iain's Forum Page

Thanks Conquistador.

I’m definitely going to demo the program again. Coming from Ableton Live, I’m impressed by the relative stability and inexpensiveness of Podium – as well by as the responsiveness of Frits to suggestions and feedback.

@Conquistador wrote:

I suspect many people who do not ‘get’ the way Podium does things at the demo stage, will be very unlikely to take the time to post here and discuss it. They will likely just move on to the next option.

Hello,

I demoed Podium yesterday after reading positive comments about it on kvr.

I’m afraid I didn’t ‘get’ it. 🙁

But I do want to take a moment to explain why. Four key reasons:

1. Inability to load a VST and VSTi in the same track. I see how this is more like a hardware mixer, but as noted elsewhere in this thread, it’s a facility I now expect in a DAW.

2. Drag and drop from Stylus RMX was strange. At first this seemed not to work at all…then it turned out to be dropping the MIDI file into an additional organiser panel (sorry, I don’t know the name of that panel) from which I had to move it into the arrangement. Too many clicks, sorry.

3. Waves VST plugins didn’t work properly, but I appreciate this is probably because of their Waveshell system. When Podium ‘imported’ the VSTs, I was offered a list of all the Waves plugins to which the Waveshell VST links. I could choose only one – the others were then unavailable.

4. Drawing together points 1 and 2, the VST/VSTi handling was mysterious.

On the one hand it was beautifully easy to open a plugin and select a program for it. But on the other hand the names of the VSTs were a bit of a shambles – different to how they appear in other VSTs. Multiple instances of the same VST all with the same name and further sub-categories (Stylus and Absynth are two examples of VSTs that looked confusing).

Also mysterious was the difference between the VST chooser panel on the left of the screen and the other panel (where the Stylus MIDI files went) on the right.

Finally regarding the VSTs, Podium ‘imported’ them at length each time I opened the program – pretty time consuming.

There were also many things I liked about the program (responsiveness, download size, cost, 64 bit facilities, etc), but I’m afraid these difficulties switched me off and led me to delete the demo. Sorry. However I thought the least I could do was post here my reasons so that my impressions can be considered when developing Podium in the future.

One last thing: reading the forum, I see there may have been some issues with getting sustain working. If that’s still the case (I didn’t test it), that too would have been a deal-breaker for me. The lack of immediate sustain support in earlier versions of FL Studio was the reason I stopped using that DAW. For my style of playing, sustain support is necessary ‘out of the box’.

Anyhow, just my thoughts. I wish Podium the best of luck! For now I’ve uninstalled it, but maybe I’ll demo it again when the ‘chainer’ facility is added.