Hi I'm the Zrythm author. No plans to change the current price model because it's reasonable (based on user feedback) and seems to be working. Haven't seen any good arguments against the current model other than people wanting everything to be gratis, but I'm all ears if you have recommendations
we use RtAudio which has ASIO support, but we can't legally distribute binaries with that so our RtAudio is built without it. if you want ASIO support you'd have to build RtAudio yourself with ASIO support and replace the DLL if you're using our binaries
It's a grey area. There are quite a few open source audio apps that ship with ASIO support, some of them even GPL licensed. AFAICT, the problem is that Steinberg forbids redistribution of the SDK which would conflict with the GPL. Now, if you would get a license agreement from Steinberg and just don't include the SDK in your source code (to comply with Steinberg's terms), who is going to sue you for not complying with the GPL?
Yes! In the end, ASIO is just a COM interface ("iasiodrv.h") + some structs, constants and typedefs in "asio.h". All the actual code in the .c files are just helpers. I definitely think it would be possible to take just the specifications and build an alternative SDK as long as you avoid the ASIO trademark. So far, nobody dared to do that, though. At least, I'm not aware of anything.
On the other hand, people did do that with the VST2 SDK a while ago. I'm pretty sure Steinberg knows about it but they probably don't want to risk a court case (which could set a clear precedent) and the bad publicity.
the "paywall" system has been proven to work by ardour and zrythm to fund the project's development
>I'm not willing to really give you 15$ without any proof this will work for me
if you want to try it out you can download the trial version at no cost. all features are there besides saving/loading projects (you can still export audio though)
The problem here is it's competing against Audacity which is free.
Then again audacity is selling user data. Even if I'm down to pay 15$ then I can't share projects with anyone who doesn't want to pay. Folks who , since it's proven, already use Logic.
I think that you are being unreasonable. Logic gives you zero demo trial period and its price is significantly higher. Most audio software is relatively expensive, if you have any experience, which I doubt given your claim that this competes with audacity. Audacity competes with Ntrack, perhaps. This competes with Ableton or Bitwig. Go check their prices
Logic is a proven technology. It's well supported software by a billion dollar company. I've been to studios and we've recorded projects entire projects just with logic.
>if you have any experience, which I doubt given your claim that this competes with audacity.
I actually make music, and I have numerous keyboards, drum machines, etc. I own both Maschine and an MPC touch. As well as numerous expensive iPad music creation apps.
The difference here is when you're buying proprietary product, you have a realistic expectation of things working without being a massive pain in the neck. Neck. I did try and install the Zrythm trial, but I got some strange lib and not found error.
I'm either paying for a product or not, if I'm paying for a product I expect it to work. The problem of having an open source project, which charges a fee in order to use it easily, is I can't realistically have an expectation of customer support.
first of all I disagree with your view on proprietary products. besides my view that proprietary software is unethical and you shouldn't use it (including your OS and firmware) because it subjugates you (see the video on our website if you don't see how https://www.zrythm.org/videos/TEDxGE2014_Stallman05_LQ.webm), it makes no difference on product quality whether the product is proprietary or libre. look at linux as an example. what makes a difference is the manpower behind the software, which is either bought with money (see linux, blender, etc.) or comes about from many people donating their work together for a common cause like GNU
your points are valid on the customer support side with logic, but logic has a multi billion company behind it and many years of experience and development - not to mention separate marketing and customer support teams. zrythm is not even in beta yet and I'm pretty much the only developer/maintainer/customer support/UI/UX designer of this with help from volunteer testers and other people in the free software community, so unless someone drops a blank check in my mail or something it will take some time before we can offer customer support and reliability comparable to logic - especially on Windows and Mac because things are extremely hard to build and debug there and no one in the free software community has motivation to learn how they work and I don't really understand those systems either. I rely on third party libs as much as possible there. I don't really understand how GNU/linux system stuff works either, but at least for GNU/Linux-related issues I get a lot of free help available online and from other developers because we are all working for a common cause - I'll gladly give free help to anyone as well because I want free software to succeed. you don't have that with proprietary OSes so you need even more manpower and time there, which money helps with a lot
