For some reason "Linux musicians" made me think of someone making art out of 'cat /dev/random > /dev/dsp', and made me wonder what Windows musicians are like (lots of anger and frustration to express I'd imagine)
The real-time low latency multi channel audio streaming needed for musicians is awfully similar to the real time low latency multi channel audio streaming required for telephony.
Yet somehow the two industries have pretty much entirely different tech stacks and don't seem to talk to one another.
Telephony is significantly less latency sensitive than real time audio processing, it’s also significantly less taxing since you’re dealing with a single channel.
The level of compression and audio resolution required are significantly different too. You can tune codecs for voice specifically, but you don’t want compression when recording audio and can’t bias towards specific inputs.
They’re only similar in that they handle audio. But that’s like saying the needs of a unicycle and the needs of an F1 car are inherently the same because they have wheels.
This is a very interesting thought. I'm not super experienced with low level audio and basically completely ignorant of telephony.
I feel like most people doing audio in music are not working at the low level. Even if they are creating their own plugins, they are probably not integrating with the audio interface. The point of JACK or Pipewire is to basically abstract all of that away so people can focus on the instrument.
The latency in music is a much, much bigger issue than in voice, so any latency spike would render network audio completely unusable.
I know Zoom has a "real time audio for musicians" feature, but outside of a few Zoom demos during lockdown, I'm not sure anybody uses this.
Pipewire supports audio channels over network, but again I'm not entirely sure what this is for. Certainly it's useful for streaming music from device A to device B, but I'm not sure anybody uses it in a production setting.
I could see something like a "live coding symphony", where people have their own livecoding setups and the audio is generated on a central server. This is not too different than what, say, Animal Collective did. But while live coding is a beautiful medium on its own, it does lack the muscle memory and tactile feedback you get from playing an instrument.
I would love to see, as you said, these fields collaborate, but these, to me, are the immediate blockers which make it less practical.
Just an fyi to anyone making or thinking of making one of these:
Turning a knob with a mouse is the worst interface I can think of.
I don't know why audio apps/DAWs fall so hard on skeuomorphism here when the interface just doesn't make sense in the context.
Unless the implementation is really bad, you actually have more control over these knobs than you would have over sliders. You could technically remove the knob completely, replace it with just textual number you click on and move your mouse, but the knob is easier to read.
A 20 pixel knob has considerably greater resolution than a 20 pixel slider with its max resolution of 20. I don't think I have come across a digital knob that you have to turn with the mouse since the previous century, just drag up or down or left or right.
It allows for dense controls and everyone's used to them. I don't find them to be a problem, they aren't intuitive in that you might think you're supposed to grab the knob and "turn" it with a circular cursor motion or something, but once you learn to drag linearly, they're an easy to use and consistent interface. And as giancarlostoro mentioned, you can map them to a MIDI device if you want to twiddle knobs while playing/recording live.
I'll add in addition - the skeumorphism here is generally pretty functional, you touched on this when you said "everyone is used to them"
But the layout of these buttons, while certainly not standard, is generally familiar across various filters, etc. So if you are dealing with a complex interface the skeumorphism absolutely helps to make the input more familiar and easily accessible.
This is what skeumorphism is for and this is a great place to use it.
Imagine if the symbols for "play" "pause" and "stop" were changed simply because it no longer made sense to follow the conventions of a VCR, then multiply that by an order of magnitude.
If not using hardware, you just click and move horizontally or vertically; not sure what a better interface would be? Though I do like it when the numeric value shows when changing. I really don't know what other UI would work well here. Usually there are so many knobs it makes sense to be compact. Though really it makes sense as well to match the visualization of the knobs on my midi controller anyway.
> Turning a knob with a mouse is the worst interface I can think of.
I'm racking my brain thinking of what a better interface would be for selecting a number between a range of values, where the number is a point on a continuum and not any specific value, and can't think of one. The equivalent "traditional" UX for webapps would be a slider control, but that's functionally the same and you'd be going against many years of domain-specific common understanding for not much benefit.
