Khazul wrote:
Yes - its what they were good at - but with crrent reliability I have to question that - Traktor + Maschine is looking like a more viable performance rig to me, especially if you need to integrate with some kind of regular style DJing.
I don't have either (yet?) but one of my students was asking me about whether I thought he should switch to Live for a certain DJ gig and I couldn't recommend that he did - he's already used to Traktor and he's only going to be DJing and adding the odd samples as well and I just couldn't see a single reason for him to switch to Live and totally change up on what he is used to etc etc... But I guess I see it as kind of Ironic that I am teaching him in "Ableton LIVE" yet it's purely for production and Live he uses something else....
On the have-to-be-a-DAW point - People seem to like tools that can do everything, or tools that are very well inttegrated. Tools that can do part of the job, but where the workflow gets horrible compromised when integrating with something else tend to just get annoying and bypassed.
Yeah I still feel split here... I mean in the above point like I said I find it ironic, but at the same time I find it so quick and easy to work in Live after all this time that each time I've messed around with other DAWs I usually end up going back just because it's quicker in Live. I wonder how the latest version of Cubase would go though... I used to use it from VST5 up to around SX2 and I remember liking a lot about it and I have read people really rating it.... I remember preferring the workflow over Logic - that was around the time when Logic went Mac only....
Reason, rewire being a good example of something that was only ever partially done (midi in, audio out only, not in both directions), and workflow that wasnt that great in the end. Same with Live + rewire - it pretty horrible with the plugin limitations it imposes to the point of useless.
Reason is the classic example - Rewire not being full duplex was one of my reasons for leaving it in v2.5 - the weird thing about Reason is it's strengths are also its weaknesses - the fact that it is such a closed system can be infuriating, but then it's probably the single most stable and CPU efficient software program I've ever used for that exact reason. So it's a definite trade off. But they are a case in point in Tarekith's original point - the interface is bewildering that they are still using those tiny little controls.... they really need to make the rack resizable by now, it seems ridiculous that they expect people to take it seriously when it looks like it does. But I've ended up with an NFR of v5 and there are a lot of things that have come a long way that I'm really quite impressed with. The groove system is genius and so are the blocks.... but again there's an irony in the fact that they have really developed the sequencer side of things so that you're now expected to use the arranger more than the pattern sequencers, but the pattern sequencers have always been the main point of it to me - the fact that you can literally load it up, hit play and start tweaking. I remember showing my dad Rebirth about 15 years ago and he sat there tweaking knobs and after about 10 minutes turned around and said "Am I really doing this?".... now I've got my son on to it and he finds that side of it really easy to get into ....
the first thing I did was wire up a couple of Redrums to use the step sequencers on Kong
OTOH, If we had excellent virtual audio and midi between applications, a better master/slave sync story, near perfect interchange fo file formats between DAWs (ie move the complete project from live to logic or cubase), then we might well be using Live as a skteching and perfromance tool, logic and cubase as our DAWs (as examples), Reason in there as well as a collection of synths and processors. But they dont play nicely with each other, so we dont - too much of a pain, except when migration is done at certain points.
The real problem is that the companies wont play nicely with each other - never mind their products. How often to WE end up being piggy in the middle between the support depts of companies based in germany? (Access, NI, Ableton, Setinberg, RME) when if they would play nice and talk to eahc other - it wouldnt be so much of a pain in the ass for us? How the how can we ever expectt them to et together and make stuff really work well for user by actually designing together, creating standards etc?
Steinberg and Prellerheads have done alot fr us, but nowhere near enough. Needs another very strong player to push things to the next stage before it all continue to fragment even more. Kore is a good idea. On a certain hardware beta programme myself and Tarekith were in we had conversations about such a scheme a long time ago, but aimed at the product we were testing. Kore is good for NI and Alchemy, but for it to be really god - other need to get on board as well as support it. But the reality - most just want to do their own thing and never commit to helping someone else.
Like herding kittens really. In other industries there are standards bodies - music software is getting to the level of maturity and size were there is now a place where it needs an ECMA/W3C equivalent - for the actual software, not just the hardware. This is the reason we are still using 31.25Kbit midi and not something much better over 1GB ethernet for example!
Have to say out of all of them NI is the one I've been most impressed by. Somewhere around 5 or so years ago they were in trouble - really buggy, really but customer support, but they rose from the ashes and have turned out some amazing stuff....
Seriously, this combo with fm8 = ?.
