sarine

1 hour ago, kitekrazy said:

This sucks.  I have a folder called Acid Media that all loops are in folders by developer.  It wont scan the whole thing. I have to choose folders inside this directory.

Lame hack for a lame problem, but you could flatten the directory tree without duplicating data by creating hard links:

(PowerShell at the root of the directory tree)

foreach ($file in get-childitem . -recurse -include *.ext) { $path = $file.fullname ; new-item -itemtype hardlink -value $path -path $path.replace("$pwd\", '').replace('\', '-') }

It recurses down from the directory it's run in, finds all files ending in .ext and creates hard links to them in current directory, naming the new links as the relative path (from the tree root) including filename and replaces backslashes with dashes. As the links' targets are inodes in the filesystem they are absolute and the links can be placed anywhere. You can delete the links and it won't delete the files before all their hard links are deleted.

Replace .ext with whatever file extension the loops use, or if there are multiple extensions you can separate them with commads, e.g.: include *.wav,*.mp3

You can also change the formatting of the string, like change dashes to something else (the last '-'), but including part of path in the filename is probably a good idea to avoid filename clashes.

Absolutely no warranty. 😄

4 hours ago, bdickens said:

If you've seen any of the gentleman in question's other posts, he is rather an asshat.

I have, and he is. Doesn't mean we have to top him.

1 hour ago, PavlovsCat said:

@sarine Your post goes from passive aggressive to worse. Two plus decades of managing digital marketing and social media and writing about it tell me responding to a hostile post directed at me isn't a great idea. But here goes anyhow. 

You could have just presented counter-arguments, but instead you chose to start off by misrepresenting my character and intent and insinuating my post is not worth responding to, while somehow managing to keep a straight face when you accuse me of passive-aggressiveness in the same breath.

Just because something is unpleasant to hear doesn't make it hostile, and just because somebody suggests you're acting outside your authority doesn't mean they don't see you as equal.

You said I went from passive-aggressive to worse, so if you truly believe your foreword there, do tell us which parts in the beginning were passive-aggressive, and where it got worse.

2 hours ago, PavlovsCat said:

I'm not against people following rules.

Of course not, but you have argued for exceptionalism using community status as justification when you suggested @cclarry to be granted the privilege to post personal sale threads and when you defended @Reid Rosefelt's right to "promote" his YouTube videos (in inappropriate subsection). Who's next to ascend?

2 hours ago, PavlovsCat said:

My issue with the individual you are holding up is that he is consistently extremely rude to others and attacking people, he routinely makes inflammatory posts, he routinely makes contrarian posts-- when Larry posted a developer out of Poland was giving his revenue for a time to relief efforts in Poland the guy attacked Larry for making the post saying it was political,  tried to have it removed and then referred to a statement Putin made, referring to Ukrainian Jews as Nazis and he got even more political and attacked the US,  all in the deals forum -- so much for his feigned concerns about off topic threads and posts; I call BS on that. His posts in this thread are attacks and insults  towards others. And he, as he does in other threads, then goes on to threaten to have the thread taken down for being off topic.

I get that. I just think it should suffice to say true things, and let everyone speak for themselves. If somebody speaks untrue things, drown them in truth and let it be. If somebody is unkind, say it clearly and don't reward them for it. I act under the assumption that we're all adults here and have the necessary means to moderate ourselves.

Let me also make it explicit that I very much appreciated you speaking out on the Ukraine topic, and was dismayed by the reflexive locking down of threads, as having open discussions serves truth and is one of the cornerstones of Western civilization.

Excuse the diversion, but the issue is (should be) on everyone's mind, and somebody has to say it:

Having realistic and truthful discussions about a war in Europe kind of trumps in importance the inviolability of our personal feelings. It's also extremely sad that we still see war as politics, when it should be seen as a failure thereof. It's different than getting unnecessarily worked up debating policies and their technicalities in a functioning society; we should be furious about mass murdering, it's the healthy thing to do. Any and all mis/disinformation must also be shot down swiftly and decisively with truth and open discourse.

