Last week Bitwig folks finally announced upcoming beta of Bitwig Studio, a new commercial DAW for Win, Mac and Linux. As it often happens, some folks in the community started speculating how this is going to affect existing free software and the community itself. After all, it’s not that we’ve got huge teams slaving away to make music production a breeze on Linux, eh?

Well, one thing I really liked in the LAU thread is that most folks who cared to comment didn’t express extreme views. I seriously hope that it’s a sign of the community becoming mature enough to treat things in a relaxed, no-fanatic way.

What I’ve been seeing on the desktop layer is that free/libre and commercial software can perfectly coexist without kicking each other in the nadgers and turning half the city to ruins. Just a few examples:

• Bibble Pro (Corel AfterShot Pro since last week, btw) didn’t make any existing free software die. Instead we got darktable.
• A month ago BrainDistrict announced PaintSupreme. Can you see Pinta folks crying in despair, because noone’s gonna use it again?
• BrainDistrict has also been resurrecting MainActor, and yet commits to Kdenlive, PiTiVi, Novacut and OpenShot keep piling up.
• Renoise didn’t kill any free software project, and they even added support for DSSI, a (currently outdated) free API for virtual instruments.
• Mixbus folks have been contributing to upstream Ardour project for a couple of years now already, and aren’t they proprietary guys?
• Loomer is busy porting their commercial synths and effects to LV2, the state of the art free API for virtual instruments and effects.
• linuxDSP started with Linux support from ground up and has been supporting LV2 since day one.
• ..and the list can go on.

The only fluctuation I can think of is the 8 years old story with Jorg Anders overreacting and abandoning NoteEdit after hearing about a, frankly speaking, fantom possibility of Finale port to Linux. And he started NtEd few years later anyway. That he doesn’t get much acknowledgment for NtEd either is a whole different story.

And even if you could recall all the epic OMG!Ubuntu threads about likewise phantom possibility of Photoshop port for Linux, you’d soon figure out that most people who expressed their interest weren’t going to use GIMP anyway. No love lost.

So if you think that some proprietary app suddenly available for Linux is going to do BLOOD NEEDLESS VIOLENCE GUTS OUTSIDE CITY TAKEN OVER DEAD BODIES ALL AROUND to your favourite free application, stop worrying. Fire up that free app and do something awesome with it. Work on your skills, become damn good at using free software, and then share what you know. This is how you become your own John McClane.

I’m very happy my good friends are playing gigs again. There are two albums in production, hopefully to be out soon (under CC as usual).

You probably already heard about loudness war and definitely have experienced that yourself unless you are hearing impaired. If you haven’t, go check Wikipedia.

Lately someone noticed that Steinberg, developers of a very popular audio editor called Wavelab, say exactly this of loudness:

“One of the most important steps in the mastering process is to enhance the loudness of a track. Loudness is the listeners’ individual perception of sound levels caused by an audio signal. In commercial productions, high volume levels are an important factor. Unprocessed songs are likely to be too quiet, which is disappointing if songs are published on radio or TV, where louder songs might attract more attention.”

Okay, that’s marketing team talking really. Surely youth thinks along the same lines, eh? Young and clueless, eh? What do they know, right? Well, wrong. This is what Tutsplus wrote in their own take at loudness war just a couple of weeks ago:

“The only real solution is for everyone to turn the volume down. For everyone to co-operate. And that’s a big job. There are no worldwide Volume Police to enforce this. There are no fines for over-compression. There is just the love of music. We all need to agree that dynamics are worth fighting for.”

You nailed it, guys.

About a week ago I cooked up a list of free patch editors and managers of external synths and samplers for the recently started linuxsound.ru. And now that yet another shovel for amateur grave diggers vintage synth manager is out, I thought I’d have a closer look.

Well, guess what. There really is a bunch of Java patch editors for ext. synths written in 2000-2004. Those are mostly dead projects. How about new applications? All, and no — I really mean all of them are written in Qt/C++. Have a look yourself, why don’t you: QXGEdit, ME-Edit, FB01 Sound Editor, Fx FloorBoard, qtpod and now Yamaha DX7-II synth manager.

And since I’m basically evil, I can’t resist recalling how principle developer of Protux went mad some years ago and decided to redo everything in Java, praising this technology and saying how much better everything will become, since he was an experienced Java developer at IBM. Remon, who joined the team shortly before that, disagreed and continued development of the tool under a new name and in Qt/C++.

You don’t need to be a wizard to see through the whole thing: the Java port miserably failed. At the same time Traverso is still alive, and even though it’s probably not kicking, but merely prodding, development continues, new features are being added, UI is being improved and so on.

I’m trying to think of any desktop Java application I used in the past years, and FreeMind is the only one I can recall (and even so it’s a sad example, because 0.9.0 has been WIP for years). So I’m curious, when did you guys and girls last used a desktop application in Java on daily basis?

After so many years of geeky interfaces native effects on Linux don’t look like complete crap anymore

The upcoming version will also feature several equalizers (already in git), and the very next thing I’m going to do is build it with –enable-experimental to enable “50 small LV2 plug-ins made specifically with modular hosts in mind”. Jeez, you free software developers just don’t seem to be able to stop making us excited recently

Here is how it looks.

What is good? UI is simple. What is not so good? There is no way to edit more tags that are possibly available. You can’t tell if there is a “Year” field. And you can’t add a composer, if “Artist” represents only performer (classical music, jazz etc.).

So here is my simple proof-of-concept mockup:

I don’t claim to follow HIG in all aspects as of now. Here is just a concept how it should work.

The basic idea is that user usually knows better what ID3 fields/tags he needs to be present.

1. This dialog shows as many ID3 fields as the file has.
2. If you need to change some of them, simply edit the value to the right of the label representing name of that field.
3. If you need a new field, add it from a combobox, fill in the value and click “Add” button. A new row will appear above.
4. If no tags are present at all, start with a minimal default set of tags (Title, Artist, Genre) ready to be filled.
5. If more than X fields are present (with X like 6 or 7), vertical scrollbar appears to prevent the dialog from growing too high.
6. If you need to delete some field, click “Delete” button.
7. Once you added a new field, it cannot be used again. So combobox should “stay tuned” to what is happening above him.

This mockup was done basically with Audacity in mind. Remembering SoundJuicer, “Next Track” and “Previous Track” buttons should be added.

Another detail: whether amount of preset ID3 fields should be infinite or not. Probably developer should make a default set of fields/tags and let users edit it.

A default set of fields/tags would look like:

1. Title
2. Artist
3. Composer
4. Conductor
5. Album
6. Number of track
7. Year
8. Genre
9. License