and there is resistance to using the free software alternatives, thus leading to a cycle where the free software alternatives don't get feedback/criticism.
Teenagers especially are really influenced by brands. I keep suggesting that 'industry standard' = 'same as all the others' and that being a bit different might be a good idea. No dice.
The free software alternatives are all absolutely terrible. Ardour is the leader amongst free DAWs, and is very nearly as good as Pro Tools was ten or fifteen years ago. There's no good free sequencer, no good sampler, no good reverb. Audio software is just too niche and too difficult; It requires a lot of skills that are rare in the free software community.
Well, some people seem to manage with these tools! And if more people were introduced to them, perhaps the feedback and number of interested coders would increase.
I admit I was thinking more of supercollider and puredata, so more 'sonic arts' I suppose.
Until there is a open-source program that replicates what Ableton Live offers (seamless and easy-to-use integration of audio recording and nonlinear editing with MIDI production), no one will consider using an open-source tool.
The biggest hurdle from my point of view is that low-latency audio on operating systems that are not Windows or OS X is a joke. Some organization needs to sink and huge chunk of developer time into either improving the user and developer experience of JACK or writing something new. Maybe once that is in place and starts shipping in vanilla Ubuntu (no special kernel requirement either!) the user software developers will be able to start catching up with the tools available on the Win/Mac platforms.
Easy to use? I've played with some of these tools, including Ableton Live and I've never found any that is actually easy to use.
They are all too stuck in the sliders/knobs metaphor. I'm not sure it's an adequate metaphor for people who has not produced in the physical world before.
If cageface's data is accurate, the expense of the software would not explain the sudden drop. Do music producers suddenly get poorer after a crack is released?
