I thought of dual boot but with a VM I can move files over a network. In the past I've had issues with moving files across different file systems, though I imagine ntfs support for Linux has matured since then. I'm probably not going to use something like FAT32 if I can help it.
I'd bet there is an open source synth that is 98% what you want.
Another slashdotter pointed out something called csounds. It sounds like what I'm looking for in a synth. I'd have to put it in a VM since Sibelius or Final seem to be the best for notation, but it looks like my synth is already out there.
I think that settles it. I'll get a Win 7 machine and put Ubuntu Studio in a VM. If Ubuntu Studio with Muse Score works for me, I'll swap Ubuntu and put Win 7 in a VM. If Ubuntu Studio doesn't do the trick, then I'll keep Win 7 and shell out the money for Finale and do the synthesis in csounds in the Linux VM. Cheers!
The idea is to build the music algorithmically, so you only need a CPU, not even a Sound card... and "if" latency exist working with MIDI software devices, that doesn't exist when creating audio files directly from mathematical definitions.
That was the idea for the synthesizer I was considering writing myself, actually, so I might not need to worry about that piece. I don't need a realtime synth. Unfortunately, for notation Finale (or possibly Sibelius) sound like the best for notation, which puts me on Windows or Mac. I'll check it out. I can always install a VM.
4. Composition: Finale and (whatever: Logic / Ableton / ProTools / Reaper / whatever) Your main point is to generate good composition - the software is just there to make it do something, so it will be more a question of what softsynths you use...)
It's pretty funny, my emphasis is on composition and the best solutions I've seen so far are Finale + either Reaper or ProTools, which is spot on with what you've recommended. I'm not familiar with Logic or Ableton, but they've come up a few times too, so I think I'll need to look into them too. After I settle on one of those, I think I'll know what hardware I need, but I'm leaning towards a Win7 PC. It's a shame there are no FOSS solutions (I was really hoping Ubuntu Studio would work), but I do think the least I can do to contribute would be work on a FOSS synth in.NET and put it on sourceforge.
Some people have principles and don't throw them out the window when it's convenient.
Well put. Unfortunately, my principles are in conflict. As much as I support FOSS, I am not willing to compromise my music to do so. I would support making the FOSS alternatives better (contributing if possible), but I wouldn't actually use something to produce music of a quality below my personal standards. Better to bring the FOSS alternatives up to par.
That was extremely helpful. The emphasis here is on composition, but I would like the auditioning to sound good, performed if possible (just recording and mixing), I don't want to be limited to physical instrument sounds (a synthesizer, but I think I can make my own), and I want my music to sound good when I share it. If any of it is ever performed live, I'd use different tools. Finale and Reaper sounds like it might be a usable combination for me and I think I could stomach the price, so I think I'll look into Reaper (although I'll admit I was secretly hoping for a FOSS solution).
That was me. Both are poorly worded. The title I tried to keep short, but should have been more like "Is FOSS music software as good as closed-source for my particular needs?" As for the summary, given two applications with the features I need, I usually always pick FOSS over closed-source, even if the closed-source alternative. I use or have used Firefox over IE, OpenOffice over MS Office, Gimp over PhotoShop, Ubuntu over Windows, etc. I like FOSS. A lot, actually. The issue here is that I like music even more and do not want to sacrifice quality. But my summary was long enough as it was, so I tried (unsuccessfully) to get that point across in as few words as possible.
Actually, I tried Ubuntu Studio a few years ago, and at the time, it wasn't quite up to snuff, though I don't doubt it has improved significantly. It's really just a question of how much it's improved.
Actually, that was quite helpful. If GarageBand is cheap enough to offset Apple's premium on hardware vs. PC + Finale, it is definitely worth looking into. Most of the posts above seem to indicate GarageBand isn't comparable to Finale, so I'm not really sure what to expect. Maybe it is just a question of what it does out-of-the-box? Maybe GarageBand just requires more work?
I'm not familiar with Ardour. I think I will read up on it, too, though from your comments, it sounds like it's not quite as good. Even if it doesn't have all the features of GarageBand or Finale, it might be possible to accomplish the same thing with multiple apps, though, so worth reading up on... I wouldn't have asked slashdot unless I was interested in FOSS alternatives. Big question about Ardour, though: Gnome or KDE?
If you are serious about doing it, avoid cable. Hook up the neighborhood with fiber to each home.
If they won't lay cable, who's going to lay fiber? Fiber is definitely preferable, but isn't it even more of a commitment from the utility?
But don't let me sidetrack you on the fiber. The subject is near and dear to my own heart. I would personally love to convince my township that we need fiber to every home, but I have no idea how to sell that apart from suggesting it will improve property value, so if you have any ideas, I'm all ears.
