[other] Haiku Project Announces Availability of Haiku R1/Alpha 1 (THE multimedia-OS resurrection)

Mmh yeah Paul wrote ones in one of his posts that he started to understand the policy of ProTools in supporting only some hardware I believe.

The problem with Linux was in the last years mainly about ALSA/OSS/JACK and last but not least pulseaudio.
Also all the different distro’s are a problem for Ardour sometimes…

So this could be the future… but then you need people and devs who picks this up.
A nice OS with no good apps is not a good OS…

From that I don’t see any indication that it will be a good multimedia OS. BeOS might have been in it’s time, I don’t know, but does that automatically mean that Haiku will be a good multimedia OS?
Why and which advantages should it have over linux in that respect?

And if at all I’m sure it’s a couple more years in the future.

I think a lot will depend on the aims of the development community which don’t (to me) seem very encouraging. For example, one of the primary goals is to promote full compatibility between Haiku and BeOS (in the sense that applications written for one will run on the other). This has already caused problems because BeOS used an old version of gcc and didn’t support some of the newer features of versions 3 and 4. Some kind of hybrid build environment got rolled out to accommodate this but a similar problem awaits applications that use multimedia codecs. Many of today’s codecs weren’t invented (or weren’t in common use) when BeOS was in its heyday. If these differences can’t be reconciled, this is bound to create friction between developers and users. Haiku’s success will then depend upon how well or badly the development community can manage that friction.

So for the time being I’d say that I have to agree with Hollunder. There’s no reason (at this point in time) to believe that Haiku will develop into an impressive multimedia platform. Time will tell of course but unless I’ve missed something (which is entirely possible) that doesn’t seem to be one of Haiku’s goals.

According to Zenja’s comment on http://www.haiku-os.org/community/forum/has_haiku_abandoned_beos_compatibility the goal for R1 (Haiku 1.0 so to speak) is to be BeOS compatible. This to ensure everyone works toward a common goal. From then on they’ll probably try to catch up with the rest of the world.

As a multimedia OS BeOS was really impressive for it’s time and possibly even compared with todays OS’s, so if the interest in developing Haiku further continues, and drivers and applications get written/ported, I think it could be a really interesting audio/video platform.
And since the point of Haiku is/was to have a free BeOS, why wouldn’t they have multimedia performance in mind?

ardour is one thing, but jack is also needed. What jack backend would be required on HAIKU ?

@John E… To be fair Apple Got Steve Jobs Back with next step. I think this was a major factor in the Deal… (either way it worked out well for apple).

The thing I recall about BeOS was that I was able to run 4 video streams simultaneously smoothly on a Pentium 166 with less than 100 MBs memory and no hardware acceleration. The system only lost responsiveness when I added the 5th.
How that translates to modern hardware and against modern OS’s I really don’t have a clue… Hopefully that will give you some idea as to where the niche may be.
a
@Paul – If my understanding is correct, Posix yes, Standard Libary yes, GTK & glib no…

@forart.it the good news is that (from listening to Pauls inexterviews today) that texshe Ardour source has a strong split between engine and UI. Should you feel the need it would be possible to use the Ardour backend and develop a native frontend. I think however that Paul and the existing devs have enough on their plates for the forceeable future

That's why platform indipendency is a really important thing (which Ardour, unfortunally, don't have).

There are definite tradeoffs involved in platform (meaning API, really) independence.

First, there are performance tradeoffs. When building for a single platform, it is possible to leverage that platform’s performance to the best effect.

Secondly, when building to multiple platforms, that do things in many cases in radically different ways (GUI toolkits, for instance, have very very different paradigms; GTK and Qt work very differently under the hood, for instance, and one of the most popular cross-platform open source GUI Toolkits, WXWidgets (used by Audacity) is different yet again), the developer either has to have completely different libraries for basic things (like the GUI event loop) or the developer has to take a least common denominator approach. And while GTK has been successfully ported to more than one platform, GTK is but one API that Ardour needs.

Third, true cross-platform compatibility is very hard to retrofit. Cross-platform support really needs to be an early design goal, when the basic cross-platform infrastructure can be designed in and not bolted on. Ardour is complex enough that making it cross-platform would involve a vast amount of work that the developers have said they aren’t keen on doing.

So if you want a true cross-platform DAW, my recommendation is to go bug the Audacity developers about making their program more DAW-like. Or join up with one of the other cross-platform DAW groups.

And, having said all that, I don’t consider Ardour’s lack of full cross-platform support to be unfortunate in any way whatsoever. [EDIT] And I’m talking about API cross-platform-ness; as Paul said, most of the basic APIs are highly portable, but some are not (Windows, for instance, has some really different ideas API-wise even in their ‘POSIX’ layer…).

What is really important is getting the work done, not what tools you use to get the work done…l Although I must admit I wish that I hadn’t sold my old UREI Levelling Amplifier years ago…some tools just have class :slight_smile: Would love to see a good LA-2 sound-alike (don’t have to look like it, like the UAD plugins do) plugin for LADSPA/LV2

Although my RCA Audimax has much the same sound…

let’s get ardour right on linux first, shall we ? :wink:

Absolutely. Better one platform (or two) done well than many done not so well.

forart.it - maybe another approach would be for you to lobby the Haiku devs to include a powerful VM feature so that Haiku could act as a host to an alternative OS or to apps written for an alternative OS (like Wine does, in Linux).