3 hours ago, PavlovsCat said:

So it isn't that I'm some defender of off topic threads as you are trying to spin it in your over analysis.

You spun it yourself. (see this thread, and references above)

3 hours ago, PavlovsCat said:

Yes, it would be better if everyone used the appropriate places in the forum,  but in the final analysis,  if people are going to post in the wrong forum but as helpful and kind to one another, I'm good with it and I'm not good with someone coming along and being hostile,  arrogant,  attacking others and making no nothing points pretending to be an expert as the poster in question habitually does. He is absolutely a serial forum bully and troll and in the end, I find that kind of behavior far worse than off topic [ ... ]

False dichotomy. I'm not defending the person and their antics - I'm defending everyone's right to be heard when they make sense.

3 hours ago, PavlovsCat said:

I  hope you can respect that I took the time to respond to your unfriendly attack on me and didn't respond in kind. 

That is such a narcissistic thing to say.

On 3/13/2022 at 4:51 PM, PavlovsCat said:

I can't help but sense that our friend is going to come back and complain that this shouldn't be in the deals forum. But this thread is exactly what makes this place so good.

Isn't it true, though? Why are you so resistant to the idea of a little housekeeping by posting in the most appropriate subsection? When we registered for the forum we all gained access to all parts of it, so there's nothing but habit keeping us from moving around instead of getting stuck in Deals. Maybe we should form new habits that adhere to how the forum is organized instead of stampeding it into something unrecognizable out of stubbornness.

Organization of the forum into subsections serves everyone as it makes relevant discussions and information easier to find. Taking this thread to its appropriate subforum (e.g. "Production Techniques: Discuss best practices for mixing, recording, production techniques, music distribution, etc.") would make it easier to find, make more room for actual deals here, and prevent the constant stream of deal announcements from knocking it off the first page. If someone comes here just for the deals then these threads are noise to them, while the appropriate content of Deals is inherently an unstable environment for long, meaningful discussions.

I don't think the quality of this discussion is by any stretch of imagination a consequence of the thread being posted on the Deals subsection, as I wouldn't expect desirable personality traits to cluster with deal chasing. Not that I gave it much thought (change my mind).

I don't really care so much for strict compartmentalization and am all for free discussion and stream of consciousness type of thing, but I think the off-topic posts (i.e. chatter taking place within threads pertaining to deals) add significantly less entropy than routinely starting off-topic threads.

It seems you're trying to establish your own law that would make the forum adjust to your habits, first by tarring & feathering our friend and now sanctifying it by appealing to communality, in effect repelling criticism - whereas in my view the criticism is valid because the forum already facilitates all kinds of interaction by virtue of its subsections and all we have to do is make better use of them by adjusting ourselves.

On 3/13/2022 at 12:07 AM, Adalheidis Daina Aletheia said:

As far as this theory exam they want him to pass? That is ridiculous. For a music theory specific school, ok, I could see some logic in it. But not music in general. If that is the qualifications to get into a music school now, that's rough.

To be fair, in order to teach there must be some way to communicate ideas, and the formalized theory of music is a well established language to communicate ideas relating to [western] music. It's not preposterous from a university to expect a serious student to know basic music theory.

On 3/13/2022 at 12:07 AM, Adalheidis Daina Aletheia said:

Music theory and reading music is kind of like mathematics in ways, either it clicks well with you, or your brain says, does not compute.

I get your frustration. I'd just add that, just like with math, for some people the language itself is a bigger hurdle than the ideas it's used to express. Music theory may seem difficult to get into because of the jargon, syntax and concepts used to describe a reality that doesn't really have parallels outside of itself. In addition to the arcane language and other historical baggage, it is mathematical in nature, but the useful stuff is very basic. If you approach it as a comprehensible and useful bounded system on which somebody sprayed a thick coating of repelling terminology, you'll win.

On 3/1/2022 at 5:40 PM, Tim Smith said:

I'll say it. No, Most of the music today really is worse than older music. No matter how you cut it or slice it ( pun maybe intended). The MIXES are better.......until the get squashed down into a compressed format.

