Re: See ya!

Hi Steve,

> DSP development is definately a bottleneck

I don't see it that way, as a user. Jamin works great, there are more 
LADSPA plugins than any one person could use, and all the classic 
effects are pretty well covered. I don't get up in the morning and 
think, 'If only Steve would write a few more plugins then I could finish 
making that album' :-)

 > Paying for something that allready does what you want
> is lower risk than paying for something that doesn't yet.

Definitely, custom development isn't cheap either. I think the 
difference is that the proprietary solution (might) work until the next 
app or OS upgrade, when the tithe has to be renewed, but the free 
software solution is a better long-term investment as you don't have the 
single point of failure (the proprietary vendor discontinuing the 
product, being acquired or going out of business).

The free software funding approach becomes more feasible if individual 
users aggregate their buying power somehow. At the moment, most of the 
money seems to be flowing towards the large Linux distributors, but goes 
no further upstream, unless those distributors employ contributors to 
those upstream projects. How many audio developers does Red Hat employ? 
I think Novell only have a couple on the ALSA team, and they were 
inherited from SuSE.

I think if users demand specific features then they should be prepared 
to either help out, or fund that work. If not, I have about as much 
sympathy for them as I do for those people who moan about a particular 
proprietary app crashing, but are using a cracked copy they got from a 
mate.

> I think I've suggested lowering the lower limit before, but those that
> know more about mastering than me said it wasn't neccesary. You can push
> up the input gain, which is equivalent

Right, but then if you have generally quiet material with big transients 
then you're hitting the limiter all the time. Compress and boost so the 
quiet bits are now loud, and you've raised the noise floor by the same 
amount.

It's not really a problem that a lower limit for the compressor or 
indeed mastering can solve; you've either got to live with a big dynamic 
range, like they do on Radio 3, or re-record so that the track isn't 
whispering along below -30dBFS.

Cheers!

Daniel

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