Tracktion 4

[barfwafl]

One other thought, Mackie was and is a hardware company, and one with a good ol' boy aspect at that. They probably think our sense of urgency is a little weird.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean here. If they had developed T3 the way they develop their mixers, they would have taken their time and come out with a fine product. But for some reason, they took their time and came out with a broken software. This can't be corporate policy. I'm getting the impression that there are bad news that they don't want to tell us.

Axl

Axl, I mean nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress though the guts of a beggar... er, oops, wrong forum, sorry

I'm a dum dabbler, but Raw Materials seems like to've been a British outsider, a visionary, like, while is Mackie a venerable corp whose forte heretofore was mostly pots and switches, shave before work and negotiate the price of copper every day, what's up with this new digital stuff anyway, maybe we should get into it, and like that.

No excuse for shoddy bits and bytes, I'll concede.

As to your concern of "bad news," take heart in the truth that the home studio market is booming and is going to keep booming. No smart company would drop a product as promising as Tracktion already is. Mackie could easily have bundled some conventional LE from Cakewalk or Steinberg with its gear, but chose to make a bit of a statement by picking up Tracktion.

Jim Aiken, the reviewer who has been writing about electronic instruments for two decades, wrote last year that T3 would be his host of choice if he weren't already committed to another one.

Tracktion's progress may puzzle us, but I can't see Tracktion going away.

[Iain]

I can see what you mean UncleAge, but I didn't want to raise that point considering that the software and support teams are up to their task. I do encounter problems each and every day with the multitude of windows systems out there that are really the cause of our software problems, we have 250,000 strong client user base under linux, windows, and other unix variaties and our software support is bogged down dawn in day out with problems resulting from windows systems. For the 25 percent portion , the windows users of out client base, it generates somewhere in the region of 80 percent of all support calls and only 1 percent require actually intervention from a maintainance standpoint.

I re-itere, Tracktion would work better under linux, and we would not have to reboot after using computation expensive devices.

Iain

[rlindsey0]

I can see what you mean UncleAge, but I didn't want to raise that point considering that the software and support teams are up to their task. I do encounter problems each and every day with the multitude of windows systems out there that are really the cause of our software problems, we have 250,000 strong client user base under linux, windows, and other unix variaties and our software support is bogged down dawn in day out with problems resulting from windows systems. For the 25 percent portion , the windows users of out client base, it generates somewhere in the region of 80 percent of all support calls and only 1 percent require actually intervention from a maintainance standpoint.

I re-itere, Tracktion would work better under linux, and we would not have to reboot after using computation expensive devices.

Iain

As a long-time Tracktion user but a pretty new Linux desktop user, I too would love to see Tracktion ported to, and working stably on, Linux. I've gradually been moving my computer activities over to Linux. Right now I only keep XP around for dual-booting to run Tracktion and iTunes. I had also needed it for MS Money but am now converting to Moneydance on Linux. As soon as I can figure out a simple and stable way of dealing with my iPod Classic 160 GB on Linux, I'll move that over too.

Anybody ever try Tracktion with Wine or Crossover Office?

[UncleAge]

I can see what you mean UncleAge, but I didn't want to raise that point considering that the software and support teams are up to their task. I do encounter problems each and every day with the multitude of windows systems out there that are really the cause of our software problems, we have 250,000 strong client user base under linux, windows, and other unix variaties and our software support is bogged down dawn in day out with problems resulting from windows systems. For the 25 percent portion , the windows users of out client base, it generates somewhere in the region of 80 percent of all support calls and only 1 percent require actually intervention from a maintainance standpoint.

I re-itere, Tracktion would work better under linux, and we would not have to reboot after using computation expensive devices.

Iain

Fair enough.

[metamorphosis]

I would love to see Tracktion on linux -
having said that, XP is my flavour of choice, and I don't have any problems with it-
I imagine a large part of what generates more windows complaints, Iain, is the fact that linux users tend to be more tech-savvy - whereas windows users are just - well, everybody.
If windows is causing more problems, it's unlikely to be because windows is more problematic, per se, but rather because the users are more likely to solve the problems themselves under linux. Also, linux can run fewer programs, which means less users downloading/installing their own stuff.
I don't see any reasons why linux would work 'better' (and you've yet to qualify 'better' - faster, more stably, what exactly?) under linux - XP is pretty stable, and faster in my experience than a properly GUI'd linux distro (IE. not xwindows) - but that's no reason why it shouldn't run on linux.
It might be nice to have a linux setup thoroughly customised for audio, rather than a general usage OS -
Cheers-
m@

[rlindsey0]

It might be nice to have a linux setup thoroughly customised for audio, rather than a general usage OS -
Cheers-
m@

There are a few that are supposed to be exactly that, including Ubuntu Studio (which uses a special real-time kernel), 64Studio, and a couple of others I can't recall. Never used any of them myself, though.

