Hack The Planet, PhotoShop is The Ultimate Music Creation Tool!! 2419

Onideus Mad Hatter mbuttes

Even if Vista can address as many processors as Linux-UNIX-Solaris, it'll still be a memory sieve with the stability of a peg legged man riding a unicycle, packed to the gills with XP bloat that uses at least one of your processors just for GUI animation and another one just for twiddling its privates in the background.

I only use Windows at work, and it's XP, so I'm not bleeding from my eyes to see what Vista will be like, but a big part of me really hopes that Microsoft actually got something right with this release. They say it's a major re-write, so maybe they have a chance. XP took two service packs to get to a level where I'd even *consider* running it recreationally (other than JUST for games).

Getting back OT, specialized industries such as special effects or professional music tend to use the platforms and software that suit their projects the best. I'm sure you could generate some statistics for which platforms and-or software are more prevalent, but there is definitely a broad range of different stuff in use, some of it over-the-counter and some of it custom-written.

Pixar, for example, uses Maya for a lot of modeling because it's hailed as the best organic modeling software in existence, and that can run in Windows, OS X, and Linux, in 32-bit or 64-bit environments, but they render their output on a several thousand-node Linux cluster running their own homebrew Renderman software.

As for graphically editing sound files, sure, why not, I'll bet a lot of open source kiddos with a lot of extra time after school would like to contribute to a project like that and probably use the thing. But don't get the idea that such a simple concept could ever produce production-quality results, or garner the interest of anyone in the music or sound production business. They already have tools to visualize sound, and they are highly parameterized and abstracted, keeping the REAL sound data behind-the-scenes and in the highest quality (e.g. a waveform display or spectral display is just that: a view of the data).

Also, I will bet you MONEY--real CASH--that taking two BMP output files from two WAVs of identical length and blending them in Photoshop, saving the composite as a BMP, and converting it back into a WAV, gives you GARBAGE. Blending of colors and blending of points of sound are based on two completely different mathematical principles and although the whole concept would be kind of interesting from an experimental perspective, I don't think it will do what you (the OP) hopes it will.

Just my two cents.

-- Aaron

"Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest." -- John Stuart Mill