Hi Rob!
Aha! The eternal 'I don't like JACK' argument arises yet again! This is the
most common complaint raised against Linux audio. The truth of the matter
for most is that JACK is very useful to have around once you've got your
head round it and most learn to love it pretty quickly - its very powerful
and the unquestioned standard in Linux audio. Thats not to say its for
everyone of course. What is? Distros like KXStudio and AVLinux remove most
of the pain of getting JACK configured, should that be an issue.
qtractor allows you to save projects as .qtz files which wraps everything
up required to move a project from one machine to another, bar plugins of
course. This is a common pitfall of plugin-based DAWs, thats true, buts its
not a big deal if you stick to using freely available plugins available in
most distro repos.
You should note I never suggested LMMS should try to become like qtractor -
I'm not advocating that at all! I just wanted to make people on this list
aware that Linux users already have a great FLOSS sequencer/DAW that is
good enough for most workflows/users. qtractor has improved a lot over the
last couple of years so I urge people to give it another go if they've not
tried it recently - thats all!
Dan
On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 4:40 PM, Rob Kudla
<[email protected]>wrote:
> On 01/14/2014 05:45 AM, Dan MacDonald wrote:
> > seems most people on this list are Linux users so I don't understand why
> > they aren't already using qtractor, presuming they're aware of it?
>
> 1. I can build entire songs in LMMS project files, which I can then email
> to other people or backup safely without adding
>
> $ dpkg -l >projectname-possible-dependencies.txt
>
> to my workflow, and have done so. It's too bad that you don't find its
> built-in instruments useful, but most of us here do. It allows me to get
> around the problem that the rest of the Linux audio community has tried
> again and again, with initiatives like LASH and LADISH, to combat, and
> they've failed every single time. So, using qtractor or any other MIDI
> sequencer without its own instruments is essentially like going back to the
> bad old days of the '80s for me, when I had a couple racks of synthesizers
> and had to remember the patches and settings (and save sysex files, in some
> cases) for each one of them in order to reconstruct a track.
>
> 2. I can run LMMS without remembering how to start and configure JACK. I
> just launched qtractor and it immediately complained I had no JACK or ALSA
> midi server running, requiring a restart after I had jumped through its
> hoops. One of my biggest issues with most Linux audio production tools is
> that they require you to learn a whole workflow (start JACK server, set up
> audio routing, set up MIDI routing) before you hear a single note, while
> with LMMS you start the program, double-click a track and hear a note in
> the default instrument.
>
> 3. With LMMS, when you're happy with what you have, Project/Render will
> make you a wav file of your song. With every other Linux MIDI program I've
> used, and unless I totally missed something in its interface, qtractor is
> no exception, you have to record the song in real time and hope for no JACK
> hiccups, which got very, very, VERY tedious when I was in the final stages
> of tweaking a track.
>
> LMMS is not meant to be a MIDI sequencer or HDR. It occupies the space
> between MOD trackers and MIDI sequencers, having its own built-in sound
> generation options that go far beyond sample playback, but totally capable
> of producing a track from start to finish. I'm told this is similar to the
> Fruity Loops workflow, but Fruity Loops appeared after I'd already dumped
> Windows. Yes, the Unix way is to have 10 different tools connected via IPC
> -- on the command line it's pipes, in the audio world it's JACK and MIDI.
> That's great on the command line where you can copy and paste a huge
> pipeline of commands or save them as a shell script, but when the 10
> different tools are all individual X programs, it's a huge pain in the ass.
>
> That workflow also impedes my creativity hugely. I couldn't get through a
> single song from 2002, when I recorded my last track in the late, great
> Buzz before ditching Windows, until 2009 when I started using LMMS
> seriously. I have five old MIDI synthesizers in the den. They haven't been
> powered up since I moved into this house six years ago, because I can do
> more with LMMS than I can with any of them (a CZ-101, a DX7, an M1, and two
> newer sample-playback workstations I inherited when my mom died). My piano
> has been on, but I'd only really use that for input; I have piano sample
> sets that sound far better and there's no analog barrier between its
> waveforms and my song.
>
> Apart from the lack of arbitrary routing, to me LMMS is the closest thing
> Linux has to Buzz, and that's what I've used LMMS to replace. When I'm
> recording a song based on guitar or piano, sure, I use something else, but
> usually it's Audacity because I don't need or want real-time effects.
>
> So, the last thing I want is for LMMS to be more like qtractor (or MUSE or
> Rosegarden or any of the other MIDI sequencers I banged my head on before
> finding LMMS).
>
> Why is this on the devel list, again?
>
> Rob
>
>
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