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I second your opinion, but I also want to point out the hard work done by Linux Audio Developers.

For one, they pushed the development of preemptible and low-latency Linux kernel to make it possible to do low-latency stuff, even on relatively aged hardware. Mac OS X's micro-kernel architecture is potentially superior in this regard because you can easily go hard real-time with micro-kernels (Linux is a monolithic kernel), but Linux kernel is more suitable than Windows XP for running audio applications because of these improvements.

They also obsoleted OSS (open sound system) and came up with ALSA, which makes it easier to support new sound devices from the developer's point of view. ALSA supports a range of consumer to professional sound cards, just like CoreAudio. It just works.

Another notable framework, JACK, goes beyond CoreAudio by providing audio routing between applications, like ReWire. JACK is also available on Mac OS X, except it is less robust than on Linux. Thrashing can cause audio drop-out because Mac OS X kernel can't lock pages in real memory.

Finally, if you ever considered audio production work on Linux, you definitely know about Ardour at some point. It's the hard work of Paul Davis, working on it unemployeed and full-time for many years. Ardour also runs on Mac OS X, by the way, because of the generous nature of Linux developers for offering you a choice.

If you do mostly recording, then you can get by on Linux quite sufficiently. If you do a lot of synthesized stuff like Reason or NI, then you'll be disappointed. There is simply no comparable app on Linux.

------

On the other hand, Linux has a lot of architecture catch-up on the graphics stack. Cairo recently has some talk about supporting more color spaces than RGB. However, the lack of end-to-end color management is a serious issue. Colors you see on the screen simply will look different when printed out. The colors are also not even consistent from monitor to monitor.

One thing I'm really impressed with Mac OS X is its monitor calibration. It lets you fine tune gamma by inspecting the monitor response in highlight, mid-tone and shadow for red, green and blue. I can easily color-match two monitors by different manufacturers.

Mac OS X also has superior built-in typesetting support, completely unparalleled by any operating system, and this is available in any application even TextEdit. In TextEdit, you can already turn on common ligatures like "fi" and "fl" as you type. In comparison, you must insert ligature glyphs manually when using Microsoft Word. Mac OS X supports more typesetting feature than that. For example, the Hoefler font has an archaic font variant with a "long s" (so congress looks more like congrefs where the f has shorter middle bar---the s at the end of the word remains the usual form because the long s is a contextual ligature that happens only in the middle of a word) and the "st ligature" (there is a small hook that goes from the top end of s to the top stem of t). Needless to say, contextual ligature is a crucial feature to support scripts like Arabic.

Mac OS X definitely has received a lot of attention in the aesthetics that goes way beyond eye candy.

I'm cannot use the blue hammer because it clashes with my salmon pink power tools and frilly toolbelt!

Yeah right... most machines sound takes far less than 0.1% of the CPU time to 'push the bits'. Even if you write it in C++ or asm it "might work on some people's computers and not on other". Ooh scary.

Well it is, if you want the code to "write once, run everywhere" (by everywhere we mean NOT "all arbitrarily fast and memory capacious home computers" but "any computer, including embedded systems, from Micro-ITX Mobos to battery-powered greeting cards that speak a greeting when opened." And forgive me for being so handwavy, it's not "pushing the bits on the buss," it's more like "reading the bits off the disk driver at whatever rate it'd like to get them for you, passing these to ringbuffers, keeping track of the ringbuffers state so they don't underrun, synchronizing the threads that read the input ringbuffers so they're all pulling the precise sample for the given realtime offset, reading the samples from the ringbuffers for several streams into the CPU for summing, writing the summed stream to the summed ringbuffer (or "mix buss"), keeping a tally of how many samples you send to the DAC so you don't overrun it, and emitting the bytes to the DAC. You CAN do it all in java, but if their are performance problems on platform X, your boss will ask you "Is this code written in the fastest way possible?" and if there's anything in it pertaining to java, you know how you'll have to answer.

These methods get inlined directly by the JIT since it knows the final types so these buffers are generally equivalent to arrays in overhead.

Generally? In C or C++, you can make it compulsory.

They do check bounds though, but if you want to crash your sound app go ahead and write it in C++.

You mean like these guys?

You can be pretty damn right that the desktop experience is improved with Ingo Molnar's scheduler! If you have done any serious audio work on any platform you know that Linux kernel + Ingo Molnar's IO scheduler = the best platform for serious audio work. This combination has the lowest latencies. Linux kernel+Ingo Molnar's IO scheduler+Ardour offers currently lowest latencies and the best of all - it's completely free! It is pretty amazing - really. Every true professional audio engineer will agree with me.

