On 18 November 2014 22:19, Rob Kudla <sourceforge-raind...@kudla.org> wrote: > On 11/18/2014 02:23 PM, Vesa wrote:
>> Well, if you have old projects, you'll just have to finish them with 1.1 >> or 1.2 and render them to wavs. Then publish them, forget about it, and >> make new music with 2.0. > If this is the current development team's outlook, I really think LMMS 2.x > needs to be called something other than LMMS (and the project file > extensions should change too.) I can't speak for anyone else, but > personally, I'm never, ever done with a piece of music. I wouldn't respond as acerbically as Rob. But I do want to note: for us users, it's about our music. Users don't actually care about the software, they care what they can do with it. If LMMS 2 is file-incompatible with LMMS 1, it's not the same software at all. I fully appreciate how messed-up some codebases can be. I follow LibreOffice. Hoo boy. They had a *mess* to deal with. And they couldn't just tell everyone to throw away their documents and write new documents. There's a bit in Neal Stephenson's "In The Beginning Was the Command Line" about this: === I began using Microsoft Word as soon as the first version was released around 1985. After some initial hassles I found it to be a better tool than MacWrite, which was its only competition at the time. I wrote a lot of stuff in early versions of Word, storing it all on floppies, and transferred the contents of all my floppies to my first hard drive, which I acquired around 1987. As new versions of Word came out I faithfully upgraded, reasoning that as a writer it made sense for me to spend a certain amount of money on tools. Sometime in the mid-1980's I attempted to open one of my old, circa-1985 Word documents using the version of Word then current: 6.0 It didn't work. Word 6.0 did not recognize a document created by an earlier version of itself. By opening it as a text file, I was able to recover the sequences of letters that made up the text of the document. My words were still there. But the formatting had been run through a log chipper--the words I'd written were interrupted by spates of empty rectangular boxes and gibberish. Now, in the context of a business (the chief market for Word) this sort of thing is only an annoyance--one of the routine hassles that go along with using computers. It's easy to buy little file converter programs that will take care of this problem. But if you are a writer whose career is words, whose professional identity is a corpus of written documents, this kind of thing is extremely disquieting. There are very few fixed assumptions in my line of work, but one of them is that once you have written a word, it is written, and cannot be unwritten. The ink stains the paper, the chisel cuts the stone, the stylus marks the clay, and something has irrevocably happened (my brother-in-law is a theologian who reads 3250-year-old cuneiform tablets--he can recognize the handwriting of particular scribes, and identify them by name). But word-processing software--particularly the sort that employs special, complex file formats--has the eldritch power to unwrite things. A small change in file formats, or a few twiddled bits, and months' or years' literary output can cease to exist. === If I saw an easy way out of this dilemma I'd have posted it. If I could personally code my way out of it, I would. But "throw away all your stuff and write new stuff" isn't it, really. - d. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download BIRT iHub F-Type - The Free Enterprise-Grade BIRT Server from Actuate! Instantly Supercharge Your Business Reports and Dashboards with Interactivity, Sharing, Native Excel Exports, App Integration & more Get technology previously reserved for billion-dollar corporations, FREE http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=157005751&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ LMMS-devel mailing list LMMS-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/lmms-devel
