Digital Performer users, I want you to convince me to switch to your DAW.

[machinesworking]

I do wish MOTU would lower the price of DP though, I think $395 for the cross grade is too high, and $499 outright is not realistic when only Cubase charges that much for their DAW these days and offers the same feature set.

I completely expected all DAWs to drop down to near what Logic costs on initial purchase but only about half came down to around $300, Cubase, Pro Tools, DP, Live, Reason etc. all remain around $500 without cross grade pricing.

[richhickey]

I do wish MOTU would lower the price of DP though, I think $395 for the cross grade is too high, and $499 outright is not realistic when only Cubase charges that much for their DAW these days and offers the same feature set.

I dunno. As I know you are aware, but others might not be, MOTU provides professional level support (rare these days) for DP, at no extra charge. If you avail yourself of that once or twice it makes the purchase price seem quite fair.

[machinesworking]

I do wish MOTU would lower the price of DP though, I think $395 for the cross grade is too high, and $499 outright is not realistic when only Cubase charges that much for their DAW these days and offers the same feature set.

I dunno. As I know you are aware, but others might not be, MOTU provides professional level support (rare these days) for DP, at no extra charge. If you avail yourself of that once or twice it makes the purchase price seem quite fair.

Mostly I feel like MOTU haven't figured out how to compete effectively against the top 8-10 DAWs They're sitting in the bottom tier with Traction, Bitwig, Samplitude, Mixcraft, Cakewalk, when 23 years ago they were in the top 5 with Cubase, Logic, Sonar, and Pro Tools.

I'm a big fan, but 4+ years between upgrades is IMO a cripplingly slow pace. Hardly anyone under 45 knows what Digital Performer is, or has any friends that have used it. For some reason they've never developed an online presence for tutorials either directly, or by hiring an influencer like Cockos did with Reaper Mania etc. The webinars happen in business hours on Fridays and only a small handfull out of hundreds are achieved.

Previous to this 4 year gap the pace of development was pretty good for new upgrades and features, and I think they will probably release a bunch more with DP12 in the next couple months, but it's painfully obvious that they're at this point only relying on regular upgrades from existing customers to keep DP afloat. I would love to think otherwise, but their desire to compete directly with the similarly targeted all in one DAWs like Logic, Cubase, Reaper, Studio One just seems lacking.

[vurt]

no one can convince you to enjoy dp, you either do, or you dont.
you just have to try it!

[machinesworking]

no one can convince you to enjoy dp, you either do, or you dont.
you just have to try it!

I will say that when I was looking at Logic 4 in around 2001 I read an online post in response to people complaining about how odd Logic was compared to other DAWs. The response outlined the idea that immediate gratification wasn't a great way to evaluate a DAW, that when you actually got comfortable with Logics key commands and workflow it was super transparent. It actually sold me on getting over the learning curve.

This is beyond the scope of the topic, but the culture of DAWs has morphed into a place where immediate gratification is everything, people brag about little icons in Studio One that represent the VSTs visually for you, which as someone with 600 VSTs is a total non starter to me. I use Live quite often, but I've never made it my main DAW, flatly because it's so mouse driven that certain commands just do not exist at all, or have weird bugs that don't make them useful like the one to open a VSTs GUi, where it needs to be the last selected plugin and you have to have opened it once. The initial experience with Live is a joy for most people though, it's very WYSIWYG, most things do what you would think they do and it has a robust audio engine that doesn't glitch when you add in new instruments while looping a clip or track.

What I'm getting at is the audience now expects certain things presented quickly and easily, and the first DAW you worked in will likely determine what you think good UX is, so anything different will seem "wrong". Personally I want mousing to be something that you can avoid as much as possible with key commands, and I want the kitchen sink, my initial discomfort is to be expected not avoided.

[richhickey]

I do wish MOTU would lower the price of DP though, I think $395 for the cross grade is too high, and $499 outright is not realistic when only Cubase charges that much for their DAW these days and offers the same feature set.

I dunno. As I know you are aware, but others might not be, MOTU provides professional level support (rare these days) for DP, at no extra charge. If you avail yourself of that once or twice it makes the purchase price seem quite fair.

Hardly anyone under 45 knows what Digital Performer is, or has any friends that have used it. For some reason they've never developed an online presence for tutorials either directly, or by hiring an influencer like Cockos did with Reaper Mania etc. The webinars happen in business hours on Fridays and only a small handfull out of hundreds are achieved.

Yeah, why they can't get those great webinars onto YouTube is baffling.

[machinesworking]

Yeah, why they can't get those great webinars onto YouTube is baffling.

I mean the only excuse is that they planned on it but big changes are coming with 12, and they're reluctant.

I do not know for a fact, but I feel like Matt LePoint from MOTU who does the wenbinars spends the other three days a week that he isn't hosting or setting up to host Performer Lite or DP webinars on helping Hollywood composers with their issues. Thier full time PR guy is too busy to edit and release the webinars. They are up on Facebook for a couple days though, and it is possible to capture them.

I think they don't do themselves any favors by not getting someone to no scoure them for snippets they could post on youtube. I'm not convinced releasing them as hour long videos would be of much help, unless they set up tags and a serchable dataabase for them.

[andypryce]

Yeah, why they can't get those great webinars onto YouTube is baffling.

I mean the only excuse is that they planned on it but big changes are coming with 12, and they're reluctant.

I do not know for a fact, but I feel like Matt LePoint from MOTU who does the wenbinars spends the other three days a week that he isn't hosting or setting up to host Performer Lite or DP webinars on helping Hollywood composers with their issues. Thier full time PR guy is too busy to edit and release the webinars. They are up on Facebook for a couple days though, and it is possible to capture them.

I think they don't do themselves any favors by not getting someone to no scoure them for snippets they could post on youtube. I'm not convinced releasing them as hour long videos would be of much help, unless they set up tags and a serchable dataabase for them.

Looks like either they are having a big overhaul of the program from ground up or just slow to release the new version. If the sales do not justify the cost maybe they reduced the development budget.
4+ years is too long without any major update while other DAWs keep going.

[machinesworking]

Looks like either they are having a big overhaul of the program from ground up or just slow to release the new version. If the sales do not justify the cost maybe they reduced the development budget.
4+ years is too long without any major update while other DAWs keep going.

Yeah, the only comparable amount of time is Ableton Live for 10 I believe? There was a sort of understanding that Live needed some core changes to make it more stable with the cycling 74 suite of object oriented programming Max 4 Live that had been embedded into the DAW and famously made it unstable after version 8.0.

As a DP user I hope this is a similar case, and MOTU worked on the core engine, cleaning it up for stability in the Windows version and stability with plugins over all. It's also of course possible that they decided to pull back on fast development, but 9 and 10 were both major upgrades, so the precedent isn't less features over time anyway. The rumor mill has it coming out in the next month or so, hopefully that's correct and it's a nice enough upgrade to get the usual KVR sarcasm out about how the boomer DAW is still around or how hard it is to use etc.