Anyway, using a DAW is far less expensive than having the "real thing" as you say, giving the oportunity to lots of musicians and bands to record and produce albums even when they have no funds to get it professionally done. AND with these Free Software (as in "freedom", you know) even professionals get good results while keeping their freedom intact.

http://www.ardour.org/ssl_support_announcement
http://www.solid-state-logic.com/
http://www.solid-state-logic.com/news/gabriel.html

Regards from Patagonia Argentina

I've had a pretty good run using Ardour, JACK, JAMIN and occasionally JACK Timemachine on an Athlon 2800+ with 256 MB of memory.

The most expensive piece of sound equipment seems to be the AD/DA converters (whether on or off board). I ended up with an RME Hamerfall 9652 (yes, the original one) and a Behringer Ultragain ADA-8000 (inexpensive at 230 USD). I also use a Behringer BCF-2000 for automation control, and a bunch of other rackmount processors. The sound is better than a studio I had recorded at a while back which used a Mackie D8B and a bunch of very expensive and fancy looking equipment.

I guess it depends what you want to get out of it. If you want to spend 30$ on a cheapie sound card, expect it to sound like that.... The audio *software* is available for Linux, so the only limitation is how much green you want to sink into your setup. (Hint, Behringer has a 30$ USB sound card available if you're looking to do recording "on the cheap" which would sound a bit better than an internal sound card, considering that you can move the AD/DA conversion process a bit further away from your machines' clock chips.)

its too bad that /. is still full of posters who manage to sound authoritative yet actually don't know anywhere near enough about the subject of their posts.

re: Ardour & MIDI: first, Ardour has support MTC and MMC along with MIDI CC for parameter control, for years, and these are the standards associated with "binding it all together. second, see http://ardour.org/node/855

second, re ALSA, MIDI & JACK: if you were following JACK development, you'd know that JACK supports inter-app distribution of MIDI now, and more and more apps are starting to support its use.

as for "a MODERN and powerful graphic interface", i think you've crossed over into the realm of the subjective. there are some very cool VST plugins, for example, whose GUI looks like a crayola version of an early 1990's X10 interface. what you consider "MODERN and powerful" is considered by some other people to be instrusive and ugly.

Ardour is great (from the screenshots and reviews I've seen, at least - never been able to actually INSTALL the sucker, because of the dep. hell)

My experience was different. Is this a case where you shouldn't be blaming Ardour but be blaming your Linux distribution or the way you've installed libaries? Having installed the Ardour release candidate about a month ago, I had no problems getting the dependencies installed. The installation page describes exactly what dependencies are needed http://ardour.org/building

For Ubuntu, it was very easy to install the needed -dev libaries, then compile Ardour as described.

Ardour: The 2.0 release (just out last week) is AWESOME! Get it!

Binaries are available only for OSX. For those not on OSX, you can build it yourself. See http://ardour.org/building for build instructions, or http://ardour.org/building_vst_support for building it with support for VST plugins. You can currently get the VST 2.3 SDK from a link on Steinberg's 3rd Party Developers page.

Ubuntu users should read UbuntuStudioPreparation ("Setting up your system for an audio workstation...")

I built with scons VST=1 PREFIX=/usr/local and installed with sudo scons VST=1 PREFIX=/usr/local install. The resulting binary is called ardourvst.

For the especially new - every time the build complains about not being able to find a library, try sudo aptitude install libraryname-dev. Barring that, do aptitude search libraryname to find matching packages. Install the -dev package if it complains about not being able to find something. Sometimes this automatically installs the package itself, sometimes not, so pay attention.

Ardour: The 2.0 release (just out last week) is AWESOME! Get it!

Binaries are available only for OSX. For those not on OSX, you can build it yourself. See http://ardour.org/building for build instructions, or http://ardour.org/building_vst_support for building it with support for VST plugins. You can currently get the VST 2.3 SDK from a link on Steinberg's 3rd Party Developers page.

Ubuntu users should read UbuntuStudioPreparation ("Setting up your system for an audio workstation...")

I built with scons VST=1 PREFIX=/usr/local and installed with sudo scons VST=1 PREFIX=/usr/local install. The resulting binary is called ardourvst.

