4

Mod -1 flamebait.

You are making a point about the lack of cooperation between different projects, and you lump together projects very different in scope and ambition.

Portability between platforms can come at a price as well, in terms of development time at least, which is the most precious resource in ardour and other projects.

Developers of the applications you mention surely know about the competing projects and have their own reasons to continue with their efforts.

PortAudio is not GPL, by the way.

#5

Currently I’m still trying to just make a complete list of the projects (complete means classified too), Wikipedia got some lists but… its barely useful cause it lacks many smaller or specialised projects (it removed Ardour from the sequencer list), JACK help a lot with its list, but it only incorporate JACK related programs, …

The reason why I wanna do the list is to look about the activity level of the projects, particulary help wikis, forums, mailing list, ambitions and goals, once with such a list we might be able to see if its possible to pass some coding from a project to another, and to specialise projects in what they are good to, instead of making everyone more similar, for an example, most people whos using midi in their audio on linux will use LMMS or RoseGarden (particulary with partition editing), Ardour is better in sound management, etc. Using many sound software to do specific jobs is at some point inevitable, its the reason why things like JACK exist.

I’M still new to some categories of sound softwares, until now I got those categories:

Drivers&Technologies (ALSA, PortAudio,…)
Wires (JACK, kx project,…)
Trackers( many, many trackers…)
Synths&Emulators(one of the hardest to find all the active projects)
Programming Sound (Chuck,Csound,Pd,Supercollider…)
Partition Editors(one of the features of Rosegarden)
Sequencers (with midi)
Sound Editors (Audacity,…)
Audio Workstation ((Ardour)somethign between sound editors and sequencers, I dont know if I should fusion that with Sound Editors))
Effect Librairies & Plugins (that export on many projects)
…

Many projects got features in many categories, which make things harder…

Yes PortAudio is not exactly GPL, but its compatible to GPL…
http://www.portaudio.com/license.html