[independentfactory]

Personally, I would rather Mackie continue to direct their limited resources to making their products as stable as possible on the two most widely used platforms.

I have tried to do professional audio work on linux. It's just too hard. XP or OSX works (for better or worse) and does everything one could conceivably need to do in the pro audio world. I make my living from this, and I don't have the time to endlessly patch and recompile a system to get functionality that's only a fraction of other systems. It's a beautiful dream, but it can't be relevant to the day to day professional user *just now*. Of course there are exceptions to this (home noodler, large scale distributed processing, sound research).

There are working audio software solutions for linux now if you have to have it, with large user and contributor communities.

At a certain point, the form and minutiae of the tools becomes irrelevant. It's just a tool.

Thankyou.

[Njxt2]

You've been around long enough to know that this is a myth. By the time T2 was acquired for distribution by Mackie, Jules was burnt out on maintaining Tracktion, and updates were few and far between.

It's easy for updates to be fast and furious when the base features are being added on and tested.

Remember how long it took Racks?

Yeah, you're probably right. I remember now (metal geek mode on : I remember how it started, I can't remember yesterday, I just remember doing what they told me ... ) ... how long we waited for this rack thing (was it 1.6 ?)
Seriously though, when I bought T1 (2002 ? 2003 ? can't remember exactly but it was largely before racks), I seem to remember frequent updates to correct bugs.
But times were probably simpler : fewer functions, fewer user base (so less strange hardware/OS configurations to deal with), "obvious" bugs perhaps ...

If anyone TRULY felt positive about getting, "I want a confirmation that we haven't been abandoned!" off their chest, I'd be surprised. 'Cause having said it out loud, it just makes you want that confirmation the more. Me, I'm rather happier not fussing about it.

I don't have that feeling and don't want to spend my time complaining (and I believe I don't).
But a word from BenO about "plans", future versions/functions/bug corrections, even without vague ETA, would be nice.
Not that the absence of communication would make me change my mind about T, but it's nice to have something to look for.
Even something like "In 2009 or 2010, expect a new version with rewritten auido engine to get rid of the first note drop bug" would please me.

[metamorphosis]

It might be nice to have a linux setup thoroughly customised for audio, rather than a general usage OS -
Cheers-
m@

There are a few that are supposed to be exactly that, including Ubuntu Studio (which uses a special real-time kernel), 64Studio, and a couple of others I can't recall. Never used any of them myself, though.

Yeah - +1 to what they've said above about general purposing though - it really does work - rather than rebooting to run X, or Y , or Z - no matter the minimal performance benefits.
Thanks for the names though, I knew there was at least one around, didn't know what it was called-
Thanks,
Matt

[Integratron]

Can somebody tell me what some of the major bugs in T3 are at this point, before I get involved with it? I'd read that they fixed the GUI click-through problem from T2. What's wrong with T3?

I use it with XP and it's rock solid for me. A couple of silly little flukey things that I never use anyway.

I still wish it had the capability to loop a clip whilst auditioning it from the loop matrix or browser!

[djsubject]

are we there yet?

[chico.co.uk]

Whenever people reminisce about the speed of updates when jules was developing tracktion, no'one ever points out that was before the mac version, and before vista. But hey, it'll run loads better on *nix derived operating systems, so let's add another platform to the mix.

[Iain]

There is an aweful lot of myths concerning linux .... I never compile anything to make the system work, I only compile my own software projects. As for the tools and programs available, well the thing I'm missing is Tracktion
The main difference is that Linux makes the CPU available for the application programs, Windows makes the CPU available for the System and eventually the application program. Our software platfrom is system and hardware independant and its business application number crunching stuff and you can see the total performance drop between windows and linux running on the same physical machine. I'll stop there because its really a case of seeing is believing.
Tracktion is the only reason I need windows

[Integratron]

... In fact, I just started today using T3 as a guitar trainer. Really does an excellent job with the markers... still haven't sussed the varispeed though. I guess I'll have to put my Tascam CD-GT1mkII on eBay now!

EDIT: oh man, that was too easy.. just hit the change speed button... however the markers didn't seem to change with the speed change... probably something stupid on my part... I'll have to look into that.

[thoshu]

Hey,

it I S near, there's already a mp3 floating around which was made with Tracktion 4:

http://mixonline.com/online_extras/mackie-tracktion-4/