Topic: Hello

where did you get this guarantees from, if i may ask?

@Cris17 wrote:

Hello everybody, my name is Cris and I am a little new to the DAW world and these forums.

Welcome to the forum, Cris.

1) I saw that many people would really like support for midi plugins. An arpeggiator (maybe something like energyxt?) would be highly appreciated. Or even support for one would be wonderful. Is this going to happen soon?

I just made a reply to a similar question:
http://www.zynewave.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2850

2) Is there any possibility to implement some basic staff view of the midi notes? I don’t think it would be too complicated. I often write in midi and would like to be able to see the music in notes.

I currently don’t have plans for a staff view. In the distant future I can see myself experimenting with this, but that is years away.

Frits

Lol! Lion, I think shortcurcuit got on the list because I was attempting to explain a tonne of info quickly and that one resides in the same folder now as the others I mentioned. Unfortunately, I can type far faster than I can think when busy. I do want to mention while on the subject that I got horrible results with shortcurcuit 2.x and fell back to shortcurcuit 1.12, which I found much more stable.

Regarding the other issue, I’ve had best results with Phrazor’s last full beta version. Even though it isn’t sold anymore, it’s still available, fully functional, stable and helpful as a workaround. I mention this one again, since some have accidentally installed the limited (trial, I believe) version of Phrazor that, last I knew, was still being linked or carried by some websites. I’ve tested Wusik as well, which I know some folks prefer. It’s a matter of personal preferences and needs.

To Chris, and others — regarding included features in Podium and features slated for improvement or inclusion later, I try to remain mindful that NO ONE DAW has every feature. Here, I’m not talking about fancy offerings such as SoundCloud uploading abilities. Instead, I mean the nebulous handful of features most experienced users might want to see included in any system they use.

Let me be specific here by discussing a couple of glaring omissions:

Propellerhead (bless ’em, they brought us all ReWire!) in its offering called Reason, is a DAW which has a cultish, almost Apple-ish following, and has what many in the business claim to be the ‘best sequencer’ out there. That’s great — except for one huge problem: to this very day they have offered absolutely no VST support. Very recently they announced (here’s some interesting news) that they will start VST support; however, it comes along with much debate and trouble. Propellerhead has stated that all 3rd-party VST’s will need to be purchased and licensed through them. They intend offerings to be hand-picked by them and relatively limited. Will users have to repurchase VST’s they already own? Or will previously owned software get a one-time ‘free pass’? No word yet, AFAIK. Silence on their part. Further, all VST’s are required to be reformatted to fit within their screen plot and meet certain other requirements — a potentially good thing that is currently causing huge delays in implementing this new plan and causing many devs to decline the offer and others to work overtime fixing the issue. Essentially, what Propellerhead proposes is to make this entirely proprietary, another reminder of Apple. In an age in which the overriding movement is for more cross-compatibility, they are taking a clear step backward.

This brings up a second example, namely former industry leader, the famous Pro Tools. AVID seems to be continuing to move to more compatibility but has a ways to go. Plenty of features in Pro Tools — except it doesn’t ‘play well’ with anyone else. And Pro Tools today is still missing a couple of features.

Other DAWs? Some still offer little or no colourisation to aid users and — related — several offer very little user-customisation. Some are still lacking in abilities to use or convert to some common audio files. Routing capabilities are very limited in a few. Even though some improvements have been made, Cubase remains rigid and limited in its routing, one of the major reasons I bailed from Steinberg.

Of course, I could go on and on, but taken all together the simple fact is that basically ALL of the leading and most popular systems (some of the most expensive, too) have glaring omissions of one feature or the other. And it’s 2012, folks!

Now, I’ve put in my Feature Requests here to my most favourite of DAWs. Just as Chris was pointing out, I can live without full MIDI support yet would welcome it. I can do without a few other things as well, and this issue is personal to each of us, since every user’s needs vary. I have tried not to ask for the moon and tried to remain reasonable in my requests. Also, I have refrained from chronic complaining, nit-picking and any urge to whine. I am not offended that my pet feature is perhaps No.9 on the ‘list’ and not No.1 or 2. I do not write code, but I do believe most of us can tell which features are extremely time-intensive.

In the end, I remain extremely grateful for the wonderful array of features that Zynewave has already given us and am patient. All good things take time — and usually many hours of effort and real skill. I would much rather have update releases that are extremely stable, to which Podium excels. On my other favourite system they are rushing out an update nearly every month now, and it often contains as many new bugs and issues as it does new features. It’s always asking for another 15 minutes to waste installing this month’s new edition.

Which do you prefer: one or a small few devs improving software to which they are intimately connected, or a small army of code hackers in one wing of corporate castle, sitting in cubicles, working mainly to get a paycheque?

And what of REAPER with its serious MIDI support shortcomings, you ask? Someone in the know lists the top 10 explanations offered by what he calls REAPER midiots (lighter MIDI users):

“I can do everything I want with REAPER’s MIDI”
“REAPER’s MIDI is great for me but then again, I’m a Midiot”
“You guys just need to learn how to play better”
“Why not use FL Studio then render and import in REAPER”
“When you buy software, you buy it as is and not for future improvements”
“I’ve recorded 5 albums with REAPER, and I didn’t have a problem”
“REAPER’s price is unbeatable”
“The OP is a troll”
“The 10 steps to getting your FR [Feature Request] implemented are…blah, blah, blah”
“The developers know what’s best so give them time”

Hey Chris, I know this comes with quite a delay after you posted your most recent comment here — for one, I don’t end up in the Podium Free section of this forum very often — but I wanted to say Thank You for your compliment.

The forum is a home page on one of my most-used browsers, so there it is each time I head for my mail. More than that, though, my high volume of posting here at the Zynewave forum is deliberate; I’ve figured out my schedule for pretty much the whole year, and I’ll be too busy at many points to hang out here or say much. Recently also I became sort of fed up with a few of the attitudes at a couple of the other forums and left off of them, at least for the foreseeable future.

Regarding the ‘advice’ you mentioned, I’m really fortunate to have reached a spot in my life where I’ve got years and years of accumulated knowledge and experience and can share it in a place like this. I’ve actually learned a couple very important bits of info from others in the time I’ve been here. One great example is that I got turned on to a few critical plugins I’d somehow missed in all my searching that have both made my collection super complete and have also allowed me to toss a handful of lessor quality ones that I feared letting go of before this. This was all thanks to another member who is seasoned in the field of digital audio and production.

So a lot of what I’ve been doing is merely returning the favour. Add to that the fact that I have very often learned things the hard way in the past, and I want to get as much ‘mileage’ out of the hard-won knowledge by sharing what I’ve learned here. It seems to me, we have a nice assortment of forum members and Podium users who are somewhat younger and considerably newer to recording and the proper mangling of the captured music.