[fluid-dev] CLI/text mode audio and midi multitrack environment

[laurent schwartz]

Hy Julien,

i'm interested in CLI and text mode multitrack environment.

I can think of several advantages that CLI and text mode have against graphical GUI:
  - lighter CPU and memory needed for same tasks




  - highly customizable using command line parameters and/or a configuration file
  - can be automated using a scripting language

I've studied some open source tools that have CLI or scripting capabilities that should be useful for audio/midi multitrack environment: 




  - ecasound (audio recording and audio effects), 
  - midish (midi sequencing/filtering/recording), 
  - timidity and fluidsynth (software synthesizer based on soundfont2).

These tools seems to be pretty good now and stable.


I could point out, trying to use them together, that there are some lack of features to provide a full audio/midi multitrack environment:

   - audio and midi transport synchronization (recv and send) using jackd server is not yet supported (midish/ecasound)
   - timidity and fluidsynth do not yet provide a jack channel for each MIDI instrument (Snare, OpenHihat, FingeredBass, SteelGuitar or at least, not in an optimized way ...)


   - color signal monitoring for each jackd channel (similar to the alsamixer text mode output) does not yet exist (as far as i know).

Combined together this features should allow some more exciting experience.

In the meaning time, CLI/text mode multitrack environment could be setup using an abstract tool such as nama (that provide a frontend to guide the user through the configuration steps). It could generate some basic scripting and/or configuration files needed to run a lighter (CPU/RAM) audio setup for welcomed users.




It seems to me that this component view is more Unix friendly and should have more advantage against a single and monolithic GUI software.

Friendly Regards,
Laurent