Digital Performer for Windows finally released! with demo!

[liquidsound]

Double post

[liquidsound]

This is great! Half an hour here on KVR and I'm going to save 30 days of "deep" pain with the demo.
Theo, thanks for the reports.

I started with Performer v1 and out at 4.x.
Things have changed!

[fluxmind]

3) I tried, still following the 'Getting started' manual, to set my interface with 'Setup/Configure audio system/Configure hardware driver'. I choosed 'E-Mu ASIO', as in Cubase. Result : every 3 seconds, I get this 'Emergency stop' window message :

The audio hardware changed while MAS was starting up
(MotuAudioSystem Mas [59:0])

[help] [HW Setup] [MIDI Only] [Continue]

No matter what I try ('Continue', 'HW setup'), the only way to go through it is to choose 'Windows Audio' which means that the ASIO driver for my E-Mu is unusable.

Same error, while trying to start a demo, end of demoing for me

[LawrenceF]

There are a lot of things I like about it, for instance: a) the possibility to do multiple songs inside a single project, b) multiple mixes, c) melodyne is basically integrated into it, etc.

I'm still trying to kind of mentally visualize it's overall architechture, how the various parts relate to each other, sequences, tracks, etc, etc. I'm starting to think that there is something really flexible and unique and potentially useful wrapped up in all that but it will take more than a few days to wrap my noggin' around it all.

I can't really "compare" it directly to anything I already own and use because I just don't know it well enough yet. I'm seeing some small hints of great ideas but some of my pre-conceptions about how I think some other things should be (in any case) are getting in the way of some of that.

Unlike MixCraft or something I think getting a really good 30-day demo of something like DP will probably take a bit more of a committment. There seems to be a heck of a lot of functionality in there.

At early glance, the routing seems to be a lot like PT in some ways, kind of "indirect".

[cubic13]

Same error, while trying to start a demo, end of demoing for me

So, I'm not the only one, it seems... I would really like to not give up so soon and I already checked the sample rate, bit depth, synchronization... to no avail. Each time I click on [Continue] or try to set again the [HW Setup], I get within 3 seconds this f*****g message.

So, something well hidden is acting under the hood. But what ?

[fluxmind]

Same error, while trying to start a demo, end of demoing for me

So, I'm not the only one, it seems... I would really like to not give up so soon and I already checked the sample rate, bit depth, synchronization... to no avail. Each time I click on [Continue] or try to set again the [HW Setup], I get within 3 seconds this f*****g message.

So, something well hidden is acting under the hood. But what ?

Yeah, I've tried various settings too, to no avail, for me there's no other way, as to just give up, because I can't demo it with windows audio, latency is unbearable that way, so it's over for me. Maybe it'll be possible to demo again once a new update comes out.

[cubic13]

Found it !

From the advice in here : http://www.motu.com/techsupport/technot ... 6349642047,

Go in the C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\MOTU\Digital Performer\Preferences folder and get rid of the MOTU Audio System Prefs file.

Result : no more MAS message after relaunching DP8, this with my 'E-Mu ASIO' driver acting. Reminds me the Cubase 'Trash your prefs' advice spread all over the place in Steiny forums.

So, DP8 demo exploration is still alive...

[Kraznet]

Hi all,

Well, I was waiting for the demo to be availble since 6 months already and jumped on it to see how it would behave with my setup.

A horror show...

1) the activation window doesn't take the '@' character when entering my e-mail address. I had to use the Windows characters table to paste it in the relevent field. Not a biggy, but well...

2) I created an empty project and, following the 'Getting started' guide, I went to the 'Studio/Bundles' menu command to configure my MIDI devices. I scratched my head a little, and ended up configuring all my MIDI devices as following in the grid, as they are in Cubase :

My 2 controller devices (keyboard and pads)
- VMK-188+ -> Port [EC00] Emulated In
- MPD-32 ---> Port 2 [EC00] Emulated In
Then my 3 external synth modules :
- TX-802 ---> Port [EC00] Emulated Out
- D-110 ----> Port [EC00] Emulated Out
- 05R/W ----> Port [EC00] Emulated Out

Result : no MIDI activity after attempting to create a MIDI track with the 'Output' column set to TX-802, and my 3 external instruments are labelled with a '(missing)' statement.

