Re: [microsound] MUTE article on PD + free software

[Alex Young <alex@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 7 Apr 2005, at 17:02, Kevin Ponto wrote:
> Doesn't it usually take many years to get to a point where you can use 
> a program like PD with any great efficiency, and wouldn't these years 
> of limitation have a drastic effect upon one's music?

It can do depending on your previous experiences - hence me finding 
tools like Supercollider easier than Logic at first (being used to odd 
programming languages like Lisp I can think that way fairly well).

It's a complicated issue to discuss because people write music for many 
reasons and think about it very differently.  I find I can get too 
easily distracted by concerning myself with ways of creating music and 
sound, to the point it completely ruins what I'm doing (that's why my 
previous comments allude to my eclectic approach combing commercial and 
open source software).

And your comments about commercial software often "beating the pants 
off" open source software could partly be explained by the often 
terrible management of open source projects.  People used to always 
argue that thousands of people submitting code would lead to tremendous 
pieces of software.  However, software projects need to be managed, 
they need to have a focus.  Good projects often end up in useless 
forked monstrosities, alienating end users and confusing other 
developers who rely on their projects (consider the current situation 
with the XFree project).

As much as the guy annoys me, Joel Spolsky discusses software 
management issues quite well, which may give you some insight into why 
it's a hard thing to do and why it affects open source software:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/

You may find this particularly relevant:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Biculturalism.html


--
homepage: http://alexyoung.org
music: http://noise.me.uk


---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: microsound-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
For additional commands, e-mail: microsound-help@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
website: http://www.microsound.org