as things stand, the fact of the matter is that the more we get from zrythm sales and other types of donations, the more time I can spend on development (or even pay people for tutorials/development/design like I have already done) and less time doing other unrelated work. if there wasn't even a price tag for the binaries (which take considerable effort to produce, especially for mac and windows which randomly break and have complex packaging requirements and are a pain/impossible to debug properly) I would spend even less time on this out of necessity. donations aren't consistent. we were lucky enough to receive a relatively large donation from the FundOSS event and a couple of relatively large donations from users but that's an one-off situation. you can't rely on donations unless you have stable organizational funding (and then you even have other problems like the organization threatening to pull funding if you don't do something they want, etc.), meanwhile software sales have been relatively consistent for the past year (and consistently growing) and there is no unrelated pressure to succumb to like with organizational funding. that's passive income you can rely on to an extent so it helps the project greatly
besides, I plan to maintain this project for several decades and compete with proprietary daws like logic, so having a "business plan" that will work in the long term is one of the top priorities for me (and my financial health) and for the project. if you are involved with free software, you see software getting abandoned all the time because the developer doesn't make a living from it - this is also why most free software projects are hobby projects and can't offer serious support. I don't want to be one of those projects. meanwhile Paul from ardour seems to have been smart about it and look how successful ardour is as a professional quality DAW, and from what I can see he doesn't have to do extra jobs to secure an income. that's a win-win situation for the project's users and its developers. the current model has been proven to work by ardour (and now by zrythm too) so it seems like the best choice for me, at least at this stage. who knows, maybe in the future there is a zrythm foundation or company and I could get enough funds from donations/investments/other ventures to even hire people. I think Paul has talked about this as well but audio development is not something you can expect tons of volunteer work for, unlike web technologies, so consider that as another reason to have a proper "business plan" for longevity
but you are basically asking me to find another job as an income source and donate the rest of my time to you with nothing coming back to me or going into the longevity of the project. I don't blame you for wanting good things for free but I think your request is unreasonable given the current circumstances. if you have any convincing arguments for dropping this "paywall" (in quotes because you can always get it from your distro or things like AUR or Geekos DAW (https://geekosdaw.tuxfamily.org/en/) or kxstudio eventually (https://kx.studio/Repositories) or build it yourself for free) that would benefit me and this project (and in turn its users) at this stage I would be very interested to hear them
someone suggested that the project would be more popular if the binaries were free but I don't think that makes a difference and also popularity alone doesn't guarantee quality. not to badmouth LMMS, I think it's a great project, but look at it as an example of a project that is popular but from what I can tell lacks manpower (correct me if I'm wrong) due to having practically no funding, and compare that with ardour which employs 2 full time developers and gets constant fixes and updates, even after 2 decades. at least in the DAW/audio space, this is what the situation seems to be like
one idea that was brought up was to have ads in the free binaries and provide the paid binaries without ads but I'm not so fond of it
this is on the radar, what you are asking for is similar to lv2apply I guess
you can already run guile scripts via the command line so you could run a few plugins and process audio if you wanted to assuming all the necessary API is exposed but I haven't really tried that yet
we keep a mirror there if you prefer to use github (https://github.com/zrythm/zrythm) but we don't actually use github for development
if you really want to use github pull requests instead of sending patches feel free to do that and I'll still look at them but we recommend patches via email because it's an open and standard system
I do wish we had an open standard for things like issues, pull requests, etc. that was a little more "featureful" than plain email. At least platforms like Gitlab, Gitea, etc. are self-hostable and open source, which is a start.
ForgeFed[1] seems to be an attempt in that direction built on top of ActivityPub[2], but (from my very brief impression) seems to be stuck in something of a development hell. I’m willing to believe it’ll get done at some point, but whether it’ll get traction—or how a project of this sort should even go about that in general—is anybody’s guess.
Just wanted to say that I personally really appreciate the setup, workflow and the way you are organized! It looks like you are really caring about building upon open tech both in development and communication. Actually made me very curious.
Same for the choice of dependencies and the documentation in place, was surprised with how easy it was to compile myself. Hadn't had the time to give the program itself a full try yet, but I'm actually looking forward to do try some recordings with it next week.
>This doesn't include "generation environments" like VCV Rack, Reaktor, Bespoke and many others that don't have any traditional DAW features but are immensely powerful tools for synthesis and compositional discovery and creation.
although you can already do this if you use the carla plugin. that feature is about having a more native way to create your own "patches" by connecting various modules/plugins in a container plugin