3) I tried, still following the 'Getting started' manual, to set my interface with 'Setup/Configure audio system/Configure hardware driver'. I choosed 'E-Mu ASIO', as in Cubase. Result : every 3 seconds, I get this 'Emergency stop' window message :

The audio hardware changed while MAS was starting up
(MotuAudioSystem Mas [59:0])

[help] [HW Setup] [MIDI Only] [Continue]

No matter what I try ('Continue', 'HW setup'), the only way to go through it is to choose 'Windows Audio' which means that the ASIO driver for my E-Mu is unusable.

Think I'm going to prematurely end this experience. DP8 seems unusable for me at its present state...

-------------------

EDIT : OK, there is a little progress. I finally managed to get my external synths working, by choosing the 'Port [EC00] Emulated' with the relevent MIDI channel, instead of using one of the 3 external synths that I defined above. Going to delete these, as they seem useless as I defined them. More to follow, I guess...

Make sure you have the IO buttons highlighted for the desired ports, then the "missing" message will go away.



Regards
Kraznet

[geronimo]

Yes, keyboard shortcut for the Bundle window: Shift U _

[machinesworking]

and all i can see in those few enthusiastic posts is that it's deep deep deeeep deeeeeeeeeep. ohrly? so what? if I wanted to go deep, i'd hire myself as a miner.

seriously, I cant see any arguments in favor of DP8 interface and workflow other than "it's good for film scoring" (yeah? and how many of kvr'ers are going to do some hollywood scoring?), "it's deep" (so is Logic, Live, Cubase and yet they are pleasant to use and pretty simple to configure), "you can have dozen songs in one project" - oh yes, that seems useful to load 10 songs simultaneously into a session of an app that crashes just by going into preferences. and even if it wasnt crashing, ask yourselves how many people will find that really useful.

OK a few things.

Arguments in favor of it's workflow:
You can easily use DP like other DAWs, stay in one Sequence/Chunk and not bother at all with Chunks, the Song window etc. I often do this. Mostly I do this, but being able to save versions of a song you're working on in the same open project has obvious clear advantages.
First off when you're done with the writing process or have to freeze or print VSTi's to audio to save CPU etc. you can save the original 'MIDI' version in that same project. So there's no arbitrary projects with names like "Opus start MIDI" "Opus audio tracks" "Opus without second verse" unless you want to separate out your song into separate Projects for some reason? In Logic and Live I have multiple "versions" of a song, and not always did I remember to name them properly. This can be a PITA at times, especially adding in a computer change or two. Conversely in DP it's a single Project with all 'version' in the same project. This includes mix downs. I'm a mediocre engineer, and I spend a good amount of time mixing down my bands material so being able to save and recall mixes inside the same song is invaluable to me. Often I get carried away and realize and earlier mix was better, with DP it's a simple sub-menu to get back to that mix.
Track Comping is dead easy, looking at Logic 9 it's at least as good. Audio editing has been compared to Pro Tools, and many prefer it to Pro Tools in some areas. In general I'm much happier and more productive in DP when it comes to mixing an putting the finishing touches on a song. Most other sequencers that were MIDI first have compromises in terms of the engineering part of songwriting, not DP. Quantize has a pre-listen feature, sure others are non destructive, but it's IMO even better to be able to on the fly listen to what quantize is doing, and IMO it makes better choices than Live or Logic. Once you get DPs workflow things just click, at first your prejudices about how things 'should' work that you develop from using other DAWs will get in the way no doubt about that.

If all you ever do is House Music, and you're not that interested in expanding the features of your current DAW etc. then yeah I get the whole "DP does things different, so it's WRONG" thing, but with that said I've met quite a few dance music people who like it, the automation is pretty out of hand in DP, very flexible. To me, just the fact that the Sequence window is expandable to almost twice the size vertically of Logic and Live is a big plus.


It doesn't crash for me at all. a beta version of a VST I own drags it down a bit, but it's a beta. Not saying the Windows version isn't having problems, it very well could be, but it's obviously not in MOTU's best interest to have a buggy Windows version. One indication it's something going on due to configuration errors or problems with a particular PC set up etc. is that most of the Mac users reporting that the version they installed on their Windows machines are running fine. That said, it's hard for me to know exactly how the Windows version is handling MIDI for instance? In OSX DP is far more integrated into OSX's 'Audio MIDI Setup', you connect MIDI devices to a MIDI box in Audio MIDI Setup and the port gets the name of the device. So my Xpander's MIDI connection in a DP track gets named 'Xpander 1-1', 1-2 etc. I hardly mess with Bundles, most of the time you can just create a new input track from your setup in the track itself in Track Overview.

