I just read different audio editing communities forums, trying to understand which audio editors/sequencers to use.
I had just started to read Ardour’s, when I saw someone asking for a feature a lot of sound editors/sequencers already had : cross platform support (even JACK got it! dont believe me just go see Audacity). The demand for feature became a dog fight of Linux VS Windows VS Mac (happily no BSD and Solaris people joined in).
What a terrible mistake I made!
It seems there is barely no inter community work together, I understand everyone are competing to be “THE” GPL audio editor/sequencer, but I didnt even had the endurance to look the GPL video editors, that I’ve been tired of reading stuff like : (lets not go on Windows, Lets not do Mac OSX, Working on this (this already ben made in at least 5 different GPL audio editors/sequencers), …
Thats not the worst, it seems most communities are completely isolated from other communities’ works. I’ve seen some exception like JACK, being used by tons of different softwares, or Audacity using Lame’s librairy for mp3, or video editors making themselves easy to use with most of sound editors. I aint speaking of all the synths, recorders.
Thats without saying that some features are inexistant in most of them, like being able to record streaming medias.
Another bad thing is many new non-free softwares that got more features often just use the best parts of code from the different GPL editors/sequencers, while they often ignore the very existence of the other’s communities, of course, everyone is doing GPL working…
I were unable to get a good review/comparison of all the editors/sequencers, one of the best I found was only for editors, with for the only 2 comparison points had “is it GPL or no?”, and “which OS supports it”.
Some people should seek to make some
cooperation between the communities. The communities that will stay isolated might get eliminated by those who’s working together to get more and more features.