I personally prefer the good old number box but they have their problems and you actually have to read each and ever box to see what the state is, with sliders and knobs we can see the value of a great many controls at a glance.
Some newer synths do this where it makes sense. e.g. in Phase Plant the wavetable frame is a number, since wavetable positions are discrete values from 1 to 256.
Ultimately I see two problems though,
1. sometimes the number doesn't matter or make sense at all. A good example is a macro knob. The value is somewhere between "0" or "1", and synths do let you set it manually (since this is how recorded automation works), but a macro slider doesn't make too much sense IMO.
2. lots of controls deal with logarithmic values. Anything that corresponds to a frequency is going to need finer control when you're tweaking values below 500Hz vs changing a value between 10000Hz and 10500Hz. Knobs mask this pretty well. I'm sure you could build a slider that dealt with this, but a number box would be very weird since you'd want the scroll step to be much smaller at lower values.
> Is it fair to assume most mouses have a scroll wheel?
Probably not, a lot of musicians develop on the go (planes etc) so they're dealing with built-in trackpads pretty often. You can still scroll but it's not as ergonomic.
most daws allow you to map hardware to the dials so u dont need to tweak by mouse. that being said, good automations are a fair replacement depending on your style of music. lfos, adsrs and pattern tools for automation lanes aswell as ability to record automations (to keep em consistent, modify manually etc ), and ofc humanization algorithms that u can apply to automation lanes.
i never use 'hardware', totally happy doin what i do. (thats music i think. enjoying your craft). most ppl i know using similar tools do have midi controllers to have more of an instrumental interface. theres tons of options. no need to discourage anyone...
and most interfaces have a condition watching for CTRL or SHIFT to ++/-- values slower or faster depending on the modifier held... that allows one to turn a knob with much greater precision than a physical interface!
double-clicking usually lets one type the value... really good interfaces let one scroll seamless independent of screen borders; the perfect pair with a trackball or a long surface/desk for sliding the mouse
No. MIDI controllers have their place, but many people work without one, or only use one for live performances. There are often also way more knobs in the various FX chains in a DAW than you would reasonably want to map to a controller, but still want to touch at least a few times while making a song.
Knobs are confusing when converted to a mouse paradigm because there can be a few strategies to control them (click+drag up/down, click+drag right/left, weird rotational things, etc), and you have to guess since each FX studio and software may implement it just a little different.
The amount of time it takes to have 1 debate about the choice is more time than I'll spend in my entire life figuring out how all the specific "knobs" I'll ever touch work. It's just not a real problem.
Reaper has a standard UI for controlling plugins you can use instead of the VST UIs, other DAWs probably do too. It's an awful, lifeless sea of sliders and check boxes that hurts to look at, and instantly drains one of all creativity.
This is great. Makes these tools much more discoverable. I can help but notice the drop in plugin ui quality one you click the foss filter checkbox. Something in me wants a foss plugin to come with a cool skin like the free ones do, but I know that's silly.
It really says something about designers when there's so few of them contributing to FOSS projects. It also says something about FOSS devs that they don't/can't find better UI for their projects. Especially for web based UIs where CSS isn't that hard to look at sites you want to emulate and get much much closer to a respectable UI.
it's an add for apps that cost as much as a box of decent used pedals and rack mount gear.
though "linux musicians" does appear to be a thing, and the bot used to check if you are human, is amusing and fully automated.
I actually assumed the link was linuxmusicians.com and I bet I am not the only one who assumed that. It is not an ad, but a store that also lists free software.
For some reason "Linux musicians" made me think of someone making art out of 'cat /dev/random > /dev/dsp', and made me wonder what Windows musicians are like (lots of anger and frustration to express I'd imagine)
It took quite a bit of scrolling until I found my old faves of dexed and zynaddsubfx, and I didn't see Helm (https://tytel.org/helm/) at all.
The real-time low latency multi channel audio streaming needed for musicians is awfully similar to the real time low latency multi channel audio streaming required for telephony.
Yet somehow the two industries have pretty much entirely different tech stacks and don't seem to talk to one another.
