[Freepats] Breaking silence and the road to free musical instruments

Mon May 7 21:09:14 EST 2007

El Dom 06 May 2007 07:37, Mark Constable escribió:
 | On Sunday 06 May 2007 06:53:53 Roberto Gordo Saez wrote:
 | > Indeed, it's been very quiet on this list. There are only few
 | > contributions and based on the responses I usually get, I know that main
 | > offenders are all those "semi-free" soundfonts out there. They are the
 | > real evil. People do not feel urged to contribute. They are discouraged
 | > to produce real free soundfonts. Why bother?
 | > ...
 |
 | Excellent post Roberto. Thanks for expressing your thoughts
 | so well, especially considering English is not your primary
 | language. So, some thoughts from me in no particular order...
 |
 | This is not possible in reality but if just one "professional
 | audio engineer" was paid a wage to spend 40 hours a week
 | working towards producing various open source instruments
 | then in a year, or two, we would have everything we currently
 | miss. If this had happened a couple of years ago then we
 | would now have a full GM set of instruments in 24/96 format.
 |
 | Yes, it would take a lot of money to do something like this
 | but if 100 people and/or a few businesses, like RedHat,
 | Canonical and even DELL, contributed $250 per year then
 | something like this could be done. This would actually be
 | cheaper than each buying a full set of professional high
 | quality samples, and then being locked into Windows as the
 | only way to use them.
 |
 | We are waiting for the egg to lay the chicken, in that if
 | freepats, or any libre sample set, gets enough exposure then
 | "the community" might start to contribute and we could end
 | up with a complete sample set good enough for real world
 | usage (including professional). The above mythical idea of
 | employing a dedicated engineer to push through the tipping
 | point barrier could work but even this idea itself would
 | take years to initiate and setup.
 |
 | There is also another HUGE fundamental problem and that is
 | the tools needed to create, manage and play good samples.
 |
 | There are some great A/V orientated distros that mostly
 | provide a good cross section of apps, and I'm just starting
 | to explore them now, but the essential glue for all of them
 | is the kernel, ALSA and JACK compatibility. Ubuntu Feisty is
 | the first mainstream distro I've seen with a "lowlat" kernel
 | option BUT it's missing pcm_jack. It's the first time I've
 | ever seen qjackctl show <1ms latency with no overruns on my
 | AMD desktop machine. I just tried the 32bit 64studio on my
 | Intel based core-duo DELL laptop but JACK won't run. It also
 | locks up when I drop ethernet interfaces, so it hangs when
 | trying to reboot... indicating a buggy kernel patchset.

<1ms latency?

You will need a good soundcard. For "poor" users, a SB Live! is the best they 
can byu, maybe (and I think it's no more into the market)... withj an 
integrated soundcard, you can manage to run JACK at 5ms latency, or less, but 
I dont think you can <1ms .

And, sorry to ask, but, I must learn: why should someone needs less than 1ms 
of latency?

When I play a MIDI instrument at 10ms I dont listen this difference, also when 
I say "hello" to a mic connected to JACK and Ardour, JACK-Rack or so...

so... I dont understan why we should need less than 1ms latency,

Running Musix 1.0 rc1:

My hardware is not good: AMD Duron 1800 (very low cache memory), 384mb RAM, SB 
Live!, I can get JACK to 1.33ms latency in PLAY mode, but it works better if 
I get 5.33ms latency, no xruns at all, also if I use 2.66ms of latency.

For recording, I can make it at 5.33ms latency: I dont listen the differency, 
but if I record at 20ms, I do.

GNU/Linux can get low latencies from cheap (onboard) soundcards, I dont know 
if Windows can... but, yes, OK, you can not record sound samples from cheap 
soundcards for Freepats, so, you will need buy something like an M-Audio, or 
RME, etc.

But you can _edit_ soundfonts in any situation, you can even not use JACK at 
all to edit a soundfont.!!

 | This is on top of years of frustration trying to get a decent
 | and stable JACK setup. I change distros once or twice a year
 | and every time I get close I have to start all over again.
 | So, any idea of me actually being productive on my linux
 | systems, even if I had the skills needed to contribute to
 | creating instruments, is severely limited by the stability
 | of the low-level "LAJ" tool chain.

Now it's more stable than ever, and you dont need big hardware setup to edit 
soundfonts: you need maybe a great amount of RAM memory, yes, and a good CPU, 
maybe 1.8GHZ would be enough for big soundfonts (more than 100mb)

 | I was recently on the #debian IRC channel and asked why there
 | was no comparable lowlat kernel for etch or unstable and the
 | answers were "just because ubuntu has one doesn't mean we have
 | to", "no one needs that realtime stuff" and, "if you have to
 | ask how to get a realtime kernel then you don't need it" !!!

Well: no words for these comments, that's why GNU/Linux distros for musicians 
exists.

But the kernel it's just a part of the thing, also ALSA and JACK, i mean, if 
we think freedom software is good, it must be user friendly to spread, so we 
can help it to be user friendly

 | Again, if just one dedicated kernel engineer was paid to
 | produce a distro agnostic kernel + alsa + jack repository
 | then most of my low-level end user frustrations would
 | disappear. 

How could it be possible? 64Studio people is paid, and their kernels are not 
distro agnostic, but you can install them into any distro I think (a friend 
of my told me he had installed them into mandriva, etc.)

 | As it is now, the dozen or so distros with JACK 
 | enabled audio systems are NOT pooling their resources to
 | ensure the essential kernel + alsa + jack triage is usable
 | across a large selection of hardware.

"across a large selection of hardware": ok, but, what do you mean with "a 
large selection"?

 | I'm about to download Musix :-)

Will be the same as 64studio, or worse maybe, I dont know :P but I made a lot 
of music using Musix, now there are almost no uncomfortable issues.

Let's call it Freedom MIDI Instrument

or

Freedom Instrument: MIDI

FIT. I dont know.

 | The most important aspect about "freepats", aside from it
 | existing at all and therefor being better than nothing, is
 | that it is distro agnostic... I think this is an important
 | aspect and some kind of "marketing strategy" to improve it's
 | presentation to both developers and end-users would help,
 | in a small way, the overall effort.
 |
 | A bit of a controversial sidenote is that I personally am
 | quite sure that the failure of Ogg-Vorbis to capture the
 | imagination of the mp3 crowd and become it's natural
 | replacement is simply... it's name and labelling. "ogg"
 | is a really dumb name that does nothing to enhance it's
 | true stature and usefulness in the eyes of naive mainstream
 | end-users. If, for instance, it had of been called "mpx"
 | (or whatever) meaning mp3 extended/improved/ng (or whatever)
 | then something as simple as that COULD have been a tipping
 | point 2 or 3 years ago just when podcasting took off. As it
 | is now we will probably be stuck with mp3 being the base
 | default digital audio format probably forever... which is
 | entirely unnecessary because Vorbis is a great audio codec.
 |
 | Anyway, my opinion about the above makes me nervous about
 | continuing to use "freepats" as the label for a libre set
 | of samples. Perhaps I should have made this point in a
 | separate thread, so if anyone wants to comment about this
 | then perhaps start another thread altogether.
 |
 | FWIW
 |
 | --markc
 | _______________________________________________
 | Freepats mailing list
 | Freepats at opensrc.org
 | http://opensrc.org/listinfo/freepats

-- 
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