[Jack-Devel] Σχετ: FOSS & stuff (Was: Re: The Situation(s) With JACK)

Paul,

Thanks for this post. Indeed sent light on many obscure corners here :-)
I'm..... messing with win7 for more than two years and all that you say it is true.

My situation with Jack started very simply wanting to add reverb to Grand Orgue software which (still) has not a VSTi version. Just desktop.
From there I discovered many things and spread the word on windows users about how versatile their system can be with Jack.
Stephane's latest windows buids openned a great wider use for 64bit systems and so on.
But still there's a kinda confusion about what is Jack and what can do and I see not much activity from these windows users.
Even here started for some projects using ReaRouteAsio from Reaper instead of Jack...:-(


So, I believe you will still consider this side of computer world, in your proposal :-)

Best
Panos



________________________________
 Áðï: Paul Davis <[hidden]>
Ðñïò: [hidden] 
Êïéí.: [hidden] 
ÓôÜëèçêå: 5:51 ì.ì. ÐáñáóêåõÞ, 9 Äåêåìâñßïõ 2011
Èåìá: [Jack-Devel] FOSS & stuff (Was: Re:  The Situation(s) With JACK)
 
(I've renamed this thread because its not really central to the
discussion about what to do with JACK)

On Fri, Dec 9, 2011 at 4:13 AM, Phil Rhodes <[hidden]> wrote:
>> My concern is over the problems we have created through the
>> development process (or lack thereof).
>
>
> Perhaps a little outside perspective would be useful, although I'm sorely
> aware that what I'm about to say isn't particularly new so I'll try to be
> brief.

I appreciate the perspective, though I disagree with most of what you
said. Specifically:

1) as was already noted, its clear at this point that talking about
"Linux" as an OS is a mistake. Things work on distributions, not
Linux. Certainly for very desktop-y user-friendly shiny polishy
things. The fact that there are different ways to do something in
Fedora, Arch and Ubuntu is not really conceptually any different from
the fact that there are different ways to do it on Windows XP and
Windows 7, or Windows and OS X. Its uncomfortable for me to
acknowledge this, because I prefer to think about Linux, but as the
years go on, its apparent that I'd better get used to it unless I want
to completely forego any level of integration into the "desktop
experience".

2) One of the side-effects of the way that open source development
works is that far more of exploration of possibilities is done. I know
(or rather, I trust) that Apple devs have played around with many
alternatives to the way (say) iTunes appears and operates, possibly
even radically altering it in some ways. But I think it would be
foolish to imagine that Apple has done even 50% of the experimentation
represented by the almost absurd number of "media players" that exist
for Linux (or Windows) for that matter.  The result is a fertile
breeding ground for new ideas and ways of doing things, most of which
are not that good. Its both a problem and a source of future
solutions.

To take a specific JACK example: netjack1 and netjack2 differ in a
variety of ways. Should some heavy-handed decision have been possible
to stop one or the other from being developed in parallel (thus
confusing users along the way), we would never have gained the
insights that we have from both of their approaches. Apple and
Microsoft's approach to this is largely to say "We don't care, what we
do is (so good|good enough) that we don't think that the benefits of
all this experimentation outweighs the benefits of the chaos and
confusion is also creates".  For some things, that's probably right.
For others, I don't think it is. In the case of AUNetSend and
AUNetReceive you have the end result of Apple's work in this area:
super easy to use, and with so much latency that its basically useless
for anything except playing a sound file across two machines. Is that
a successful outcome for users?

> It is no secret that open source development tends to produce software of
> use primarily to software engineers that can reasonably be developed by one
> person - linux has, famously, dozens of text editors and email clients. It
> is therefore perhaps not that surprising that media production software,
> which is not generally of interest to software engineers and can't be
> developed solo, has traditionally been lacking.

I don't believe this is a correct analysis. Open source development
became famous among the general public because of Linux (the kernel),
Apache, Mozilla/Firefox and Open(now Libre) Office. Because these are
such big projects, you don't tend to see much duplication of effort.
Contrary to a lot of silly articles in the popular press, its actually
VERY difficult to get developers to work on *any* project, whether
open source or proprietary, and so the one of the biggest obstacles to
launch media production software for Linux is that even if its of
interest to some developers, there are never enough of them to really
move things along rapidly.

Professional media production software is a niche that suffers from
two large barriers to entry: adoption inertia, which is caused by
people having already invested a lot of time or money in a solution,
which acts as a strong disincentive to them trying something new ; and
the lack of a market. Video s/w is a bit different, because broadcast
continues to have a solid revenue stream based on advertising and/or
public funding, but there are almost no companies that make music
technology that make much money. There's also a bit of a chicken-egg
situation, in which until a platform has *everything* that a workflow
needs, its very difficult to convince anyone to switch to it.

> Ultimately this is a failure of management because as far as I can see there
> are enough free-software hours of work being done, they're just terribly
> misdirected, and the situation with JACK1/JACK2/[insert huge list of other
> Linux audio subsystems] is a prime example.

I get quite tired of rediscovering this urban legend. During the last
12 months, I got a lot more acquainted with audio on Windows. Its
vastly more of a mess than Linux. WinMME? ASIO? DirectSound? WASAPI?
WaveRT? I mean, my god ...  Why do you not hear the same kind of
complaints about it? Because Microsoft pays a lot of people a lot of
money to paper over the cracks.

JACK was invented to solve a very specific problem associated with a
very particular type of workflow. Its solution has some tradeoffs that
don't matter to the people who need what it does. Should the rest of
the audio stack have to deal with this? Should pro-audio people have
to deal with the tradeoffs caused by the design goals that desktop
users want?

And lets flip this around and look at it from a different direction:
both Linux and OS X audio is being split in two by the arrival of
mobile platforms and phone communication. Both ALSA and CoreAudio have
had to be mangled in different ways to the point where writing an
audio app that works on a mobile device is substantively different
than doing so for a desktop machine. This is important because it
gives lie to the idea that there can only be one way to do audio in an
OS and it can/should work for all.

Thus, some of the confusion that is obvious on Linux (because all
kinds of Linux are affected by what happens in all the other kinds of
Linux - desktop, embedded, mobile), is actually a reflection of the
reality present on other platforms, minus the financial/developer
resources to paper over it and make it look shiny.

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