For the especially new - every time the build complains about not being able to find a library, try sudo aptitude install libraryname-dev. Barring that, do aptitude search libraryname to find matching packages. Install the -dev package if it complains about not being able to find something. Sometimes this automatically installs the package itself, sometimes not, so pay attention.

Each shows promise, but all of them have fatal flaws that make them useless for anything but the most basic recording

you can build ardour with VST plugin support. http://ardour.org/building_vst_support

A few other cool things: Ardour under the 3d window manager, beryl. Jamin - mastering software. Bristol - softsynth.

I note that even more popular than Ardour 2 on linux is Ardour 2 on Mac OSX. It works pretty good on a mini - Aside from getting X installed, which seems to be a painful process for some users (answers for this are on the forums)
Ardour is much more sophisticated than garageband. For me, the killer app in ardour is the anywhere to anywhere routing model.

I have just recorded and mixed a live album with this software on Ubuntu Feisty:

http://ardour.org/
http://jackaudio.org/
http://www.ffado.org/ (aka Freebob) with a Mackie Onyx desk & firewire interface
http://jamin.sourceforge.net/

Very very good indeed, I vastly prefer it to my previous Windows based Cubase setup.

No comments and it's already slashdotted. Ah well. What are your thoughts on these products?

RoseGarden
Ardour
CSound

Do you really need anything else?

I've performed with Pure Data on tour and it stood up well on my Debian laptop. At the time I was either using a gamepad or midi-slider interface to drive the instruments I made with this tool, some of which were multichannel. A friend and I have had several hundred people play with our audiovisual instrument Fijuu2 day in day out for a week. This setup runs on Ubuntu and uses PD as a sound server. Several other friends perform with Supercollideron their Linux laptops .

Where sequencing is concerned I've heard some enjoy Hydrogen. For a DAW on Linux it's hard to go past Ardour, though that's hardly an instrument.

Jumping directly into the center of a loop - Aggressively and effectively using registers - Developing compilers - Doing bit manipulation - using barely language supported features like "find first bit" or popcount - are all things that can often be best done in assembly. Big today is vector arithmetic.

Grokking assembly helps is knowing what can be fast in your language, and what can't be. For example, in looking at some gcc generated X86_64 assembly code recently I found that floor and ceil were still function calls on that processor. As was lrint (even though SSE has a rounding mode).

The two places where assembly is used a lot these days is in accelerating vectorized code, and in low level hardware bringup. If you are interested in developing code for a new processor or SOC, you aren't going to be writing in java at first, but painful, tedious assembly, poked directly into the processor via jtag.

Lastly - in the general case, if you don't know how your hardware really works, you don't know how to program effectively for it.

Sure, in today's day and age, you shouldn't set out to code an entire visicalc-alike in assembly - but profiling your code to find hot spots - and knowing when and to use assembly to fix them, IS important.

Examples:

Extensive oprofiling of ardour 2's core routines showed several that would benefit from being rewritten in assembly, or something much closer to assembly. Result? Ardour now scales 2-3x better under high workloads than it did before (and those core routines STILL dominate the runtime)

Now, if the question is: "would being a competent assembly language programmer be a help in the job market?"

Beats me. Isn't helping me out at all.

IMHO everybody should learn some assembly for at least one processor at some point before exiting college, preferably in the first or second year.

check THIS out:

http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/

and paired with audacity for chopping and converting samples you would have everything you need to make your own music:

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

A nice drum machine:
http://www.hydrogen-music.org/

use ardour to mix it all!
http://ardour.org/

And that Linux box will run iMovie, GarageBand, iTunes, [Microsoft] Office, require no command-line knowledge, and work out of the box with most major peripherals without having to download or install any drivers, right?

Where's my copy of Audition....

If you can't find it you might try Ardour.

Until they realise that most of their professional-level software isn't installed in these packages...

Ardour is a pretty good multitrack recording program, with a rich feature set. For sequencing, I'd recommend Rosegarden.

"What if they can't afford a decent studio, or don't have the discipline to do enough takes until the sound is right, or the drummer sucks? Good production has turned a lot of bad music into good. An artist can be incredibly gifted musically but that doesn't mean they know the best way to record their music, or the point where a guitar solo stretches from cool to self indulgent wankery."

Record you music in Ardour:

http://ardour.org/

Release the project file with a copyleft license. Say Creative Commons BY-SA for argument.

