Long time Fastmail customer. Let it learn a bit about your inbox. I barely see any spam these days that’s not been caught. Except LinkedIn, that somehow goes through
I dont/didn't use Jack at all, straight into pipewire, which makes for a super unintuitive way to select 'audio device' in Reaper (iirc, something like select ALSA and 'default's for input/output and somehow that's all routed via pipewire). I'm not unhappy about pipewire, I finally have a low-ish latency audio system (enough for mixing, if not recording) that I don't have to spend hours on to get it to work. A la MacOS.
But generally that's my point, 'it works if you go and edit this obscure line in this obscure config file'. Mac has had a stable CoreAudio backend for quarter of a century now (counterpoint - Windows is also a mess). I wish Linux would stabilise their userland a bit more and stop rewriting stuff every few years.
Sometimes I wish there was a commercial company behind 'linux for audio' that will give me a finely tuned Linux distro on a finely tuned desktop machine, based on whatever distro, I don't really care. But have it all released/patched at their own pace, as long as everything 'just works'. I'd be happy to pay for that. The whole 'OS due upgrade, is anything going to work tomorrow, I have a session' is still an unsolved problem on _every_ OS/platform. Most busy studio heads go years without installing/upgrading _anything_ for fear of having a lemon after said upgrade, with clients waiting at the door.
I used this site as a reference earlier this year quite often, as I attempted to establish some baseline for a Linux DAW. I use Mac for serious audio stuff, but 'what if' (since I use Linux for everything else anyway).
I came back pleasantly surprised with the current state of things. Minus the underlying linux sound system, which is still a mess of things that barely work together. (I have a lot of expensive/pro plugins and all the DAWs on the Mac, so this was mostly a filtering exercise - what I can use on Linux that can still mix/master a whole project).
- I'm not a FOSS purist in audio, so that wasn't a requirement. But I am 'linux purist' so no VST wrappers of windows DLLs etc.
- Watershed moment for me: Toneboosters and Kazrog coming to Linux. Along with u-he, these make for a very, very high quality offering. You can easily mix a commercial release just with these. Kazrog isn't even 'Linux beta' like the rest, proper full release on Linux. I was briefly involved in beta testing for Linux, Shane & co are incredible people.
- I have most/all DAWs for the Mac. Reaper and Bitwig on Linux are enough for me and feel like good citizens in Linux. (ProTools is never coming, neither is Logic. But addition of Studio One makes for a really good trio).
- Any USB class-compliant audio interface will work (modulo control applications which generally aren't available on Linux, so ymmv).
- iLok is missing, which removes a whole host of possible options (I have 500+ licences on my iLok dongle, none of that stuff is accessible). I can't say I miss iLok, but I do miss Softube (not that it's available on Linux, iLok or not).
I made a few 100+ tracks mixes on my thinkpad with Reaper and the above combo of plugins, it worked just fine.
But Linux is still Linux, and 30 years later still annoys me with typical 'linux problems', which generally boil down to 'lack of care'. UI is still laggy, compositors be damned. While Reaper is butter-smooth on a Mac, audio thread never interferes with UI (and vice versa), it can get quite choppy on Linux. If you allow your laptop to go to sleep with a DAW open, chances are good that upon resuming you'll have to restart it as it will lose sound. And a lot of smaller annoyances that are just lack of polish and/or persistent bugs, that I'm sadly used to on Linux (want to switch users on Linux Mint? The lock screen can get hella confused and require a lot of tinkering to get the desktop back). But overall, it's a million miles away from a hobbyist endeavour that Linux audio used to be until recently. I could get actual work done with Linux this time around.
Isn't Apple taking UK gov't to court over this, and the reason they have abandoned encryption for everybody is to avoid being forced to provide backdoors. On this you should be on their side, not against them.
Macintosh has always been application-centric, instead of window-centric desktop. Hence the top application menu that controls the 'application'. There is nothing inherently wrong with that approach.
And I'm not sure why anyone would complain that installing (most, not all) applications is just dragging an icon into applications folder.
There are a lot of small companies / single devs working in very technical, pro-oriented, industries. They still thrive in the days of browsers and javascripts and what not, writing super optimised, super inovative, native code.
Like all the 'audio plugins' people that essentially write .so's that go into the big desktop audio workstations, doing anything and everything with sound, while also experimenting with various UI/UX paradigms, unrestricted by what's possible in the DOM/CSS, integrating hardware into it all etc. (I imagine similar in the video/rendering industry, but I'm not too familiar with that side)
A lot of this stuff has been investigated in Mr Alexandrescu's ironically named book Modern C++. Typelists (before variadic templates) recursive templates and componenet-like assembling of classes, etc.
I imagine there is a modern-modern-c++ version of Loki library somewhere on github.
> the main insight was that rather than wait for market signals to then decide what to do, you can precalculate your responses up to and including the actual message to be sent to the exchange
Ah those nasty market opens in the morning and trying to get a good spot in the queue
Indeed. Although I don't know what precisions are required in crypto products, in traditional trading an 8 byte double is quite enough - the price submitted will have to be rounded to the instrument's precision anyway (e.g. most spot FX products are rounded to 5 decimal places).
With a caveat here, after a very quick look at the code: The price here is defined as long double, which can be different among platforms... My Mac/clang says that long double is still 8 bytes, Linux on that same arm64 machine says it's 16 bytes (and I'm not sure what that's mapped to these days - 80bit FPU instructions, or some Float128 representation)
Used to that... but once I accumulated a heap of AU plugins I just couldn't bear the thought of spending a weekend reinstalling all that again (plus most of them won't work with the new macOS on day one).
Don't know if it counts, but RME Audio are now providing drivers for their pro audio gear via DriverKit instead of the ole kext. Installed yesterday, works just fine (modulo checking forums if any widespread issues)
Thanks for that! I remember reading something on the subject years ago and scrolled through comments hoping someone would dig it up! Kudos!
(But there was another, similar article, much longer, with the actual frames from the movie, going through symbols one by one… I thought I had it bookmarked…)