To build a community

[Louigi Verona]

A lot of the problems are caused first of all by the proprietary software. This is a concept harmful to everything it touches upon. And all tracking communities died out because of that. As soon as sharing dies out, for any reason, communities cease to exist.

If all VSTi's were free (as in freedom), there would be no problem in obtaining the necessary plugins when needed or packaging them together if they are small. But because authors of plugins require everyone to report to them, today sharing is not possible.

There are, however, two workarounds.
1. In a source version include instead of a plugin a compressed mp3 track. (if mpt allows mp3 samples. if not - it's about time it should)

2. Replace the plugin with a wave file sample of it - the result might sound ugly, but the techniques used will be seen.

And there is one solution - everyone uses free software and free plugins to make music. But this is near impossible today (((

At FSF Groups I have organized a Multimedia Libre group. There we analyze existing free multimedia software, point out to programmers who want to help what needs to be done first, also offer musicians an overview of features. I am now engaged in testing free software sequencers. If you are interested I can report of my findings here.

I really miss the Community.

[bvanoudtshoorn]

LV, I don't think that would really work, at least for my tracks. You see, I only really use OpenMPT to lay down the notes, their velocities, and some simple MIDI macros. (And simple effects like note delay, tempo adjustment, retrigger, and so on.) All of the really fun stuff happens inside Chainer, and within Chainer, mostly inside Kontakt.

Also, replacing parts of the track with wave files or MP3s or whatever would be very time-consuming. Personally, I think that it's better for a community to be open to sharing techniques on request. Hey, if someone asked me how I achieved something, I'd be more than happy to go into a fairly long rant about just what I did. (Of course, I tend not to do hugely impressive, "out-there" things, so this hasn't been an issue for me. )

I think that at the moment, that's how this community actually functions. Although people distribute files as MP3s, you'll notice that in the threads for tracks, as well as in other threads scattered throughout the forum, there are a lot of quite in-depth discussions on how people achieve certain effects. Side-chaining, for whatever reason, seems to be the flavour of the month at the moment.

[Louigi Verona]

Yeah, I understand.

I meant the mp3 track to be deployed automatically by the render engine though.

As for community basis, there is a notable difference between being ready to answer questions and releasing the source file. Theoretically, everyone in the world in any profession is ready to answer questions.

But if we all could try out some free software solutions and free plugins... then maybe more people would be able to actually share source file. Rosegarden is a serious sequencer for instance, MuSe.

[bvanoudtshoorn]

I see your point, LV. But the problem is that, for me at least, there is no other product in the world, commercial, open source, or free, that comes at all close to Kontakt.

[Harbinger]

As for myself, i use MPT for creating music, not instructional pieces. Including "source" files is like an painter including his palette and a list of his brush models and the colors he used.

I've checked our UL/DL page and we have PLENTY of examples to learn from, if it's instruction you need. But Verona's original concern was building the community, which he feels can be done by sharing source files. But i think by sharing the results of using MPT, we can achieve the same effect.

But it should be noted that we are already a small target community. Out of the population of the computer-literate, a very small percentage have any desire to create music. A small percentage of those use trackers (instead of sequencing software, sequencing synthesizers, or live gigs), and maybe 25%, being very liberal, use MPT regularly. It's natural that our community is going to be quite small. We actually have only a dozen or so that contribute regularly to the forums....


Besides, i find it cozy here, sharing war stories over a glass of chianti with a few close friends....