There was a comment on the recent Blender 3.0 thread posted here wondering why there isn't an equivalent program for audio. This looks very polished and much more approachable compared to Ardour or LMMS, and seems like a good candidate. But one feature I really wish my dream "Blender for audio" had would be the convenient device view that Ableton and Bitwig offer for working quickly with effects. It's so much faster than the type of effect chains offered by DAWs like FL and makes it fun to mess around and experiment with effects-based synthesis. Looking at the screenshots and videos it looks like Zrythm doesn't have this feature, although I understand how tedious it would be to implement because you would essentially have to write your own effects or create wrappers around others to expose an interface that can fit in a device view. Probably not high on the list of priorities for a work in progress DAW
I would argue there are many more, and much more widely differing, workflows for DAW use than there are for 3D (maybe even 2D) graphics. There are somewhere in the range of 12-20 "significant" DAWs out there, with a very wide range of workflows supported (not all of them by all the DAWs).
This doesn't include "generation environments" like VCV Rack, Reaktor, Bespoke and many others that don't have any traditional DAW features but are immensely powerful tools for synthesis and compositional discovery and creation.
Depending on the uniqueness of your imagined or actual workflow, there is probably a tool that comes close, but the potential variations do imply that its not hard to come up with a description for "what I really want in an audio tool" that just doesn't exist (at least not without you doing significant work yourself e.g. programming in PureData).
Note that the same is true for 3d/2d, there are a good 20 significant applications all primed for doing "that thing that you wish other tools did" better than any other tool.
If your application does 80% of all work 50% better than the rest, and the last 20% at least just as bad as everyone else, then even if there will be folks who want something that is more specifically tailored to that one thing they really want to do you still have an amazing product. That's certainly Blender, and if someone wants to try to achieve the same in DAW land, most folks who use DAWs will be watching that development with excitement.
They may not switch primary DAW, but using different tools sparks different creative flows, and in a few rare cases, you stick with the new tool.
As the author of another FLOSS DAW, I'd disagree with your closing sentence. The number of users of computer graphics tools outnumbers the computer audio tools by at least 10:1 based on any metric I can find. Maybe I've grown immune to the "excitement" or maybe my 21-year old project is just shite, but I really don't think it works the same way.
Your 21 year old project is amazing and I'm grateful for your efforts.
The slow development of DAWs and ther interfaces is really interesting and I'd love to know your thoughts on explorable UI/UX. You have a very hard job.
If after 20 years you're no longer excited about a new DAW, I'm sorry to hear that, but there are plenty of folks who still get excited when something new comes out that tries to address a gaping hole in the digital audio space. You can be set in which DAW you use because you've been using it for over a decade (even if you own all the other ones because things go on sale so much, and hardware comes with "cheap to upgrade to the full version from" licenses for everything that it's nearly impossible not to just own all the DAWs after a few years. Except maybe Pro Tools), and still go "this looks... really cool, actually. Let's see if it has magic".
(Although of course, if you _make_ a DAW your story is vastly different from the end user experience. You are not hoping to find that magic, you'll have already determined what the magic is, and considered most ways to try to implement it, and maybe even fell out of love with it because of that)
I didn't mean to imply that I'm no longer excited by a new DAW. We're in the middle of adding clip launching to Ardour right now, and that alone is fairly exciting. What I meant was that I don't really detect much excitement in the world from the emergence of a new DAW, and what I do see mostly comes from people who don't seem to actually know very much about existing DAWs. There are way more people talking about Blender 3.0 than anytime a new version of any major DAW is released.
If you asked me, Blender is just insanely good at marketing itself. When it comes to software, having good marketing and sales is always more important than the quality of the product. The Blender team knows this and is very aggressive when it comes to keeping their product in the news. This worked in their favor even in the early days when there still were a few other open source 3D tools that had a chance of growing up to become seriously useful. These projects were starved out by drawing attention away from them. Twenty years later, that space is dominated by Blender so forcefully that there is zero room for an alternative, even as an underdog.
That isn't quite correct. The Blender team did and does more than just the usual community building. They are more actively seeking attention from media than other open source which I am aware of.
>This doesn't include "generation environments" like VCV Rack, Reaktor, Bespoke and many others that don't have any traditional DAW features but are immensely powerful tools for synthesis and compositional discovery and creation.
although you can already do this if you use the carla plugin. that feature is about having a more native way to create your own "patches" by connecting various modules/plugins in a container plugin
Am a keen user of Renoise which is not free but it's really good (if you enjoy trackers) and also very affordable.
