While in Austin last month, wise traveling colleague Joe Wallace did me a Texas-sized favor by steering me through the door of the alarmingly cool Waterloo Records. One prize: a completist’s decision to acquire a Japanese CD version of XTC’s 1982 English Settlement . In honor of this, check out Andy Partridge discussing the specifics of writing and demoing that disc’s staggering Senses Working Overtime.
The pro audio world and Linux/open source software world have been trying to find a way to fit together. Looks like they may keep trying. The latest effort, launched by a former executive of a legendary 1970s digital instrument maker, is linuxdigitalaudio.com. The site strikes me a bit like venture capital in the reverse; instead of nerds petitioning professional capitalists for funding, this is investors pitching the open-source community the promise of “economic incentive” if they would just be so kind as to, you know, conceive, design, prototype, integrate, and deliver the Pro-Tools-killing portable box. When I asked the executive in question about the problem of driver development, which I consider to be the far biggest hurdle if for no other reason than hardware sure isn’t any more, I got a response that boiled down to “the community will do that.” Then he told me how he sold his instrument to Frank Zappa back in The Day. Shrug. We’ll see if the open source community is more or less discerning than Frank was.
