Topic: What about the future in Podium?

The next few releases will be minor improvements and bug fixes. I’m currently revising the code that handles VST plugin loading. The next feature update will be 3.3, and it will mostly include various UI improvements. I’ve recently purchased a 23″ touch display, so I’m experimenting with adding gesture support to Podium. That may appear in 3.3.

Greetings all,

So, I’m in a bit of a spot here. My Podium license is up for renewal, don’t really need the Warmverb addition or any of the latest or upcoming changes, but probably would like to keep my license current and active.

Thing is, we all came together over a year ago and considered just a handful of various features we truly wanted and/or needed. They were maybe 6 or 8 in total. These were both ridiculously small features, such as a Pre-Roll/Count-In added to the metronome, to larger things, such as some users’ request for full Time Stretching and others’ (including me) requesting significantly improved routing abilities.

Insisting on a couple of measures of ‘click’ before the recording starts may seem like a silly thing, but it makes all the difference in the world between keeping Podium a modern up-to-date professional DAW or having it left in the past.

And although I fully realise that the routing features (or limitations) are hard-coded deep within Podium’s structure (meaning a much harder thing to fix, certainly), the lack of being able to route MIDI, use MIDI FX, route audio easily from any input or source to any place, and similar, makes Podium unusable for me on at least half of my projects. I’m constantly being rewarded by some red warning notice that I can’t do this or that when I work. Even dropping a few MIDI clips, each in a separate track, below the group head track containing a drum VSTi gets me a red warning on each MIDI track. Yet the whole thing works just fine when I solo and audition each clip into the drum machine. What’s far worse, however, is the red warnings at too many turns when things are simply no-go. Podium is critically limited in track flexibility. If the coding is too hard to change, could a new ‘hybrid’ track be added in to fix this? A third kind of track that will accept anything inserted on it?

Naturally, like others, I’ve tried numerous workarounds — almost always resulting in a total fail and using up far too much of my time and energy. I’ve gave up on those notions long ago. At present, I am nowadays using Podium solely for its editor screens, both MIDI and audio. They are quite good, so I sometimes work on clips from other DAW projects there before returning them.

I have always loved Podium and would have liked to keep it as my go-to or only DAW, but the limitations and (for my needs) lack of just a very few modern features have made this impossible in the last year or so. I could easily pass on a request such as time stretching — it was not even a feature I asked for, but the few other things I find indispensable. Grouping and send/returns are a start but still too restrictive. Try running a Sequencer instrument into a VSTi — you can’t have two VSTi work together. You actually get a false statement about “this track processes audio but the other does not” — not actually the real case. Too much of this going on and not enough work being done has made me back off.

@The Telenator: Your license does not expire, so you can continue to use Podium and WarmVerb after your upgrade period expires. If at some point in the future Podium gets a feature upgrade that is useful to you, you can at any time purchase a new upgrade period.

Greetings Frits,

I didn’t mean to suggest that my edition of Podium had become un-workable since the license period had run its course. I was only saying that I like to keep current on any/all of my software licenses. At the moment, there is nothing in the most recent release that I cannot live without.

For previous feature additions, let me just say that there were indeed some that were wonderful new items. That Mackie capability is a true blessing — among other things I can hit one bank button on my keyboard/control surface and jump up 8 tracks at a time to change their settings. I’ve also noted and appreciated several of the less noticeable upgrades in the last couple of years.

I fully understand the time constraints you face when it comes to intensive changes that might be made to Podium. If it is any consolation, I am much more critical of certain DAW makers who boast large and skilled dev staffs — virtual armies of people or entire wings of buildings — yet seem almost totally incompetent when it comes to making the simplest of improvements. On a lark, and because they were practically giving the thing away, I bought Mixbus a few months ago. This Harrison Consoles ‘mixer page’ addition/add-on to the open-source Ardour DAW has proved to be a horror story I don’t even like to discuss. Similar, though, could be said of a few of the more established DAW companies, outfits that appear block-headed, obtuse or at least dreadfully slow in satisfying professional and casual users’ needs.

Whatever the case at present, I have to insist that Podium is truly the most visually attractive DAW of all-time, a true beaut of a creation, and very good and solid at the things it is built to do. I think it still boasts the best-looking and most functional of all MIDI editors out there, also, and if nothing more I still drag files into it whenever I have major editing to do, and I work on them there.

I hope I was clear about the routing issue(s). Naturally, I have been spoiled rotten through use of Reaper, but beyond that some devs have resolved track inflexibilities in their DAWs by ‘shimming’ in what is sometimes termed a ‘hybrid track’. I thought of this, short of some complete rewrite to much code. Cheers!