I'm  not going to apologize for bad music that leans too much on computers. 

The biggest problem with this assertion is that agreeing or disagreeing depends on so many unspoken presuppositions which, when made explicit, tear down everything. So I'm not sure we even know what we actually want to talk about, and why it concerns us.

When we talk about "the good old music" it usually means music from the later half of the 20th century, and for most of that time music industry as we now know it didn't exist, and generally speaking your music had to pass a certain quality threshold to get aired on radio stations or get a record contract to be widely distributed. All the good music of the past made it through that filter into our consciousness. Both good and bad music was caught in the filter, but I'm willing to bet the curating skewed the average in favor of good. Because the mass culture phenomenon that rock'n'roll initiated was still raging forward and music was evolving rapidly, the developing music industry probably didn't have the foresight into future trends and hadn't yet homed in on the lowest common denominator. While I think they picked up on the "spirit" of the masses and successfully experimented with targeted manufacturing of music as early as 70's, it wasn't until the 90's that the industry tipped the balance of power in their favor by getting to define demand by exploiting the youth's need for validation by inclusion (in the collective consciousness of mass culture).

Efficient commercialization of music gradually turned it more and more into a commodity and an exploitable product, and as the advent of television and cinema had just demonstrated the power of streaming imagery and people with mind-massaging interests quickly saw the potential power it could wield in selling products or ideas, as a natural continuation MTV cultivated music into wholesome audio-visual experiences that delivered narratives with the backing of music, imagery, personalities, attitudes, and other extra-musical content, and at some point the market feedback must have made it clear for the manufacturers that this new packaged experience is the product, and music is a trigger for the "user" to recall rest of the experience and its associations.

So if this one facet of the larger package is what we're talking about, then you may well be right in calling it out as musical garbage, but I'm not sure who your audience is - unless you actually want to criticize culture or capitalism, in which case fixating on music seems to make as much sense as complaining about the style of sneakers or how they hang their pants these days.

Regarding music itself, I'll simplify and suppose that the "quality" of music measured in any imaginable metrics follows normal distribution, i.e. the vast majority of music is recognizably average and deviations from the mean become progressively rarer towards both extremes (of good and bad). I don't think there is a real reason to think we've somehow managed to drag the whole quality curve towards the bad end - rather we have more tools for creating/performing music, the tools have become more prevalent due to advancements in technology and higher standards of living, which means more people are expressing themselves musically and publishing their creations without obstructions, so we have more music.

To test this hypothesis, I would expect to find more bad music than 30 years ago, and more good music than 30 years ago. Turns out that's exactly the case. There is a greater quantity of good music being performed/written/composed/produced/doodled at any given time in the current era, than at any point in the past. Note that while I'm weasel-wording with "good" and "bad" to make a point, and I'm actually aware that the two-minute track that DubStepBro2k22 finished just now that barely makes the low end of "good" isn't necessarily comparable as an achievement with J.S. Bach's Passacaglia (because nothing is or ever will be), I think it's also an inevitable truth that many geniuses who could have made history slipped through the cracks into oblivion only because they weren't fortunate enough to discover or gain access to means of cultivating their musicality, because it used to be the norm that you had to either be born with the privilege or be hit with incredible luck and find a benevolent master or a patron. Just like DubStepBro's older brother - who made that one track that no-one liked on SoundCloud and that caused me 27 seconds of great anguish once - never became a musician, yet managed to produce an insignificant but annoying amount of aural pollution in the little time he was testing the waters.

Even if it was the case that we've somehow gotten less competent at music, then who could detect and quantify it? You would have to be "in" in the hundreds of subgenres innovated in the last decades and familiar with the most relevant material of tens of thousands of artists that can be considered definitive in their style, as well as with everything that came before - and those are just the pre-requisites.

The thing is, the good stuff doesn't come to you (or does it, I don't use Spotify) - you have to go digging for it. The stuff you happen to like may be buried under twelve dozen layers of anything from "slightly intriguing" to "acceptable" to "pretty good" to "please revoke this human's right to musical expression".

