They are completely valid comparisons, given both are products designed to do exactly the same f**king thing. Anybody who chooses a company, rather than a product, is a complete idiot in my book. I don't give a flying f**k about any company, if they are offering me a product I want at a price I am willing to pay. If Roland Lamb turned out to be a child molester, it wouldn't make the tiniest difference to how I view Roli's products. I wouldn't buy them in that situation but I'd still have the same opinion of them.machinesworking wrote: Mon Sep 06, 2021 5:23 pmCompanies like NI and Roli end up selling themselves off to investors after years of unchecked growth, at some point they get these massive mixed reputations, but they offered "value" at the cost of the companies stability.When another company opts for the independent boutique item approach you get these sort of awkward unrealistic comparisons.
Again, I don't give a flying f**k about RME and I've still got the $200 Edirol UA-20 I bought in 2002. In fact, that's a great example of what I'm talking about because I have a fairly low opinion of Roland's synths but I didn't let that influence my decision to buy a UA-20, because it was the best product I could find at the time, for my needs. Do I still use it? No, because it was such a tiny investment I didn't feel any loyalty to it, so I've tried heaps of other things since. Some were good, some not so good, but I'd still happily use the UA-20 again, if my band-mate was finished with it. What it does tell me is that even if I won Lotto, there is no way I'd waste three grand on an audio interface because you just don't need to.I'm a fan of RME, they aren't cheap, but in the same time I've owned the FF800 it's fair to think that someone else (anecdotally all my real life musician friends), would go through 3-4 cheaper audio interfaces.
You've spent a fortune on your RME, 3 x what my current laptop cost me, so of course you are going to put more into making it work. But, honestly, if that was the price I had to pay for an I/O device, I just wouldn't bother. I'd happily get by plugging my laptop directly into my monitors, or via a $200 line mixer if I needed to mix any hardware in with it. I'd much rather put that money towards my next new car.
I would fully expect anything I own today to still work in 15 years time, unless it breaks. That's the beauty of being on Windows - everything keeps working. The MIDIman (now M-Audio) USB to MIDI adapter I bought in 2000, when I was on Windows 95, still works today. We still rely on it on stage and we've never had a problem with it. I've probably had my Ultranova for nearly 10 years, too, and I can still load up the VSTi editor and I can still use it as an audio I/O device if I want to because the drivers I have for it still work, even though the product was discontinued several years ago.To me, this is the case with software companies and hardware controllers as well. If there is no way to play the thing 10-15 years from now then why buy it?
That's just absurd, It is a scenario that is far less likely than that your hardware synth will break and you won't be able to get it fixed. For me, continuity is probably the biggest advantage in going ITB. In my hardware days, I would spend 6 months getting all my songs working every time I upgraded my sequencer, so I could play a gig. Today I can load any song we have ever played since we started using Orion, all the way back to 2001, and even if there is something missing, sorting that out is trivial compared to what I used to have to go through with hardware, as is moving it from Orion to Studio One.The advantage of software is huge, it's 10x cheaper than hardware, but if it dies in 3-10 years and you relied on it, and it requires you to set up an old version of Mac or Windows OS to run it, or worse it can't be authorized then to me it starts losing it's value as a fantastic 10x cheaper product.
This is the perfect example of your irrationality. You cannot possibly know if Osmose will ever get released, much less whether or not it will be around in 5 years. It's pure wishful thinking on your part with absolutely no basis in reality. Anything could happen - they might get bought out by Fatar, just so Fatar can kill it off, the main guy behind it ight drop dead (that happened to my father and he lost tens of thousands he'd invested in the guy's idea), it might prove unreliable, keys might go dead after a year of playing. You just don't know. You can't know but that doesn't stop you making pronouncements. Do you not see how that completely undermines any credibility you might think you have?The Osmose won't be dead in 5 years, it will be a sort of miracle if Lumi isn't. This means the cheaper Block might be better "value" today, but there's no telling what tomorrow brings.
Nobody does it, that's kind of the point. If there was any reason to do it, people would do it but the reality is that as a justification people use for buying hardware, it doesn't stack up. I've often thought about installing some standalone softsynths on my ancient 8" Windows tablet and seeing how they go but, ultimately, I can't see the point so I haven't got around to it.machinesworking wrote: Mon Sep 06, 2021 5:44 pmThis gets trotted out, and I admit I've trotted it out too, but who does this?I can buy any keyboard controller and a dedicated Mac Mini M1, slap a bunch of synths on it, disconnect it from the internet FOREVER, and keep using it as a hardware synth for as much as long as the osmose at least.
You don't need to go to anything like those lengths. One of the best things about my ITB set-up is that it is infinitely more portable than hardware. I have a laptop that is 2cm thick and weighs just 1.5kg. Add in a Roli Lightpad Block that is the same thickness, just 10cm square and only weighs 250g and you've got a perfectly playable setup that fits in even a small shoulder bag. It will all run for hours and hours on batteries so I don't even need a power-point to use what isn't just a portable synth, but a portable warehouse full of synths.Seriously, I've thought about it, but it just doesn't happen. Years of discontinued software tittles etc. meanwhile the few hardware synths I own are still there.
I'd also point out that there are dozens of softsynths I've had for way, way longer than I've owned any of my current crop of hardware synths. I bought Uno in 2018, my current Rocket in 2020 and Uno Pro this year. Everything older than that is gone or going. OTOH, I still have pretty much all my softsynths, all the way back to the turn of the Century, so I can still go back to a project from 2002, open it and it will work, unless it's a live thing, because I no longer have any of the hardware we used live last time we played (2017).
No, instead you have repair costs, cabling, the cost of a mixer, stands to put things on, dustcovers, cases/bags for transport, powerboards, extension leads, power conditioners and all the rest of it. To suggest that hardware upkeep/maintenance is easier or cheaper than software is complete and utter bollocks, I'm afraid. We are only two-thirds of the way through the year and I've already spent more than $400 on hardware-related things (but not actual hardware) but only $99 on software upgrades - the new Korg Collection v3, which included several actual new synths. The one hardware synth I've bought in 2021 has cost me twice as much as the last 10 softsynths I've bought, combined, and I got it cheap! And, if I'm honest, it's about 1% as useful as even the recent Freebies I've got. But that's OK because I like having it around and we'll definitely get some use out of it if lockdown ever ends and that's enough for me.This is the difference between software and hardware, there's no authorization issues, finding a compatible driver, OS, DAW etc. no upkeeping old software.
