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Wired: Pro-Level, GPL'd Audio Editing For Linux
Sven Hertz writes "For all us music professionals who were longing to a promising music production and creation software on Linux, there is now Wired (screenshots). It supports unlimited Audio/Midi tracks playback and recording, and introduces a Plugin system for instruments and effects (VST support under way too). It can also read AKAI CDs and import 18 different Wave formats. The first test version was released a few days ago and its news made the rounds successfully on OSNews & GnomeDesktop while it was placed "app of the week" over at GnomeFiles."
Would be nice to have more GPLed/Free audio/music editing apps for macos X. Sure, Garageband is nice, but the more the merrier!
A very important rule in software engineering (especially in OSS) is: A program should have as few dependancies as possible.
- >xgoofy) dependancy on a program who's main function is audio processing?
So this is for gnome. Next week we'll have a similar thing for KDE on qt. And next month another tool based on XUL that runs on all systems....
Why, did't they had to add the GNOME(->pango->freetype->xrenderer->xpat->rederer
They will lose users because at the time the same thing appears with no WM dependancies, users will prefer that. Compare KDE-mail-app, GNOME-mail-app and mutt. Everybody except KDE/GNOME developers uses mutt.
...you keep using that term. I think it does not mean what you think it means.
My other first post is car post.
Do you realise you advise him getting a new computer for an app?
Kind of expensive, don't you think? Especially since he has already a working solution dual booting Windows..
I wouldn't brand you as a troll, but as an "over-enthousiast"!
Thx Bob!
/. didn't have stickies, as we could compile a "recommended" app list summary.
:( I wonder what people are using instead?)
Too bad
I finally remembered that DVD authoring program for Windows...
- DVD Maestro => DVD Studio, or Sizzle
(Allthough it is no longer being sold.
You a Red Dwarf fan?! The seasons are out on DVD! (Or your "local" torrent TV show listing)
Peace
What does the Mac do out of the box that Windows doesn't do? Like you, I'm not trolling but I really don't see any evidence of this. I have been a Mac user for 15 years and have a dual G4 in my office and have been settng up a couple of dual G5 ProTools systems over the past few months so I have a decent cache of experience to go on.
Maybe in the Windows 3.1 days or even windows 9x I would concede that the Mac had better audio capabilities by default, but I really don't see it these days.
Dissolve... Resolve... Evolve...
It would have been better to use standard UI widgets for a lot of that stuff. When will people learn that rotary knobs do not work well in computer interfaces.
We use rotary knobs on physical devices because they are easy to manipulate by applying friction with our fingers. A far better alternative for a computer-based interface would be a slider combined with a text-entry widget to allow precise values to be entered, thus making the computer interface better than the real-life one, rather than reinventing all of the limitations of the physical interface with the extra pain of figuring out how to manipulate a turning control with a mouse pointer. They'd also have a bit more room to write a decent text label on the control, rather than the unreadable blurs they use now.
None of it goes together, either. If they'd just let the standard UI widgets render in the standard way it would have looked a lot more consistant across different parts of the application, and they'd only have had to implement special behavior for the more specialised widgets such as the waveform viewers and so forth. I suspect that as we reach higher and higher display resolutions that bitmap-based interface will end up tiny and unusable, too.
If you're using Alcohol 120% mainly for it's virtual drive features on Windows, you won't need anything on the Mac. DiskCopy (now DiskUtility, i believe) allows you to create images of disks, and the OS supports mounting of these natively. And it's been that way for at least the 10+ years that I've been using Macs...One of the beauties of not having letters assigned to drives...
this app isn't "pro quality". Its tinker grade at best, alot of the bargain bin software at your local music store is better at being amateur grade than this product is.
1) Lack of good low latency options for the MIDI, etc.
2) Where's the vocoder? the pitch matching? the multipass filters? the FFT-based filter? the automatic noise reduction based on a noise sample?
3 examples (of many) of why this isn't *PRO* software. I already saw many posts "WOW! FINALLY ANOTHER REASON I CAN GO 100% TO LINUX!!!!"
This release and any number of previous sound software releases suggest that but I dont see anything from 1 hr of reading on the website about this package that suggests it even competes with Samplitude releases from 1995 or Sound Forge in 1995 in terms of even single channel editing.
