Welcome, stranger!
Take a seat, have a biscuit, look around. While you are getting comfortable, I’ll tell you why you’re here :0)
I am an audio professional, both maintaining and operating audio (and other media) hard & software.
I have a passionate belief in public service broadcasting, national health systems – and open source software!
However, while the first of those is battling for a future even in it’s heartlands, and the second is hoping for a much needed injection… the third one, in my humble opinion, has not even achieved any acceptance broad enough to make it a viable proposal – in the audio/media industry, that is!
Over the years I have had several tries at Linux – I downloaded RH when that took three days – in Uni. I bought SuSE 5. I loved (and was scared to bits – not by the software, but by the attitude of the converts :0) ) my first steps in Debian three years ago. Each time I learned, I liked, I disliked… and then it was time to get to work, and with a heavy heart, back came the system disk with my trusted Windows system.
To put this into context: I came to computers late in life, but have written software, and database applications. Even earned money with it. All very simple stuff, but I am not afraid of some brain surgery on my computer. I can find my way around a linux OS and I think I am comfortable with vim, the shells, the processes in general, etc.
However, any recording and editing gear is a tool to me. A tool to create, or help others create, music. Within the Windows world, that tool took me a couple of hours to set up – literally. Now it is there, reliably, doing it’s thing. But it is expensive, it is corporate, it is *bleurgh* – Windows.
Linux promises many things, and cheap software is not the main goal here. But in the past the setting up of such systems involved many of my friends having their patience sorely tested, me spending nights upon nights of investigating, and never trusting the system to perform when it mattered, because it was all a bit… last minute tweaks.
I don’t expect to be able to run a linux based system without any learning, without any deeper understanding of, say, the ALSA subsystem etc. But if I have to spend days and nights building tools in order to help me to build just more tools in order to make a system that makes music – then Linux is not for me, and nor, so I suspect, is it for a majority of my colleagues. And I think that’s a shame.
I am here in the quest of a distribution that I can load into my Dell Inspiron 8200 with a RME Hammerfall DSP card, load some software, do some moderate tweaks – and be off to a live gig, knowing that when I wake up tomorrow the performance is safely on my HD – and I can start editing and mixing it!
My last brush with the world of open source for audio was two years ago, when a friend pointed out Agnula – A Gnu/Linux Audio distribution. It went straight on my laptop – and stayed there, as a dual boot until now, for the reasons mentioned above – and now? Now might be the time to try again. As my friend says, try again, fail again, fail better!
And then the shock: Agnula is dead. Apparently some people are keeping the corpse and are quite possibly going to turn it into a much better, much nicer “monster”. But I am stranded. The internet is full of advice – from 2004, mostly. Many webpages, once lovingly maintained, link to a nirvana. With open source, the knowledge sharing between users is crucial, but it seems to me that information management is also least cut to eternal newbies, casual users, who find themselves lost in the masses of data, very little of it useful to the task in hand.
So here’s the deal: I have my laptop in front of me – I have a brand new hard disk in a caddy so that I don’t have to faff about with dual boots. I shall spend about half an hour every day researching this – my job allowing. And I shall share with you truthfully every step I take, and collate as much information as I can on these pages. If you have any useful links or any other contributions, you shall be my friend forever (unless, of course, that contribution is an attempt to sell me body modifications etc. Shame on you!).
And now… I shall go hunting!
limu
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