Re: See ya!

Hi Daniel,

On Wed, Nov 15, 2006 at 01:42:27 +0000, Daniel James wrote:
> 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' :-)

Sure, Linux as a whole is doing very well, but JAMin is somewhat tied to
my compressors, and they have bugs. It's not clear how serious, but they
could be better. If someone comes along with a better compressor it would
be easy enough to switch over, but noone has yet.
 
>  > 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.

Yeah, it doesn't really work that way, though I got my current (highly
desirable) job by virtue of working on free software, and I'm being paid
to work on free software, just not in the linux music area. Linux music is
just not sufficiently interesting to big business at this stage.
 
> 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.

Perhaps. In general I disagree, users making helpful suggestions on how to
improve software is worthwhile. The thing you have to be wary of is
pandering to a vocal minority of people who want things a certain way at
the expense of the majority.

The developer - user relationship is hardly one way, most users provide
feedback at some point.

> > 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.

Yeah, it's a too much rope situation.
 
> 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.

I don't think a 30dB peak range between "loud" and "quiet" is too much of
an issue, but then I don't master, or make music for a living :)

There is a fine line between "this takes your well mixed-down final mix
and masters it" and "this takes your slightly badly mixed-down finalish
mix and rescues it and masters it". I don't have any particular preference
either way, but we've definatly seen pull from users in both directions.
I think currently we err on the first side.

If you only have a 2 track recording of a live performance then you may
well need *something* to flaten out the peaks and make it an acceptable
recording, whether JAMin is/should be geared up for that is another
question.

- Steve

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