No, just kidding. I hesitated a while about making this a new thread or not, but given the groundhogging around, well... here we go.
So, yesterday I went to a French music show, mainly to see whether Mackie was showing its new baby... And so they did.
I was able to play a couple of times with the T! (note that it was on a Mac, and I am not very familiar with it).
And this is specially for you tonite, my first impressions about T2 :
- First of all, the midi editor revamping is excellent: you can now select which length the notes you create will be (up to 8 bars IIRC) and there are a few preset velocities you can choose from in order to make it easier for you to input notes (...,64, 96, 112, 127). This does the trick for most of the little annoyances of MIDI editing in T1.
The toolbar is horizontal, with two buttons on its left side, "velocity" and "controller", which you can push to select the type of data to enter. Finally, you can choose the notes color (which is more a cosmetic thing, but, well, it is always nice to have the choice).
- Second, external controller support. A Mackie HUI was plugged into T2, and I was blowed away by the combination : T's automation now is shining ten times brighter than before!
There is a new page under "settings" where a list of hooked devices is displayed (though I wonder how T knows of them...what about my custom MIDI box ?) To assign a controller to a parameter, go to the option button on the edit screen, choose "controller", move one, then select a parameter - that's it !
- Third comes video. It is a bit surprising but a total no brainer : choose a *.qt or *.mov file, and T2 loads it and displays it in a separate, borderless window that you can drag anywhere. You can change the offset, to have the video start after a selected amount of time (hh:mm:ss), dans une fenêtre séparée (sans bordure). One gripe, I could not find the "always on top" setting (but I am not a Mac user, so maybe you can blame me for this one). The video is really easy and simple, but I was really disturbed by the absence of a visible track to know it is loaded/playing. Anyway, it is enough to start making music to video.
- Fourth, the bonuses : colors schemes (nice), the track inputs as list instead of the dragged inputs (quite efficient, moreover if you have many inputs)the function create track now allowing up to 16 tracks to be created at once, the keybord shortcuts list segmented into sections (general, MIDI, video...), the ability to hide the right and left part of the screen to focus on the tracks (excellent addition), and the big Volume filters, which sadly never worked. the sampler has not been changed, as far as I could see.
The retail price is 159€ without VAT here, in a boxed set with plugins (that I could not test).
The only downside of the demo was... the demo itself: the use of "Funky Plutonian Mix", and a video of a young couple's holiday under some island in the Indian Ocean. Definitely not something to catch your attention if you accidentally stumble over it : "what's that playskool app' you're running with Mackie tools ?"
The Mackie team was very nice, but had received the software the day before the exhibition, and so the guys did not know everything about T. yet (I introduced them to the "m" key, so helpful in loop mode; but they had me drooling over them demoing the HUI commanding the automation). But overall, they were charming, and T. will take them only a few hours more to get going. And most of all, they know how to market:
Ok, now, let the trolls come
[btw, the entire post as I wrote it yesterday evening can be found in its original language here: http://fr.forums.audiofanzine.com/appre ... ,3203.html]
Beno?