A machine readable web was what many people pushed for ten years ago. Then came HTML5 tag soup and "webapps" with messy code.
What's the deal with that? Whatever happened to xhtml? I am a little disappointed the W3C didn't merge the xhtml and HTML5 specifications... The web is messier than ever.</rant>
Watson, how do we ensure freedom and equality for all people?
People are only truly free from oppression and equal to each other in every way when they've been vaporized into their component atoms. I recommend a nuclear holocaust.
.NET does a great deal for you, and I really think the handicap has prevented me from learning what's really going on.
Rats. I had a really long reply about how C# was superior to C++ and that the stuff behind the scenes was the stuff you don't want to deal with, but then I realized you're whole point is not that you want to do it but that you want to see how it's done (and even just what's happening). So I concede, you are right..NET is not great if you are trying to understanding how computing and programming work at a low level. Once you learn all the stuff that has to happen at that level, chances are you'll then appreciate that.NET does these things for you.
I've never liked C++ better than C. I liked the object oriented design, but it was even more dangerous than C. When C# came out, I said, "Now this is what C++ should have been." I think.NET would be in better shape had all the C++ programmers moved to C#. Unfortunately, employers are still of the opinion that somebody who learned C# in college last year is going to be a better.NET developer than somebody who's been programming C++ for 15 years. Clueless. Actually, when I considered moving to C#, I remember seeing a job posting in 2001 that demanded 7 years.NET experience in lieu of having learned.NET in college. Again, this was not recently, this was in 2001. I can only imagine how that worked out.
Too bad I don't have any moderator points, I'd have given you an informative. I haven't been on slashdot recently so maybe that's why I have no points, but I strongly suspect I had some metamoderators mod down some of my past moderations in a rather controversial article I decided to moderate. If only we had meta-meta-moderation, I think I'd still have had a point left to give you. Too bad.
Belief in God is inherently irrational but that doesn't make it wrong. If you believe in a God so complete that nothing can be greater, then such a God is also proof of His own non-existence. I would hazard a guess that Godel's Incompleteness Theorem applies to God (because I believe in math more than anything found in the Bible). But alas, I am a practicing Christian. Like Godel, I used rational thought to arrive at an irrational conclusion. The only real argument a believer should have with an atheist is whether reality is consistent but incomplete or complete but inconsistent? I believe the latter while you, apparently, believe the former.
As with all metaphors, its value is for people who know very little about the topic, in that it helps them relating the topic to something which they're already familiar with.
I would at least qualify that with a note about how little value it actually has to the layman as most people are not well versed in any religion but their own, they've forgotten all their history from school and they'll have difficulty forming any kind of connection between two things as different as software and religion.
I think most of slashdot would agree that this would definitely be easier to understand if it had been in the form of a car analogy.
Yeah, I agree. I hit Submit to soon and left the bit out about Brick's mistake looking reasonable. Then I tried replying to myself to correct the omission but I guess I forgot to submit because I don't see it. (It's been a long time since I've commented on Slashdot but I really should not be having this much trouble with the UI concept called the "button." It's been around a while... I should get it by now.)
Whether you agree w/ the Affordable Care Act or not, it is legally required that everybody have insurance. When you've got a government mandate to use a website* and that website doesn't work, that's a pretty big problem.
* Yes, I am aware there are other ways to sign up. But a) have you ever had to wait for service at any office run by the government? and b) isn't this 2013? almost 2014?
The fact that slashdotters have kids should be news in itself. Admittedly, I'm the father of three.
I introduced my kids to what was current when they started playing. They've seen video games get better, but with things like Virtual Console and PS1/PS2 Classics, I can now download the games I played when I was a kid. I didn't need to do anything to get them to play them, either. They played around with everything, and they play things from Super Mario Bros 3 and Pac-Man to LittleBigPlanet and Minecraft.
I think a good game is good, period. I don't think games have gotten better over the years per se other than from a technical perspective. It's just that with more and more computing resources available, they expanded into areas they couldn't previously explore due to hardware contraints, but core gameplay/story/etc. is good or bad regardless of how advanced it is. To solidify my point, people will say new technology enables better games, but nobody ever blames current hardware for a bad game. Because technology only offers new ways to play, but does not alter what is fun to play.
Download/purchase a variety of fun stuff appropriate for their age and your kids will gravitate to the good ones.
Sorry, the point is 50% can reasonably be assumed to be a genuine offer. The Brick may not have a choice but to honor the discount, at least in some parts of the country.
Slashdot Mirror
That'll work. Cheers!