This is very much not true.
Telephony is significantly less latency sensitive than real time audio processing, it’s also significantly less taxing since you’re dealing with a single channel.
The level of compression and audio resolution required are significantly different too. You can tune codecs for voice specifically, but you don’t want compression when recording audio and can’t bias towards specific inputs.
They’re only similar in that they handle audio. But that’s like saying the needs of a unicycle and the needs of an F1 car are inherently the same because they have wheels.
This is a very interesting thought. I'm not super experienced with low level audio and basically completely ignorant of telephony.
I feel like most people doing audio in music are not working at the low level. Even if they are creating their own plugins, they are probably not integrating with the audio interface. The point of JACK or Pipewire is to basically abstract all of that away so people can focus on the instrument.
The latency in music is a much, much bigger issue than in voice, so any latency spike would render network audio completely unusable. I know Zoom has a "real time audio for musicians" feature, but outside of a few Zoom demos during lockdown, I'm not sure anybody uses this.
Pipewire supports audio channels over network, but again I'm not entirely sure what this is for. Certainly it's useful for streaming music from device A to device B, but I'm not sure anybody uses it in a production setting.
I could see something like a "live coding symphony", where people have their own livecoding setups and the audio is generated on a central server. This is not too different than what, say, Animal Collective did. But while live coding is a beautiful medium on its own, it does lack the muscle memory and tactile feedback you get from playing an instrument.
I would love to see, as you said, these fields collaborate, but these, to me, are the immediate blockers which make it less practical.
Regarding Zoom, music lessons 1:1 online are still pretty common. I would guess this won't hold up with multiple musicians.
irony amplified by the nature of the tech stacks xD surely they can figure out some channel to communicate over clearly haha
Just an fyi to anyone making or thinking of making one of these:
Turning a knob with a mouse is the worst interface I can think of. I don't know why audio apps/DAWs fall so hard on skeuomorphism here when the interface just doesn't make sense in the context.
Unless the implementation is really bad, you actually have more control over these knobs than you would have over sliders. You could technically remove the knob completely, replace it with just textual number you click on and move your mouse, but the knob is easier to read.
A 20 pixel knob has considerably greater resolution than a 20 pixel slider with its max resolution of 20. I don't think I have come across a digital knob that you have to turn with the mouse since the previous century, just drag up or down or left or right.
It allows for dense controls and everyone's used to them. I don't find them to be a problem, they aren't intuitive in that you might think you're supposed to grab the knob and "turn" it with a circular cursor motion or something, but once you learn to drag linearly, they're an easy to use and consistent interface. And as giancarlostoro mentioned, you can map them to a MIDI device if you want to twiddle knobs while playing/recording live.
I'll add in addition - the skeumorphism here is generally pretty functional, you touched on this when you said "everyone is used to them"
But the layout of these buttons, while certainly not standard, is generally familiar across various filters, etc. So if you are dealing with a complex interface the skeumorphism absolutely helps to make the input more familiar and easily accessible.
This is what skeumorphism is for and this is a great place to use it.
Imagine if the symbols for "play" "pause" and "stop" were changed simply because it no longer made sense to follow the conventions of a VCR, then multiply that by an order of magnitude.
If not using hardware, you just click and move horizontally or vertically; not sure what a better interface would be? Though I do like it when the numeric value shows when changing. I really don't know what other UI would work well here. Usually there are so many knobs it makes sense to be compact. Though really it makes sense as well to match the visualization of the knobs on my midi controller anyway.
> Turning a knob with a mouse is the worst interface I can think of.
I'm racking my brain thinking of what a better interface would be for selecting a number between a range of values, where the number is a point on a continuum and not any specific value, and can't think of one. The equivalent "traditional" UX for webapps would be a slider control, but that's functionally the same and you'd be going against many years of domain-specific common understanding for not much benefit.
I personally prefer the good old number box but they have their problems and you actually have to read each and ever box to see what the state is, with sliders and knobs we can see the value of a great many controls at a glance.
