martinvicanek wrote:There is a "Clear Audio" prim, does that not help?
That only resets the schematic's internal streams, which is useful if e.g. you have nasty numbers in a feedback loop etc. - but if the audio driver itself becomes unresponsive, you have to resort to Spogg's solution. I'm having this problem quite a bit myself lately - a recent Win10 update seems to have really messed up my USB ports!
chjan wrote:I imagine this is a very good tool for schools that want to introduce students to the art of easy programming and prototyping. So I am curious why that apparently did not happen
I agree that it could have a lot of potential as a general purpose coding system and a teaching resource. Having worked as a product designer in the UK science education sector and as a school lab-tech, I think there are a few reasons why FS didn't succeed there - requiring a lot of work which DSPr may not have had the resources for...
1) Lack of customer support. Schools and colleges expect teaching resources - you won't succeed in that market without step-by-step examples, student handouts, lesson plans for teachers, etc. customised to the exact curriculum being taught. Teachers also generally won't use forums, nor encourage their students to do so - the resources must be readymade and printable!
2) Parochialism. For big success, you need to reach beyond just the UK. Even breaking into other English-speaking markets isn't easy unless you have the right contacts and local knowledge. Support for languages besides English is non-existent besides a handful of helpful forum members.
3) Very strong competition. Products such as Scratch, Arduino, Lego Mindstorms, etc. are far better resourced than FlowStone, and already have strong brand recognition. Once schools have decided on what kit to use, they will cling to it very, very stubbornly (both to save money on kit, and to avoid changing lesson plans).
4) School-level teaching of coding in most English-speaking countries is abysmal, and is often forced onto teachers with no coding experience (partly explaining the reliance on readymade resources). The last UK politician to push for it admitted publicly that she didn't even know what coding is, but that this was OK because, like the unfortunate teachers who she expected to teach it, she was going to attend the one-day-long teacher-training course (cue much mockery from the software industry, as usual). These policies have been failing ever since I was at school in the 1980's, so schools are understandably reluctant to waste their limited resources on coding in the absence of a curriculum and qualification that will attract large student numbers and will be taken seriously by employers or higher-education.
And a kind of number (5): Graphical coding isn't widely accepted for professional work, which is still almost exclusively done using traditional "literate" languages. Only a minority of FS users write DSP, Assembly, or Ruby, and many struggle with the transition from "graphical" to "literate", suggesting that "graphical" isn't always a good "gateway" to traditional coding. I don't mean to criticise anyone as I'm a great believer in fitting learning and working methods to people's individual talents; but, rightly or wrongly, the industry strongly favours one set of talents over the other, and the idea that systems like FS are not "proper coding" is very stubborn (though wrong, IMHO).
chjan wrote:The one and only major weakness I have experienced is the CPU consumption of GUI modules
This has long been my biggest complaint, and from many other people too, as far back as the SynthmMaker days. The primary problem is that no hardware acceleration is used - no matter how good your graphics-card is, all GUI rendering is done by the main CPU (using GDI+, an ancient Windows component). Making FS 64-bit and VST3 compatible has been the main focus of development recently, which is perfectly understandable and necessary, but I sincerely hope that the GUI bottleneck is the next major thing to get some attention - I have abandoned several projects because of it.