I thought of dual boot but with a VM I can move files over a network. In the past I've had issues with moving files across different file systems, though I imagine ntfs support for Linux has matured since then. I'm probably not going to use something like FAT32 if I can help it.
I'd bet there is an open source synth that is 98% what you want.
Another slashdotter pointed out something called csounds. It sounds like what I'm looking for in a synth. I'd have to put it in a VM since Sibelius or Final seem to be the best for notation, but it looks like my synth is already out there.
I think that settles it. I'll get a Win 7 machine and put Ubuntu Studio in a VM. If Ubuntu Studio with Muse Score works for me, I'll swap Ubuntu and put Win 7 in a VM. If Ubuntu Studio doesn't do the trick, then I'll keep Win 7 and shell out the money for Finale and do the synthesis in csounds in the Linux VM. Cheers!
The idea is to build the music algorithmically, so you only need a CPU, not even a Sound card ... and "if" latency exist working with MIDI software devices, that doesn't exist when creating audio files directly from mathematical definitions.
That was the idea for the synthesizer I was considering writing myself, actually, so I might not need to worry about that piece. I don't need a realtime synth. Unfortunately, for notation Finale (or possibly Sibelius) sound like the best for notation, which puts me on Windows or Mac. I'll check it out. I can always install a VM.
4. Composition: Finale and (whatever: Logic / Ableton / ProTools / Reaper / whatever) Your main point is to generate good composition - the software is just there to make it do something, so it will be more a question of what softsynths you use...)
It's pretty funny, my emphasis is on composition and the best solutions I've seen so far are Finale + either Reaper or ProTools, which is spot on with what you've recommended. I'm not familiar with Logic or Ableton, but they've come up a few times too, so I think I'll need to look into them too. After I settle on one of those, I think I'll know what hardware I need, but I'm leaning towards a Win7 PC. It's a shame there are no FOSS solutions (I was really hoping Ubuntu Studio would work), but I do think the least I can do to contribute would be work on a FOSS synth in .NET and put it on sourceforge.
Some people have principles and don't throw them out the window when it's convenient.
Well put. Unfortunately, my principles are in conflict. As much as I support FOSS, I am not willing to compromise my music to do so. I would support making the FOSS alternatives better (contributing if possible), but I wouldn't actually use something to produce music of a quality below my personal standards. Better to bring the FOSS alternatives up to par.
That was extremely helpful. The emphasis here is on composition, but I would like the auditioning to sound good, performed if possible (just recording and mixing), I don't want to be limited to physical instrument sounds (a synthesizer, but I think I can make my own), and I want my music to sound good when I share it. If any of it is ever performed live, I'd use different tools. Finale and Reaper sounds like it might be a usable combination for me and I think I could stomach the price, so I think I'll look into Reaper (although I'll admit I was secretly hoping for a FOSS solution).
That was me. Both are poorly worded. The title I tried to keep short, but should have been more like "Is FOSS music software as good as closed-source for my particular needs?" As for the summary, given two applications with the features I need, I usually always pick FOSS over closed-source, even if the closed-source alternative. I use or have used Firefox over IE, OpenOffice over MS Office, Gimp over PhotoShop, Ubuntu over Windows, etc. I like FOSS. A lot, actually. The issue here is that I like music even more and do not want to sacrifice quality. But my summary was long enough as it was, so I tried (unsuccessfully) to get that point across in as few words as possible.
Actually, I tried Ubuntu Studio a few years ago, and at the time, it wasn't quite up to snuff, though I don't doubt it has improved significantly. It's really just a question of how much it's improved.
Actually, that was quite helpful. If GarageBand is cheap enough to offset Apple's premium on hardware vs. PC + Finale, it is definitely worth looking into. Most of the posts above seem to indicate GarageBand isn't comparable to Finale, so I'm not really sure what to expect. Maybe it is just a question of what it does out-of-the-box? Maybe GarageBand just requires more work?
I'm not familiar with Ardour. I think I will read up on it, too, though from your comments, it sounds like it's not quite as good. Even if it doesn't have all the features of GarageBand or Finale, it might be possible to accomplish the same thing with multiple apps, though, so worth reading up on... I wouldn't have asked slashdot unless I was interested in FOSS alternatives. Big question about Ardour, though: Gnome or KDE?
If you are serious about doing it, avoid cable. Hook up the neighborhood with fiber to each home.
If they won't lay cable, who's going to lay fiber? Fiber is definitely preferable, but isn't it even more of a commitment from the utility?
But don't let me sidetrack you on the fiber. The subject is near and dear to my own heart. I would personally love to convince my township that we need fiber to every home, but I have no idea how to sell that apart from suggesting it will improve property value, so if you have any ideas, I'm all ears.