If the guitar track is bad, someone else can add a better one. Someone else can add some reverb on the backing vocals. Others can try different mixdowns. Still other can master with something like Jamin.

http://jamin.sourceforge.net/en/about.html

I have a feeling you might get a few gems in with all the junk.

Anyone who wants can burn CDs of such songs and flog them on the street or in their shops. Any band that wants can perform them.

all the best,

drew

Killer app differs for different folk. For me, it's Ardour2.

"Hmm. Of course...who's working on that free music again?

www.anvilstudio.com"

I am, for one:

http://musicians.opensrc.org/DrewRoberts

May I suggest considering a copyleft type license for your Free music?

Oh and as to programs, people might check:

http://lmms.sourceforge.net/
http://ardour.org/
http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/
http://www.ferventsoftware.com/

Ardour is backed by a major company which pays for its development: http://ardour.org/ssl_support_announcement

Ardour has VST support: http://ardour.org/node/280

(On Linux, VST support won't be 100% flawless at least in the midterm because it's relies on Wine, but when the Windows port is complete, VST plugins will be supported fully in it.)

Jack runs on Windows: http://jackaudio.org/node/13

Moreover, Ardour is currently in the process of being ported to Windows (basically only some backend details have to be ported, because all the rest, including GUI, is already portable). Also, Ardour has an OS X version, too.

Also let me know when it upgrades its interface out of 1990s-era Pro Tools

Uhm, does it need to? What's wrong with it?

All in all, it looks like you are pretty ignorant when it comes to Ardour current state. You even characterize Jack as "audio format" which makes you look seriously misinformed to say the least.

Ardour is backed by a major company which pays for its development: http://ardour.org/ssl_support_announcement

Ardour has VST support: http://ardour.org/node/280

(On Linux, VST support won't be 100% flawless at least in the midterm because it's relies on Wine, but when the Windows port is complete, VST plugins will be supported fully in it.)

Jack runs on Windows: http://jackaudio.org/node/13

Moreover, Ardour is currently in the process of being ported to Windows (basically only some backend details have to be ported, because all the rest, including GUI, is already portable). Also, Ardour has an OS X version, too.

Also let me know when it upgrades its interface out of 1990s-era Pro Tools

Uhm, does it need to? What's wrong with it?

All in all, it looks like you are pretty ignorant when it comes to Ardour current state. You even characterize Jack as "audio format" which makes you look seriously misinformed to say the least.

Hmm.. Really? Do you know what you are talking about? If what you're saying is true then I really have to wonder why high-end hardware mixer manufacturers are funding and using Ardour? These companies are one of the leading companies in the industry.

"The Ardour project is happy to be able to announce the involvement and support of Solid State Logic (SSL), one of the most respected and trusted names in the field of audio technology. SSL has chosen to support Ardour's development and to promote the idea of its broader adoption within the audio technology industry."

Solid State Logic

Harrison/GLW

Oops.. the link was broken. Ardour website. Anyway, below 1ms is not possible with any other audio system out there - and this includes Macs and Windows systems.

Ingo Molnar and Andrew Morton's original 2.4 patches for better soft-real-time performance were prompted by complaints from those of us in the linux audio (pro-audio/music) software community. Systems like JACK and applications like Ardour were written around this kind of functionality.

Ingo has picked up the ball and run with it for 2.6 to the point where a kernel patched with his most recent patches is basically hard-time except for cases where a badly written device driver screws it up. And increasingly parts of his work have become part of the vanilla kernel so that even a 2.6 kernel now works pretty well unless you need very low latency (as require for real-time monitoring and FX processing.

Tell me a piece of consumer software (sorry this doesn't include servers, compilers and hacker tools), that has become successful on Linux.

It depends on what you mean by "successful." If you mean market penetration, then not much. But I look at "successful" as whether it does what I need it to do and does it better.

For starters, GNU Lilypond, which is light-years ahead of software like Finale in its flexibility. True, it doesn't (yet) have all of the features of all the commercial products, but it has the hooks to allow users to add functionality. I'll never go back to graphical notation entry again. The Lilypond interface is much more efficient.

Ardour is another great project. Again, it provides flexibility that doesn't exist in commercial DAWs.

Of course there's always Emacs (or vi!). Show me a text editor with more timesaving and productivity-enhancing features.

I get along just fine with OpenOffice. Why should I shell out hundreds of dollars for software I don't need?