Somebody said there will never be another Led Zeppelin or the Stones - or something to that effect - and that's right. But there never was another Muse either.

On 3/1/2022 at 6:10 PM, pbognar said:

Part of the problem is many create a production and a vibe and then try to twist it into a "song".

Very good observation.

On 3/1/2022 at 7:45 PM, Wibbles said:

Sometimes the real instruments being played by real musicians happen to be drum machines and synthesizers and samplers and computers.

Quoted for truth.

On 3/2/2022 at 4:27 PM, kennywtelejazz said:

Great music involves not only drawing the listener in with a story the listener wants to hear told , the listener also wants to have the song wash over them and bring them to a place where they can feel the full power and emotions the song brings up for them .

QFT.

On 3/2/2022 at 4:27 PM, kennywtelejazz said:

It used to be everything came down to writing and performing good Songs . People just don't write that way anymore  .

Yes, they do. You just don't hear them.

Also, for me personally, lyrics are secondary. In fact, I suspect processing music cross-inhibits language processing in my brain, as I seem to be deaf to lyrical content unless I consciously focus on listening to words. If I don't, most of the time I have no idea what the song was about, even after I've heard it ten times.

On 3/2/2022 at 6:03 PM, Wibbles said:

But it is the role of middle-aged men to moan about how nothing is as good as it was in their youth, when the truth is they no longer feel relevant as the world changes around them.

Ah, yes, the youth's biggest fear; feeling irrelevant, i.e. "outside" - and their defining feature of relevance; having hip taste in music and being in-the-know on the latest buzz.

No, the thing is, you stop giving a crap. You don't care about their culture, and you loathe it, because you think it is ridiculous and they are ridiculous. That's how it's always been, and it's true; the new generations are ridiculous. Always.

On 3/2/2022 at 7:53 PM, Kurre said:

We have the loudness war. Bad or not. Music seems to be louder nowadays. Could have to do with the studies that say louder music is experienced as better sounding.

We have the overuse of voice. Bad or not. Wailing, wobble, warble and glides singing technics wasn't used that much back then. Could have to do with room to come up with new good songs isn't that easy nowadays. Seems that the new in a song isn't the song itself rather the technics and performance.

Loudness war is bad because it has practically coerced the use of dynamics as a powerful means of musical expression out of electronic music and desensitized listeners. You and I both know they don't do it to serve us, but themselves. Stupid and bad.

When you use the word "overuse" it already says you think it's too much. Bad, then.

I don't personally appreciate any sort of self-gratuitous effects. If it serves a musical purpose then it's fine.

On 3/3/2022 at 3:05 AM, Adalheidis Daina Aletheia said:

Yes the ease of access to electronics and computer programs that can now wipe your butt for you have seemed to dumb down the younger generations [ ... ]

I don't know how you arrived at that conclusion, and I think it's completely false. The "dumbed down" electronic music producer probably wouldn't become much smarter if given a piano and a pencil with empty sheet music, but he would certainly become less productive in short-term. Did you consider the possibility that the computer software environment is just the right thing for his genius to flourish?

5 hours ago, Shane_B. said:

But, S1 either doesn't support audio through HDMI or I don't have it set up right because I tried to use it and S1 couldn't see it.

They only need to support WASAPI. Make sure an application isn't reserving the device (probably not, if game audio works) and choose WASAPI as the driver in the DAW, and the device should be available. If it isn't, check the supported audio specs from control panel (run: mmsys.cpl -> Playback -> Properties (of the HDMI output of your GPU) -> Advanced -> Default Format, check the supported combinations from the dropdown menu), choose one and make sure all the input/output device and project specs in the DAW match it. Use exclusive mode for better performance at the cost of the DAW taking over the playback device (tick the boxes in the Advanced tab of the playback device properties in Sound control panel), or shared mode for going through the Windows mixer.

1 hour ago, Tezza said:

If you are on windows 10, you can also right click on the bottom toolbar and select "Task Manager" from the pop up dialog box.

