The Telenator's Forum Page

“Something that isn’t really causing me grief”?!?!

druid, I do think I’m the better judge of that, since it affects me personally. SO FAR I’ve had to purchase — and learn mind you — another DAW, since Podium is a true paraplegic in various departments: no pre-count, had to buy a MIDI keyboard because no on-screen keys like every other DAW has, need REAPER because the routing in Podium is deplorable. How is that for starters? Grief enough, indeed!

Further, I am not asking for the sun and moon here, as I have had to explain to you and others some dozen times before. I am only requesting that Podium have the same standard set of features that every other stinking DAW has in the year 2012. Is this unreasonable? No, what is unreasonable is being left hanging without improvements, why, without even a clue and up river in a canoe without a paddle.

Look here, I understand Frits has had to take on outside work, and it’s not an issue, although I think the 1st page of the wiki still states he is full-time here and that upgrades are quite frequent and user-driven. None of this is any longer true. Aside from starting upgrades with the simplest and easiest to add, such as that metronome precount and perhaps an on-screen keyboard for the newbies and younger musicians who come to Podium broke and short on equipment, I think we dedicated, paying users are fully due some kind of a road map. Further, I have been in business both in music and various related REAL businesses for decades. In business, what is going on here (or perhaps I should say what is NOT going on here) is complete and utter crap. THIS is how businesses fail. This barely qualifies as a planned and organised hobby at this point. Sometimes blunt words are needed, such as, “Hey, stop shooting yourself in the bloody foot; that’s daft! Hey, get a clue! Show your following and the market you have your act together!”

Music, recording, performing — these things are businesses. What we have here is BUSINESS SOFTWARE. Yes, it is inexpensive, but we did indeed pay for it. We are invested in the product and its future, as it figures into our own futures most likely.

It is inexcusable that I should have to explain and then justify myself yet again. Let me make one thing very clear at this point. I am not anti-tablet; however I do not want one. Moreover, I know full well how much storage, memory and processing can be crammed into that tiny space. Even gauging future compatibility and compactness, these things will NEVER be able to function as full-blown true DAWs. They will exist somewhere between DAWs and audio editors and very fancy cell phone apps. Yes, one can do some recording, but these tablets are TOYS, druid, very expensive toys. You need to understand their limitations.

Also, are all the basic missing standard DAW features going to suddenly appear once Podium is installed on tablet? Well, they bloody well better, or you are going to have all your potential users pass Podium by for the app that will be more complete. Are you pretending there will not be competition? Are you blind to the fact that Microsoft, not Frits, has total control of Podium’s tablet fate? Better open your eyes to reality here. If this DAW is half-arsed here and now, it is going to be an half-arsed app on a tablet. Or are you employing magical thinking to solve this dilemma? Magical thinking will not produce successful business models; it produces fairy tales instead. I accept that there may be some market out there for Podium on tablet, but let’s note that virtually NO ONE here is requesting it, neither are we awaiting it with wringing hands and sweaty brows.

This is truly becoming the proverbial ‘putting the cart before the horse’. Granted that if Frits can wholly circumvent anything to do with that dodgy RT nonsense on tablet then he can save himself doing a massive recompiling from ground up. Still, he will be bringing a currently second-rate system from PC to tablet.

Have you noticed how Microsoft has been so careful to do everything perfectly and correctly in its launch of the Surface tablet? It’s because they are unwilling to allow any handhold for failure. In fact, they have been rather harsh with suppliers and contractees. That’s called ‘business smarts’, druid, and someone needs to start applying some to Podium before it becomes just one more bit of abandonware and a footnote in the history of digital recording.

Now, you need to come off your high horse, because the flawed logic is in your camp. I’ve been extremely successful in every business I’ve operated. I essentially retired at 48 officially, not needing to work any longer unless I choose to do so, which I still do. If I am harsh at times it is because of a few very good reasons. First, this is a business, not a school dance. Next, we users are lately greeted with a wall of deafening silence and no answers, real plans, guidance or response to our considered and thoughtful requests. And if nothing else, we were asked to make our voices heard, and then we were summarily blown off. And you question why my tone is serious? You really ought to be questioning why I haven’t simply said ‘screw this’ and walked off, just like the other last several dozen of former Podium users. You might better question why I even bother to respond now or advocate for BETTER. I assure you, my time is very valuable. No matter how it may appear here in my forum posts, all of my actions are prioritised and allotted as needed — I don’t have any of what you call ‘free time,’ as none of my time or efforts are free in any way.

BTW! You are entirely correct about your concerns over that posted link. Microsoft will certainly move to this new scheme, forcing devs to upgrade, reconfigure, etc., on demand and to their tune whenever they so please. Their way or the highway. They can snuff an app for any reason and at any time. Frits will have no rights and no recourse should Microsoft suddenly take any other course.