If these appliations don't work for you, that's fine, stick to the commercial stuff. But don't tear down others because they've found a different way that works better for them.

Using drum patterns from Hydrogen is indeed useful and I use them along with dubbed recordings using Ardour which allows the usual multi-track recording, editing, etc. A requirement is the brilliant jackd audio connection kit which allows a crazy level of audio processing and manipulation. All in all, I have no need for anything other than linux when recording/dubbing music.

The Firepod's chipset (BeBoB) has a driver in the works for Linux, called FreeBoB. FreeBoB is still in early beta stages. While it does work and looks promising, there's still a lot of work to be done with it.

Firepod + Jack + Ardour is the shit!

RME
Ardour (New website! :-))

I couldn't agree more. In case he's running Linux, I'd like to point out some software he could use.
Audacity - simple audio recording
Rosegarden - audio editor/sequencer
Ardour - digital audio workstation (think pro tools)

But this tools are no pro if you compare them to the windows tools. So linux has neither support for pro-audio tools.
 
Oh really? That's pretty weird. Please tell me what we are lacking? In what sense Ardour is not capable for pro-audio? Please tell me, I'm truly interested to hear that.
 
Maybe you didn't know that, but Linux ALSA supports high end audio cards like RME Hammerfall 100%. It is also possible to use VST plugins with JACK audio connection kit. Also, JACK is the most advanced way to share audio between different audio apps on _ANY_ platform.
 
Hey, it's funny! You know what I heard? Highend mixing console designer Harrison (one of the leading manufacturers in business) supports Ardour and actually promotes it to it's customers! What the hell? How can this be? Oh no, they favor Ardour over Pro-Tools! No! This must not be true! It's Linux software, it's not Windows software so it can not be pro-audio tool! Yeah right. Are you familiar with Ardour? Did you know that it outperforms ProTools on similar hardware? Perhaps you should actually learn about Linux audio before you open your mouth.

eleven different mixers

Maybe you should actually learn something about Linux audio. ALSA is part of 2.6 kernels now and you only have one mixer - ALSA mixer.
 
What comes to Linux sound servers - JACK is a low latency audio server for pro-audio apps. It is the most advanced sound server on this planet. You can assign the output of any ALSA app to input of any ALSA app that supports Jack. This will be de-facto standard sound server and it runs on top of ALSA. Jack has also been ported to OS X and many pro-audio OS X users are using Jack and Linux pro-audio apps like Ardour.

But how about the other areas of study? I used to take music theory and people would rant and rave about their Macs or one of various composing suites in Windows. I tried explaining that Linux has (certainly more affordable) solutions to offer in this department too but no one would even listen to me. It's not like they were mixing platinum selling records, they were just looking for software to write sheet music with.

Ironically, the only area that Linux can (could?) compete at the moment is in mixing platinum selling records, with software like Ardour.

For scorewriting there really is nothing that can compete with Sibelius on Windows or Mac - even Finale doesn't really come close when it comes to ease of use - and ultimately that is what is important for such applications. The software should be transparent to the user, and not require a degree in computer science to figure out (for example LilyPond).

• Ardour. Excellent Free Digital Audio Workstation.

Well, this is totally cool. No other OS i ever used was able to let me run realtime audio processing with a roundtrip latency of 64 sample (that's a buffersize of 32 samples) without any dropouts whatsoever while at the same time compiling a kernel, doing a dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/dev/hda2 and downloading large files via bittorrent (POSIX realtime scheduling classes and prioritizable IRQ handlers allow users to really finetune their system).

Ingo Molnar's realtime preemption patches make linux THE superiour OS for all kinds of timing critical media works. It's a crime that media production software vendors are not selling their stuff for linux.

For information's sake. Here's the typical setup for a linux audioworkstation these days:

- Install realtime-preemption kernel

- setup the realtime lsm or rtlimits so mere users can put tasks into realtime schedulnig classes

- make soundcard irq handler rt prio 90

- run jackd http://jackit.sf.net/ rt at prio 70

- leave all other irq handlers untouched at rt prios around 50

Whooops now all properly coded jack client apps i.e. ardour http://ardour.org/ run undisturbed by otherwise dropout producing hd or net activity. Or even normal processes' cpu load.

