Does anyone compose music using any of theportsfromthe/ports/audio collection in FreeBSD?

[4Front Technologies]

Conrad J. Sabatier wrote:


> Perhaps, but still, native support is what we need and want.
> 
> Speaking of which, I was browsing 4Front's site the other day and was a
> little disappointed to see that even the existing FreeBSD support is
> not available for amd64.  Is that likely to change anytime in the
> future?
> 
Yes, we plan to support FreeBSD on AMD64 with FreeBSD 5.2.1 - should be
out in a week or two. Right now we're trying to support DragonFly BSD.

[SNIP]

> 
> Is there any hope at all of the Unix sound development community ever
> coming together and agreeing on a cross-platform standard?  This seems
> to be what's really needed, IMHO.
>  

OSS was (and is) the cross platform API standard. It's just that the Linux guys 
didn't want to put effort into OSS because the perceived notion was that 4Front 
is a big bad proprietary company and OSS API was BSD licensed. ALSA appealed to 
the GPL people. The fact that ALSA had to support OSS API before it was allowed 
into the Linux kernel implies that OSS API is still the "de-facto" standard for 
all UNIX operating systems.


> 
> BROING!!!  MIDI is *the* single most important aspect of music creation
> for most people.  I'm astonished to see such a statement.
>

Perhaps you should talk to people using Macs and Windows, they're all moving to 
samplers/vsts. Nobody creates .mid files anymore, it's all in pure digital 
format such as wav or mp3 or aiff. Garage band on Mac OSX has more emphasis on 
digital audio sequencing/sampling rather than MIDI.

That said, yes, MIDI is important because it's the standard way of connecting 
keyboards to computers. OSS already has very good MIDI in/out support. The 
sequencer is lowlevel but functional and the only thing needed is a proper MIDI 
patchbay/router/sysex support and we plan to address that in the near future.


[SNIP]

> And please don't forget the amd64 platform, either.  :-)
> 

Certainly!.


best regards

Dev Mazumdar
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4Front Technologies
4035 Lafayette Place, Unit F, Culver City, CA 90232, USA.
Tel: (310) 202 8530		URL: www.opensound.com
Fax: (310) 202 0496 		Email: info at opensound.com
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