A machine readable web was what many people pushed for ten years ago. Then came HTML5 tag soup and "webapps" with messy code.
What's the deal with that? Whatever happened to xhtml? I am a little disappointed the W3C didn't merge the xhtml and HTML5 specifications... The web is messier than ever.</rant>
Democracy creates these idiots.
Finally, an argument in favor of authoritarianism. About time.
You might actually want him to lie on occasion...
Watson, how do we ensure freedom and equality for all people?
People are only truly free from oppression and equal to each other in every way when they've been vaporized into their component atoms. I recommend a nuclear holocaust.
.NET does a great deal for you, and I really think the handicap has prevented me from learning what's really going on.
Rats. I had a really long reply about how C# was superior to C++ and that the stuff behind the scenes was the stuff you don't want to deal with, but then I realized you're whole point is not that you want to do it but that you want to see how it's done (and even just what's happening). So I concede, you are right. .NET is not great if you are trying to understanding how computing and programming work at a low level. Once you learn all the stuff that has to happen at that level, chances are you'll then appreciate that .NET does these things for you.
The JAVA/.NET generation is a fucking disaster.
I've never liked C++ better than C. I liked the object oriented design, but it was even more dangerous than C. When C# came out, I said, "Now this is what C++ should have been." I think .NET would be in better shape had all the C++ programmers moved to C#. Unfortunately, employers are still of the opinion that somebody who learned C# in college last year is going to be a better .NET developer than somebody who's been programming C++ for 15 years. Clueless. Actually, when I considered moving to C#, I remember seeing a job posting in 2001 that demanded 7 years .NET experience in lieu of having learned .NET in college. Again, this was not recently, this was in 2001. I can only imagine how that worked out.
Trolling's no fun when the trolls go after each other. Give it a rest, you two.
Too bad I don't have any moderator points, I'd have given you an informative. I haven't been on slashdot recently so maybe that's why I have no points, but I strongly suspect I had some metamoderators mod down some of my past moderations in a rather controversial article I decided to moderate. If only we had meta-meta-moderation, I think I'd still have had a point left to give you. Too bad.
Belief in God is inherently irrational but that doesn't make it wrong. If you believe in a God so complete that nothing can be greater, then such a God is also proof of His own non-existence. I would hazard a guess that Godel's Incompleteness Theorem applies to God (because I believe in math more than anything found in the Bible). But alas, I am a practicing Christian. Like Godel, I used rational thought to arrive at an irrational conclusion. The only real argument a believer should have with an atheist is whether reality is consistent but incomplete or complete but inconsistent? I believe the latter while you, apparently, believe the former.
As with all metaphors, its value is for people who know very little about the topic, in that it helps them relating the topic to something which they're already familiar with.
I would at least qualify that with a note about how little value it actually has to the layman as most people are not well versed in any religion but their own, they've forgotten all their history from school and they'll have difficulty forming any kind of connection between two things as different as software and religion.
I think most of slashdot would agree that this would definitely be easier to understand if it had been in the form of a car analogy.
Yeah, I agree. I hit Submit to soon and left the bit out about Brick's mistake looking reasonable. Then I tried replying to myself to correct the omission but I guess I forgot to submit because I don't see it. (It's been a long time since I've commented on Slashdot but I really should not be having this much trouble with the UI concept called the "button." It's been around a while... I should get it by now.)
Whether you agree w/ the Affordable Care Act or not, it is legally required that everybody have insurance. When you've got a government mandate to use a website* and that website doesn't work, that's a pretty big problem.
* Yes, I am aware there are other ways to sign up. But a) have you ever had to wait for service at any office run by the government? and b) isn't this 2013? almost 2014?
The fact that slashdotters have kids should be news in itself. Admittedly, I'm the father of three.
I introduced my kids to what was current when they started playing. They've seen video games get better, but with things like Virtual Console and PS1/PS2 Classics, I can now download the games I played when I was a kid. I didn't need to do anything to get them to play them, either. They played around with everything, and they play things from Super Mario Bros 3 and Pac-Man to LittleBigPlanet and Minecraft.
I think a good game is good, period. I don't think games have gotten better over the years per se other than from a technical perspective. It's just that with more and more computing resources available, they expanded into areas they couldn't previously explore due to hardware contraints, but core gameplay/story/etc. is good or bad regardless of how advanced it is. To solidify my point, people will say new technology enables better games, but nobody ever blames current hardware for a bad game. Because technology only offers new ways to play, but does not alter what is fun to play.
Download/purchase a variety of fun stuff appropriate for their age and your kids will gravitate to the good ones.
Sorry, the point is 50% can reasonably be assumed to be a genuine offer. The Brick may not have a choice but to honor the discount, at least in some parts of the country.