[ubuntu-studio-devel] Audio

[eylul]

I'd rather not call inexperienced users, or people who don't have a lot
of time to go read "lazy". They are users all the same. Not everybody
has to become experts.

Anyway the solution for such users is profiles (from your suggestion we
will have 2 or 3). Ideally a beginner user will not have to create or
modify their setup at all.

This next level of complexity is for users who need a little bit more
customization due to their specific hardware or simply use cases we
haven't thought of, yet doing so without having to go to scripting and
still with tools to easily make decision. It is also a good place to
start understanding the underlying structure for the user who wants to
learn more.

In terms of commercial solutions UIs you are referring to, can you
clarify which products you are thinking of? or if possible at all
screenshots would be helpful. While we don't want to copy verbatim
design solutions, it is helpful to know what people switching from
industry standard commercial software to ubuntustudio would expect to find.

Best

Eylul


On 01/15/2017 08:14 PM, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
> On Sun, 15 Jan 2017 17:22:12 +0100, Dennis Schulmeister-Zimolong wrote:
>> Hi Ralf,
>>
>> On Sun, 15 Jan 2017 16:56:52 +0100
>> Ralf Mardorf <ralf.mardorf at alice-dsl.net> wrote:
>>
>>> For experienced audio users and novices willing to learn your app is
>>> crap. The target group are users who don't have a clue and who are
>>> unwilling to learn. You need to make it easy for them, but actually
>>> you make it harder, by mixing jack settings, with settings that are
>>> not directly related to jack and by providing the same choice jack
>>> provides. Don't!
>>>
>>> Provide a first choice, 1. music production, 2. other
>>> audio productions (radio etc.) and 3. audio for anything else. Don't
>>> provide to chose between PA bridge and things like this. Disable PA
>>> for music production and enable it for other audio productions and
>>> don't launch Jack at all, for anything else.  
>> I can't help but find your answer here unfair and biased. All in all I
>> think the proposed UI really helps to make things easier, not only for
>> people who are "too lazy to learn the details" and options like ALSA
>> MIDI or PA bridge are not as unreasonable as you think. They are
>> options anyway.
>>
>> I agree with you on the 32-bit bit depth setting. Other than that I
>> like the proposed UI much better than what you are suggesting here. In
>> fact your proposal is an even more "dumb" UI. What's the difference
>> between music and audio production anyway? Where do you know from, that
>> I don't also need low-latency in an audio production context? Or that I
>> don't need to listen to some web-audio on my monitor speakers while
>> working on a new song? You don't, and that's why the original proposal
>> gives me the choice to enable the features I want, while striping away
>> some of the more obscure jack parameters.
>>
>> Dennis
>>
> Hi,
>
> the available options require some additional short information, but
> apart from this, noob-friendly GUIs provided by the most successful
> proprietary platforms work the way as I suggested. If expert
> options are needed, then this app makes no sense at all, especially in
> regards to low latency, there's a lot more to take into account.
> Btw. before writing an application, it's most important to have a clear
> idea about what it should provide and for what purpose it should be
> provided. To conceptualize when already writing the app is the ultimate
> guarantor that "you" or somebody else ask yourself "how does you know,
> what I need?". Asking this questions actually means, that at best you
> know what you need, but maybe you even don't know this, but you
> definitively don't care about a target group, for an app that should
> provide settings, that are fundamental part of the distro.
>
> If you keep the other options as are, then you could also provide a
> selection of bit depth. Some combinations, for some tasks and for some
> target groups simply don't make sense. The "how do you know?" question
> is part of a concept.
>
> When producing music, it makes not much sense to listen to web radio at
> the same time. If you produce web radio, it could make sense for
> comparison purpose, hence "Provide a first choice, 1. music production,
> 2. other audio productions (radio etc.) and 3. audio for anything
> else". Apart from the pre selected pulseaudio or no pulsaudio, the used
> frames could still be chosen, so in this regards latency isn't
> affected. If you really want to fine tune, optimize latency, then start
> with building a rt patched kernel, unbind devices, stop unneeded
> services ...
>
> Regards,
> Ralf
>