Chris Hermansen

7192 points
Chris Hermansen portrait Temuco Chile
Vancouver, Canada

Seldom without a computer of some sort since graduating from the University of British Columbia in 1978, I have been a full-time Linux user since 2005, a full-time Solaris and SunOS user from 1986 through 2005, and UNIX System V user before that.

On the technical side of things, I have spent a great deal of my career as a consultant, doing data analysis and visualization; especially spatial data analysis. I have a substantial amount of related programming experience, using C, awk, Java, Python, PostgreSQL, PostGIS and lately Groovy. I'm looking at Julia with great interest. I have also built a few desktop and web-based applications, primarily in Java and lately in Grails with lots of JavaScript on the front end and PostgreSQL as my database of choice.

Aside from that, I spend a considerable amount of time writing proposals, technical reports and - of course - stuff on https://www.opensource.com.

Authored Comments

Thank you for your detailed comments, Sal1950.

I must emphasize that Jonas did all the work on Strawberry; I just wrote this article - so thanks are really due to him.

As to "the attitude towards audiophiles at Clementine", I guess you might be referring to https://github.com/clementine-player/Clementine/issues/5344 where someone comments "I don't think we care about "audiophile" things". That is indeed unfortunate, but it's their project, and fortunately for us, Jonas Kvinge does care and took the time to fork Clementine!

With regard to the "you can't hear it so we don't support it", I would like to leave the "last word" to this study, also from the AES, which suggests that in fact we can hear differences http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=18296

I like your idea about being able to disable (sorry) the volume control.

With respect to the "internet services" thing, their presence or absence isn't a dealbreaker for me, unlike the lack of direct ALSA connection in Clementine. If I had forked Clementine, I might have left them in, but Jonas didn't. Along those lines, though, tne thing that I've never seen, which puzzles me, is the ability to pop open PDF "liner notes" included with album download purchases.

Anyway! Once again, thanks for taking the time to write such detailed and thoughtful comments.

Thanks for the comments, Loxmyth.

As to what may (or may not) have been done to improve processing in a closed source operating system, that's a bit outside the subject matter at hand.

As to choices for a DAW, this is outside my comfort zone, but as far as I know, the open source alternatives are:
- Ubuntu Studio
- AV Linux
- KX Studio

As to tools, I like this link https://alternativeto.net/software/fl-studio/?platform=linux but again it's outside my experience so please take it with a grain of salt!