[Ardour-Users] Hm...

[Paul Davis]

On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 2:59 PM, David Kastrup <dak at gnu.org> wrote:

   [ ... ]

I could spend time going over every single point you raise. But I've
spent time doing that over the last 10 years, because your observatons
are not new. Every thing you bring up has some element of truth and
sense to it, and they all represent design decisions that we've had
visit and revisit over time. But everything you bring up also comes
with a heavy dose of expectation on your part about what the workflow
looks like. If I've learned anything from working on Ardour for more
than 10 years, and from being an Emacs user and developer for more
than 25 years, its that there isn't a single workflow for everyone and
by extension there isn't a single application behaviour or model for
everyone. Emacs being the perfect demonstration of this, wherein
despite its elegance, supreme power and overall conceptual beauty, it
still meets hostility in the face of users of vi and several other
editors.

In every example you cite, I could explain to you the workflows/use
scenarios that justify why Ardour behaves the way it does right now.
They are not the way *you* want it to work, that's true. But the
behaviour is there to meet several other different styles of working
that, over time, seem to be the most likely ones that the programs
users will either have prior experience with (e.g. ProTools users) or
expectations of.

I regret that Ardour doesn't meet your mental model of what a program
"like this" should do. But I also gave up long ago expecting that
everyone who thinks that Ardour might be useful for them is actually
going to find it so.

I will address one small example that you bought up: "Quit with
saving" does not mean "Quit and undo any changes to your system that
this program has made since it was started". I suspect that you are
overlooking the fact that a DAW, because of its potentially gargantuan
memory requirements, is actually saving state to disk at many points
in time other than when you say "Save". As Lamar noted, theoretically,
one might argue that this should happen to a "temporary" session that
is deleted at exit if not saved. There is something to be said for
this approach, and several arguments against it to. It works fine for
single-file editors, but has some notable drawbacks for DAWs.