I actually haven't used DP to score film. I may in the future, but at this point I haven't, that flies in the face of the argument that only film people would like DP. I got heavily back into it a year or two ago after my band recorded in a Pro Tools studio and I got the tracks to mix. Being able to load every take of a song into a single project, then load those takes into a Comp and edit away was/is a huge time saver. The Pro Tools guy had never dealt with OMF files etc. so I didn't have that luxury. Again mixing in DP is very much a strong point compared to other DAWs I've used.

[koolkeys]

no offence guys, but making music is not rocket science nowadays. you fire up your daw, add an instrument/vsti (which usually create a midi track automatically, if not - u create one), go to midi editor/piano roll and draw some notes, or you just fire up recording and play your notes on your previously selected and set up midi controller. then you add some fx, record some vocals or whatever, or you even just forget the vsti part and just set your tracks up for recording and do record your mates playing real instruments. then you do some arrangement modifications, which usually involves moving around some kind of "blocks".

it's that simple.
really.
and it's the software that made this process possible to be so simple.

and now we got DP8, where everything is upside down, hard to configure and far from being fun which is the most important part of music making if you ask me. fun. and all i can see in those few enthusiastic posts is that it's deep deep deeeep deeeeeeeeeep. ohrly? so what? if I wanted to go deep, i'd hire myself as a miner.

seriously, I cant see any arguments in favor of DP8 interface and workflow other than "it's good for film scoring" (yeah? and how many of kvr'ers are going to do some hollywood scoring?), "it's deep" (so is Logic, Live, Cubase and yet they are pleasant to use and pretty simple to configure), "you can have dozen songs in one project" - oh yes, that seems useful to load 10 songs simultaneously into a session of an app that crashes just by going into preferences. and even if it wasnt crashing, ask yourselves how many people will find that really useful.

it's 2013, software is really powerful these days, and most of the devs manage to make it really convenient to use. this looks like it's made by people who dont really make any music too often, with interface made with accountants and coders in mind. good luck with finding new users for $500 application with such a poor UX. except those few doing some hollywood scoring.

If this is the impression you've gotten from DP8, then it's just not for you. Fortunately, music is not just about arming a track and recording or inserting VSTs for everyone. Even here on KVR, there are award-winning composers who DO appreciate the post production and scoring features, among other things, that DP8 offers.

And if you don't think that having multiple songs open in a project is useful, then tell that to the dozens of A-list artists who use DP on stage to not only control their music, but also their lighting rigs and pyrotechnics. You don't think that live musicians can find it useful? No problem. But they do.

If it was all just as simple as you said, we'd all be using the same host and DP would have gone away years ago(though honestly, it's one of the oldest hosts, if not THE oldest host that is still around). Fortunately for DP8, it has a very large following and continues to draw people in.

Not every host has to cater to the primary demographic at KVR, and not all of KVR composes the way you describe.

Your simplified and closed minded assumptions of how people want their software to work are quite inaccurate, really.

Brent

[machinesworking]

Copy pasted from an earlier reply from me on "why DP might be for you" in a thread at gearslutz:


Chunks In DP Chunks are sort of hard to grasp until you use them, but they're either "Songs" which are a sort of global project mostly for messing with an arrangement, Sequences which are essentially 'songs' in all other DAWs language, or V-Racks which are virtual Racks for global sequence plug ins. Mostly the useful one to think about is the Sequence Chunk, it can be a bridge, verse, chorus single track of a song or a complete song. So in a single open DP project you could have all the songs for an album, a single song with parts broken up into Chunks ( you can drag chunks into Chunks if that's not clear ), or various remixes length and style wise of a song. So with a single open Project you could have all versions of a song you're working on, the MIDI and VSTi version, the audio only version with various mixes, and the short version plus the long dub version. This also makes sense in terms of movie cues and variations on a theme etc.

Themes Small thing I know but you can drastically change the look of DP in a way that only maybe Reaper is capable of, and they're built in, so it's about 1 second to switch themes. Cubase could use this, it's kind of awkward looking IMO. Logic would benefit too.

The Mixer OK by far the most logical way to manage mixer tracks on a screen. A roll over list of tracks is opened on your left that shows and hides individual tracks. You can very very quickly change the open tracks to suit your needs at the moment. No scrolling through MIDI tracks etc. if you have no need to see them. Tapping W twice temporarily groups all the open tracks in view, once ungroups them. Automation versions are more extensive than any DAW I know of.

