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a_vision [2008/05/01 11:14]
cannam created |
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| [[http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_name=200602191223.08676.cannam%40all-day-breakfast.com|Mail archive link]] - [[http://lalists.stanford.edu/lad/2006/02/0119.html|See also]] - "Having visions is easy" | |
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| <code> | |
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| On Sunday 19 Feb 2006 00:38, Luis Garrido wrote: | |
| > So what is your vision, then? | |
| |
| I'm not sure I have a "vision", or at least not one that I understand | |
| how to realise, which is probably why it isn't very well expressed in | |
| Rosegarden. | |
| |
| Traditional notation is a very useful thing in music learning, in | |
| exchanging and publishing certain sorts of music in certain ways, and | |
| in musicological contexts. MIDI and the like are very useful not just | |
| for producing a finished piece of work (in some ways MIDI is rather | |
| limiting for that) but for experimentation and "rough drafting". What | |
| I want is to be able to start in either one of those areas and | |
| incorporate the other, either to start with an existing score and | |
| explore performance possibilities for it, or to start with a | |
| performance and try to work out what makes it what it is. | |
| |
| In other words, I'm not directly all that interested in either making | |
| studio software or published scores. I'm interested in looking at and | |
| editing music in symbolic terms for educational and exploratory | |
| purposes. I would like to be able to see, study, and manipulate the | |
| performance of a score, not just have it played to me, I would like to | |
| be able to hear other people's interpretations while studying the same | |
| score, I would like to be able to use linear track-style and other | |
| block or structural editing operations to edit a score structure, and I | |
| would like to be able to derive likely scores from performances and | |
| experiments. | |
| |
| I hope all this manages to sound at the same time sufficiently vague, | |
| high-concept, and bleeding obvious. | |
| |
| > Is there any commercial software you think succeeds in this? | |
| |
| Sibelius is in fact the closest thing I know of, not so much because of | |
| its good score layout as because of its parts management and the | |
| integration of reasonable (if not brilliant) tempo tracking, synth | |
| plugins, and the like. | |
| |
| > It is all about choices. When mscore is usable and linuxsampler can | |
| > play Kontakt libraries I will be able to kick Windows out of my | |
| > computer for good. | |
| |
| Well, there is that practical viewpoint. | |
| |
| As a user, there is always a time (or many) when what you really want is | |
| a direct alternative to an existing program, whether for a different | |
| platform, for a lower cost, in an open-source environment or whatever. | |
| |
| As a developer, it offends me to imitate proprietary software directly. | |
| Rosegarden is a deliberately conservative program that does an awful | |
| lot of borrowing from the general classes of track-based sequencers and | |
| notation software, but it isn't a knock-off of any single program. | |
| Where we've looked at the alternatives, we've done it with a view to | |
| trying to come up with something better, or something that fits more | |
| with some conceived model for the rest of the program. Even when we've | |
| only succeeded in producing something worse, less reliable, more | |
| confusing and harder to use, at least we've usually made the honest | |
| effort to investigate and understand what we're trying to make. Indeed | |
| even if the end result then turned out to be almost indistinguishable | |
| from another program, we would still have made it with some integrity. | |
| |
| But to set out deliberately to produce and distribute an exact | |
| replacement for an existing proprietary program, unless there is a | |
| really strong necessity, is not a righteous thing to do. To replace | |
| Sibelius with a better program for Linux would be good work. To | |
| attempt to clone Sibelius for Linux is a wrong to the creators of | |
| Sibelius and offensive to the creative spirit in the programmers doing | |
| the work. To do so while claiming that the clone is superior software | |
| because it has "open source ethics" is doubly wrong. It would be | |
| better to have no program that worked as well, than to have our best | |
| program in the field be a cheap duplicate. | |
| |
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| Chris | |
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| </code> | |
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