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

["Alan Kroeger" <alan@akroeger.com>]

A Personal Computer (be it Mac/Win/Lin) is a device with an interface an
EDP is also a device with an interface. I am leaning towards control
surfaces in conjunction with a PC (leaving out prefered OS's) it just
seams sliders and pots make better interface controls for mixing then a
mouse does. The software that is out there for recording and now some
for looping is amazing but the available graphical intefaces on the PCs
is not a real improvement over control surface, but yeah there really
needs to be a good standard protocol to transfer data and control
messages etc.. Between devices and controls like IP perhaps a better QOS
mechanism.


-----Original Message-----
From: Jesse Ray Lucas [mailto:jlucas@neoprimitive.net] 
Sent: Thursday, March 13, 2003 8:55 PM
To: Loopers-Delight@loopers-delight.com
Subject: Re: kim's refreshing insight (was: Ableton LIVE's...)


It all depends on what you grew up on.  If you started out with analog
4-tracks, patch cables, and having dedicated hardware for everything,
then you might as well stick with that approach and get a DAW.

I got into Cakewalk (now Sonar) at version 2.0, when it fit on one
1.44MB floopy disk and before it even did digital audio at all, so I
have basically grown up on that software.  There is stuff out there that
everyone says is better, but for me it's not worth the downtime to
re-learn everything.

With so many people switching over to using PCs and Macs for
recording/composing purposes I don't see hardware as disappearing, but
as getting closer and closer to being computers in themselves.  The
problem now is getting data back and forth between external hardware in
as fast and transparent way as you can move it to and from disk on a
computer.

It would be great if, say, a sampler, would just speak TCP/IP and have a
built in FTP server, and a telnet or SSH server with a console
interface. Boot it up, connected to the internet or your LAN, and it has
its own IP, or will DHCP one.  That would be friggin' awesome.  No more
proprietary mLAN, or Akai.sys bullshit.  No more pokey SCSI/MIDI SDMI
transfers.  USB implementations are okay, but still require proprietary
clients which, once the hardware is superceeded by the next version,
inevitably are never updated for new computer OS releases.  100Mbps
ethernet for everything -- maybe even wireless!

Come on, somebody.  Move into the 21st century.  Make everything
UNIX-based and fluent in TCP/IP, a world-wide standard language.  Even
Macintosh has realized that things are headed this way (OSX is
Unix-based).  Windows will go there, eventually (Windows NT is based on
FreeBSD, I heard), but they will have a nasty, bloated legacy OS for
years to come.

I'm sure someone on this list knows what I'm talking about with all
these acronyms above.  For those of you who don't, sorry to bother you.
It will happen eventually.  Just wait.

-J