Also Ctrl-Shift-Esc. I karate-chop Ctrl-Shift with the side of my palm and use middle finger for Esc.

2 hours ago, bdickens said:

Its a scam just like Android phones. There is absolutely no reason why a phone can't be updated to newer versions of Android but the manufacturers make you buy a whole new device.

The blame lays all over the field, from Google to SoC manufacturers to OEM phone vendors to phone pushers to the consumer sucking it all up. Google keeps changing Android, Linux kernel changes, and Qualcomm/MediaTek has to account for both in building a specific Android version & drivers to run on their SoC's in addition to tailoring them for different OEM implementations, and they only do it for "free" for so many months (24? 36?), and OEM don't want to pay them to support newer Android on older devices when the cellular service providers are so good at pushing new devices on their customers (at least that's how it works around here), and the SoC manufacturers don't complain that their new chips are in higher demand than extended support for older chips, and on and on it goes...

It's supposed to be changing for the better since Google tried to instill a bit more sense into the software stack by e.g. a backward compatible hardware abstraction layer and decoupling the vendor implementation from the core Android, meaning OEM don't need to change the vendor implementation to be compatible with the Android framework, and correspondingly the SoC manufacturers don't need to create different board support packages for every combination of Android+VI+SoC, and guaranteeing longer backward compatibility - with the caveat of vendors being locked to their original implementation which means no software updates for non-SoC hardware components of the device (or the vendor would be breaking the contract and have the SoC manufacturer bail out of updating the drivers).

Of course, it's not guaranteed that the extended backward compatibility made possible cost-effective by the more modular architecture and the contracts will be reflected in OEM support for their phones. 🙄

P.s. It looks like the new Google Pixel uses Google's own SoC, which would explain why they can provide support for longer (they are first-party in supporting the platform).

Like most YouTube "polymaths" (generalist knowledge workers) this guy is a BS generator.

9 hours ago, telecode 101 said:

One of my kids is a teen in high school -- and a regular teen. gamer, goofing off, and doesn't know what to do with his life. He likes making music and does the bedroom producer thing. Releases some tracks once in  a while.

4 hours ago, bdickens said:

2) He's going to be competing against kids who have been playing and practicing constantly since before they were knee high to a snake.

The above don't sound like a good equation. While the level of competitiveness varies between universities/conservatories and programs, the universal truth is that the further you get, more serious the competition becomes.

I'm not familiar with the RCM and I only took a quick glance, but based on that my uneducated opinion is that going from level 6 to level 9 in 18 months is realistically achievable. You don't need good ear to play an instrument (well) - just the physique and memory. Power, stamina, joint mobility, flexibility, flex-extend speed, fine motor skills and sensitivity of touch (to name a few) are far more important than acuity of pitch recognition. Out of all the instruments, this is truest for piano (least for violin).

What is also more important than ear though, is determination, and putting your above description and wife's comment together it doesn't sound like he's determined to pursue this. There's a difference between expressing interest and being hungry, and there's the real danger of being rewarded with disappointment and identity crisis for all the time and energy wasted on pursuing what should have been a fleeting thought.

I would spar with him to see if there's hunger. Ask him open-ended questions like what is it that he wants to accomplish, then be utilitarian and work together to try and see clearly the reality of if and how formal education would align with that. If you find hunger and it seems like the education could have utility for him, then see if you can make him hungrier.

If there's no indication of determination and rationale, and it seems more like one rather arbitrary option out of many possible, chosen under pressure of having come of age and nothing more, then I'd gently reel him back into reality by doing my best to explain why there's no treasure at the end of that rainbow.

7 hours ago, Shane_B. said:

My neighbor who is an IT guy that runs his own business said he's never, not once, installed shielded wire and has never had a problem. Not worth the risk IMO but to each his own I guess and who am I to argue with a guy who is almost 60 and been doing this his entire career.

