[ardour-users] Ardour New-user and Linux new as well :D

[Brett McCoy]

Paul Davis wrote:

> 	a) the user interface is not part of the core operating system.
>            In XP, it is more or less impossible to interact 
> 	   meaningfully with the operating system without a GUI. In
> 	   Linux (and all *nix-related systems), the GUI is just
>            an additional way of interacting with programs and the
>            system itself. 
> 
>         b) in linux (and all *nix-related systems), it is always
>            possible to "look under the hood" - to get inside 
>            the system and see what is going on in varying levels
>            of detail. this is much harder to do in XP, which 
> 	   is based on the idea that most OS functionality 
>            should be opaque to most users.

It's kind of ironic that the Macintosh used to be more like XP in this 
respect (or should I say, XP is the way Mac OS used to be...?), but OSX 
has made the Mac much more respectable to the *nix crowd.

One thing I will further mention about Jack, Favio, is that the Unix 
(and Linux) philosophy has always been to have a set of tools where each 
tool does one thing and does it very well... (which is why the 
bytestream interface Paul mentioned is very important -- a consistent 
interface between the tools allows you to easily mix and match).

The use of jack follows this philosophy, so you can have a collection of 
audio tools that can interconnect to each other, distributing the 
workflow, rather than having a monolithic application that tries to do 
everything, which is the Windows philosophy. Unfortunately, this can 
lead to components of this application to be limited in functionality.

So while Ardour doesn't do MIDI sequencing (and I personally don't care 
if it ever does or nor), you can use Jack to synchronize Ardour with a 
full-featured external MIDI sequencer (like Rosegarden), and let the 
sequencer do what it does best, handle MIDI; and let Ardour do what it 
does best, record audio.

-- Brett