Have we reached the end of hardware synths with software plug-ins?

[vurt]

well more specifically, as you might know it, widnes, right next to fiddler's ferry, 5 mins walk from my front door

I know fiddler's ferry well, did a few projects at the power station before it closed!

yeah im hoping to catch the demolition, should be impressive.

[SLiC]

do you have modular as well as synths?

Were you asking me that? I have a bit....

[vurt]

do you have modular as well as synths?

Were you asking me that? I have a bit....

nice!
yeah was you i was asking, was sure id seen you mention it, but then wondered if i was mixing you up with someone else (my excuse is it's friday evening...)

[SLiC]

I'm spending my kids inheritance They can have my studio when I go!
And yeh, its great to sit there ands not in front of a computer screen where I inevitable end up on KVR To the left of the poly fx module is 'injectr' module for putting my guitars through the modular

[vurt]

yup, the kids want money for inheritance, they can sell the modules
if my son asks me for gift ideas, i usually choose a small collectable figure of some sort.
when he rolls is eyes, i tell him how much some of the other toys i have are worth a few years later

[kritikon]

Widnes and around there...I vaguely remember there are lots of interesting bridges. I used to travel through from MCR to Nth Wales - Sadly don't remember much else. I'm visiting home next month, and will have to go shopping at Cheshire Oaks (the shopping for everything is resolutely crap in NZ...and expensive). Last time we were home we ended up somehow at Gladstone's library just outside Queensferry. Not what you expect there of all places...it's a beautiful place, especially if you like books...a grand old mad Victorian Gothic cathedral type library.
It's very flat in Cheshire and they make good cheese. Good attributes IMO.

[pizzatime]

I stayed at Gladstone's library a couple of months ago for a few days of reading in the library and relaxing, amazing place and good pub near it. If you stay there you can read in the library until 10pm.. was quite a unique experience having a few glasses of wine with the evening meal then reading in that incredible space.. probably dozed off a couple of times but read Patrick Hamiltons Slaves of Solitude along with books I found in the library.

[Uncle E]

Don't need much more hardware, don't need more sounds, but more time would be greatly appreciated

My favorite threads are when we discuss time saving techniques and gear. Logitech mouses/touch screens/controllers help. Maschine, Addictive Keys, and UJAM are a big part of my workflow since I neither enjoy nor am very good at programming drums (EZdrummer not so much, ironically). I dislike Maschine and Komplete Kontrol for programming synths because I don't like looking at the screens or going through menus, thus hardware synths or plugins that work seamlessly with hardware (Discovery Pro, System-1/-8, that Virus synth that everyone's talking about lately) are nice.

[vurt]

Widnes and around there...I vaguely remember there are lots of interesting bridges.

yeah back then, you would have gone over the one made famous by the tv show "two pints of lager" the "runcorn widnes" bridge, sure it is also something about the jubilee bridge?
then there's the victoria railway bridge.
once you go over the runcorn/widnes bridge, there's one over the canal, the waterloo bridge.

but now, you have to come back, we got a new one. the queen elizabeth the second bridge.
she had to come to open it

[vurt]

Don't need much more hardware, don't need more sounds, but more time would be greatly appreciated

My favorite threads are when we discuss time saving techniques and gear.

gear i can do!
time saving, no clue when it comes to audio, time sort of bends and twists when i switch on. can lose several days before i realise ive not slept or eaten.
however, i can help reduce the time spent doing other housework, so you have more time for music
step 1 : make a list.
step 2 : give list to someone else, say "do this for me, thanks"
hope this helps

[kritikon]

Widnes and around there...I vaguely remember there are lots of interesting bridges.

yeah back then, you would have gone over the one made famous by the tv show "two pints of lager" the "runcorn widnes" bridge, sure it is also something about the jubilee bridge?
then there's the victoria railway bridge.
once you go over the runcorn/widnes bridge, there's one over the canal, the waterloo bridge.

but now, you have to come back, we got a new one. the queen elizabeth the second bridge.
she had to come to open it

I'll have to check it out. My mum moved to Lymm so that stuff is all much closer. I'm also going to be a pig and check out all the gourmet stuff I can't get here. For example...black pudding Scotch egg. Can't get it down here and TBH too difficult to get hold of a decent black pudding to make one; I've never had one and desperately want one. Pork pie with pickle in it - simple but genius. And Walkers cheese'n'onion. I'm sure they'll have changed, but still...and the piece de resistance...Chinese chippy curry sauce'n'chips. You take that for granted in the UK but believe me it's a rare and unique British delicacy. And probably lots of curry - you can get decent curry here but the Indians are all so shit scared of making it too hot for the delicate Kiwi taste - even when they say "Indian hot or Kiwi hot" their Indian hot is definitely not. So a visit to MCR curry mile is on the cards.

