Topic: Some Thoughts About Podium’s Future

I could say I know Podium Free pretty good know. But I ain’t gonna talk about Podium free this time. It’s a great peace of software both for newbies and people who are flat broke. Together with Audacity or/and Wavosaur and a bunch of freeware vst and vsti plugins (and a lot of workarounds) it makes it possible to get professional results. So, Podium free is the most generous lite version of software ever and for that: Thank you Frits!

But, let’s see how’s Podium doing. Not so good, I’m afraid.

Before I’ve started writing this I took a look at what was done between 2.42 and current version (about 15 months) and between 2.24 and 2.42 (15 months again). I won’t discuss that, but take a look if you want. I also won’t discuss “one man show” or how much time the dev has for Podium and for what reasons (I have to mention that I understand that he’s a software engineer an is interested in many things – it somehow explains his wish that Podium runs on freakin’ tablets. Nobody who’s serious about music will ever feel the need for something like that, not to mention the fact that soon, Frits won’t have anything serious to run on anything if something doesn’t change. I let a few of my buddies know about Podium free (all experienced DAW users). After some time the comments were:” Really nice, it’s just such a shame that…….. (see The Telenator’s thread)”:

http://www.zynewave.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2861

Now, I’m aware of the fact that my requests will be somewhere at the end of the dev’s to-do list if at all (and that shouldn’t be that way (not because of me of coarse)). I asked for: Dual pan, pan knob on sends and precount (and those are must have features for every serious DAW). Now, I don’t care about midi too much (but I absolutely agree with most of the midi feature requests), but I need MIDI routing for mixing – I couldn’t even create a trigger track to add a sample to a kick. Fx automation is also a must have feature.

Now, I think this wasn’t a bad idea at all:

@michi_mak wrote:

yes, that was me suggesting a kind of poll…
my idea was that Frits holds the poll so he can decide which features he wants to inplement and let us vote for most wanted ones.

another suggestion would be :
everbody posts one thead per request and adds a polling option with 3 choices : a) i would use this feature b) i would not use this feature c) i don’t know

Let me explain why. More or less all the features on the list are must have, but (what should come first?):

– Dithering
– Timestretching

Even though these are must have features I find the support of an external wave editor more useful (it’s also one of the requests) – one can use Audacity for that and the people who owe a professional wave editor with timestretching and dithering and noise shaping or a mastering limiter with dithering and noise shaping on board will use that, anyway. And, of coarse, nothing can replace real time timestreching, which brings me to:

– On the fly sample rate conversion (access to an external wave editor as a workaround, again)

But, the need for workarounds for such basic features shouldn’t even exist – I’m just trying to figure out which feature would solve more problems than the other.

– Autosave

That’s the first thing I disable when I want to use any DAW. But, all DAWs have it. It can save newbies from loosing their work and the pros will turn it off.

I won’t discuss MIDI – as I said I only need MIDI routing (and agree with most of the midi feature requests).

I think I could keep writing forever, but I think I made my point – everybody has different needs and maybe what michi_mac suggested is a good solution for both Frits and the users.

TBH I won’t buy Podium until all the features I need are implemented. I enjoyed every minute spent with Podium Free very much and don’t want to become a pissed Podium owner.

Cheers, Alex