In the meantime, hyped for how the foss audio world is shaping up. We soon might not even a commercial daw at all anymore, just like Blender is doing in the 3D world (I work with artists in a studio and we switched almost our whole pipeline, sans simulations, to Blender).
Yeah, and the modulators themselves are a very cool feature too. Excited to see how Zrythm evolves, the UI looks great and it could be a good starting point for beginners.
A working recording studio will not change versions, let alone DAWs, given the non significant investment in plugins, time patching routing, probably to a physical patchbay, and hardware controllers or digital mixers that may have firmware compatibility concerns etc. Apples pace in pushing you off their hardware is many times faster than the geological timespan of pro studio upgrades.
Note that Harrison mixing consoles funded some of Ardour dev a few years back expressly to use it for their system, adding bespoke plugins etc.
it’s really a different world from electronic music production, which I’m rather familiar with lol.
Basically, if it involves in-the-box synthesis and largely programmatic sequencing it’s a different animal than a multi track audio editor optimized for comping takes.
Ableton workflow makes it clear how they are streamlining features to fit the electrónica (everything is electrónica these days, in terms of the production techniques having been appropriated by everyone else.)
And trackers and such are one of the original opinionated platforms expressly for making machine music, as Frooty and it’s ilk like Orion added audio tracks and recording features much later.
Workflow. Horses for courses. Upgrade timescales. Different animals. Can’t be everything to everyone.
Well for audio I think most of the tools are already out there, it's just a matter of bundling them neatly into a nice open source package that has a good UX and workflow.
Do any Free DAWs have Ableton-like VST "hiding"? I can't leave Ableton because of how insane window management gets on complex projects when 10 different VSTs are all fighting for screen space. Even the screenshots for this app look chaotic from all of the VSTs covering the screen at the same time.
Due to your question, I just added this feature to Ardour. There's now a user preference that if set will only allow one plugin GUI window to be visible at a time. Lots of our users would find that irritating, but you get the choice now.
Some Qs I've had about this recently in case you or someone else could offer insights: Is it realistic to run Ardour for music composition on regular Intel sound hardware these days? Is it still pretty easy to migrate from Ubuntu to (presumably realtime) Studio?
Thanks for any input; I'm interested in Ardour, Jack, etc. but not "buy new sound card" interested, as LMMS on ALSA is not too bad for what I do.
Ardour does not have significantly higher requirements than other audio software and should work just fine with any decent-ish machine. The audio interface is really up to you, it's just a matter of sound quality. If onboard audio suits you, then who are we to judge?
I myself used the onboard audio with an external mixer for quite a while. I've since upgraded to a 24 track FireWire rig assembled from cheap used hardware that no longer ran on Mac or Windows because of obsolete drivers. In-tree drivers is major advantage of Linux when it comes to hardware support.
You don't need a fancy card for music production if you're not recording external audio. As long as it has decently good quality output and you're either using amplified speakers, a headphone amp, or it has a good enough internal amp, you can get away with internal audio.
You'd be surprised at how many music producers do all their work on a laptop and headphones these days. If you just want to mess around, any internal card will do for sure.
This applies to all DAW work on Linux regardless of what app you use. LMMS, Ardour, it's all the same. JACK runs peefectly fine on internal cards.
> Even the screenshots for this app look chaotic from all of the VSTs covering the screen at the same time.
That's one of the first things I noticed - how messy it looks. Perhaps that's just because they tried to showcase all the features in one single screenshot lol.
I don't like the word at all when describing interfaces. It's an overly broad term that in my experience doesn't tend to lead to very good conversations about what's good or bad. Case in point, we recently did a complete UI make-over at $JOB and the bossman keeps referring to it as the new 'more intuitive UI'. We moved a few buttons around and changed some font sizes, but the most visible change is the completely new colour palette. So yeah.
I'd also argue that nobody is born with an intuition to work a DAW or any other piece of software, and in that sense I think it's just a misleading term.
