Linux and audio pro 3822

John

You don't know much about free software. The first version of Linux was written by a guy piddling about in their spare time. Now IBM, HP and others sell Linux based solutions, based on its superior reliability and value. You can be sure that movie studios are exploiting Linux not just for video but audio as well.

I'd not be surprised to find that digital mixers and so on are running embedded versions of Linux using JACK as the underlying interconnect architecture. It's already good enough for that. I've been writing software for DJing on Linux, and I would have been happy to use a Mac if JACK hadn't been so excellent to begin with, what with it having parametric EQ, reverb and just about any other effect I could ever ask for, already written for me.

There are 3 major advantages to free software:

1) you don't generally end up getting technical support from a screen reader in Bangalore.

2) If it doesn't do what you want, you can crack open the source code (or pay someone to) and make it do what you want, instead of waiting for a marketing droid to decide your must have feature is worthy of a developer's attention. Same goes for bug fixes.

3) Good free software projects usually develop cleaner, tighter, better software faster than commercial developers can.

I predict that Audacity, etc. will catch up to and surpbutt their closed source equivalents within a couple of years at the outside. Not half bad for "hobbyist" work.