Topic: Wishes for 2012…

To adimatis, love your new avatar. Predominantly a keyboardist? If so, that’s perfection, isn’t it?

Also, I think I would concur with your thoughtful list of Feature Requests. The Big One that I need thrown in with any MIDI improvements is, of course, the on-screen MIDI keyboard. I’m not really a keyboardist, even though I had to take two semesters of it as a music major at the university. I’m mainly a guitarist and singer, and it is all I can do to maintain my guitars and amps, without adding keyboards and yet another pile of cords and cables.

Speaking of which: To Frits, I hear through the EU grapevine that you, sir, are indeed a keyboardist. This explains much, now that I have studied and used Podium more thoroughly. Now, please throw us non-keyboardists a bone and add a really nice, polyphonic on-screen keyboard. No need to go overboard, but including a couple of controls, maybe a pitch wheel on one side and perhaps portamento on the other, would be cool. Have a look at how My Little Piano 32 did theirs, and have a look at the nice keyboard size on the Cantabile 2.0 Lite (both free downloads).

Basically, I, like so many other non-keyboardists, don’t have a living room full of keyboards on hand. I’ve got enough going on already, and the great convenience of on-screen real-time keys would save so much time and trouble. You see, I just need to tap out the pads and parts, and perhaps a short sax solo here or there. I’m getting so tired of constantly needing to plug and unplug instruments and gadgets all the time. This would allow the creativity to be so much more spontaneous.

It’s somewhat the same reason I asked if you could throw in a nice in-house dithering. I believe the necessary algorithms are all non-proprietary, aren’t they? It’s one less plugin to fool with. Wouldn’t it be nice if Podium had its own little master/render/export station at the end of it all? I’m doing all production from start to finish now, and I will not be sending work to any mastering houses anymore. The quality of service from one to the other varies too much these days, the best ones being over-worked, over-booked and getting way too pricey. Let us do ALL our work on Podium whenever possible, and good dithering is not optional for pro sound.

Having had lots of time lately to use the fully licensed Podium 3.10, I have to conclude by saying that I’m about three times more impressed with this software now than I was when I first began. (And I was fairly smitten by it from the beginning already.) Whatever upgrades you will be making to Podium in 2012, I truly hope it will always retain its inherent Zen, or Weltanschauung, “feel,” or whatever you want to call it. That’s one big reason I’m still here and preferring it over REAPER, which I also use for a change of pace, or others I’ve used before. Podium is great partly because it approaches sound recording and production from a slightly “other” direction.

And so I’m just checking in to repeat what I’ve said before, that this workstation continually proves itself to be truly wonderful — I’m still inspired greatly by it — and to wish you guys and all the other users of Podium a Happy (and better!) New Year.

Best Wishes!
The Telenator

For the stuff that’s actually on the roadmap, directly exporting FLACs and MP3s would definitely be of interest to me.