I think there are much better words to use to talk about whether a UI is successful or not: "Familiar" is a good word, because then you can ask "familiar to whom" and have a good conversation about what kind of users you have, their backgrounds, how much work you expect them to put into learning your software, etc. "Internally consistent" is another thing you can talk about and to some extent quantify. Being "discoverable" is another thing where you can talk about the balances between having everything right in front of you and a complete information overload. And of course, you can't really get around whether or not a UI is attractive, displaying good colour sense and being visually balanced and such. While you can certainly make pretty things that are impossible to understand, I would tend to argue that there is a bare minimum of prettiness needed to make something that's friendly and engaging.
(PS: Thank you very much for Ardour, it is a remarkable piece of software.)
I don't think it's about familiarity at all. I think it's about mapping domain knowledge to users tasks with as little friction and unnecessary complication as possible.
You might think that's the same thing as familiarity with existing software, but it really isn't.
For example: Cubase. You can do a lot with it, but it's a mess of accreted features with some bizarre near-duplications, all splattered around almost randomly. A good few are entirely hidden. You won't find them unless you read the manual and/or watch a video - if you can find it.
A lot of people use it, but it's not a model you'd want to copy.
Ableton Live is more of a mix. Some features are very intuitive, some are less so. But someone has at least thought about typical task-based workflows and tried to minimise the number of UI entities and clicks required to perform them.
None of this is mysterious. The principles of good UI design are well known: minimise clicks, minimise pages, minimise the number of entities that users need to remember, avoid multiple access points for features, avoid hidden modes and secret key combinations (unless it's a command-line app, sort of), group related features, concentrate on implementing the most common tasks with as little friction as possible, avoid constant mode switching, avoid long lists of unrelated items, try to handle windows and dialogs intelligently to avoid clutter, make all operations as consistent as possible, follow general OS and industry standards. (Etc.)
Of course software is specialised and if you don't know anything about DAWs - or photo editing, or 3D - you're going to have to climb a learning curve.
But domain basics are standard. If you know them a good intuitive tool should be able to make them available with as little friction as possible. And a really good tool will anticipate what you're trying to do and make it even easier than you were expecting it to be.
Thanks for Ardour. I've been using it on an off for a couple of years now (every time I get the itch to remix some pop song that's stuck in my head).
I will say that I consider Ardour unintuitive, and reading your post on the forums I think we have different takes on the perspective used for this criteria. You seem to be making the argument for users coming from other DAWs to Ardour, whereas Ardour was for me was the first DAW I used. Thus rather than comparing it to existing tools I always try to find out how to do X, and often I have to Google for help because what I expect to be possible is not straightforward/"intuitive".
Let me give out two examples that tripped me up recently
1) Wasn't able to easily reorder my tracks. I would have found intuitive to be able to drag & drop tracks within the main view. Instead I had to switch to the mixer view to reorder them.
2) I was playing around with a song that had around 20 stem tracks. Grouped them out by voice, melody, percussion. But once grouped I couldn't find an easy way to solo an individual track within a group, as the solo button would solo the entire group. For me a group specific set of controls would be intuitive, whereas existing buttons changing their behaviour is not. If I recall correctly I had to click the group name in the main view for it to become uncolored (disabled?) for individual controls to effect individual tracks.
Re: 1: View > Show Editor Lists and then you can drag & drop in precisely the same way as in the Mixer window.
Re: 2: the primary modifier key (Ctrl on Linux/Window, Cmd on macOS) overrides group operations universally. So click on a solo button for one member of a group, solo the whole group; Primary-click ... solo just that member.
1) That's definitely useful info, I was not actively aware of the Editor List. If it shows up on the first Ardour startup I probably closed it out just to have more room available in the default setup.
2) Also wasn't aware of the "primary modifier key". What I noticed from giving it a quick try on my project is that when holding down Ctrl cannot solo a single track in the Show Editor Lists -> Tracks & Busses window (clicks are prevented). Nor does it allow me to adjust individual volume sliders per track within a group. But seems to work for all the other track controls.
Re 2: the editor list "Tracks&Busses" tab uses a GTK TreeView for displaying status and offering controls.
GTK's treeviews don't make it very easy (understatement!) to make cells in the treeview detect keyboard modifiers. When you click on the green/gray box in the solo column, mostly what we know is that you clicked, we don't tend to get modifier info. I was referring to tbe buttons in track headers/mixer strip, but you're right it should be consistent/universal. I'll see what I can do.
