Re: Real-time category

[Matthias Grob <matigrob@terra.com.br>]

>      I seem to understand what Kim is saying perfectly well.  You 
>seem like a very intellegent person, though you don't seem to see 
>things the same way.  I have one question for you and I don't mean 
>it to sound elitist or anything.
>
>      Are you a Musician?

Stephen
you could ask the same question to Kim :-)

The main diference between them is not that one of them is a 
musician, but that Jeff defends his software work and Kim the 
hardware.
Its Kims personal position and as far as I know it rather comes more 
from his experience with creating PCs than from actual playing.
Likely, its Kims decision not to list Jeffs Mobius on LD.

If you ask me, I would answer with your nice words:
Most people that jam with me come away from the experience thinking 
that I am a musician (I am not sure about "man, he is a Real Musician 
Real Musician" :-).
Luckily I am one with bad ears, I did not spend time to practice 
acurate timing, so for me the PC works :-)
And my brasilian percussionist friends did not notice the 20ms latency :-)
My PC creates single clicks sometimes, probably due to the problem 
that Kim explains well: "there is always some probability that a 
command will get delayed longer than expected." Somebody told me that 
its because my PC uses Nvidia graphics that share the main memory :-(
Anyway, for me the clicks are rare enough and I believe it will 
improve in the future.
Yet, if I was a Real Musician and had to play a show for 20kPeople 
every night, I would use a huge hardware rack and a roadie :-)

>The way I see it, nobody except a musician really gives a hoot as to 
>whether or not a Looper has a
>RTOS.  I think Kim has stated very well and quite clearly, that non 
>real time systems are quite
>fine and adequate for many uses and users.  Just not for musicians.
>

hm... no, Kim said: "Some people don't seem to mind that 
unreliability, others do"
I wonder: who on this list does mind?

It seems that non realtime machines are more suited to looping than 
to other live music applications, since the latency can be 
compensated when the loop is played back (and thus the buffer size 
=latency can be long to avoid clicks). I know musicians (with 
exellent ears) who would not want to play through a computer but 
still use it as a looper.

It makes sense that there is a variable delay on MIDI commands, but 
keyboard players would suffer it more than loopers, yet it seems that 
its working for them, no?

Also, there are hardware units like keyboards running Linux. I guess 
that in the near future this question will become ordinary: "is there 
a PC in the box?"
I see people smile when a bank machine crashes (as they do here in 
Brasil) and it restarts showing the Win logo :-)...

So, please my friends, dont fight about what is a personal joice and 
especially dont spend energy to put down what works for others!
-- 


          ---> http://Matthias.Grob.org