[kritikon]

I stayed at Gladstone's library a couple of months ago for a few days of reading in the library and relaxing, amazing place and good pub near it. If you stay there you can read in the library until 10pm.. was quite a unique experience having a few glasses of wine with the evening meal then reading in that incredible space.. probably dozed off a couple of times but read Patrick Hamiltons Slaves of Solitude along with books I found in the library.

When we were there I saw that and was sorely tempted. But we just didn't have enough time to do it. Sounds superb. I'm envious.

[machinesworking]

Absolutely. Microsoft are theworst when it comes to the consumer market and i hate them because they have f**ked me over several times when they drop product that are far and away the best at what they do but Microsoft couldn't convince anyone. But that's the thing, I don't give a toss about the company, I am only interested in the products. Brands are nothing more than a con and you'll always get better products from the under-dog, for the simple reaosn they have to try so much harder. That's why the best laptops I've owned have been from Asus and Acer, not Sony or Dell. That's why I have a Kobo not a Kindle and it's why Zune was so much better than iPod/iTunes.

I agree, except there's not a thing underdog about Asus or Microsofts Zune. Asus managed to eke out a solid name for themselves, at least from my perspective looking at Windows laptops it was either the Zenbook or a Sony. Zune missed out on usability for better features, which is a typical MS issue. Sometimes the major players just have the better tech, that's what money and large research departments buy.

Apple for whatever reason refuse to integrate the two, probably because they know how easily confused the general public is, and iPad sales prove them right.

Apple don't integrrate them because they want to keep selling you two products instead of just one.

For sure, and because they saw the backlash MS has received, (partly not and MS issue, since touch is also a hardware thing), so crappy implementation on cheap laptops made it seem like a toy for Windows users. Apple went again for usability over features, great touch on an iPad, limited OS.

Things like mixing at the end, and real time manipulation of soft synths for patch design, these are areas of workflow where it's patently obvious once you use touch screens, that it's better.

Sorry but that's not been my experience at all. In fact, I'd go as far as to say I hate working with touch. Everything has to be too big to use screen space efficiently and your hand gets in the way, so you can't see what you're doing half the time. I hate it. It feels like finger-painting when I need to be using a sharp pencil.

this is an implementation issue, the way that touch acts with your laptop and DAW. To that end Slate make an interface for the Raven and Windows with Studio One. That says a lot, that a multitouch OS still has enough caveats that a dedicated set of tools to mimic Mackie control surface support with touch is still a marketable thing on Windows. There's also their macro buttons etc., but the fact that the thing was developed at all says that there are issues with a generic touch screens with Windows and Studio One.

I used to have to do the same and I didn't like it much. To me it would make a lot more sense to put the piano roll in the arrangement/timeline window than in with the mixer but nobody seems to do it that way, although Cubase lets you edit MIDI directly in the arrangment window (but it's a bit messy to get there).

You lost me here, are you talking about subwindows with piano rolls in them the way Logic and Live do it? DP also lets you edit MIDI in the Sequence Editor, but only recently was that not a hassle with notes scrolling off screen etc. I always imagined in Logic when I used it, because it at the time had a super fast zoom implementation that worked great with a decent 5-7 button powerful mouse, that it would be fantastic if the piano roll became editable at higher zoom settings, that would be great, but most DAWs are about separate windows there, or poor implementations of this idea.

[wwjd]

have we stopped riding horses?
stopped buying vinyl records?
stopped listing to radio?
stopped watching television?
stopped making homemade meals?
stopped sending paper mail?

[BONES]

Mostly, yes we have. I've never ridden a horse, I haven't bought a vinyl record since CDs came out, I stopped listening to the radio about 40 years ago and I haven't sent a letter in the post for at least 10 years, probably closer to 20. I do still watch telly but I am in a tiny minority these days. There will always be Luddites and laggards but that doesn't invalidate the question at all.

I agree, except there's not a thing underdog about Asus or Microsofts Zune.

Are you suggesting Zune was as popular as iTunes/iPod? Because in that market, everyone but Apple was an under-dog. You couldn't even buy a Zune device or subscribe to Zune Pass outside the US and Canada. I had to get mine from Amazon but at least I could buy my music through Zune. Same with the PC market, if you're not Dell, HP or Lenovo, you're an under-dog.

Asus managed to eke out a solid name for themselves, at least from my perspective looking at Windows laptops it was either the Zenbook or a Sony.

Interestingly, the one and only Vaio I owned was far and away the worst laptop I'v eowned. Even though ti wa sone fo the more expensive purchases, it suffered from cheap build quality and poor performance for its spec. It's one of the few brands I wouldn't consider again.