Regarding faders not being group-overridden by the Primary modifier ... yes, that's true. Ctrl-drag on the fader provides finer-grain control. However, there's a reason for this difference. In general, we recommend that people use VCA's for group gain control and disable shared gain control in a group. It gives you a much more flexible working style, and is a feature typically found only on extremely expensive mixing consoles. Ardour offers both SSL and Harrison style VCAs (i.e. heirarchical/stacked or parallel), depending solely on how you set things up.
My instinctive reaction to any software product advertised as "Intuitive", "Simple", or "Fast", is full-on Generation X "what utter bullshit" skepticism.
A greenfield software project in an inherently complex domain may be intuitive, simple, and fast at first, but claiming it will stay that way is like advertising a rock you throw into the air as "Flying".
The "intuitive" thing is largely the sum of the usability issues that open source developers typically don't have the time/resources to fix or even gather data on.
E.g., how many new users have gotten frustrated with the default setting one of your users described which doesn't allow drag-and-drop of tracks in the view? 0%? 100%? If you knew the answer and that answer motivated you to make an improvement, then that moves the software one notch away from "unintuitive" toward "intuitive."
Most open source projects probably cannot easily get the type of data needed to make these assessments with much accuracy, so they find other ways to grope toward UI improvements. Nevertheless, what non-technical users call "intuitive" is still a real thing, and they know that because they've felt the frustration of "unintuitive" UI choices eating more than their fair share of cognitive capacity.
"Intuitive for who" is a good question, and I hope the answer is "intuitive to the new/occasional user".
I've used a number of different DAWs, and the main challenge is that if I haven't made any music for several months, I don't really remember all the various maneuvers that a daily user would have in muscle memory. I end up having to re-learn everything, and experience extra special frustration along the lines of "I know there was a trick to moving this thing to that place, but I can't remember what it is".
Almost every time, it's hard to argue that the way the DAW does it "doesn't make sense"; it generally does make sense. But a lot of the time the maneuver is so different than the things one does in a non-DAW for basic clicking, editing, and dragging things around, that it gets frustrating having to re-learn it over and over again.
Reaper is a fantastic DAW, at a great price point IMO. I've had a side hustle for a while now editing podcasts and doing voice overs for a couple of corporate clients (my former job being one of them) and Reaper is the chefs knife in my kitchen of sound
I'm also a Reaper user. The Windows version is so snappy that it runs perfectly under WINE and, as a Linux user, I didn't feel the lack of a native version before it existed. And I still use it; unfortunately something happened on my 6+ years old installed machine and I'm not able anymore to run Linux VST hosts under native software; all attempt to use linvst now fail, etc, so I'll be soon building a new machine dedicated only to music.
Anyway, one feature I'd like to be addressed in DAWs is pattern based drum programming, just like we did with old drum machines in the 80s, but on steroids. I wouldn't use it for electronic music however; I'd like to quickly create patterns with an UI that for example let me show them like boxes on a flowchart (double clicking for editing), then drag, move, connect, copy them, apply variations, different time signatures, etc. The mouse interface would allow extremely quick creation and managing of a rhythm track, but unfortunately all we got is piano/drum tracks that are good for fine editing but IMO aren't the best tool when composing. They surely allow selecting areas then copying, moving etc, but in most DAWs the interface is so much crammed with objects that can be dragged and dropped that mistakes are a regular thing. We lack something in between that helps organizing drum tracks areas as patterns, then treat them as such.
are you familiar with yabridge? im not sure if it will fix your vst problem but it's the only vst bridge i could get reason's rack plugin working in, and ive tried pretty much every vst bridge out there
I never heard about it, thanks. I moved to wine-staging and tried building it but it failed probably due to my screwed up install. I'll keep a note to try it on the next reinstall however.
I saw your comment and thought, “could it be…”, clicked on your profile and sure enough, it’s Booth Junkie. Love your work. You have great energy and really helped me to find a sound that works - thank you.
This is a bit off topic, but this is the first time I've actually used sourcehut and I've got to say I love it. Nearly instant account creation and sometimes I don't notice a page is already loaded because I blinked when I clicked.
What I want is a way to run VSTs from the command line. Often I just have the same chain of VST with saved settings that I want to run a file through and a DAW shouldn't be required. mrswatson is the only thing close I have found but it doesn't seem to work at all.
