Comments by "John Crawford" (@JohnCrawford1979) on "Pipewire Will Revolutionize Linux Video" video.
-
34
-
23
-
21
-
6
-
I like what Pipewire can do with audio. Still going to wait to see how the video side comes out. Theme of the story: If it sounds too good to be true, it possibly is. So better to wait and see. I really don't like doing the Jack GUI. It's the least intuitive, even for professional AV sound designers, because so much of the physical jack outputs had been given digital solutions that are far more intuitive for front end use. With DAWs, much of the jack style audio is over-complicated, especially when you're just looking to edit and compose. Heck, it was easier working with the physical jacks and MIDI ports back in the day, outside funky stage setups, but the plug and play was simple for a basic sound, AV studio setup. Jack overcomplicates it. Which is why I love Pipewire without diving into a bunch of GUI graphical nonsense. All you really need nowadays is something that looks like an AV/soundboard with check boxes for enabling/disabling the devices you want or need, and bon't bother with virtualizing the back end jacks. It's not as intuitive as you think, there's simpler front end controls, and if you really want that 1970's - 1980's over-complex synth experience, just get the VST plug-ins. Otherwise there's plenty of soundfonts and VST sound banks and samplers that create the sounds just fine without all the funky wiring.
5
-
3
-
2
-
@MrGamelover23 - which would be why something that can mode switch/set in accordance to what Wayland does best, while also doing the same for what X-11 does best. Virtually all other OSes have had to figure that out with their own kernels and core drivers, etc. It would be great if can figure it out with the ability to support as many computers and systems as possible, but there may have to be a fork made somewhere between legacy and modern. Exactly how? That's above my paygrade and knowledge. I'm just saying we have to figure out how to do this, because, unlike Windows, Apple, and Google, Linux is a community (well, numerous communities) that try to make computing for everyone, regardless of if they are trying to run it on the latest and greatest $10,000 power gaming PC, or some $10 refurbished 386 PC they found at the GoodWill.
2
-
2
-
2
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
@vocassen - I started on Cakewalk way back on Win 3.11 around 1996. For me, it had the features I needed for notation composition, and the soundboard was basically each MIDI instrument or Wave sample had their own volume control with basic features for panning between left speaker and right speaker, and adding chorus and reverb. You then had the master volume as well. So it's basically a bit more advanced version of volume control.
You could add patches to the software for extra effects, but it also depended on what sound configuration you had on your PC, particularly with regards to hardware, from a basic SoundBlaster 16, to Roland Sound Canvas, to the SoundBlaster AWE 32/64 series that introduced soundfonts, which improved the quality of sound banks, as well as allowed for creating your own. So, at the time, the better the sound card, the better quality effects and instruments you can have. But, that changed after integrated sound, and as RAM and storage increased. more currently, we have VSTs, (virtual instruments) that are similar to sound fonts in adding more quality to the sound bank, but also implementing Instruments, and sets of instruments that nor set to the old MIDI sound bank presets, but instead are specialized for, say, a variety of drum sets that, in their own app you can adjust the volume and sound of the each part of a drum set, from the snare, the bass, cymbals, etc. These are outside of the soundboard, or the instrument selection of the DAWS (Digital Audio Workstation), or composition software, but may be accessed within the software, and edited to use with the main composition/DAWS software.
Just typing it might make it sound more complex than it really is. But the basic framework for the soundboard has been around for decades, and is pretty much standard to most DAWS and composition software like Sibelius, Finale, MuseScore. PreSonus, Rosegarden, Reaper, LMMS, and Ardour, to name a few. For my current setup, I have MuseScore 4 for music notation composition and editing, with a little bit of basic mixing of MIDI soundfonts and VSTs to at least get the basic adjustments of a musical piece. Then I export each track, along with a master track (optional). and tweak the instrument tracks in Audacity. Sometimes I'll compare the master track to the Audacity edits for a bit of quality control. If I really dead to do anything more advanced, I might use Arduous for mixing, but it all depends on the workflow, which I've changed up several times.
The basic soundboard has remained a standard in most any music composition and mixing software I've used. But you can get into nodes, which many of the modern DAWS have as plugins. There are also VSTs that have a similar node style to mimic old sythns that relied on the whole wiring and jack system to change sounds that most MIDI synths can make. I have no trouble with people wanting to toy with such a VST setup. It's just not essential, but can add some interesting sounds or effects. But to try and setup virtual jack/node system for my laptop's sound? Eh, I'd rather have a basic soundboard/volume control, and the option to enable and disable the audio and video devices and drives as needed. In Mabox, the audio is done through Volume Control, with tabs for Playback, Recording, Output Devices, Input Devices, and configuration.
For the short, basically, if you know how to use volume control, chances are you are not going to have too much trouble with the soundboard mixer in most common DAWS and music composition software. However, you might have trouble getting the audio to work with some of them (*ahem* Rosegarden, Ardour), specially it they are tied to needing JACK setup in a certain manner. Again, I switched to Pipewire to get away from having to configure JACK nodes and have my audio just work.
1
-
@cericat - Graphs are a whole different thing. I guess the simplest answer for what I mean is just a volume control.
I'm just used to considering it a soundboard, because each track on a soundboard has it's own individual volume control. The back end, as I understand it, would be the plug and play stuff, like the MIDI cables and sockets, or the audio jacks, from which JACK got it's name, and what the nodes are supposed to mimic. Most of that, with how each device is setup, ought to already be something that is done by the computer and the device drivers, and if I have to work with the devices, then some sort of AV control panel, or AV board similar to Volume Control or a sound/video mixing board. Nodes just seem to add too much complexity to the whole setup, like some 80's power synth that looks like some sort of wiring system in Frankenstein's personal lab.
1
-
1
-
@vocassen - VoiceMeter looks similar, but really, just something like volume control, but maybe a combination of AV. On Mabox, it's pretty simple to go up to the right corner, right click on the audio icon, and the first application I have under 'Sound and Music' is 'Volume Control'. I usually keep that open because Pipewire automatically adds whatever devices or applications are using audio, and I can tweak things there as needed. It's simple, but it gets the job done. From there, Muse Score has its own mixing board for MIDI/virtual instruments, and Audacity helps polish it off in sound editing, and maybe adding some extra effects in post production. It really comes down to how simple or complex one wants to make things, and I usually prefer to keep the basic workflow as simple as possible.
1
-
1
-
1