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Re: "state of multimedia" (audio)



Junichi Uekawa wrote:

Hi,

I've done a little presentation for Tokyo-area Debian meeting[1] last week.
I've translated the resource into English[2].

It's a summary of what I've been doing and where I want to go from
now, and an introduction to what the Debian scene currently looks like.

I would be interested in what you think about the presentation, and
what might be missing from my perspective.



[1] http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/column/2005-debianmeeting.html.en

[2]
http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/column/data/debianmeetingresume200602-pres
entation-uekawa-english.pdf
Yes, there's a couple of pieces that stood out for attention:

"""
DAW: Debian Audio Workstation An uneducated attempt to use Debian to perform recording and mastering with many audio tracks. It was known to be a difficult path until beginning of 2006. With improvement of real-time response times, it became popular by year 2007... (hope)
"""

!?!uneducated!?!

Ardour has been useable in Debian for a while now. A/DeMuDi has provided a stable (i.e. useable) multimedia distribution since the release of the 1.2 series. I would s/2006/2005 at least. Debian is already becoming the platform of choice for many musicians and sub-distributions like (off the top of my head) 64studio, Musix, the Lionstracs Mediastation uses Debian and studio to Go! is based on Knoppix. Most of these systems work ootb in most cases.

I realise that you're talking about mainstream Debian here and the remark is possibly a little tongue in cheek, but I also you are being a little conservative / pessimistic too.

Yup, this is a forward looking statement with tongue-in-cheek,
requesting other developers to participate in debian-multimedia so
that we can have an excellent etch system released by 2007 :).

Tokyo Area Debian Meeting is a meeting held every month targeted at
Debian Developers, and new maintainers in Tokyo area.
OK, I understand the perspective.

"""
DeMuDi/agnula: A project that ran in Europe with some funding for the last few years. A Multimedia distribution based on Debian.
"""

AGNULA/DeMuDi please! It is a Custom Debian Distribution, a CDD focused on multimedia applications. A/DeMuDi is not separate from Debian, it is simply a customised way to distribute it. This distinction is _very_ important.

Thanks, fixed.
Cool. :)

"""
Quality assurance. Want to start adding regression testsuites. Most of applications I donʼt know how to use; starting with researching the usage scenarios.
"""

This paragraph needs explaining better, or at least, I need to educate myself better. Possibly this is opening up a whole new subject for discussion. ?regression testing? ?usage scenarios? Along with identifying who the multimedia maintainers are and trying to keep tabs on whether they are active or need help. Multimedia QA would be a Good Thing. Count me in.

Background: I'm most interested in QA on Debian as a whole, and always
looking for possibilities of introducing some automated testing to
help a project of this size.

Considering we have a lot of audio-communication protocols, and many
tools support multiple protocols, it's unlikely that all of them will
be tested through each release.

I'm looking for possibilities of automating some of it, and also
facilitating some parts of the manual testing.

As in, "I'm starting to think aloud about this topic, you're welcome
to help."
Great, I'm specifically interested in QA issues for multimedia apps. I've been muddling my way through and lurking on Debian-qa for a bit. I've never studied computer science so my approach is rather intuitive, however I seem to have a skill for doing all the really stupid things to an application that ordinary users are likely to try without knowledge of the way the underlying code works and then document it reasonably clearly. I'd love to learn how to put applications through their paces in a more thorough and focused manner.

I'm becoming increasingly happy with anything I can do with my rather basic Python skills. I'm thinking along the lines of filtering information about 'multimedia' packages from the central qa database, which may be as simple as manipulating RSS feeds, I will have to have a proper look. If it is possible to collate this info with WNPP information and developer links it could provide a useful overview of the state of play of multimedia in Debian. Obviously, if this work has already been done and I missed it, let me know. ;)

cheers,

tim hall
/|\

PS. Please excuse strange formatting, I have had to migrate from Kmail to Thunderbird due to dependency conflicts and I haven't quite got used to Thunderbird's behaviour yet. I trust it will Do The Right Thing.



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