Hello everyone,
I figured that since we just got our 10th member, it's high time that I
introduce myself and officially inaugurate this little hangout. :)
My name is Jan, I've been a professional composer and audio producer for
some 12 years and an avid Tango user since 2009. Like many of you, I was
shocked and dumbfounded by SmartAV's decision to cease all Tango
development and support from earlier this year (even though with the
development pace crawling almost to a halt over the past 2 years, the
writing was kind of on the wall). For one thing, I'm not keen on the
thought of my Tango turning into a $8000 boat anchor the day the
developer of my DAW (Steinberg, in my case) decides to flip a bit that
renders the API incompatible with NetSmart; but what almost bugs me more
is that Tango's concept of a DAW-agnostic, yet tightly integrated and
well-specified control surface is still pretty much without alternative
in the marketplace. Also, I've always felt that there's still a ton of
unrealized potential in the concept that I was really hoping SmartAV
would one day get around to implement. Oh well.
Some weeks ago, as a personal last-ditch effort, I asked Roger Savage
(CEO of SmartAV and Soundfirm) if he'd consider releasing the source
code to Tango's software under an open source license as a parting gift
to its user base. This would potentially allow me and other enterprising
hackers to try and keep it up-to-date with upcoming versions of DAWs, or
possibly even extend its functionality (I have a fair amount of C/C++
development experience under my belt). Although he was open to the idea,
he ultimately decided against it, at least for the time being -
presumably because there are parts of the software that are governed by
third-party licenses, and these would have to be uncoupled from the main
codebase first before a release. There's a small glimmer of hope,
though; he mentioned he'd talk to Nikolozi about whether he'd be willing
to continue maintaining the software, possibly depending on some amount
of funding to be raised by us, the user base. How far this idea has
progressed I don't know (keep in mind I'm just a user and not privy to
any SmartAV internals). So that seems to be the current state of things.
In talking to Jérôme (of Studio Ubik in Brussels) and among our
bemoaning the general state of things, the idea was born to create a
hangout for Tango users that's independent from the quasi-abandoned
SmartAV forum. Hopefully this will become a useful place to exchange
advice and ideas about keeping our Tango and Tango2 systems alive and
useful. I should mention that I'm notoriously bad at keeping up with the
day-to-day organization of things like this, but I'm in good spirits
that with the size and maturity of our community, the list will
self-govern just fine. Still, if someone is scrambling to put on the
official Moderator-with-a-capital-M hat, be my guest. :)
We've thought about asking Roger to send a final (?) mail to the SmartAV
newsletter subscribers that mentions this list; when/if that happens,
I'm hoping we'll get another sizeable batch of members. I think it'd
also be great to have him, Niko, or other SmartAV people join. Lastly,
please note that anything you write to this list will be archived and
made publicly accessible on the web for everyone
(https://www.freelists.org/archive/tangousers), so it's not exactly
private.
Anyhow, shall we do a quick roll call? I'd love to hear who y'all are,
what you do, and what Tango hardware and DAW you're using. (Me, I'm on a
Tango 1 hooked up to a Nuendo 6.5 PC, Win7).
All the best,
jan
--
Jan Morgenstern >> Composer for media
http://www.janmorgenstern.com >> http://twitter.com/wavecaster
OpenPGP public key at http://www.wavemage.com/public.key