I'll admit my usecase is unique, just running certain Izotope plugins over interview audio to clean them up but I really wish command line composition and automation were possible.
this is on the radar, what you are asking for is similar to lv2apply I guess
you can already run guile scripts via the command line so you could run a few plugins and process audio if you wanted to assuming all the necessary API is exposed but I haven't really tried that yet
What is "a file" in this case? Because VST don't have idea what that is, so you're still going to be generating your projects in _something_
That said, what you're describing sounds pretty close to using cantabile in headless mode (https://www.cantabilesoftware.com/guides/commandLineOptions), where you just create a project with your desired VST chain, and then take it from there.
But don't VST's have settings? mrswatson can feed them fxp settings files so I assume its a standard. mrswatson just only seems to work with older or simpler vsts.
If you don't mind a little bit of high level programming, I would recommend SuperCollider in NRT mode + the VSTPlugin extension or Pure Data in batch mode + the [vstplugin~] external. In both cases you'd generate the OSC command file resp. write the Pd patch once and then invoke it from the command line with any soundfile you want.
My first thought was to see if ffmpeg could do this. Unfortunately it seems like not currently [0] but what caught my eye is a mention that "the VST SDK has a linux command line VST Host you can compile" which might be all you need.
I don't know exactly what kind of software is better suited for FLOSS. I'm a bit sad that there are no AAA FLOSS games. Open source libraries have been in common use for games for long time, there are a few somewhat adequate engines and Godot is a major promise for changing the landscape.
Now, consider linux, gcc, llvm, apache, the rest of the gnu project... these are technical projects. It looks like "technical people" are willing to improve the tools they use and that drives FLOSS technical/system software to continually evolve through the years.
Regarding artistic software... well they are definitely technical and advanced, but an artist is much less willing or knowledgeable to make any contribution. But, when the right sauce finally mixes in, we get Blender.
So, I think there is hope for the DAW market. If proprietary options don't take care to make good offers, they will be eaten just the same way the traditional proprietary UNIX world was. MacOS survives, but the market the survive into is very different.
AAA games are typically the result of a small army of artists, working overlong hours for a year or three. Go read the credits of one all the way through sometime, and compare to the credits of a summer tentpole action/effects film.
Do you have any proposals for ways to get this many people to work for that long for free? Or for a way to fund them and release the full source for the executables and the assets for free?
I said nothing about the assets. Actually I really think this is a path for good FLOSS AAA games: paid assets. Not even Stallman is opposed to that: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/nonfree-games.en.html the part that says "Game art is a different issue, because it isn't software."
Yup, and if you look at Quake 3 Arena as a good example, the game is free software but the assets or not, and as a result of that you wind up with games lime Open Arena and the dozens of other arena style games built from quake. It can still be that way.
Policy in id software in Carmak days was to GPL the last engine as soon as a new one was released. The business model was to expose more people to the old engine, weaken competition and offer consultancy and customization (I think).
They basically showed that it was possible and profitable. It is a shame this ended after doom 3.
Looks good. Perplexed by the lack of information on the features page vs the landing page, though? I wanted to know more about this 'chord pad' before downloading it but the Features pages seems unfinished.
After taking a cursory glance at the sources, It's rather unique in a way that it's GTK based yet looks nothing the average GTK application. I wonder what made them pick GTK instead of QML or even something unique like many DAWs do.
btw congrats to the team, I'm not musically gifted to give an opinion on how usable it is, but the design looks very crisp and more akin to something you see in closed source apps with an army of designers behind them.
I saw this a while ago and wanted to contribute so I found my way to their source. Unfortunately, this was my first interaction with SourceHut, the site they use as their central point of development, and found it completely unintuitive. After 15 minutes of fumbling around I basically just said "I'll try it again later" and never got back to it. This might just be because this was my first encounter with the site.
we keep a mirror there if you prefer to use github (https://github.com/zrythm/zrythm) but we don't actually use github for development
if you really want to use github pull requests instead of sending patches feel free to do that and I'll still look at them but we recommend patches via email because it's an open and standard system
I do wish we had an open standard for things like issues, pull requests, etc. that was a little more "featureful" than plain email. At least platforms like Gitlab, Gitea, etc. are self-hostable and open source, which is a start.
ForgeFed[1] seems to be an attempt in that direction built on top of ActivityPub[2], but (from my very brief impression) seems to be stuck in something of a development hell. I’m willing to believe it’ll get done at some point, but whether it’ll get traction—or how a project of this sort should even go about that in general—is anybody’s guess.
Just wanted to say that I personally really appreciate the setup, workflow and the way you are organized! It looks like you are really caring about building upon open tech both in development and communication. Actually made me very curious.
