Not exactly, it looks like it only supports one master tempo.
Bidule lets you have as many tempos as you want, with sync
as desired.
Well, why don't you suss it out and then tell us about it :-)
Bidule only gets mention because people like Per and myself spend
time with it and then report back.
Touché! ;-) You're right of course. Usine is top of my list of things to get intimate with, but when it comes to music making I fear I'm a hardware guy at heart. I feel my eyes glazing over when reading the manual. The heavy french accent doesn't help either! What I can say is that of the apps I have tried to get to grips with in the past couple of years (Bidule, EnergyXT, Mulch etc.) Usine is the one that appeals to me the most. It feels like something I could actually find myself making music with, if that makes any sense ...
It's hard to tell without downloading the program and spending some time with
it, for instance, looking at the web page I couldn't be 100% certain it even had
an audio input!
It does! For example one of the default demo patches is a basic looper emulation called 'Echoplex' ...
It looks like it's more sequencer based than Bidule,
but it does appear to have the same sort of patching layout.
The sequencer is optional.
There's no mention that you can re-patch fx while playing, which
is offered by Bidule ( with Bidule, you could search your hard
drive for interesting vst/vsti's while you let the music run).
Yes, you can do that in Usine. I think the main point of usine is to build useful interfaces tailored to your specific song/performance needs. If that entails searching your harddisk for VSTs, that can be done. Alternatively if you need a highly structured sequence with just a couple of tweakable parameters, that can be done too.
Ian