Re: Import a MIDI file

[Stefan Westerfeld <stefan space twc de>]

   Hi!

On Sat, May 26, 2007 at 06:23:20PM +0200, W.Boeke wrote:
> I have also a suggestion for the beast developers. Why don't
> you stop working on the code and first write a decent user
> manual? I know this is not a pleasant endeavour, but without
> such a thing the app simply is not useable for a 'Jo User'
> like me!

Besides the stuff that Tim already mentioned why we don't write a manual
first, before continuing writing code, there is also something that is
frequently forgotten: in free software projects, often various people
work on different things, because they can, because they want to,
because they see a need for doing it, and so on. Somebody may be an
excellent translator for Japanese, but just because the Greek
translation is really bad, but required by lots of people, you cannot
just reassign him from the Japanese translation team to the Greek
translation team.

While in a company, you could at least try to do it (and say: if you
don't learn Greek, we'll just fire you), in free software projects it
may not work so well to reassign someone from one task to another. If
someone loves writing code, then he will probably be more happy
contributing code than documentation.

But you're right: there seems to be the need for better documentation,
and it would be great if someone would start working on that. For me
right now, the 0.7.2 release still is a more important thing to work on,
and the release will benefit all BEAST users. But I'll support
documentation writers as good as I can, without stopping to work on
coding.

BEAST may also not be as hard to learn as you may think at first. In
fact, I've seen several people learning to use the program in very
little time, as long as they asked questions on IRC, personally or
otherwise, whenever they occured.

Of course, mastering the subject of creating good music electronically
is a task that will take years to achive. But its not BEAST that is
guilty if you cannot produce decent music at first, in the same way that
you wouldn't blame the piano if a player cannot produce decent music, or
the word processor if somebody doesn't write good books.

   Cu... Stefan
-- 
Stefan Westerfeld, Hamburg/Germany, http://space.twc.de/~stefan