From: latta@scam.berkeley.edu (Craig R. Latta)
Newsgroups: news.groups
Subject: Re: RFD: rec.music.makers.* groups
Date: 4 Sep 92 18:55:28
Organization: Experimental Computing Facility (XCF)
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In-reply-to: jlewis@ogicse.ogi.edu's message of 2 Sep 92 23:30:15 GMT




	Jeff Lewis (jlewis@ogicse.ogi.edu) writes:

> [a bunch of rec.music*.* schemes]

	I prefer this a combination of C, and D, which I will call X
(just to avoid the obvious... and conflicts):

Variations on a theme:
X:	rec.music.makers for general musician discussion
	rec.music.makers.<genre> for genre-based musician discussion
		(I doubt there would be sufficient traffic to sustain
		these groups, however)
	rec.music.<genre> for genre-based discussion (as it is now.
		Genre-based discussion shouldn't be assumed to be
		conducted by musicians only!). Note that
		"rec.music.synth" would be used for discussion of
		synth-based music, not so much for discussion of the
		synths themselves.
	rec.music.instruments.<instrument>, including
		rec.music.instruments.synth, for discussion of
			*synths* (sound and sound data generators),
			not so much for discussion of synth
			*interfaces*, like keyboard controllers.
		rec.music.instruments.controllers
		rec.music.instruments.controllers.keyboard
		rec.music.instruments.controllers.guitar
	rec.music.instruments.misc
	rec.music.instruments.marketplace


	Obviously discussions will have significant (but less, and
hopefully minimal) overlap. This is a Good Thing.

	I'd like to point out that "synth" is used as an umbrella term
for many kinds of controllers, not just keyboards (and rarely for mere
sound generators!). I think it would be a mistake to marginalize
non-keyboard synth controllers by turning rec.music.synth into
rec.music.keyboard, etc., or by discussion of dumping non-keyboard
controllers into rec.music.synth.alternate or somesuch.

	In general, I think newsgroups are better grouped by subject
matter, not by categorizing the participants. One of the greatest
things about USENET is that it allows very different people to
associate via their *interests*. So the "rec.musician" groupname
element turns me off, and it also conflicts with the
"rec.music.makers" (by duplicating "music-").

	And I don't have any aesthetic problem with long heirarchical
names, as long as they are the shortest *appropriate* names.

	Finally, the current configuration doesn't really pain me. I'm
not expecting a whole lot of people to want to change anything, except
perhaps to make the traditional move of the established alt groups out
of alt and into the "real" part of the namespace.



-C


--
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Craig R. Latta           Experimental Computing Facility                (XCF)
Composer, Software and   ParcPlace Systems, Inc.        (latta@parcplace.com)
    Recording Engineer   NetJam, Berkeley                (netjam-request@xcf)
latta@xcf.Berkeley.EDU   Smallmusic OO music project (smallmusic-request@xcf)
(standard  disclaimer)   proof NL parsing project         (proof-request@xcf)
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