On hardware being gone forever - yes but you don’t save hardware settings in the DAW. It’s usually audio written to disk. Unless you have a habit of freezing tracks to disk and throwing away the plugins the plugins tend to stay on projects. And over time with computer upgrades the plugins fall off and projects don’t recall. Don’t pretend you don’t know the problem I’m talking about. Every producer has run into this. It requires innate discipline to render stems and in many of the ‘rough idea’ projects we don’t do it.BONES wrote: Mon Mar 24, 2025 12:13 amYou've got it arse-backwards. Once you sell a hardware synth, it's gone forever. One of the biggest attraction of working ITB for me was that I'd be able to keep using softsynths forever and, therefore, all my old songs would keep working forever. OTOH, every time I bought a new synth, I'd spend months trying to recreate the old instruments parts with the new synth. If I forgot about a song at that time, chances were I wouldn't be able to play it ever again. Every song we have ever worked on ITB, all the way back to 2002, is still accessible on my current PC. They all still load and play pretty much perfectly. The most I have to do is relocate a few samples.keyman_sam wrote: Sun Mar 23, 2025 4:40 pmOne problem with software, I find, is that it's a bit harder to sell it once you use it. i.e. there's always the danger that one of my old projects used it and I'm worried it might not open.No it doesn't. I find it the easiest thing in the world to ignore. I know I have four hardware synths somewhere on my boat but, right now, I'm not exactly sure where two of them are and I realised a couple of weeks ago that one that I thought was in storage was actually buried in the back of a cupboard, here on the boat. I'll probably end up throwing a couple of them out, because they'll rot away here for years before I can be bothered doing anything with them, and giving the others away, assuming they still work.I don't need a bunch of plugins, it's been collecting dust. HW demands your attention.Don't be f**king ridiculous. You'll lose hundreds, if not thousands, when you sell hardware. OTOH, you can just stop installing software you no longer use and not be anywhere near as out of pocket. And hardware can be much, much harder to unload. I've been trying to sell a Novation Ultranova and an Elektron Analog Keys, both in very good condition, for well over a year now. They've been sitting in a second-hand shop for most of that time and I'm going to take a bath on both of them. It won't be so bad with the Ultranova because I got that really cheaply, second-hand, but I had to spend $300 on repairs to the AK before I could even think about selling it. When (if) I sell them both, I will lose more money than I have spent on software in the last 20 years. Seriously, the soft bag I bought for the AK cost more than Studio One but it won't add $1 to the resale price.Easier to sell too as the value doesn't depreciate that much.You clearly have no idea what "being a mechanic" involves. If you've done both things, the parallels are obvious - technical skill, creative solutions to the problems that come up, fabricating something beautiful from a steaming pile of shit and a huge sense of achievement and pride when the job is done.I'd rather spend a day behind the wheel of my car than behind a synth keyboard or computer monitor. It's at least as engaging and, at the end of the day, more enjoyable and more rewarding.markello wrote: Sun Mar 23, 2025 6:43 pm Some folks compare making music to being a mechanic? lol
But nothing like being a mechanic.
If we didn't play live, I'd definitely spend way more time working on cars than I'd spend working on music. The enjoyment I get from music is far more fleeting - you finish a song and it's sounds great but if you're not getting up on stage and performing it, the thrill fades very quickly and you move onto the next thing, trying to get that little buzz again. OTOH, when you finish working on your car, that's when the fun really starts and it won't normally fade for years, if ever. If I had to choose, I'd take cars every time.I know a reasonably successful artist - her paintings sell for thousands of dollars, sometimes tens of thousands - and she paints with her own blood and shit. That's "shit", as in faeces.BBFG# wrote: Sun Mar 23, 2025 7:11 pmI've been known to use things that weren't ever actually made for my medium. (Such as old nail polish or spray cans that someone was throwing out. )Is that how it works for you? I've never had that experience. For me there is never any hint of anything until I start playing around. My songs always come out of that. Same with my bandmate. We can start with another song in mind but, obviously, we'll be trying to make something different to that, using it purely as inspiration. A few times I've had maybe a bassline in my head but it's just a sequence of notes, I've never had a sound in my head for it. What I end up with is invariably nothing like the thing in my head was, so it also just serves as inspiration.ROTMetro wrote: Sun Mar 23, 2025 9:11 pmit’s like assembling and tuning a machine to get the song I hear in my head out, assembling the right parts in the right way, and then sounding 'correct'.
On the cost - yeah I was wrong and I think you’re right, now that I think about it more. HW does cost more overall and the cost to recoup is non trivial. One advantage with HW is there’s some inherent value in it just by existing. Even if the triton plugin can almost replace the hardware, you still see korg tritons being sold. I was amazed I could buy and sell a Roland standalone DAW VS-24xx after 2 years of not using it, for the same price I bought it for.
My hardware and software are still needed. For the curious, AVLinux comes with wine-staging, and the yabridge plugin wrapper installed, and a Reaper demo, so it's pretty easy to test windows plugins, and some are included by default. Changing to a preferred desktop environment is mostly a quick google-search away.
But well worth checking out. 
