A generic, cross-platform, extensible framework for the distributed production and rendering of temporal media
This page was quickly thrown together over the course of a couple of evenings, in order to provide a basic summary of the Tinara project, since the only other easily accessible information was the description on the SourceForge.net project page - which is limited to 255 characters in length. If you have questions about Tinara which are not answered here, I'd encourage you to ask those questions on the message forums or e-mail list. Also, feel free to e-mail me directly. My e-mail address consists of my nickname in lower case ("benji") at the domain name of this web site ("@tinara.org").
Tinara is my ongoing effort to implement my ideas about how I'd prefer to work with sound and images. While the initial focus is on music production (due to the fact that I most often work in that realm), film and video features have always been major design considerations. Note that it's still mostly vaporware - Tinara is a work-in-progress.
A secondary goal of the project is the creation of custom interfaces for the use of people with special needs. One example would be a simplified interface which could be used by those who were unable to read (such as my younger brother, who has Down Syndrome). Another example would be a music production interface which would allow blind users to edit and mix their music (traditional interfaces require the user to see the locations of faders and waveforms on the screen).
For more details on exactly what makes Tinara different from existing media production systems, take a look at the "How does Tinara compare to..." section.
Tinara is composed of several components, which will use and/or support several programming languages:
There are, in fact, many excellent open source media production projects which are already in a fairly mature state. In cases where they are suitable for what I need/want to do, I gratefully use them, and I contribute bug reports and patches. I am, for example, a credited contributor to the wonderful Hydrogen drum machine, and I created a difference keying plug-in which become part of the official versions of the Cinelerra video editor/compositor.
Great as many of these projects are, however, none of them fully address the media production process in the unified manner that I desire. Tinara is intended to be the "glue" which ties together my favorite tools, across multiple computers, multiple platforms, multiple users, and multiple locations.
Additionally, Tinara has adopted certain core design principals which are either absent from or inherently incompatible with the these existing projects.
Alpha releases will be made for the following platforms:
The main development machine is currently running 64-bit Gentoo Linux (~amd64).
At the time of writing (mid-October 2006), multiple instances of Tinara's components (interface, core, and renderer) can be run across multiple machines via TCP sockets. The core loads a rendering tree from disk upon startup, and keeps the on-disk copy up-to-date with any changes to environments or objects.
The next step will be the introduction of basic numeric data types into the rendering engine. This will allow tests to be performed, simple rendering agents to be developed, and the core of the cache system to be implemented.
After that, work on the audio output and graphical interface features can begin. A simple demo "song", using oscillators as sound sources, can be created, and a demo release could be made (the graphical interface would, at that point, consist of little more than a window with start/stop/rewind buttons)
Wherever possible, Tinara's components will use OSI-approved (open source) licenses. Certain future components (such as rendering agents which enable proprietary 3rd-party technology) may or may not end up needing slightly different licenses. Such exceptions will be clearly noted.
The first ideas for what would become Tinara came into my mind in the fall of 2000. Further ideas grew out of frustrations with Pro Tools in early 2001. After incubating these thoughts for a while, I came up with the name "Tinara", and registered my project with SourceForge.net in March of 2003.
I've burned the design to the ground and rebuilt it several times since then, but I'm now confident that the current design is simple enough to be realistically implemented, yet flexible enough to accommodate future design considerations.
The main differences are:
It is worth noting, however, that Tinara will initially "wrap" Ecasound to do tasks like reading/writing audio files, routing data through LADSPA plug-ins, performing basic EQ/compression, etc. Eventually, Tinara will be given native support for these tasks, but the ability to wrap powerful tools like Ecasound is one of the things that will accelerate Tinara's development, and allow it to embrace new technologies as they emerge.
Eclipse's role in the software production industry is analogous to Tinara's intended role in the media production industry. I do not personally use Eclipse at present, but I have a high degree of respect for the project, and for the level of enthusiastic acceptance it has received from both commercial and noncommercial software developers.
I hate Halo.
Copyright 2006 by Benjamin Flaming. Released under the GNU Free Documentation License