Re: Is Linux A Feasible Platofrm For Professional DAW work ?

dawhead wrote:

one person's "too much interaction" is another person's "not enough
control". maybe we should pay more attention to the fact that there
are probably more people in the first situation than the second, or
maybe we're interested in a niche market of audio professionals who
actually want control.

There's nothing at all wrong with Group #2. But you seem to have at least
initially grabbed the attention of those in Group #1. Even me, and I don't
even have a Mac.

Really. A fascinating assesment of the windows situation. You know
that WDM is deprecated in Windows7, yes?

"Deprecated" as in "stable, so soon to become obsolete?" ;) But few
pro DAW users are using WDM drivers.

That ASIO was never provided
by Microsoft and always relied on 3rd party drivers which didn't
always track the latest version of Windows precisely?

That, indeed, is a problem, but it's as much a Microsoft problem as with
any other vendor. Why does Windows change in ways that affect the
hooks around which ASIO is built? Steinberg recognized that there was
a problem with WDM that stood in the way of their DAWs working as well
as they wanted them to, and they came up with a solution, along with
somewhat of a standard to which others could write drivers for their hardware.

> That before WDM,
there was no reasonable "out of the box" low latency solution on that
platform?

WDM is "low latency?" It's better than MME, but not as good as ASIO,
nor is it adjustable to take adavantage of a well tuned computer.

That most windows consumer desktop applications used MME,
not ASIO, for playback and capture, which could often conflict with
ASIO use of the audio interface?

We (the professional "we") recommend that a computer that's used as a DAW
be devoted to DAW use and not get corrupted with consumer desktop audio
applications. It's good advice, and a cheap solution to a lot of problems.

What's a mess is that so many people, including you, have read so much
stuff that has led them to completely misunderstand the role of these
things in the Linux "audio stack".

That's because nobody, not even you, has successfully related how Linux
does audio with what those working with other software understand. I've tried,
really I have, but I just don't get it. There's something very fundamental that I'm
missing, and I suspect that the Linux world figures "everybody knows that." I'm no
expert in Windows audio connections either, but at least the terminology and
user interface has always been pretty clear. Not so with Linux.

But Linux is not a company.

And this is part of the problem with trying to build a commercial product around it.

If you want a smooth experience with Linux audio, do you
randomly pick some distro, some machine, some audio interface and put
them together and expect that it will all just work?

What other choice do you have? Maybe not random, but you need to learn
a lot about how the pieces fit together to make the right choice. For better or
worse, Microsoft and Apple have made some of those choices for us and limited
the scope of our choices to things that are pretty likely to work together without
too much fooling around.

> It appears that
many existing or potential Linux users do indeed expect this to be
possible. Sorry, its not. Its unfortunate that so many people believe
that it is, or even more irritatingly, believe that it should be.

Why not? Certainly a company who wants to sell a program can specify
a certain version of Linux, a certain distribution, and as long as the user
sets that up as the program vendor tells him, and doesn't muck with it, it'll
work. It's just like Windows. If you have something working under XP, you
may indeed expect to have some problems when moving to Vista or Seven,
but that doesn't happen every few weeks. There's no configuration management
with a user's version of Linux, however.

This is why Linux will never be the operating system of choice for people who
want to run an application and not fool around with things that nobody else is doing.

audio forums for Windows DAWs are full of testimonies to problems that
people have with particularly bad combinations of choices. If you
want that kind of experience, you need to get your system from a
company that controls everything end-to-end, which means either Apple
or a company that specializes in building machines for media work that
run Linux. Unfortunately, I can't recommend any of them at this
particular point in time.

So how is it that you can buy a retail copy of Windows, load it up on just about
any computer that meets a certain minimum specification, and have it all work?
The CPU works, the hard drives work, the optical drives work, the USB ports
work, the networking works. Plug in a Firewire card and Windows knows what it
is and how to talk to it. Connect a Firewire audio interface and, when you install
the driver that's provided by the manufacturer (and you have the major version
of Windows for which that driver is written) it'll work.

The only part of that game that's really different in Linux is that, for example, when
you buy a PreSounus interface, you can't stick the CD that comes with it into the
drive and have the driver for that interface installed magically. The procedure is
different - it can be learned, but it's not documented with the new purchase, you
need to know where to find it in the Linux world. And then your hardware may
or may not be supported depending on whether someone got around to it. And it
may be only halfway supported - like it'll pass audio but you won't have a control
panel for the built-in mixer.

Maybe this sounds like a cop out but all I want to do is make music.

Then why are you using computers? What is it that leads you to expect
that a general purpose operating system (windows/OSX/linux) on a
general purpose CPU on a general purpose motherboard is a sensible way
to build a tool that will let you "just make music" ?

I've tried that argument. The brutal fact of life is that today, recording has
become an integral part of the work of a hobbyist and even professional
musician. Musicians don't have a lot of money, and a computer is an inexpensive
way to put together a functional recording system. If they could get it cheaper
by using open source software that they didn't have to pay for in dollars, they
would - but only if they could get the same results with about the same level
of effort.

Many times, I've recommended a simple hardware workstation (some of them
cost less than a computer) but it's a hard sell.
.

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