On Fri, 2016-09-23 at 13:00 +0200, Patrick Shirkey wrote: > I suppose that their marketing department has decided that Linux > Developers/Users don't represent a big enough share of the market to > justify committing more resources to the platform. > > However JACK also runs on the other two main platforms so what is their > rational behind completely ignoring it altogether while committing > resources to creating a competing API?
Let me start by saying I love the idea of Jack. IMO it is, unquestionably, The right way to do an audio API/system, and it's fantastic. ... however, using Jack on other platforms is a gigantic PITA. Hell, it is on Lignux, too, but we're just used to it. It lacks the polish of something that can act as The system audio API, largely because all of that stuff (shiny device selection support, flexible handling of changing rates, and so on) wasn't in its design priorities in the first place, but that doesn't change the reality of things. That's unfortunate, but one needs to have been living deep in the LAD bubble to pretend otherwise. We haven't even managed to make Jack the go-to out of the box audio API on Linux distributions, to say nothing of OSX or Windows. Which, in terms of market relevance, does mean that companies like Ableton have little incentive to care. For most users, it's just this extra thing they have to deal with that doesn't provide much if anything for their use case. I don't think it's particularly helpful to complain that commercial companies don't build on our technologies, regardless of what you think of them. It's more useful to ask: why? Much of it (a bit ironically) boils down to the very fact that we aren't driven by certain forces that commercial developers are. We can, and do, just ignore polish, or ease of use, or features that we don't particularly feel like bothering with, and so on. That's the nature of unfunded free software development, really. That said, occasionally, there are nefarious motivations behind lack of adoption / platform support, and so on... but not always. Jack is not my child, though, so it's a bit more honest and revealing to use LV2 as an example. It's a free and open audio plugin spec, it's powerful, it does mostly everything, and considerably more, than the proprietary specs, and it does some things dramatically better. Why, then, has it not taken over as the go-to audio plugin spec for everyone? Is it because the commercial developers are evil? Well, maybe, a little bit, for a few of them with a vested interest in the proprietary APIs themselves, but really it's because LV2 is "weird", distributed in a Linuxey modular way where you need a bunch of separate libraries to implement it, there's no standard shiny/easy C++ bindings, nobody really regularly does the effort to make it super integrated and easy to use on other platforms, and other external issues like the good ol' portable plugin UI problem make things difficult. There's a few technical points in there, but it really just boils down to polish, packaging, documentation, and so on. There's a long list of things that need to happen there, I'm keenly aware of what most/all of them are, and I don't blame commercial developers for not caring at the moment. It's not their fault for not adopting it. It's ours, it's mine, for not presenting things on as polished a silver platter as possible, and I accept that. So it is with Jack. (Interesting intersectional sidenote: I've realized lately that in order to better establish LV2 on Windows/OSX, I need to write a native host, which is to say, a non-JACK one. A JACK one is weird and requires setting up a bunch of other stuff at which point you've already lost) It's getting better, and we're making progress, but whining that nobody likes / cares about / uses our technology isn't going to help. They have reasons. Our technology is fantastic in many ways, better than what the proprietary people work with in several, but it's also terrible in other ways, and those ways are considered equally, if not even more, important by most commercial developers. Hobbyists working on the fun parts in their spare time don't share those priorities, but they're priorities nonetheless. -- dr _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-dev mailing list Linux-audio-dev@lists.linuxaudio.org http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-dev