Shielding is mostly a requirement in "noisy" industrial environments and maybe heavily bundled cablings where crosstalk could occur. The shields must be grounded properly or you could inadvertently cause current to flow between different ground potentials, create ground loops, or the antenna effect. Not really worth the hassle.

19 hours ago, craigb said:

And, just for the record, having wired several offices, I could argue that an RJ45 IS a CAT6 connector.  As in, a connector you put on the end of a CAT6 cable.  I might add that in any new wiring effort, anytime we see CAT5E (or worse) it gets removed and replaced with CAT6.  🙂

Here is where my Plenum joke comes from.

You could argue, but the argument makes no sense. It's akin to calling your stove an "eggs in a teflon pan stove" - the stove doesn't care about the non-stick properties nor what you throw in it, even though there clearly is a contract between the two to interface with each other, and the coating was put on the pan to make the experience better.

As for Cat 5e vs. 6; there's probably not much difference (if any) difference at short distances (30m or 100ft) and normal living space environments. If I were doing permanent installations I'd want the best and for RF/EMF-noisy environments I'd want shielded, but for connecting your PC to your home router or the wall jack (home or office), practically Cat 5e = Cat 6.

8 minutes ago, craigb said:

Next I suppose you're going to tell me I should use Plenum for inside wiring, ya? 😁

I had to look up what plenum means, but if you mean something like this then that's brilliant.

By the way, I didn't want to mention this in fear of upping my besserwissering, but there's a difference between a wire and a cable and I can't take it anymore. 😫

7 hours ago, craigb said:

Those are CAT6 connectors (RJ45's).

Cat 6 is a cable - not connector - standard. The same connectors (RJ45) can be used for many appliances (e.g. RS-485). Also, you can't easily distinguish between Cat 6 and Cat 5 without looking at the markings. From what the picture quality graces us with, the yellow ones in Tim's picture look like BNC to me. They have also been used for LAN but more notably A/V and RF signals, typical on radio equipment and high-precision electric measurement instruments, e.g. oscilloscopes. 

In my previous apartment I repurposed the in-wall LAN cabling and RJ45 sockets for transmitting analog audio from a Raspberry Pi stuffed into the entryway fuse box locker to the living room. It wasn't Hi-Fi but neither am I.

18 hours ago, SteveStrummerUK said:

All back to normal ☺️

Curious, how did you fix this?

When your computer craps out it's a learning opportunity.

So I love it when other people's computers crap out.

I don't know where that Comic Sans on steroids came from, but it's odd that it would fallback to something like that. Normally I would delete cookies and web cache, but as this affects two different browsers it probably won't help, unless there's a shared Chromium resource somewhere on disk.

The font defined in the CSS is Source Sans Pro, but being a Google font they're usually automatically available from Google's online font cache. It should fallback to Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif - not this thing, whatever it is.

I would still probably try at least deleting the browser cache and see if that helps.

Next go to "C:\Windows\Fonts\" and see if Source Sans Pro is there.

If not, install: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Source+Sans+Pro

If yes; close Chrome/Edge, delete the font, and reinstall.

If that does nothing, run down Windows' own font cache service and delete the cache:

Win-R, type in powershell, ctrl-shift-enter (to run as admin), then run down the service and delete cache:

set-service -name fontcache -status stopped

rm -r "C:\Windows\ServiceProfiles\LocalService\AppData\Local\FontCache\*","C:\Windows\System32\fntcache.dat"

set-service -name fontcache -status running

Or install Firefox.

It's all fun & games until you make an enemy with nothing to lose except their unlimited time. 🤔 Or they make you.

Throw away all the money you want, but please be pennywise with your identity.

28 minutes ago, Paul Young said:

Magix hasn't done much with Acid except change the paint and overprice it.

I beg to differ. Magix has made remarkable effort to destabilize and bloat the software. They should just rename it Booze, to stick with the theme of recreational drugs but better communicate the experience you're to expect; difficulties walking straight, and a hangover. Not the "mind blown" that original Acid might have delivered back in the day.

inb4 Fleer :

Quote

Finally the hipster chip apartheid is over and soon singularity will be here.

