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

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DateFri, 09 Dec 2011 20:39:22 +0100
From Dominique Michel <[hidden] at vtxnet dot ch>
To[hidden] at lists dot jackaudio dot org
In-Reply-ToPaul Davis [Jack-Devel] FOSS & stuff (Was: Re: The Situation(s) With JACK)
Le Fri, 9 Dec 2011 10:51:59 -0500,
Paul Davis <[hidden]> a écrit :

> 
> 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.

It is itune in the US. And a few other big players will come soon in
the rest of the world. Deezer is one of them.

I make a different analyse. With the digital technology, the structure
of the recording industry have changed. In the past, the important was
to own the recording equipment. They was very expensive. Now, anyone
that can afford a good pc can make its own recording studio, and that
even with free software like jack. In consequence, the important now is
to own the legal rights on the recordings.

Many musicians do understand that, and it is the first reason why it is
so many small recording companies now. On the long run, the only chance
for the majors are to take control over the distribution, that is
mainly over internet. But that is another discussion.

The video market is not in the same situation because it is still
harder to make its own video recording studio with a pc. But I think
that this is only a question of time for a video server similar to
jack to be possible on a high end pc.

> 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?

For me, the big feature of using jack for the desktop is that I never
get annoyed by those stupid desktop sounds -:) It is also very easy to
setup.

> 
> 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.

And for the user, most linux distributiona are easier to manage than
windows. You launch an application or a command and you get a
centralised way to manage and update all the applications in the box.
With windows update, it will update only the OS and a few applications
like explorer. And you manage anything, the management is made by
microsoft, you must blindly trust it.

Another great difference is what I can call scale. On linux, it is very
few applications that make every thing but the coffee. Instead, we have
a lot of applications that make one task, but make it very well. On
windows, and I guess on mac too, it is a lot big applications that make
every thing but the coffee. It is why the most frequent question from
most if not all new linux user is which application to use to make
a task or to replace the xyz windows or mac software. Very often, the
answer is not to use one application, but to use a few applications,
each of them will do a part of the job.

I also think that a new linux user that is ready to take the time to
ask on the forums and email lists will fail in love with linux. He
will maybe never look back. He will eventually look to alternatives like
freebsd. But well, support is very important in a modern OS and what is
better than a fast and free support, especially when this support is
made by skilled peoples.

Dominique

-- 
"We have the heroes we deserve."
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