Software vs Hardware

[Uncle E]

But that being said, there are a handful of extremely competent softwares that have just just disappeared and there are no replacement, the only way to run them is by having a separate computer for them. Mainly not talking about plugins here, but applications, converters, editors and stuff like that. But if the original FXpansion Guru were able to run on my Mac, I would most likely use it - I have maybe 10-15 viable alternatives that are better hotter cooler etc, but Guru was easy, simple and FUN.

Oof, there was one that was completely brilliant and I don’t think there’s been anything like it since. It was a simple pattern sequencer/sample player except that all the sequences were playable, all the samples were playable just by changing a midi channel, and all the steps had modulations. The simplicity of it was what made it great, you could literally play your arrangements.

[zerocrossing]

When will you two finally join forces instead of trying to hardware/software - Baptize each other and build the greatest Hybrid - setup ever known to Mankind?

I already have that!

Obviously everyone makes "the greatest" setup that they can that works for their use cases. What works for me is maybe not going to work for someone else. For a hardware synth to get a place in my world, it needs to have a unique character, or a unique feature set. Obviously, that means different things to different people.

[pdxindy]

Last couple of years I've started to feel the same. It's really now when software is at that crazy high level you can do anything you want really. For me it kind of started with u-he Repro where I felt I entered a new level, and after that more and more companies are releasing incredible stuff.

Still, there are the glaring problem with software that the gaming community have faced for ages: keeping your old software going. That and hardware (sometimes) being way more tactile than any computer + mouse / controller can ever be.

But yes, just talking about sound, hardware is no longer the king.

Maybe Eurorack is still the most innovative place for sound generation though. As much as I try to avoid modulars, the stuff that are coming out from Kickstarter / small developers are just fantastic.

Software modular is still not the same sonically as hardware modular. Hardware modular is still the king of sound.

[IvyBirds]

When will you two finally join forces instead of trying to hardware/software - Baptize each other and build the greatest Hybrid - setup ever known to Mankind?

mmm... let me think about it... I could build the greatest setup and then become the greatest technician just to keep it running, with no time left for music making... it sounds like a good deal to me...

Using multiple computers in a DSP Server/client setup takes so little actual time to do any kind of maintenance it's ridiculous

For my setup I have three computers that I connect to the Internet on a semi regular basis. Let's call them A, B, and C. If I go into my studio and do some kind of music related things on B, I can spend 5 seconds and turn on C while simultaneously booting up B. Once both B.and C are booted up which takes less than 30 seconds I go over the C, connect it to my Wi-Fi and launch Windows Update, I then go back to B and let C do it's thing automatically like it's intended to do without any thought or effort on my part all the while I am working on music

Total time invested away from working on music? All of 60 seconds or less. Since I do this once a month or so that's 12 minutes a year spread out over the entirety of the year

The alternative to that which I do sometimes is when I am done in my studio for the day I simply connect all three to Wi-Fi run Windows Update on all of them and walk away and let them do their thing while I am not even in the room. Again all of 60 seconds

One of the great mysteries in life is why members of the "Church of Hardware" always make it seem on Internet forums that running automated OS updates is some kind of massive time consuming chore, but even if it were, having multiple computers means you can be working on music with one while the other is doing its update.

As for software updates on plugins, if they are stable on my system I generally don't update them or even give any thought to updating them, most updates are fixing bugs I don't notice or fix issues with DAWs I don't use. If the update is adding a new feature I think would benefit me I will update it on all three of my main computers at the same time. It's really not that hard and takes minimal effort

I find out about the major updates on forums such as this. Which I don't visit when I am working on music in my studio

[andypryce]

I just stumbled upon Reverb interview with Mike Dean on youtubr.
With that much talent he most probably can get close to those sounds with software too but the sheer beauty and immediacy of those instruments are inspiring and breath taking.

[BONES]

You don't understand the basic principles of insurance. Winning at that game means never having a claim at all. What you paid for is peace of mind, that in the case of a large loss, you won't be rendered destitute.

... where "peace of mind" means quelling unreasonable paranoia, based on an inability to assess risk. This is made obvious by your choice of words. What could possibly render you "destitute? If your house burns down, you can find somewhere to rent, unless you keep all your money in your mattress, which would not be covered by insurance anyway. If you invested all your premiums instead of giving them to an insurance company, you'd be far better off in the long term and you'd have plenty of your own money to rebuild after a setback. You'd have the added bonus of not having to worry about the insurance company finding a loophole that allowed them not to pay you out.