Same for the choice of dependencies and the documentation in place, was surprised with how easy it was to compile myself. Hadn't had the time to give the program itself a full try yet, but I'm actually looking forward to do try some recordings with it next week.
we use RtAudio which has ASIO support, but we can't legally distribute binaries with that so our RtAudio is built without it. if you want ASIO support you'd have to build RtAudio yourself with ASIO support and replace the DLL if you're using our binaries
It's a grey area. There are quite a few open source audio apps that ship with ASIO support, some of them even GPL licensed. AFAICT, the problem is that Steinberg forbids redistribution of the SDK which would conflict with the GPL. Now, if you would get a license agreement from Steinberg and just don't include the SDK in your source code (to comply with Steinberg's terms), who is going to sue you for not complying with the GPL?
Yes! In the end, ASIO is just a COM interface ("iasiodrv.h") + some structs, constants and typedefs in "asio.h". All the actual code in the .c files are just helpers. I definitely think it would be possible to take just the specifications and build an alternative SDK as long as you avoid the ASIO trademark. So far, nobody dared to do that, though. At least, I'm not aware of anything.
On the other hand, people did do that with the VST2 SDK a while ago. I'm pretty sure Steinberg knows about it but they probably don't want to risk a court case (which could set a clear precedent) and the bad publicity.
Trackers are just vertical piano rolls with all tracks visible concurrently. Piano rolls are is better, I’d argue, when working with audio clips and automation.
I use and like both, but I'd say they're quite different.
With trackers, you're editing a series of events. Events can be notes, parameter changes, or commands such as "reverse this sample's playing direction now" or "move the playhead for this sample to exactly 50%". Those are common tasks when making electronic beats.
With pianorolls, everything has to be represented as a note or an automation curve. The examples I gave above become difficult to represent properly, and are often done with plugin-specific keyswitches or velocity switches. You end up with a D sharp that actually means "change to sample number 2", that kind of thing. I don't really see how it's better for working with audio clips.
I understand why, but it's really hurting adoption of this project to lock the installers behind a paywall. When I'm looking to download something like this, I already have garage band and logic. I'm not willing to really give you 15$ without any proof this will work for me. However, if the installers were available for free, I would have no trouble paying €5 or so on the honor system. Assume it works for my computer and all that stuff
Note: you must also build the software yourself to get ASIO support for Windows (which uses RtAudio). You'll be stuck with an order of magnitude greater latency under WASAPI (or worse under MME), assuming your device drivers are built to use it.
Assuming this works I have no problem donating 15 or 30$. I already know it's not going to work as Logic, so then it turns into $15 just to sort of see what it is.
I compile stuff for myself all the time and I bought the installer. As far as this category of software goes, $15 is cheap. (Although I think it was $5 when I got it.)
It didn't work very well a year and a half ago or whenever it was, though. Maybe I should give it a look again.
Yeah this is a turnoff for me. I get that I could compile it myself but since the authors clearly don't want that, I'd rather just put my money into tools I know will work.
the "paywall" system has been proven to work by ardour and zrythm to fund the project's development
>I'm not willing to really give you 15$ without any proof this will work for me
if you want to try it out you can download the trial version at no cost. all features are there besides saving/loading projects (you can still export audio though)
The problem here is it's competing against Audacity which is free.
Then again audacity is selling user data. Even if I'm down to pay 15$ then I can't share projects with anyone who doesn't want to pay. Folks who , since it's proven, already use Logic.
I think that you are being unreasonable. Logic gives you zero demo trial period and its price is significantly higher. Most audio software is relatively expensive, if you have any experience, which I doubt given your claim that this competes with audacity. Audacity competes with Ntrack, perhaps. This competes with Ableton or Bitwig. Go check their prices
Logic is a proven technology. It's well supported software by a billion dollar company. I've been to studios and we've recorded projects entire projects just with logic.
>if you have any experience, which I doubt given your claim that this competes with audacity.
I actually make music, and I have numerous keyboards, drum machines, etc. I own both Maschine and an MPC touch. As well as numerous expensive iPad music creation apps.
The difference here is when you're buying proprietary product, you have a realistic expectation of things working without being a massive pain in the neck. Neck. I did try and install the Zrythm trial, but I got some strange lib and not found error.