Maybe not post his registered name (real or not) and leave a permanent public record of it, even if it leaks...

12 hours ago, paulo said:

Here ya go Lars.......problem solved.

Whoa, slow down cowboy. What's with all the knobs? Need a simpler flavor of talent. It can't be that difficult to just give me talent. You just have to try harder.

1 hour ago, Time+Space said:

It's a very complicated process but we are indeed out of business and will no longer be trading.

Can you tell us the reason? Be as generic as you want, I'm only asking to end speculation. So, no security breach?

4 hours ago, Shane_B. said:

Seeing how we're running on 60Hz AC, I wonder how you can truly have anything above that? I know you can increase voltage but I'm not sure how that works with Hz. IOW, is it all marketing scams and gimmicks? I've read that no matter what TV's can only do 120Hz native. Anything above that is artificially achieved.

In CRT's with analog circuits the mains frequency could be directly used to drive the direction of the cathode ray in a purely analog fashion. The ray generator itself would operate on tens of kilovolts. You don't run mains voltage into an LCD/LED display, it's all solid-state. What you get from mains is the [P]ower to the power supply for the digital circuitry.

I don't know where the claims about upper limits of progressive display refresh come from, but 120Hz seems awfully arbitrary to be based in physics.

So here's some new information. After recent trouble from their cybersecurity exec;  best and brightest IT guy , and the backup admin;  good with computers -nephew , who'd been hired to patch up after him, Time+Space thought it was time to get someone to oversee their IT operations, and their headhunter found Mr. Datacenter Deleter. The reinforced IT compartment is assuring management that the site should be back up any minute now. As a continuation of the recent reforms to the company's organization and infrastructure, Time+Space is currently internally negotiating the viability of positioning The Incredible Hulk as their CEO, hoping "he would get things done and possibly take the company in new, exciting directions."

48 minutes ago, Zo said:

I don t know , thing is that editing in daws is so non fun that i tend to skip it aspossible witch can lower production quality sometime as a result of lazyness ....

Those type of tools alows complex move to be fast and fun ...

It isn't fun, it doesn't have to be fun, and - in my case at least - it can't be fun. When working on a project at some point I reach the point at which I know what has to be done, and from then on there's very little room for fun. When I'm busy and not having fun, I know I'm getting things done. A good DAW, mouse and keyboard are the tools that enable me to get stuff done, not a bunch of gadgets that I could toy with for hours on end just having fun.

Don't get me wrong; I have never used a near-perfect DAW. They all suck in some ways. I stuck with the one that I qualitatively assessed to suck the least in the most important problem domains for me personally. It still sucks and I can name a handful of DAW's (that I don't use) that do this, that or those things better, but - on the whole - when push comes to shove it does my bidding.

For inspiration, I see some merit in these gadgets. But for me, creativity is a state of mind best reached in solitude. Fooling around twiddling knobs and playing with gimped hardware sequencers doesn't get me into that state of mind, on the contrary I see them as jealous friends that demand too much of my undivided attention in all the wrong places.

Neither do they increase my productivity, because the operating interface is by necessity laborious compared to pointing at functions on a screen where you can have thousands of direct controls easily accessible by virtue of the mutability of a software interface and not having to mentally keep track of state.

I'm not arguing that these devices are fundamentally bad and that your experience can't be the opposite of mine.

I'm only asserting that for me they were a red herring that ended up consuming a lot of my time and effort (and some money, although it could've been worse) without giving back anything except this realization.

The reason for voicing my discord is that there must be some poor ***** sucking up all the hardware hype just like I did, and I'm just here for the slap to remind them that no matter how many recommendations you hear, they could all be wrong. Because those people are not you, they don't think like you do, they don't work like you, and they don't do what you do. It took me much longer than necessary to realize there was nothing wrong with me just because I was unable to incorporate the myriad of posh tools and workflows into my creative processes, so here's hoping my uninvited opinion could help someone else like me to have the confidence to keep cultivating their strengths and stop hallucinating about the perfect producer bliss.