The idea of insurance is to spread the risk over as large a population as possible.

Whose idea? I'm pretty sure the insurance companies' idea is to fleece you of as much money as they possibly can and pay out as little as they can get away with, by whatever under-handed means they can think of.

So even though a house fire is rare, the magnitude of the loss is very high.

So don't own a house. I don't own anything I couldn't get by without or that would put me in a situation like that. If my boat sank, I could buy another one for $20k or so. That's completely manageable and surely it's just common sense to live within your means like that. The "Great (insert name of country here) Dream of Owning Your Own Home" is nothing but a societal con-job to keep you in line. If you've got a massive mortgage over your head, you are much easier to control. To be clear, it's not some deep Illuminati conspiracy, it's just the way society has evolved. It's a reflection of the species' most primal instincts but like racism and a raft of other things, it is something we could evolve beyond if we had the will to do so. But when you can't even see how you are, that's not going to happen.

So, if everyone pays a small portion of the predicted overall loss over the premium period, plus a sum for the service, you can live fairly worry free, and if you are part of the portion of people who have a disaster, you can continue on without too much of a loss.

1. I live completely worry-free without insurance, thanks. But imagine how much more careful motorists might be without insurance? I reckon banning car insurance could halve the road toll overnight and would probably also get a lot of bad drivers off the road, because they couldn't afford to keep repairing or replacing cars at their own expense.

2. What you're really saying here is that sensible people are ultimately subsidising stupid people. Why would you want to do that? Because if you look at where houses burn down, it's not in the more affluent areas of the city, it's always where the dumb-arses and fucktards live. Ditto for things like car theft.
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On an unrelated note, I'm listening to The Beat as I'm doing this, and Holy f**k! Their last two albums, before Ranking Roger died, are absolutely f**king brilliant. I'm not at all into that kind of music, they are the only even vaguely Ska albums I've ever owned, but they are so f**king good.
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But that being said, there are a handful of extremely competent softwares that have just just disappeared and there are no replacement, the only way to run them is by having a separate computer for them.

Maybe for stupid Mac users but every application I still use from my Windows 95 days installs and runs on my current Windows 11 computer. I say "every" but there is only one music-related application- Orion - and the 32 bit version still runs all my 32 bit VSTs, including all my SynthEdit synths and things like PlastiCZ!, even though ReFX discontinued it 20 or so years ago. Most of them don't require installers, either. I have an ancient back-up of the whole ORION folder, with all my old VSTi and samples in it, and most of them will run without even having to enter a serial no., although I have all those serial no.s backed up in a million places.

Realistically, it is probably the best thing about working ITB. In the old days, whenever I bought a new sequencer or synth workstation, I had to transfer and/or translate all my songs form the old set-up to the new one. It was painstaking and often took me 6 months or more. Anything I didn't transfer would be lost forever once I sold the old gear. I have a shoebox in storage that is full of old floppies, mini-disks and Zip discs, with all my old songs on them, that I'll never be able to get off there. If I wanted to play/perform any of the old stuff from my solo/hardware days, I'd have to recreate it all from scratch.

OTOH, every single thing I have ever done on my PC I can load and play today. Songs from our early albums, songs that never made it to an album, ideas that never quite made it into songs and every bit of pointless noodling I decided to save - it's all still there and I can open any of it whenever I want to.

Really? Let's see in America if you have a mortgage like most people do, you need fire insurance. My fire insurance is actually pretty inexpensive

See my point above on the utter stupidity of living beyond your means.

In America if you own a car you need car insurance by law

See, that's how they rope you in - force you to pay money to fund other people's stupidity.

I also maintain life insurance because I want my wife and kids taken care of if I die. So if I drop dead tomorrow, I know they will be fine.

What, you think your wife is too stupid be OK on her own? Again, why not just put that money aside and invest it yourself? Nothing fancy, just term deposits or superannuation that looks after itself. I dunno what the rules are in the States but any money I put into superannuation gets taxed at half the rate of the money I'd spend on insurance premiums, so it's a much better idea.

To me it's called being responsible, most mature adults would have no issues with that but you do you

Most "mature" adults are brainless f**king idiots, in case you haven't noticed.

[IvyBirds]

Really? Let's see in America if you have a mortgage like most people do, you need fire insurance. My fire insurance is actually pretty inexpensive

See my point above on the utter stupidity of living beyond your means.

In America if you own a car you need car insurance by law

See, that's how they rope you in - force you to pay money to fund other people's stupidity.

