dekstop: weblog

Since I got my PowerBook early last year I'm on the search for decent alternatives to some of the applications I was using on the PC. Thanks to a flourishing development community I found replacements for the most important stuff (and more), but one thing that is still missing is a decent multi-track audio editor suitable for music production.

I've been using Samplitude on the PC for the last couple of years, which after a brief learning curve turned out to be perfect for my needs -- it offers quite elegant means of editing audio, including non-destructive filters and timestretching on individual audio clips, a versatile approach to editing volume envelopes of samples and tracks, and a very keyboard-friendly interface. MIDI support was lacking on the versions I used, but I didn't really care as most of the stuff I'm interested in happens in the audio domain.

On the Mac side of things, at least from my perspective, the software offerings look rather bland. I can't bring myself to use the bloated and ancient Logic or Cubase interfaces, but briefly flirted with an early version of Soundtrack Pro (which turned out to be both too unstable and too demanding for screen space for my meager 12" screen), was both delighted and disappointed with Digital Performer (not really suitable if you're making many copies of small sound snippets and plan to edit each of them individually), and even found myself using Audacity, the only free offering on the Mac that I know of that is still in development, and (until now) my secretly most favoured competitor of the bunch.

But man, does Audacity suck. I would be really happy to cope with some quirks as long as the basics are taken care of, but the dev team does not seem to grasp the basics of good interface development. Reminds you of the infamous Gimp interface (whose developers actively discourage attempts to improve the UI, cf. the GimpShop story). My secret wish still is that someone gives Audacity the Firefox treatment (clean up the UI and discard the unnecessary), but that doesn't seem to be on the horizon. So I'm patiently waiting for 1.3 to be stable enough to at least have a decent multi-track editor that gets rid of some of the existing limitations (it introduces the notion of audio clips, among other things).

An Unexpected Competitor

A couple of days ago, while researching Cairo, I found an exciting new open source multitrack audio editor that seems much more interesting: Jokosher! It not only has a great looking interface, but it already seems to spark innovative side-projects, and it's quite apparent that many people are getting excited about finding such a promising open source offering, so it's safe to say that this project is going to become quite popular within the next 1-2 years.

Jokosher has a range of features that make it really interesting for music production: Not only does is provide a well-designed multitrack audio editor, it also supports LADSPA effects, an extensions API, and more... which is amazing for such an early release.

The pitfall: it's developed on Linux, which means we'll have to wait for someone to port it to OS X...

(Jonty then also pointed me to the Diva Video Editor project, which looks like the equivalent hungry leftfield offering for simple video editing -- looks interesting!)

The Jokosher preview 0.2 will be released on November 20th.

Links

• Jokosher Homepage
• jonobacon.org: Designing Jokosher Remote
• Audacity Homepage

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