[Fedora-music-list] about the Fedora Studio idea

[David Sommerseth]

Orcan Ogetbil wrote:
>> On Mon, 2009-05-04 at 16:24 -0400, Orcan Ogetbil wrote:
>>
>>> I will start writing the wiki page this week and report the status
>>> once I have enough material that can benefit from feedback.
> 
> I did start writing the wiki page [1] last week but I got stuck at one point.
> 
> It is not easy to make a good and fair classification. If we just take
> the AudioCreation software away and make a new group with them, and
> leave all the Audio/Video players, Digital Media and Video production
> software in Multimedia, it will be bad design. We need a better
> solution, which is not that easy to find.
> 
> These are the types of software we have in the Multimedia group.
> 
> - Audio Player
> - Video Player
> - Both Audio and Video Player
> - Digital (optical) Media Creation
> - Digital (optical) Media Ripping
> - Video Creation
> - Subtitle software
> - Audio Creation (which itself has many sub-categories)
> 
> So how shall we do the branching?
> 
> * A starting point would be separating Audio and Video. Then make
> "Players" and "Creation" subgroups an each. But then where will the
> CD/DVD creation/ripping stuff will go?
> 
> * Another starting point would be to separate Creation stuff
> altogether, leaving all the players in Multimedia. Then the Creation
> group will contain both Audio and Video stuff. This is not a bad thing
> to do if the subgrouping is made logical.
> 
> * Yet another starting point is, do not create another main group.
> Just do all the subgrouping inside Multimedia.
> 
> I really can't decide which of the three to pick. Can I get some
> opinions here? In all the cases, we will have the issue of having some
> packages that belong to multiple subgroups. How shall we handle this?

Good points, and David Timms also got a nice approach in another mail 
thread (even though, maybe a bit too extensive maybe?)

Some software can be really difficult to categorise, especially if aligned 
along these directions.  I'm just thinking out loud here now, please shoot 
these ideas down if they are useless.

We are serving segments, one is big already and the other segment has a 
potential to be just as big: Consumer and Pro ... what do I mean here?

Consumer: The "normal" computer user who wants different players, sounds, 
and video, and just playing with things just for fun.

Pro: Those who want to use the computer for serious production, like 
composers, musicians, DJ's, whatever who needs high-quality experience.

To oversimplify it: Consumers will be more than satisfied enough with 
PulseAudio, while Pro users who most probably want Jack instead.

Could this be a better path to help grouping the software?  F.ex. Totem, 
VLC, MPlayer -  in this scheme, a reasonable place would be a "Consumer" 
group.  While Rosegarden, Audacity, QSynth, different DJ software, Video 
editing, etc might fit better into a "Pro" group.  But let's not call 
anything "Consumer" to the user, but rather stick to the "Sound & Video" 
group name as today.

These two groups could then have subgroups, like Video, Audio/MIDI ... 
Maybe if more subgroups are wanted below this point, it should be 
considered to have two main groups for the pro-segment, like "Pro-Audio", 
"Pro-Video" and for consumer, a single "Sound & Video" group.

The reason for not splitting up "Sound & Video" is becuase: where would 
VLC, MPlayer and Totem fit in, between audio and video ... For more single 
directed applications in the "consumer" group, it could of course have 
subcategories.

In this approach, the "Pro" categories could also show up in the menu when 
Jack is installed.  And as Jack most probably is a dependency to several 
Pro-targeted software packages, you get everything in place at once.

Another thing for using the word "Pro" in these groups, is to emphasize 
that Linux is not just for geeks and amateurs, and that even less (Linux?) 
experienced pro-audio/video people will then catch the point - Linux might 
also be something for them.  For marketing people in the Linux world, using 
the word "Pro" might be beneficial - as this description is still (I 
believe) heavily used in the music and video world today.

But for a product to slip into the Pro-* groups, it really needs to be 
high-quality piece of product - or else it can easily backfire again and 
making Linux Pro-* effort a big joke.


Just my few cents

David S.