sysrqer wrote:It depends on what kind of music you are making, if you are recording instruments or playing in a band then I would agree that performance is the key aspect, and generally you can do everything very well in linux with FOSS tools for that. But if you are Doing electronic music with lots of layering and lots of fx and synths, huge track counts and complex routing then the quality of the software and the way the user can interact with it can be more important than the performance. Lots of electronic music is made with no element of performance at all. In this situation FOSS can start to get sketchy pretty quickly and involves knowing which out of the hundreds of fx you might have cause crashes in particular circumstances. I mentioned this earlier but Unfa had ardour crash on him and caused him to lose his work on a live stream while doing something mundane like adding a midi note. I've had the same thing happen many times, and I personally know a few people on this forum who have suffered the same thing. Perhaps it is not fair to expect anything else but for as long as that is a likely possibility then FOSS will never be used widely for professional music.
I did have my fair share of crashes with Sonar (ugh... I am old) and DP far more recently. And Adobe Audition many years ago. One friend of mine, a pretty good producer and DJ, once said something like "Dang, computers always do what they want, do they?". He used macs.
I really have no data to claim that crashes and bugs are as common in commercial audio software as they are in open source audio software. In other realms this kind of stats exist. I remember my teachers at Uni showing some evidence that the Linux kernel is the software of its kind with the least amount of bugs, but I really do not remember how that was even measured and I will just leave it there, I am not sure I can dig that out from my notes. One of the ideas behind open source is that bugs should be quickly fixed if the source is open. And if the contributors are many. On open source audio software the contributors are few, so maybe that doesn't work out. But then Renoise, BitWig and Moddart all have very small teams... how do they handle it?
Well, anyway, no matter whether open source audio software is more or less stable than its commercial counterparts (which I really do not know whether it is true or not), I think it is safe to say that many, if not most, perceive it that way. And I can easily imagine that someone that was using GarageBand until yesterday would trash Ardour completely for a bug like the one you mentioned, even though maybe the actual stability is not too different from that of GarageBand, just due to the bias that comes from seeing something unfamiliar, which they are putting to test, going down that spectacularly.
sysrqer wrote:The leading brands of non-FOSS music tools are far ahead of linux/FOSS offerings at the moment, I can't see how that is even questionable. Of course, it is possible to get the same result with hard work, knowledge, time, experience, and good ears (not to mention luck that your project will not crash and lose your work) but show me a FOSS tool that can find a sample that is in the same key, or same timbre as another from the thousands I have, or one that can tell me which instruments have clashing frequencies, or how my master compares to thousands of other analysed examples from the same genre, or one that analyse one piece of audio and superimpose the EQ curve on to another piece of audio. Ironically these are things that bedroom musicians would benefit from more than professionals but they are examples of the current day difference between FOSS and non-FOSS and why many people would stick with non-FOSS even if they gave FOSS a good chance.
That's juicy stuff that it would be awesome to have. Here the discussion ties back in to what someone said above. It isn't really about how to do it, or technical knowledge. It is about the time to make it happen. If all open source audio developers worked on their projets full time it would be a different story. We can see what teams as small as that of Moddart can achieve with full time work.