Decide if we want to go with the name of the old SIG or take on a new one.
Tidy up the Audio Creation SIG and related Wiki pages. Or start from scratch.
Establish communication channels.
Figure out the purpose of the SIG …
… and how formal we want to make things.
Here are my personal takes on the above:
The old name “Audio Creation” rings very technical to me. I want this to appeal to people who are less proficient or interested in the technical side, too. How about “Music & Audio”?
I would start the Wiki content from scratch, getting some inspiration from the old pages at most – they’re really outdated in places, many of the links point to nowhere meanwhile and I would say they also go into too much detail in places (e.g. much ”real estate” goes into PlanetCCRMA and what it is and what the plans of the SIG in relation to it are). I’d rather have the landing page short and sweet .
The Creating a Fedora SIG page still mentions mailing lists and IRC channels. However, I lean heavily towards using Discourse and Matrix instead. While I was a long holdout for both mailing lists and IRC, I eventually realized a) I’m not very good at staying on top of either and b) the world hasn’t stood still. Both mailing lists and IRC are pretty high maintenance communication channels even for users: you need to set up filtering or find/run a proxy if you don’t want to miss out on conversations that happened while you were away.
The goal of the old SIG was “to make Fedora the best Free software and open source platform it can be for computer based music production, audio mastering and audio editing.” This is not wrong, but it is rather long-winded. And it was grandfathered in when contents where imported from the old MoinMoin wiki in 2008 . I’m not good at writing slogans, but what about “Making it easy and enjoyable to jam, produce music and edit audio on Fedora”?
I’m not a friend of making things more formal than they absolutely have to be. As I understand it, we’re here voluntarily and I don’t expect us to need voting rules or a ticketing system of our own soon: we all have our itches to scratch and they are probably where we will contribute the most. We can’t force anybody else to work on something they don’t want to (and neither should we). For instance, I don’t have a great need for the Jam spin myself, so while I’ll gladly help out where I can, I won’t be driving it.
The new name gives all-encompassing vibes for musicians and also appealing to a broad spectrum of hobbyists or pros around audio, sound engineers or tinkerers in general, if I’m not mistaken.
I can’t open the old wiki pages, somehow. If they are largely outdated, creation of new repo is an option. See this link.
I would leave the SIG landing page on the Wiki (just as other SIGs). When we have some solid user documentation, that can of course go to the documentation website, but changing things there is more involved.
One thing I forgot to mention above, I’d like the SIG to have a tag (like jam-team) just so interested people can filter for it.
If you use the Fedora IRC you can have the meet bot produce the output of your meeting, minutes actions etc… Then post them here, this is how other groups do it, such as the magazine.
There is a similar bot being developed for Matrix after the Great Chat Schism (Matrix-IRC bridge went down). You should be able to do the same and post notes to Discourse.
This is super cool to see taking shape! If you guys need help with marketing the SIG or spin for something, hit up the marketing-team here or in our Matrix channel! I think there would be interest in this from the wider community from a user and contributor standpoint. For starters, we’ll share a link to this thread to see who else may be interested in helping.
If we turn our perspectives to audiences rather than Fedora brand/features, the tagline/ethos will grab more attention that is close to their heart. On that note, your new tagline sounds true to ‘audience’ perspectives, which clarifies how they can benefit from the SIG and audio processing tools in Fedora Linux.
My take-on is something along the lines of “Helping you get the best out of audio processing with Fedora Linux and thrive in music production”.
Okay, I am going to confess that I am an audiophile. I have pretty good gear, but not for my PC. I was thinking that it would also be good to look at audio gear for listening, there are some very nice stuff out there, if you have the coin.
[Edit] Like for instance, if Enid Lumley wrote an article about how placing two pails of bovine fecal matter directly behind the listener would increase your tonal quality, and sharpen your soundstage, I’d be collecting pails of poo as a result.
[Edit] The Absolute Sound is the best magazine for audio IMO … https://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/the-legend-of-dr-tezukuri/
Wanting to make Fedora better for some purpose is something I would take as a given for a SIG, so I feel that stating it again is a bit redundant.
It’s also important to consider who our main audience is, whom we want to reach. I personally would want the SIG to appeal to folks who use computers and software as tools in their creative process more than I expect the old one did, to get more of the artistic perspective into the conversation.
I’d say we could reach out to Linux audio enthusiasts in sub-reddit, DistroKid musicians, Linux-friendly audio interface manufacturer like Focusrite, package maintainers of DAW (top 2 or 3) and plugins or kernel testers.
I don’t think we should announce this as widely at this time. I’d say we look for people who want to contribute in some form, and in this group, anybody who isn’t involved with Fedora yet (they’re on another distro or even operating system) would ask why they should start now. And I don’t think we have a compelling answer to that question, at least yet.
The reason why I brought up with Focusrite in this discussion is I’d say audio interface is a nice bridge between hardware and software. From what I understand Focusrite tries to be Linux-friendly and getting ahead with Linux support. This is in contrast to other brands. See below articles.
Some of their audio interfaces already have kernel support, more will be coming in 6.7. Besides, they at least plan on helping Geoffrey (the guy who added Linux support for the Scarlett and Clarett devices) with future driver development.
What’s more, the GUI Geoffrey wrote actually exposes functionality that is not present in their official GUI despite the hardware supporting it, such as an internal hardware mixer.
Absolutely, it’s the central piece without which we wouldn’t discuss music on computers .
This sounds like what’s mentioned in the article @hank linked, and is really good news! I seem to remember they supported the folks who developer the ffado driver for the Saffire Firewire range way back when with docs (officially/unofficially I don’t know) but they took a more distanced approach in between.
I would jump in and play with this group. I couldn’t be relied upon from a timeliness perspective because I can’t seem to stop myself from overcommitting. But I may be able to add a modicum of value here-and-there occasionally. And I would definitely, and shamelessly, harvest the fruits of the group.
I am a very amateur Mountain Dulcimer player; gamely trying to use MuseScore for notation even tho it doesn’t support my instrument. I have done a bit of recording and mixing using Ardour for Mountain Dulcimer folks. I occasionally get asked to record performances to make YouTube videos (KdenLive, Ardour, and GIMP are implicated here). I’ve used Polyphone to hack out a terrible sounding custom soundfont for MIDI use. For me I am finding that MIDI tools in particular are lacking. Rosegarden is there, but I find it to be too cumbersome for my purposes.
I’m up for a SIG. I use JAM but there’s some things I dont use that often, so Im not sure if there are better options for what we default install. I’m always open for suggestions for how to make JAM better.
I think you bring up an important point: As far as I’m concerned, any contribution is welcome, whatever the “size”, whether on a regular basis or not. Happy to have you!
I would be disappointed if you didn’t! I mean, up to now we’ve only been talking, but if something I do makes benefits someone else, so much the better.
Yeah, Ardour has been catching up on the MIDI side of things, but I remember having my problems with Rosegarden, too, when I tried it. I also had problems synchronizing the Hydrogen drum machine to Ardour if there were changes in tempo – this was an attempt to transcribing drum parts, but not a very successful one as my tastes lie where many recordings aren’t done to a click and fluctuate.
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. I’m not good at writing slogans, but what about “Making it easy and enjoyable to jam, produce music and edit audio on Fedora”?
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