Comment by gnarlouse
15 hours ago
I’d like to see some company come out with a wrapper for Logic, Ableton, ProTools, etc with the following:
- portable, reproducible environments: I suppose you could achieve this with a docker setup. If I jump to a different workstation, I want to be able to load my current project without playing setup wrangler.
- license management like a dotfile database: all my licenses are fettered to the wind across two or three email addresses, and every time my PC crashes (twice in the past 5y) or something breaks I have to go recollect them. It’s a quest. Quests suck.
- remote or cloud processing: connect to your workstation if you’re on the road, or a cloud cluster running DAWs. Sure, this introduces some lag which can force you into drag to piano roll contexts, but other times you’re just messing with mixes. But gaming giants like Sony figured it out for PS4/5 titles.
- shareable projects with some innovative business solution to the license barrier. I want to be able to access somebody else’s project and load it in its entirety—whether I have Neural DSP’s latest Archetype or not. Whether I have Serum2 or not. Apple managed to get bands onto iTunes. We seriously can’t get Waves or Neural DSP to go the same route? Some royalty-based approach?
I know these are outlandish requirements in some scenarios but I feel like this would fix the misery of music making in the era of Windows and macOS being goblinware operating systems.
The site linked to by the title is about mostly FLOSS projects for people doing audio/music creation work on Linux. The problems you're describing, in particular the licensing ones, are endemic to proprietary software. While this still affects e.g. Bitwig on Linux, it isn't really a feature of Linux audio software in general.
Cloud work so far just hasn't had much appeal. People are walking around with Apple M{1..5} laptops with enough compute power to do things you couldn't do on a studio system 10 years ago. Sure, if you're doing sample based playback with really high end sample libraries, or physically modelled synthesis, you can always max out any system with a large orchestral piece, but the stuff you can do on a laptop on a bus or train or the back of car really does encompass most of what most people want to be able to do.
iTunes was useless for people on Linux, just as any system that convinced Waves to participate in some sort of "implicit licensing" scheme would be (even though they run linux inside the hardware units they sell). Again, this link was to a set specifically concerned with the situation for audio work on Linux; until plugin developers en masse recognize it as a valid latform that they should support (improvements every day, but very slowly), this will as useless for Linux as iTunes was (and remains).
I just don't think the economics of this work. Software synths are just such cutthroat competition that there is no profit margin.
I have a Pittsburgh Modular TAIGA that cost $800. How much am I willing to pay for a software synth doing analog modeling? Basically nothing.
To get everyone a piece of the pie to make it worth it for this, it would cost the end user so much for the pie that no one would bother.
My experience with music collaboration is that the technical challenges have been minimal for a long time now. The challenges of collaboration are social and being on the same page musically. Even in the 90s, it wasn't hard to find people to make rock music with locally. The problem was always what was meant by "rock music" to begin with.
It is exactly the opposite problem of video games. It would be like the economics of video games if the goal was to team up to play video games no one else was playing.
I think this would only work if every musician's goal was to be Taylor Swift.
> goblinware operating systems
I'm very interested in what you mean by the term "goblinware", that's a new one to me
“Clearly made by and for goblins,” I think, but I’m open to riffing on the best interpretation
That clears up nothing.
1 reply →
Despite open plugins, and mostly open end result file formats, the entirety of the media software world is built around proprietary software primarily for several reasons: Ephemeral fads have you making money in one big upfront push, integration of some new technique doesn't lend itself to open standards, or the fact that the actual bulk of paying customers are presumably working musicians with budgets, and that market is ultimately small. The side effect of this, much like radios, rc planes and drones, and many other hobbies, is that a collection of smaller product producing organizations have an even smaller, more even playing field full of smaller professionals and some amateurs. Some of the modular hardware producers have the right idea and provide free versions of their hardware as plugins as a marketing gimmick for their actual hardware. However, outside of the Linux world, the mystique of a proprietary salve that will supplant your creative block pushes people towards short sighted sales pushes instead of trying to lock in a give and take interaction with the broader community.
But I would love every thing that you list. I think things like PipeWire for better or worse are pushing things towards sanity, or least, better ideas for managing the mess in the open source world, which is decades in the making.
I'm a former film/game composer turned programmer, and you basically just outlined what I hope to be my life's work :p Each and every one of these is a white whale for me, and is something I'm working on in one way or another.
Get in touch if you'd like to chat more about this stuff (my email is in my profile).