Some newer synths do this where it makes sense. e.g. in Phase Plant the wavetable frame is a number, since wavetable positions are discrete values from 1 to 256.
Ultimately I see two problems though,
1. sometimes the number doesn't matter or make sense at all. A good example is a macro knob. The value is somewhere between "0" or "1", and synths do let you set it manually (since this is how recorded automation works), but a macro slider doesn't make too much sense IMO.
2. lots of controls deal with logarithmic values. Anything that corresponds to a frequency is going to need finer control when you're tweaking values below 500Hz vs changing a value between 10000Hz and 10500Hz. Knobs mask this pretty well. I'm sure you could build a slider that dealt with this, but a number box would be very weird since you'd want the scroll step to be much smaller at lower values.
Is it fair to assume most mouses have a scroll wheel? Hover and use that? Do they do that?
> Is it fair to assume most mouses have a scroll wheel?
Probably not, a lot of musicians develop on the go (planes etc) so they're dealing with built-in trackpads pretty often. You can still scroll but it's not as ergonomic.
Most have click+drag and a shift modifier for fine adjustments.
most daws allow you to map hardware to the dials so u dont need to tweak by mouse. that being said, good automations are a fair replacement depending on your style of music. lfos, adsrs and pattern tools for automation lanes aswell as ability to record automations (to keep em consistent, modify manually etc ), and ofc humanization algorithms that u can apply to automation lanes.
i never use 'hardware', totally happy doin what i do. (thats music i think. enjoying your craft). most ppl i know using similar tools do have midi controllers to have more of an instrumental interface. theres tons of options. no need to discourage anyone...
and most interfaces have a condition watching for CTRL or SHIFT to ++/-- values slower or faster depending on the modifier held... that allows one to turn a knob with much greater precision than a physical interface!
double-clicking usually lets one type the value... really good interfaces let one scroll seamless independent of screen borders; the perfect pair with a trackball or a long surface/desk for sliding the mouse
Isn't the entire idea that you hook it up to physical hardware?
No. MIDI controllers have their place, but many people work without one, or only use one for live performances. There are often also way more knobs in the various FX chains in a DAW than you would reasonably want to map to a controller, but still want to touch at least a few times while making a song.
Knobs are confusing when converted to a mouse paradigm because there can be a few strategies to control them (click+drag up/down, click+drag right/left, weird rotational things, etc), and you have to guess since each FX studio and software may implement it just a little different.
The amount of time it takes to have 1 debate about the choice is more time than I'll spend in my entire life figuring out how all the specific "knobs" I'll ever touch work. It's just not a real problem.
Reaper has a standard UI for controlling plugins you can use instead of the VST UIs, other DAWs probably do too. It's an awful, lifeless sea of sliders and check boxes that hurts to look at, and instantly drains one of all creativity.
On the other hand turning a knob with a mouse wheel is the best interface I can think of.
This is great. Makes these tools much more discoverable. I can help but notice the drop in plugin ui quality one you click the foss filter checkbox. Something in me wants a foss plugin to come with a cool skin like the free ones do, but I know that's silly.
It really says something about designers when there's so few of them contributing to FOSS projects. It also says something about FOSS devs that they don't/can't find better UI for their projects. Especially for web based UIs where CSS isn't that hard to look at sites you want to emulate and get much much closer to a respectable UI.
The things I need are free and opensource
https://lsp-plug.in/
I'm wondering if you missed that the site has checkboxes for "No charge" and "FOSS".
Is there a way I can see which would run on a raspberry pi?
They will need arm builds sadly so the list is likely going to be rather small.
Great demo of the JUNE - Classic Analog Polysynth JUNO-60 Plugin - AudioThing
https://youtu.be/GMsUqsyy62Q?t=46
it's an add for apps that cost as much as a box of decent used pedals and rack mount gear. though "linux musicians" does appear to be a thing, and the bot used to check if you are human, is amusing and fully automated.
https://linuxmusicians.com/
I actually assumed the link was linuxmusicians.com and I bet I am not the only one who assumed that. It is not an ad, but a store that also lists free software.