Windows and Mac still and always will rule for "pro" sound editing, unless protools, samplitude, propellerheads or any number of other companies port to windows.
--- ask me about nihilism, I will have nothing to tell you.
If the application is either multi-threaded, or uses multiple processes, then it automatically supports SMP.
On Linux, apps don't have to be specially aware of multiple processors. Linux apps are SMP aware merely by being multi-threaded or multi-processed. Linux will automatically spread them around the processors.
I hate to rain on everyone's parade here, but every time a "great" linux app comes out, it turns out to be a pale mockery of some "great" Windows app. Here's my opinion on this project:
It is (at least to me) obviously mimicking Cubase. Cubase is a serious application, used by serious musicians and audio engineers. I use Cubase, almost daily, and I find it kind of backwards sometimes because it is designed from a musician's point of view, making it look like conventional rack equipment, while I am a code guru and I'd rather have extreme control over everything.
Now we have Wired, which is a virtual studio app built for a coder/hacker's operating system; why are we imitating the rich fool's interface when we could instead be designing one that is better suited to the target demographic ? I'm not saying this app does not belong on Linux, but instead of blindly copying an existing app's look and feel, why not start with a clean slate and build it RIGHT ?
And VST support ? that's a pipe dream if you ask me. Running Win32 video codecs in MPlayer is one thing, running Win32 VST plugs is a whole different ball game. One thing I learned over the years is that most people who are good at music, suck at code, and vice-versa. I am one sexy exception =) What I mean is that the typical VST plugin is kind of rough around the edges.. they look pretty and sound kinky, but under the hood it's grossly inefficient and poorly debugged code. VST plugs tend to crash often, and most likely depend on a few Win32 support DLL's for a handful of stupid non-audio tasks. Lots of nasty stuff to "emulate" if you want it to work good (and fast).
What I think Linux needs is for people to accept a common audio interchange format and protocol. VST is just a standard for software plugins, but it is Steinberg's intellectual property. What if Linux had a license-free standard for audio chains, let's call it LinVST for fun. Write one linux app that takes LinVST Input, does a few nasties then spits out LinVST Output. Then that conformant app can be plugged into any LinVST-aware host.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
By the way, there's a huge problem with VST and GPL'd programs: the VST SDK has a restrictive license on it that doesn't allow you to redistribute it - you have to download it from Steinberg yourself, after agreeing to their terms. So the only way to distribute a GPL'd program that depends on the VST header files is if you add an exception clause to the GPL...but if you do that, you can't link to any other libraries without that exception clause, such as FFTW, for example. It's a big pain, and that's the reason Audacity doesn't have native VST support (though there are still ways to access VST plug-ins through plug-in bridges).
On a b/w limited server? Nitpick: at gnomefiles it says "aims to be a professional ..." Also warns this is a beta, and offers the Sourceforge forum as help. For a "pro-level" digital audio app I would expect to be able to pay money for help, GPL or no. Having run thru a mini zoo of daw apps in the past 15 years, we always come back to Digidesign. As an earlier post said, the tight coupling of h/w + s/w means it always works as advertised.
The list of dependencies for Wired is also a bit worrying, but with supreme confidence the ToDo file is empty. The source is available at Sourceforge so I'll try to buld it, and report back if there's anything interesting...
How's that for a dirty-sounding subject line?
...
You're right that on-screen knobs meant to be manipulated with mouse-dragging are lame; however, as another responder has pointed out, knobs also take up far less valuable space, so your channel density can be higher.
That may not be a great tradeoff for everyone -- how many channels are most home recordists really interesting in playing with at once?* -- but it's one that a lot of audio programs' designers seem to think was wise.
The real point I'd like to make though is that while on-screen knobs are lame as a mouse-driven interface tool, they're *not* necessarily bad; for instance; a combination of mouse-over activation and a PowerMate or controlled by an external MIDI control surface, for instance, might be a really nice setup. It's not perfect for on-screen control elements to scream out for off-screen controllers, but not much is. I really wish keyboards could come with a rotary controller standard -- rotation is a nice motion!
timothy
* However, there might be quite a few who *do* want a lot, I'm not denying that
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5