Much timely info in your post here. Yes, I saw the $49 Waves deal. How could anyone wanting to dig in and get started with highly rated commercial plugins turn that offer down? (Actually, I’m too stretched ATM to consider much this season. I already have a shopping list from weeks and months ago.) And I see UAD is coming on strong also. Saw an advert today for the famous Oxford plugin very low price.

In a way, I seem to prefer using all of these free and freaky plugins. I get a smile from ear to ear when I come across one that equals an expensive one. I must say, there are some well-made weird ones out there. I tested the W 1 (L 1) limiter (the cute GUI’ed version) against a ‘one-knob wonder’ limiter today . . . and believe it or not it lost! I realised I have Sir Elliot’s Peak Limiter II, a crafty and artsy one-knob creation. It is designed to handle full buss limiting and can mix down to -0.1 dBFS without significant or noticeably unpleasant distortion. This little beast was made to win the Loudness War, along with his rock’n’roll compressor/limiter called the Little Black Box. One reason I put the two limiters head to head was that, for all W 1’s cuteness, the three knobs change settings massively if you so much as breathe on them. You get it very close to loud and perfect, then only touch a knob ever so slightly and you’re suddenly clipping. You’d think the minor distortion would be much more pleasant than Sir Elliot’s little monsters, too, considering the W 1 is a close clone of the L 1 model without the UltraMaximizer part. But, NO — to my ears repeated testing a dozen times the Peak Limiter kicked its butt badly using only one little knob. I’m afraid I tossed the W 1. The touchy controls were unacceptable and helped my decision.

Some folks were just talking about the 60 days of REAPER over there, like, yesterday I think. I’ve promised myself I will upgrade to the commercial license if I win or even just get nominated for a Grammy in the next 2-3 years. Meanwhile, I’m annoyed with my oldest son because he cracked an Ableton Live 8 a while back and now is firm in deciding never to pay for an edition. I won’t use Warez. I mean, maybe if the company was truly the devil and evil to the core, and they were striving to make audio people miserable (sounds like I am describing Steinberg up until Yamaha bought them out and did a shakedown of personnel last year). But Ableton is not quite as huge and wealthy as some kids think. So, I mean he’s stealing their livelihoods. He’d have a cow if someone pirated or dub mixed without crediting his latest hip hop album. It’s really the same thing.

I finally got all the hours of downloading and updating done. Funny, but just as I thought I was finished, Mike Scuffham, the perfectionist who conceived and created the fabulous S-Gear guitar amps, spotted some very minor thing that didn’t look quite right in his latest edition and so, yes, he released his forth re-update of the week last night. It seems perfect to me now, but knowing Mike I could be way wrong. I edited the latest edition of the S-Gear User’s Manual very recently for this update, and am pleased that it didn’t need a complete overhaul, just a chapter addition to go through and a few dozen corrections. My biggest success with it, however, is that Mike is another Brit, and I believe someone was trying to convince him to ‘Americanize’ the British-isms, run it through a U.S.A. spell checker and ruin the beauty of the language of the text within. I have persuaded him to hold fast, as the manual is a real gem.

Well, I’ve run on here. My biggest upcoming audio software duties, besides continuing work on some newer music and songs, is to keep testing and comparing some compressor plugins. I discovered I have collected 22 in that folder which is just daft. I need to get this down to less than half that. They are all the best, the usual suspects from the free and cheap, but this winter’s goal is to better refine and define my compressor sound and approach in my recordings. It’s going to be a bit of work but truly needs doing, sort of my Achilles’ heal, you know. I’m always looking to reduce my glut of software!

Cheers!

No worries! Simply discussing plugins lately has been the least of my troubles. So many are being updated, the Variety of Sound collection a good example, that I can barely keep up with replacing the older versions with the newer. The devs at REAPER have been working overtime, too, it seems — two major updates in one week, plus a major Manual rewrite. I’ve just spent more than half a day between posting here and catching up on my mail updating all of this. Every time I think I’m set, I get another notice in the mail from KVR that someone else has just released an update. TesslaPRO is now MkII, the Baxter EQ now has a smaller, more reasonably sized GUI, and on and on and on.

I sort of saw this coming. Some of these free ones are really approaching state of the art. It’s impressive. Just for example, the TesslaPRO now employs the VOS’ algorithm called ‘stateful saturation’ and now sounds about 10 times better. It sounded good before but now comes with colour options such as ‘British Console’, ‘Tape’ and much more. Meanwhile, there are about a dozen new freeware synths out lately that have enough character to them to make each at least worth fiddling about with. Kamioooka from the KVR D.C.2012 is a poor man’s version of u-he’s ACE synth, and I’m impressed with the Poly 2106 synth, a Juno-family style of VA synth that was also entered in the DC’12. Of course, I’m only scratching the surface here.

I expect you are witnessing this explosion of software, too. Do you remember the days when you had to hunt around for a while on the Net to find a decent free plugin? Perhaps already owning a good bundle of Waves plugs is one of the safest ways to avoid being overwhelmed these days. The quality of output has me almost speechless at times!