I'm either paying for a product or not, if I'm paying for a product I expect it to work. The problem of having an open source project, which charges a fee in order to use it easily, is I can't realistically have an expectation of customer support.
first of all I disagree with your view on proprietary products. besides my view that proprietary software is unethical and you shouldn't use it (including your OS and firmware) because it subjugates you (see the video on our website if you don't see how https://www.zrythm.org/videos/TEDxGE2014_Stallman05_LQ.webm), it makes no difference on product quality whether the product is proprietary or libre. look at linux as an example. what makes a difference is the manpower behind the software, which is either bought with money (see linux, blender, etc.) or comes about from many people donating their work together for a common cause like GNU
your points are valid on the customer support side with logic, but logic has a multi billion company behind it and many years of experience and development - not to mention separate marketing and customer support teams. zrythm is not even in beta yet and I'm pretty much the only developer/maintainer/customer support/UI/UX designer of this with help from volunteer testers and other people in the free software community, so unless someone drops a blank check in my mail or something it will take some time before we can offer customer support and reliability comparable to logic - especially on Windows and Mac because things are extremely hard to build and debug there and no one in the free software community has motivation to learn how they work and I don't really understand those systems either. I rely on third party libs as much as possible there. I don't really understand how GNU/linux system stuff works either, but at least for GNU/Linux-related issues I get a lot of free help available online and from other developers because we are all working for a common cause - I'll gladly give free help to anyone as well because I want free software to succeed. you don't have that with proprietary OSes so you need even more manpower and time there, which money helps with a lot
as things stand, the fact of the matter is that the more we get from zrythm sales and other types of donations, the more time I can spend on development (or even pay people for tutorials/development/design like I have already done) and less time doing other unrelated work. if there wasn't even a price tag for the binaries (which take considerable effort to produce, especially for mac and windows which randomly break and have complex packaging requirements and are a pain/impossible to debug properly) I would spend even less time on this out of necessity. donations aren't consistent. we were lucky enough to receive a relatively large donation from the FundOSS event and a couple of relatively large donations from users but that's an one-off situation. you can't rely on donations unless you have stable organizational funding (and then you even have other problems like the organization threatening to pull funding if you don't do something they want, etc.), meanwhile software sales have been relatively consistent for the past year (and consistently growing) and there is no unrelated pressure to succumb to like with organizational funding. that's passive income you can rely on to an extent so it helps the project greatly
besides, I plan to maintain this project for several decades and compete with proprietary daws like logic, so having a "business plan" that will work in the long term is one of the top priorities for me (and my financial health) and for the project. if you are involved with free software, you see software getting abandoned all the time because the developer doesn't make a living from it - this is also why most free software projects are hobby projects and can't offer serious support. I don't want to be one of those projects. meanwhile Paul from ardour seems to have been smart about it and look how successful ardour is as a professional quality DAW, and from what I can see he doesn't have to do extra jobs to secure an income. that's a win-win situation for the project's users and its developers. the current model has been proven to work by ardour (and now by zrythm too) so it seems like the best choice for me, at least at this stage. who knows, maybe in the future there is a zrythm foundation or company and I could get enough funds from donations/investments/other ventures to even hire people. I think Paul has talked about this as well but audio development is not something you can expect tons of volunteer work for, unlike web technologies, so consider that as another reason to have a proper "business plan" for longevity
but you are basically asking me to find another job as an income source and donate the rest of my time to you with nothing coming back to me or going into the longevity of the project. I don't blame you for wanting good things for free but I think your request is unreasonable given the current circumstances. if you have any convincing arguments for dropping this "paywall" (in quotes because you can always get it from your distro or things like AUR or Geekos DAW (https://geekosdaw.tuxfamily.org/en/) or kxstudio eventually (https://kx.studio/Repositories) or build it yourself for free) that would benefit me and this project (and in turn its users) at this stage I would be very interested to hear them
someone suggested that the project would be more popular if the binaries were free but I don't think that makes a difference and also popularity alone doesn't guarantee quality. not to badmouth LMMS, I think it's a great project, but look at it as an example of a project that is popular but from what I can tell lacks manpower (correct me if I'm wrong) due to having practically no funding, and compare that with ardour which employs 2 full time developers and gets constant fixes and updates, even after 2 decades. at least in the DAW/audio space, this is what the situation seems to be like
one idea that was brought up was to have ads in the free binaries and provide the paid binaries without ads but I'm not so fond of it
