Really. It amazes me that I still find out about new Linux plugins after years of producing music on the platform. It could not have been easy to compile this; the information is all over the place online.
The ability to filter (!) for compression, saturation, etc. is so great.
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.
Additionally, from what little I'm aware of, telephony is heavily optimized for particular frequencies of human voice and then heavily compressed within that. As well, any single telephony stream is basically a single channel. A song may have dozen of channels, at high resolution, full spectrum, all sorts of computationally demanding effects and processing, and still need latency and sync measured on milliseconds.
So... Kind of the opposite of each other,while both being about processing sound :-).
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.
There are projects that aim to provide synced multi player jamming, but last I checked they are all based around looping. Human ear SHOCKINGLY does not lend itself to being fooled and will noticed surprisingly small sync issues.
I always compare it with photo editing where you can cheat and smudge some background details with no one the wiser, whereas any regular non-audiophile will notice similar smudging or sync in audio.
It's still limited to whatever latency the network has, but it can be useful for some things. If that means it's mostly useful for loops, then that's that up to the musicians. :)
(I myself have used it for remote livestream participants, but only for voice. I was able to get distinct inputs into my console just like folks in the studio had, and I gave them a mix-minus bus that included everyone's voice but their own, for their headphones.
It worked slick. Interaction was quick and quality was excellent. And unlike what popularly passes for teleconferencing these days: It all flowed smoothly and sounded like they were in the room with us, even though they were a thousand miles away.)
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.
1. Drag up/down to change value. 2. A modifier key to slow the drag for finer resolution changes when dragging. 3. The ability to double-click the knob and type in precise values when I know exactly what I want.
The problem with knobs on a GUI is when designers stay with them when there is a faster option. Like an opportunity to combine three knobs.
For example, the EQ on any SSL channel strip is a nightmare because they slavishly stick with a skeumorphic design of the original hardware. The hardware required mixers to use two hands to adjust gain and frequency at the same time, and then dial in Q on a third knob. Very tedious when you have a mouse.
When this is done right, you get something like FabFilter's Pro-Q graphic EQ. The gain and frequency controls are instead an X/Y slider that you can easily drag across a representation of the frequency spectrum. In addition you can use a modifier key to narrow/widen your Q. All with a single click and drag of your band.
True though I would put this very much in the "feature, not a bug" bucket. These tools are for people who have worked with the original hardware and want a very faithful emulation, including the look and feel. In the digital world with a modern PC there's not much purpose of a channel strip plugin in the first place, so the only people using one are doing so with intention.
It's a bit like saying that manual transmission cars could be controlled more easily if they were automatic transmission; it's completely true, but if you're buying a manual you want that experience.
Pro-Q is a great example of a digital-first tool (the automatic transmission equivalent), with lots of great visual feedback and a lot of thought put into a mouse+kb workflow. All of Fabfilter's stuff is like this actually, though sometimes to its detriment; the Fabfilter automation and LFO system feels very different from basically every other plugin. It's actually a more efficient workflow when you get used to it, but due to how different it is from everything else most people I talk to dislike it unless they've really bought into the Fabfilter suite.
Which kind of goes back to the original point: VSTs use knobs because it's what people are used to, and using something different might be a negative even if it's better!
Sure it mismatches the GUI, but it gives users the option when they don't want to do a click/drag for freq, then gain, then freq, then gain, then Q. You know?
That tediousness is what keeps me from using the SSL channel strip altogether.
Re: channel strip plugins: The advantage to using them in DAWs is speed and economy. Having everything in one window (ala the Scheps Omni Channel) saves me a lot of clicks vs. when I have multiple plugins in different slots.
I do absolutely everything in the box with a laptop keyboard and track pad. My primary motive is being quick and precise, and the less plugin window management I have to do the better. The channel strip keeps the tools compact and my movements minimal.
A slick-looking GUI is a kind of ad for the app. As author of an accessible, terminal-based DAW app, I contrast remembering an incantation like 'add-track' or 'list-buses' with hunting around. These incantations can have shorter abbreviations, such 'lb' for list buses, and 'help bus' or 'h bus' to be sufficiently discoverable, easier for both implementer and user. And then to have hotkeys to bump plugin parameters +/- 1/10/100 etc. Probably I'm pissing into the wind to think the majority of users will ever choose this -- and GUIs do provide amazing facilities for many purposes -- but we do have a huge array of choices on linux, including this plethora of music creation and production apps. That is a big success, IMO.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I would say the opposite, it's basically the perfect interface for a very specific scenario with requirements that don't really occur in much other computer software.
In fact, if it was all MIDI controlled, it's just a matter of mapping the mouse scroll wheel to a midi channel.
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...
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
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.
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.
Many if not most professional producers use MIDI controllers with knobs/sliders/buttons MIDI mapped to DAW controls. As such the skeuomorphism actually plays a valuable role in ensuring that the physical instrument experience maps to their workflows. Secondarily, during production/mastering, producers are generally using automation lanes and envelopes to program parameters into the timeline, and the piano roll to polish the actual notes.
When I've historically done working sessions, the composition phase of what I'm doing tends to involve very little interaction with the keyboard, and is almost entirely driven by my interaction with the MIDI controller.
Conversely, when I'm at the production phase, I am generally not futzing with around with either knobs or the controller, and I am entirely interacting with the DAW through automation lanes or drawing in notes through the piano roll. So I don't really ever use the knob through a mouse and I've never really encountered any professional or even hobbyist musicians who do except for throwaway experimentation purposes.
Vital is a wave table synth; Helm is a subtractive synth.
Helm was the first synthesizer that I really excelled with. I would recommend anyone who wants to actually learn the fundamentals of synthesis, to start on it. Once you get good at to it, it's faster to dial in the exact sound you want than to reach for a preset.
It's far more straightforward and less complicated than additive (ZynAddSubFX), FM, or wave table synths.
That being said, if you just want a very advanced synth with a lot of great presets, Vital is far more advanced.