Nice to hear from you, adimatis. It’s also nice to hear other perspectives on something like Studio One. You probably have discovered that it is version 2 of that DAW that is receiving all the interest lately. They certainly have come a long way since their humble beginnings not so long ago. If there were no Podium or REAPER, Studio One v2 would be a possible choice; it’s that Melodyne editor that accounts for it, of course, but that DAW itself is indeed good enough I think.

One of the things I’ve come to like so much about REAPER and that I only realised very recently is the forum itself. It is much like the the tone and interest you find here, except more of everything — more posts, threads, traffic.

Once you get REAPER all set up the way you like it and choose, for example, a skin that is well-designed and fully functional, it’s clear sailing with discoveries along the way as you explore some of the deeper features provided by the SWS extension and easy construction of macros, if needed. However, as good as all this is, Podium has somehow managed to remain ‘home base’ for me. Some part of almost every project gets some kind of treatment or play on Podium at some point.

Some of it may be my own stubbornness. I might have never quit Cubase had the company not been so unbelievably arrogant and lacking in reasonably prompt support. And their forum was all that and more, which became the last straw — pay an arm and a leg for something, then get treated like dirt.

Love to hear a bit more of your experiences with Studio One sometime, especially anything having any relation to Podium or the functioning of DAWs in general.

Greetings,

First to JPRacer’s remark. I don’t know why but several DAWs also tend to clip that first note(s). Leave yourself space, a measure, etc., and anticipate this. I saw it explained in some forum but can’t remember why it happens — and happens often.

To Frits, I have loads of experience ‘abusing’ WordPress by floating personal and band websites with them. I’ve had lots of success with WordPress, though I should say I’m not crazy about how their system works. It seems needlessly a little too complicated. I did want to chime in here if only to say it would be a valid option. There are so many options very lately to WordPress that I know much less about, so something else might suit better!

I’m sure I’ve posted this at least a couple of times before, but I use both REAPER and Podium, and the two really complement each other. Both have their own strengths and weaknesses, just like any DAW does, but since I’ve come up to speed on both I can say I’ve never been happier in recording. (There is much to learn in REAPER, although basic tasks are quite simple to get started, yet you can go as deep as you desire.) Consider that you can own both fully licensed and still pay far less than buying any other leading DAW. I believe the routing in REAPER is the best on the market, and there’s a couple of other things it does quite well. I prefer Podium’s MIDI editor, and I suppose we all know the other features that make Podium so pleasant to use.

These days I have my folders set up in Podium’s browser so that I can grab any work I’ve been doing in REAPER and drag it right into Podium and proceed. It’s almost as easy in reverse, bringing a file into REAPER from Podium, except Podium’s browser setup is divine and best.

I’m finding folks everywhere that are using two DAWs. I wouldn’t have debated the decision at all if I had known then how common this is. Although I’m in the minority, Podium does get some mention as the ‘other DAW’ in the REAPER Forum. More often, I see Studio One V2 listed as the other, followed by perhaps Ableton Live and some still using Cubase. I’ve looked over Studio One rather thoroughly. And it comes with the Melodyne editor as a big bonus. Still, this was not enough to take on another DAW, as I’m tired of learning new setups. (And personally, there are things about Studio One that annoy me to no end, starting with the corpse gray look that many DAW designers think is so vogue right now.) It did get me thinking about just adding the $99 editor version of Melodyne (or one of the other imitators) to Podium. Something like that, to me, would be perfection.

Always too tempted by new audio software, I went into this list and tested a few. The synths Kamioooka and Poly 2106 (and including its sister synth Prodigious) work quite well and were fun to try out. Kamioooka is a modular setup with cable you can connect, much like u-he’s ACE. The Poly 2106 is along the lines of the several Juno emulations out there, very sweet and VA-sounding.

I also tested ThrillseekerXTC, best described as an exciter. It is fantastic. A plugin that you will want to at least try on some of your tracks, especially if you have no good unit of this sort in your arsenal.

Orchestral Strings One, as I posted elsewhere, did not work at all for me and others who posted. The tube saturation effect, AXP Softamp 3OD, seemed wonderful in the way it is structured yet nearly crashed my entire PC, so beware of that one — really too bad for something that looks so promising. I call it outright dangerous to your DAW. The collection of patches for various synths by rmus7 are great. Do grab those if you have any of the 5 or 6 VSTi’s he’s made them for.

I also tested and kept a copy of the very interesting collaboration of Vladg Sound (Molot, LimiterNo6) and Tokyo Dawn Labs (many, many VST’s) in the plugin called Proximity. It has to do with quite what its name states. I’m seeing these kinds of specialty plugins pop up a lot lately.

Can anyone confirm that WAVES plugins even work in Podium? I know they don’t work in half the other DAWs, or you have to only use the DX version, or a wrapper, or you need to funnel money into their insane WUP program just to get any customer support, or, or . . .

I know some people rate Waves plugins very highly, but I wouldn’t do any business with them if you paid me. They play proprietary games. Personally, I think their plugins are both ugly and very overrated.