Have fun,
Florian Schmidt

Audacity is good for simple things (cutting up parts of a song, etc) but if you're trying to do anything moderatley complex such as mixing a song, don't waste your time. Been there. Not fun. Use Ardour, which is also GPL. Don't get me wrong, I use Audacity for things like recording a riff or other ideas, but for a song it doesn't come close to cutting it. If you're wanting to do MIDI, Rosegarden (GPL) is what you want. I haven't messed with it much, though, so I can't rate it.

This is not a complete list, but Reason and GarageBand are not free nor open source, so these links might be useful:

- ardour, Digital Audio workstation / http://ardour.org/
- Rosegarden, audio and MIDI sequencer, score editor, and general-purpose music composition and editing environment / http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/
- LilyPond, music notation / http://lilypond.org/web/
- MusE MIDI/Audio sequencer / http://muse.serverkommune.de/
- Audacity, music editing station / http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
- Music Theory (free, not oss): http://www.musictheory.net/ and http://andyvn.ath.cx/Software-Aquallegro.php
- general link: http://linux-sound.org/

Cheers :-)

You need hydrogen Its a midi based drum designer. Its very nice to use - you can find a tutorial about getting it to sync with Ardour here... http://ardour.org/manual/synchronizing_ardour_with _hydrogen?DokuWiki=672b889b7ba37d1ac7edcc198f034a8 e note the connection step is done on MacOSX in the example - you can do the same job with in the connect part of QJackctl under linux. I think once you can save restore whole Jack sessions Including apps that this whole setup will work a lot better. But at the momemnt it is quite serviceable I get your point about the integration thing - but I think in the linux example Jack is the application and all the sequencers midi editors etc are the plugins if you like. Hopefully the whole set up will become more mature over time but I sincerely believe that this is better in the long run than having everything under the one roof

What do Apogee converters have to do with the prosumer cards that were listed?

You plug them into those cards. Digital data moves between them. The sound is phenomenal (mostly because 95% of audio quality issues arise from the sample clock and related issues, and apogee have probably the best clock in the business.

Oh...okay, I'll believe what "most reviewers" say. :) Let me know when you name them.

i never saw a single review of HD that was really glowing about the sound quality unless it was clearly just pulling from the PR. people like it, but nobody in Mix, EQ, TapeOP or SoundOnSound thought it was that compelling, at either 96 or 192 kHz, especially when compared to other systems at the same SR.

> Yeah, probably the same PT HD setup that you paid US$10-20,000 for, to get some overpriced DSP power that a dual opteron can walk over in its sleep?

Haha. Try recording 80 simultaneous live tracks as someone else posted about. Your dual opteron will never "walk over in its sleep" hardware-based DSP. Or do you play your 3D games entirely on CPU? No, you use a dedicated 3D card.

One of our beta testers regularly records 32 tracks live on a small laptop, and runs sessions with 80 tracks. People have used Ardour to record 100 tracks simultaneously onto a RAID5. Simultaneous track count for recording is disk-io limited, not DSP related. For playback, it obviously depends on the FX level, but see below for a link to my take on this.

Pro Tools doesn't even have a "freeze track" feature. It doesn't need one, like the other DAWs do. DSP is processed off the CPU so you can keep working without having to stop what you're doing and keep your computer from coughing blood when you're pushing Ivory, Rebirth, BFD, Ozone, etc.

My take on DSP vs. native.

I love how anyone who points out that cheesy little prosumer products don't compare with the high-end stuff are suddenly "junkies" or "shills," which tells me you don't know how to argue in a debate. Ended with the classic "Do some research." Why don't you offer me some research? You're the one claiming I'm wrong.

If all those cards have really exceeded and matched today's top studios, nobody would be using Pro Tools as the industry standard. You just can't beat Pro Tools, and it's a standard for a reason...get over it.

I never called you a junkie or a shill, and I actually regret the tone this has taken on. But seriously, PT h/w is nothing particularly special, and everyone I've spoken too who knows anything about their technology agrees. In fact I find it interesting that I've never met anyone who actually likes PT at all, even though I've met many people who use it. PT's h/w is acceptable, but supports the profit margins digidesign needs, not what smaller studios and other organizations should be paying. Their s/w's audio capabilities have always been excellent, the MIDI is so-so and getting better, but there is very little in PT that isn't done better by someone else (problem is, its always different other systems). Studios that I know who care about quality sound use apogee converters and skip the PT h/w for that functionality entirely. Studios who care about modularity, flexibility and lack of vendor lock in certainly don't go the PT route, they use Nuendo, Sonar or others that can be used with various h/w. I've not heard any of them complaining that their stuff is worse quality than PT, in fact, I've heard the opposite.