Mix Takes In DP's Mixer you can store mix automation takes of various mixes etc. in the open sequence, so no having to have separate sequences for each mixdown. This includes different plug in configurations, so if you;re unsure whether to use the clean compressor or the vintage coloring compressor you have easy access to both versions.

Clippings Basically pretty much anything can be stored a project clipping or as a global clipping, for dragging back into a song etc. track settings for external gear, sequences, midi, text etc. It's a bit like having a clipboard for each Project that you store a piece of MIDI notes anything really. Apparently Clippings can open up things in OSX, so you could have a Project that used Live reWired in and have the "start clipping" open up Live for you. Global Clippings can be things like in/out setups for your hardware (I do that), basic setups for VI's etc.

Other things include a smart pencil tool in the MIDI editor, smarter by far IMO than Live or Logic which I also use. A pretty good pitch editor not unlike Melodyne, with people reporting that some results are better than Melodyne etc. I can't really say, my pich correction needs are small.
Good MIDI FX and the inclusion recently of mastering tools that most of us would normally just do without in the Precision Delay, Spatial Maximizer, Dynamic EQ etc.

An OK Score editor, if you're into that sort of thing though nothing beats Finale apparently.


Anyway, that's all I can think of right now, but I'm sure I'm missing a few other unique or rare features DP has over the rest.

[LawrenceF]

Can't do it. I see some really nice stuff in there, but it will take awhile to learn the thing... but it keeps crashing and going wacky. I can only surmise they have some work to do on the Win version.

To be clear, using MOTU PCI-424 hardware with the latest drivers, and using absolutely no 3rd party plugs, wanting to get a feel for it's own audio plugs. In fact, I'm not even sure if it loads VST plugs since I never see any of my plugs listed to use anyway. It crashed multiple times. Mixer was acting kind of wacky, scrollbars mysteriously disappearing, things like that.

At one point when I tried "live Room B" on a bass track (sounded pretty great actualy) all the meters in the entire song froze, stopped metering. Closed the song, reopen, no go. Quit the app and relaunched, they started working again.

After the third or fourth crash I decided to just not keep at it.

I'll take another look later when the Win version is futhur along and more stable.

[koolkeys]

I haven't pushed it real hard yet, but it hasn't crashed yet for me. Just using on board sound(well, ASIO4ALL) so far since I've only been able to use my laptop so far. I need to test with my Saffire Pro 24 and actually doing some heavier work.

I'm sure that there will be a couple of bug fix updates though. At least I hope so. I also think that the transition to Windows is going to introduce them to a different level of feedback, or at least some different perspectives. So hopefully that helps to shape the future updates.

For now, I think it's safe to say that the DP8 workflow is absolutely not for everyone. It's not really going to be the fastest for many things, or the smoothest experience. The value is going to come probably in the power user features, if they are needed. Hence the reason I'm still excited to see DP8 on Windows.

Still not switching from Studio One(are you freakin' kidding me? Talk about a difficult task, but it ain't happening right now). But I am sure looking at this for some video scoring work. Maaaaaaaaan it is AWESOME for that.

Brent

[LawrenceF]

I kinda like DP tbh.. If it would run without issue I'd spend more time digging in and I'll probably give it another go or 3 before the demo expires.

I had a nice mix going and had the PDF help open on monitor two and was finding my way around pretty easily. I like the contextual help, where you can jump to help for whatever tab you happen to be on, that's nice, with aome nice graphics pointing to stuff that you mightt not even really see. I figured I'd just drop in some stems and mix something and it was all going well until it started hanging and crashing. That can be frustrating when you're making progress learning it.

There were always 4-5 things in my mind I didn't like (or hadn't learned enough yet causing me not to like), like the EQ which seemed odd, to touch and move an EQ band and not have it turn on by itself, little stuff like that. I chalked most of that up to me not knowing it yet. Some stuff was intuitive enough like... "Lemme try to drag / detach the mixer. Ok, that worked, cool.". Or just drag a docked panel from one side of the screen to another.

Launches fast enough, nice start screen showing your projects, I like the UI except for some of the really tiny header text. The reverb sounds good and creating auxes is easy enough. I can see why people like it. I think I dropped a stereo plug on a mono track and suddenly, the track was stereo, two meters, nice touch, logical.

I'd like to stand over the shoulder of a long time user and just watch them work though. I haven't yet gotten remotely close to most of the thiinga that initially interested me like multiple automation takes / passes and all that.