Comment by officeplant

Comment by officeplant 2 days ago

4 replies

The sad thing is linux, like MacOS, is often vastly superior for audio routing and latency.

Personally I gave up all my audio productions tools that don't support Linux, but since music/audio work is just a hobby for me that's easier to do. I do miss my old DAWs (Ableton/Reason), and I miss a lot of VST plugins.

Not everyone can just re-base their setup on linux (for me Renoise & VCV Rack), but I can get plenty of joy out of a complete lack of Windows, license management crapware, invasive rootkit level DRM, etc.

Side benefit: it pushes me to get some more external hardware, but I have to do investigations on how some companies do firmware updates which often require MacOS/Windows or Chrome Browser (fucking webmidi looking at you Novation)

999900000999 2 days ago

I've tried switching to hardware sequencers multiple times.

I just don't like it. I came of age making beats in Fruity Loops. I'll gladly drop another 200$ or 300$ just to make things easier.

I do have some dreams of making an open source sequencer that runs directly off a raspberry pi. Something like a fully open source MPC.

Some projects like this exist, but it's still more difficult than I'd like.

Maybe one day in the distant future Apple will make affordable laptops. A MacBook that takes a standard 2280 SSD would be amazing.

Never going to happen though. That's where the money is.

  • officeplant a day ago

    > I came of age making beats in Fruity Loops

    Fruity Loops 4 was my first DAW, and yeah it has been hard to ever leave computer based production behind since then.

    The only hardware sequencing that has ever clicked for me is the Polyend Tracker, which is just a tracker so I hesitate to even call it hardware sequencing. I also dig Elektron's sequencing, but its an entirely different headspace I have to spend time in to get used to everytime I fire one up.

    I'm lucky that most of my projects only use 4-12 channels of midi/audio, because I can't stand massive projects with 40+ channels of things going on like some friends I've worked with. Hard to imagine trying to do that in hardware alone.

    • 999900000999 18 hours ago

      I actually have a Polyend Tracker.

      It is a VERY weird device to say the least. I found myself not really enjoying it. The issue with hardware is when you want a final result mastering and splitting up tracks is like teeth extraction.

      Vs using software where you can just export stems and hand it off to someone else.

      However, with software you end up spending a lot of money on non tangable goods.

      I can sell my Polyend. Selling a software license normally isn't possible.

      Plus say you own a license to version 10.x. The day version 11.x comes out, the previous version might be worthless.

      Vs vintage audio gear which might actually go up in value.

      • officeplant 18 hours ago

        I was pretty surprised that the Polyend Tracker could spit out channel stems at least. I ended up selling mine when I needed some extra money to made ends meet, will buy one again eventually.

        >However, with software you end up spending a lot of money on non tangable goods.

        Yeah it sucks that this also keeps us locked into platforms for so much longer. I've been buying Reason updates for a decade, and own a bunch of Korgs VST releases of their hardware synths (Op-Six, Modwave, etc). If I can at least get the Korg stuff running on Linux one day that would be nice. It might be possible but I haven't tried.

        >Plus say you own a license to version 10.x. The day version 11.x comes out, the previous version might be worthless.

        Shout out to Renoise for being affordable and you get a whole versions worth of updates. Which after over a decade I still haven't had to pay again, but will gladly when the time comes. Plus I can even run it on a raspberry pi now.