You have indicated in the past that you live in Australia where car insurance is mandatory, do you not own a car? Since you claim you don't have any kind of insurance? Or are you just breaking the law? Or just lying? You mentioned you have never been in a car accident is that because you never travel by vehicle?

As far as living in my means, why are you advocating for renting? My mortgage is less than rent would be, and when I sell my house I will walk away with hundreds of thousands of dollars, when I walk away from a rental I have nothing

My wife and I own two houses, one of which she inherited from her father when he passed away. We rent that one out and we maintain insurance on it. When he died his life insurance paid off the balance of the mortgage. We pay $2500 a year for insurance on that house and make $36,000 in rental income from it. Keep in mind my tenants could buy a similar house in the same exact neighborhood that is for sale right now and pay less with a mortgage and the insurance that would require than they are paying us in rent every month. They have been fantastic long term tenants. So far they have paid us close to $200,000 American Dollars in rent and when they move at some point they will have absolutely zero to show for it. That is what you are advocating them to do, basically flush hundreds of thousands of dollars down the toilet

Their rent every month also pays for my mortgage, the property tax on both properties and the insurance on both properties with a little extra left over

We had a really bad hailstorm a few years back that damaged the roof on my rental house. Instead of paying $30,000 to replace that roof I paid $500 because the insurance that my tenants pay for in their rent that you encourage them to do paid for the rest

[BBFG#]

Many mortgage companies require property insurance as well.

[DrGonzo]

Last couple of years I've started to feel the same. It's really now when software is at that crazy high level you can do anything you want really. For me it kind of started with u-he Repro where I felt I entered a new level, and after that more and more companies are releasing incredible stuff.

Still, there are the glaring problem with software that the gaming community have faced for ages: keeping your old software going. That and hardware (sometimes) being way more tactile than any computer + mouse / controller can ever be.

But yes, just talking about sound, hardware is no longer the king.

Maybe Eurorack is still the most innovative place for sound generation though. As much as I try to avoid modulars, the stuff that are coming out from Kickstarter / small developers are just fantastic.

Software modular is still not the same sonically as hardware modular. Hardware modular is still the king of sound.

I have that impression as well. And as much I can't stand modulars for any other reason that it's like effing crack, it's absolutely where the innovation is at the moment.

[kritikon]

As for the insurance rant:

1. In NZ where the risk of earthquakes, floods, landslips etc are pretty high, I'd be a fkn eejit to NOT have insurance. My latest estimate to rebuild and fit out a similar house was $850,000. No way can I finance that and couldn't if I'd invested insurance premiums over the last 40 yrs. It wouldn't cover a fraction of it.

2. If I HAD saved my insurance premiums over the years, I still wouldn't have saved enough to build a house, because I would have spent it on synths and other abominations that would make you even more mad . However, I'd have a massive f**k off studio that also would have been destroyed in the earthquake that destroyed my house. So insurance would have been doubly sensible to have invested in .

3. Road stupidity in NZ is mostly by young eejits who tend not to have insurance anyway. The careful drivers mostly have insurance. Not having insurance most definitely does not stop them driving like suicide is a sport. Actually, Kiwi drivers would be world champions if suicide by car was a sport.

4. Sensible people subsidising stupid people - that's not only insurance. Taxes are exactly that also, so try not paying taxes and see how right you are in your moral rant. You and I have been subsidising stupid people all our lives from the moment you started working and paid a percentage of it to the govt. TBH I'm not too sure who's the stupid here - maybe the stupid people who can't/won't finance themselves are smarter than twats like us who work our whole lives to pay for them? Just a thought...

5. I didn't even know Ranking Roger had died. That's sad. And you probably are missing out on some very good ska stuff. I know it's not shouty music, but once you get past the cheesy stuff it's a great genre. Probably what I'd call happy music, so I can see why it's not necessarily to your taste. It's got great energy though.

[sin night]

Let’s try to get back to the original topic… I think bad car drivers should stick to software (aka “driving simulators”)

[sin night]

Here car insurance is mandatory as well. If you injure or kill someone (there’s a chance even for careful drivers), you would have to pay a massive amount of money.
Living without a car is not really an option here, I wish it was feasible…

[swilow11]

I just wanna hear more about BONES living on a motherfucking boat

[frag]

I just wanna hear more about BONES living on a motherfucking boat

This topic got really interesting. I suppose boat is hardware
Virtual boat, on the other hand, is software.

[seafire]

I just wanna hear more about BONES living on a motherfucking boat

He's moved