Well, the article itself touches on a few of my reasons. Ardour, specifially, is very "Linuxy" in its interface layout and design, reminding me in many ways of the old Dos version of 3D Studio. It definitely looks like a programmer-designed UI, it's very stark and bare-bones, and things are never quite where you expect them to be. It's clearly a Cubase/Logic inspired design and layout, but without the years of fine-tuning those have had to get to their current states. I prefer Ableton's more unorthodox approach anyway, but that's just me :)

Ardour's UI is based almost entirely on ProTools, which most casual users of audio s/w have never used, and many have never even seen. The people who use ardour professionally (and there are a few!) comment that its UI is the most efficient they have used, including ProTools, which most people say is the most efficient in the proprietary world because of its extensive use of keyboard shortcuts. Ardour's development and design has been geared toward learning as much as possible from the years of fine tuning done with other DAWs, although we have been a little hampered by some issues with our GUI toolkit (GTK+ v1). We are currently about 60% done porting ardour to GTK2, and plan to be quite focused on usability issues after that (among many other things).

Re: h/w DSP support: first, DAC's don't have anything to do with this, and even when they are internal to the audio interface, they use no CPU cycles - they are always h/w! But more generally, see: my position on this issue.

Hardware: http://www.rme-audio.com/english/hammer/ (with stable third party drivers in ALSA) Software: http://ardour.org/ (still in beta but very useable)

Frankly, I think you've totally missed the reason why applications like OpenOffice got written. A couple of years ago, everyone who wanted to use open source systems or wanted others to use open systems was saying that they need a replacement for MS Office. Not "an improvement", not "a more innovative program that does similar things" but a more or less exact replacement so that user retraining time was minimized.

So, OpenOffice somes along (c/o StarOffice), and everyone says "its not innovative", "they didn't do anything new". They were not trying to do anything new. The application is there to provide a recognizable, usable alternative for MS Office users on Windows and a recognizable, usable alternative for users on other operating systems. Nothing more.

My own area of open source development - pro audio tools like ardour - is full of people who don't want "better" or "more innovative" tools than ProTools, Nuendo, Cubase SX etc: they want tools that work just like them, in fact preferably as close as possible to all of them, depending on who you talk to.

The lack of innovation in most open source apps doesn't reflect on the creativity of the open source development community, but the inertia of millions of computer users who have grown used to existing applications. How many users does Apple's Pages have versus OpenOffice? Why is that?

There are some very innovative open source applications, but they are not direct drop in replacements for existing Windows (or OS X) apps, and as a result most people neither use them nor are aware of them.

'Ere's one, then:

I'm shopping 'round for a high-quality audio interface, for recording into Ardour.

The RME-Audio Fireface looked ( understatement-warning ) Ideal.

No Linux support.

I e-mailed 'em, asking about this, and was told that. . .

The chip in the thing isn't the standard chip, and making an OSS driver would compromise their IP, so it Would Not Happen, Period.

I pointed-out that they could make binary-drivers, then. . .

No response. . .

So, I'm instead committing-on Edirol's FA-101,
and hoping that FreeBob ( early-alpha ) is going to sufficiently-work on it ( or I'm going to be stuck dual-booting ), but am reasonably certain OSS, aka open evolution wins when competing against closed-evolution, when seen long-term. . .

I don't know if RME-Audio's made a "win-driver", like the software-modems, or if they've used a fpga, or what, or if the Reason is really a "reason" hiding political-commitment, but I cannot commit that much resources to something that is guaranteed to force me to live-in an OS I find obnoxious, so I finance their competitors, it seems. . . ( who don't support linux, but who don't stomp compatibility, at-least. . .

I simply don't know if it isn't possible for RME-Audio to open the spec without running into IP liability/damage, but have no-doubt that permitting the market to shift ( as Ardour is doing ) so-that it isn't controlled by the upstream companies is felt to be a threat by many companies' establishment, and I know that committing the work necessary for making binary-only-drivers costs: so I neither blame nor bless 'em for their predicament. . .

Particularly since anyone wanting to do pro-recording without paying the SW-tax ( to the tune of $1000 for OS + Ardour-equiv + AV/Firewall/Etc ) is going to have a significant advantage, and anyone who read the Tipping Point ( customer-tracking stripped URI ) is going to understand the implications of that pressure on the market. . .