Zune missed out on usability for better features, which is a typical MS issue.

I foudn it superior in every way that mattered. Ihe menu system is the best i've ever come across, the Metro forerunner to Windows 8, perfectly implemented. Despite it's tiny size, it was a useful enough web browser in a pinch, too. I'd say that, if anything, it had a limited feature-set tailored to the experience they were after.

I also have the AV dock so I could hook it up to my big-screen TV and read the band bios it automatically downloaded, look at band photos it also downloaded automatically and watch the screensavers while I listened ot music. It was awesome. And the Zune software is possibly even better, or it was before Microsoft shut down half it's features. Nothing else comes close to the way it replicates the experience of your favourite record shop or your teenage bedroom. It's a music fan's wet dream. I bouoght my ZuneHD in 2010 and it's still going strong. I use it pretty much every day and Zune is still the only media player I use on my computer. It's f**king awesome. Like my Kobo H2O, it's the perfect example of how much harder you have to try when you're a distant no. 2 and how much benefit that bestows upon your customers.

Sometimes the major players just have the better tech, that's what money and large research departments buy.

Are you honestly suggesting Microsoft don't have enough money to throw at anything they care to? It's all about the will to succeed. Ballmer had it, the putz who's running the show now does not. He's only concerned with maximising profit, he seems to have no time for anything that doesn't give them an instant return. I'm surprised he hasn't killed off Hololens, which is a good example of what Microsoft can do when they put the effort in. Everyone said this and that other VR headset would blow them out of the water but HoloLens is the only one that ever got any traction at all.

crappy implementation on cheap laptops made it seem like a toy for Windows users

What "crappy implementeation"? I've never heard anyone complain about the touch experience on a Windows tablet. In fact, Windows 8's tablet experience shat all over iPad. People just got their backs up because Microsoft made too many big changes, too quickly, and their customers were not willing to go along for the ride. When they dialled it right back, everyone was happy again. Since then they've quietly moved things to a point where WIndows 11 is pretty much a touch-first UX but nobody seems to have noticed. I find it quite amusing. Their stylus implementation also forced Apple to do a 180 and make their own, despite Jobs saying it would never, ever happen.

this is an implementation issue, the way that touch acts with your laptop and DAW.

No it's not, it is a simple fact that fingers are big and a mouse cursor is not. You try hitting the close tab button on a desktop browser on an 8" touchscreen, or even a 14" one. Browsing the 'net in Windows 8's incredible Metro version of IE10 is a brilliant experience, doing the same in Chrome on any version of Windows is not. But you couldn't have a DAW set up the way that browser was, you'd never fit enough stuff on screen. f**k me, you're the perfect example - you've had to spend a f**king grand on a touchscreen and then hack the shit out of it to make it work. My laptop only cost about $250 more than your screen, FFS. That's how hard you have to try to make touch even remotely usable. And even then it's a second rate experience with no more tactility than a mouse. You've just had to convince yourself otherwisre after all that expense and effort.

To that end Slate make an interface for the Raven and Windows with Studio One. That says a lot

No, it jus t proves that nobody is really interested because it doesn't make sense, but one company has gone down that road anyway so they need to make it work as best they can. I made a massive f**king skin for Orion so I could use it with touch on stage but it was completely useless for any production work. It was basically just a giant toolbar that filled half the screen, with most of the normal toolbar elements not even visible. Great for starting and stopping the sequencer but useless for anything else.

... that a multitouch OS still has enough caveats that a dedicated set of tools to mimic Mackie control surface support with touch is still a marketable thing on Windows.

Is it? Do you know anyone else who has one? I'd never even heard of it until you started carrying on about yours the other day. It looks like the greatest waste of money ever to me. And why would you need to "mimic" MMC? It works just fine here on my machine. I use it with my Roli Touch Block for transport control.

There's also their macro buttons etc., but the fact that the thing was developed at all says that there are issues with a generic touch screens with Windows and Studio One.

Obviously that's not the case, as millions of happy Surface Pro owners will tell you. If there's an issue, it's that Studio One doesn't support multi-touch but that's very much down to Presonus, because BItwig does (and proably some others, too), so it's very clearly not a limitation of Windows.

You lost me here, are you talking about subwindows with piano rolls in them the way Logic and Live do it?

I don't know how either of those applications work so I'm not sure. In S1 it's called the EDIT window, I think, but it's the PR to me. So you have two basic work areas - the Arrangment/Timeline above and below that a second work area that you can switch between the EDIT screen and the Mixer. To me it would make more sense if the switchable window was between the Arrangement and the Edit window, not the Edit and Mixer. My laptop allows me to deal with this by putting the Edit window on the second screen but I wouldn't feel the need to do that if I could switch betwwen the Arrangement and the Piano Roll.