Updating Musicians' Guide for Fedora 20

[Christopher Antila]

Hello Docs and Audio Creation SIGs:

Now that I have a little more time in my life, I'd like to properly
update the Musicians' Guide for Fedora 20. Since there are so many
possible tasks, and I'm not really the best person to judge what changes
would be most useful, I want to include others in the revision-planning
process.

These broad goals can help focus our efforts:

(1) Incorporate changes to software since Fedora 16.

(2) Eliminate content present in upstream documentation. This would
preserve Fedora-specific information, the sample creative projects, and
summaries.

(3) Do copyediting to ensure high-quality, low-ambiguity, easily
translated text. If we do this, it should be a concerted effort in one
place, to minimize the amount of text that requires re-translation.

Possible specific tasks:
- see what can be removed from Qtractor, referring to upstream docs
- include Ardour 3, if it'll be ready during Fedora 20 cycle
- use the SuperCollider GUI rather than the GEdit plugin
- rationalize the SuperCollider chapter, which is half the guide

In addition, I'd like to finish my long-standing goals of changing the
specific piece used for the LilyPond piano tutorial, and of using a
freely-available recording as the basis for the Qtractor activity.

I appreciate any feedback or new tasks, and especially offers to help.
In the coming days, I'll start filing these issues on Bugzilla so we can
track their progress.


Regards,
Christopher

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

Quoting "Christopher R. Antila" <crantila(a)fedoraproject.org&gt;:

>  (2) Eliminate content present in upstream documentation. This would
>  preserve Fedora-specific information, the sample creative projects, and
>  summaries. 
Yes, but how good *is* the upstream documentation? On my own  
project(s), I link to a lot of upstream documentation but I have to be  
very careful - some of it is junk. Whenever possible, I install the  
documentation packaged in Fedora rather than link to upstream.

>  I appreciate any feedback or new tasks, and especially offers to
> help.
>  In the coming days, I'll start filing these issues on Bugzilla so we can
>  track their progress. 
I'll be working through my Planet CCRMA scripts  
(https://github.com/znmeb/AlgoCompSynth) next week on Jam alpha, and  
I'll also be learning ChucK in the process. That should yield some  
more usage examples and shake out some usability/documentation bugs,  
although ChucK is in Planet CCRMA and not Jam.


-- 
Twitter: http://twitter.com/znmeb; Computational Journalism on a Stick
http://j.mp/CompJournoStick/

Pondering the pandemonium of pontificating pantheism to ponderous  
pandas since 1994

[Brendan Jones]

On 09/12/2013 08:18 PM, Christopher R. Antila wrote:
>  Hello Docs and Audio Creation SIGs:
>
>  Now that I have a little more time in my life, I'd like to properly
>  update the Musicians' Guide for Fedora 20. Since there are so many
>  possible tasks, and I'm not really the best person to judge what changes
>  would be most useful, I want to include others in the revision-planning
>  process.
>
>  These broad goals can help focus our efforts:
>
>  (1) Incorporate changes to software since Fedora 16.
>
>  (2) Eliminate content present in upstream documentation. This would
>  preserve Fedora-specific information, the sample creative projects, and
>  summaries.
>
>  (3) Do copyediting to ensure high-quality, low-ambiguity, easily
>  translated text. If we do this, it should be a concerted effort in one
>  place, to minimize the amount of text that requires re-translation.
>
>  Possible specific tasks:
>  - see what can be removed from Qtractor, referring to upstream docs
>  - include Ardour 3, if it'll be ready during Fedora 20 cycle
>  - use the SuperCollider GUI rather than the GEdit plugin
>  - rationalize the SuperCollider chapter, which is half the guide
>  
BTW, the qtractor by docs klaatu et al complete ignore buses which is 
integral to working with plugins. Very well laid out and useful 
documentation in every other respect though.

I think the hardest part of navigating around Linux audio is finding a 
method that is conducive to your workflow. It's not so much the 
applications (as you've stated *some* good docs upstream, some bad), but 
more of a way of keeping everything together so that you can just turn 
stuff on and go when inspiration hits.

Perhaps some focus on session management?

F20 has the latest version of non-session-manager. Could be worth a 
look. Upstream projects are looking to embrace it over jack-session 
(qjackctl) these days due to its flexibility, but both are worth a 
mention. Qtractor is also nsm enabled now for example. Ladish review 
request is still in stasis unfortunately - I'd push it if it didn't rely 
soley on jack DBUS (bug reports abound - non-dbus qjackctl and 
ladish/gladish). It certainly confuses things, but it is a great 
project. On that note, jack upstream recommends that jackd and jackdbus 
should be mutually exclusive. I'm not sure if that is even possible with RPM

Sorry for the brain dump,

Brendan