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SV: kim's refreshing insight (was: Ableton LIVE's...)



> Från: Kim Flint [mailto:kflint@loopers-delight.com] 
 
> Per, you miss my point. 

Yes, I guess I did ;-) I doubt that I will ever find a software looper
that will work exactly like the EDP, that's for sure. But I'm not
looking for that because I'm perfectly happy with my EDP and almost
happy with my Repeater. But I'm curious like hell for what will come up
in software in a (hopefully) near future. You just can't expect software
to replace hardware with dedicated built in operating systems! But some
other cool trick might be possible with software loopers. We'll see ;-)

Personally I do all recording on Mac and PC systems and have done so
since the first Mac based hard drive recording systems from Digidesign.
I even earn some of my income from doing this and I can honestly say
that I love computers as much as I love dedicated hardware. The
computers I use for recording are dedicating to that task, just as any
piece of hardware is. I do not install games and office software
together with the music software and I always keep at least one hidden
bootable partition with the music software installed, just in case the
machine will have a system breakdown in the middle of a recording
session. I can then reboot from the second partition and keep up the
work flow (although that has not happened yet). You can't expect a
computer to be as stable as hardware if you keep using it "like a
businessman" ;-) (installing all kinds of applications). 

I still think my computer based recording system is much easier to
maintain than the real to real Tascam 8-track tape recorder I was using
in the eighties. You had to clean the heads every day with isopropanol
and use a degausser on it to stay free from too much noise. And those
tapes were very expensive! But I have to admit that it took me some
time, and quite some frustration, to get into hard disk recording as
intuitively as I once played around with my old Fostex 4 track cassette
porta studio ;-)


> to me, a more significant issue than these technical points 
> is the user 
> interface. Notebook computers are designed for businessmen to 
> create power 
> point slides in airports and display them in conference 
> rooms. 

You are so right! That's a problem for computerized musicians. But it
looks as we are arriving to a point in time were these "businessman
machines" are powerful enough to handle interesting musical instruments
as software.

 
> Personally, I find myself with less and less patience for 
> things where I 
> have to create the user interface details for a tool before I 
> can use it. 

I'm not sure I'm getting the point here? Are you thinking about
applications like MAX? With Logic I simply press "record" and go, just
like a tape recorder but so much more powerful and versatile. Of course
you have to install the software and arrange the preferences to match
what you are going to do, but that is only done once. With the guitars I
have to change strings every second day if I play fulltime and that is
almost boring me to death. In fact all musical instruments demand that
you dedicate an awful lot of time to "customize your user interface";
like intonating the bridge, trimming the twang bar, burning sax reed
edges, trying out "the right" mouthpiece etc.  And as I have invested
years of unpaid time to learn to play certain instruments the way I want
to, why shouldn't I sit down for some days and tweak a computer that
will be serving as my recorder (and also partly as an incredibly
inspiring "instrument")?


>  These days I 
> find I'd much rather take advantage of the interface design work that 
> somebody else already did, rather than reinventing that wheel myself.

Maybe I understand your point better now ;-)  I wouldn't call it
"reinventing that wheel". If it's a good piece of gear I would just call
it "freedom to use it for what I want to do". 

All the best

Per