Recommend a USB MIDI controller for me?

[MBTC]

Originally Posted by namnibor

Thank you for that comment as I know for instance an AI was seriously considering was the PreSonus Firewire Mobile or Firestudio Project AI where PreSonus stated the VIA 6308 worked but issues *could* arise at higher track counts.

I guess it is possible I may run into issues at higher track counts that I have not yet seen. However, when I was troubleshooting around the conflict I had with the Creative card in same PC, all of the posts I read sounded a lot like what I was experiencing even in easily-simulated test scenarios (for example I was able to make things go horribly sideways by adding a few instances of Massive or Diva for example). I've also loaded up some projects which were pretty heavy in terms of overall tracks/load and all seemed fine. Admittedly though that potentially be different with lots of hardware? Not sure..but if I ever run into problems my backup plan is to just drop a dedicated Firewire card in.

[namnibor]

Originally Posted by MBTC

I actually have to disagree with this. There's been lots of evidence to support Windows 8 as better than Windows 7 with regard to music production. The whole metro interface thing does take some getting used to and still bugs me sometimes, but check out these benchmarks and keep in mind this comes to us from Cakewalk/Roland, who has absolutely no motivation to get you to upgrade to Windows 8:

http://blog.cakewalk.com/windows-8-a...-applications/

From the summary : "The results of the benchmarks were surprisingly good! Windows 8 performed better than Windows 7 across the board in all categories, and in many cases with fairly dramatic performance gains."

To keep on-subject, if not for but this one sentence; I think Novation has always been well-ahead of likes of M-Audio in this department going back to their VA Synths such as the X Station, which was not only a capable synth but an all-out audio interface and controller in one. No idea what the Novation Impulse line is like but am glad I went with the Remote SL 61MkII because Automap or not, for me and most of us its the feel of the keys and my top requirement of After Touch, as I find it an invaluable creative routing option for things a lot of people never think of like Breath Control.

Now, I wanted to tell Tweakhead that I do INDEED have what I deem a "pre-mixer" for my hardware synths that is an older Kawai Keyboard Mixer that not only has individual sends for my Lexicon MPX110 at either pre or post-fader AND this ahead of its time utilitarian mixer actually has one MIDI IN and THREE MIDI THRU ports, effectively serving as a midi merge device that's not connected to the audio input signal. Even though sending that mixer's output to AI, if I desire of course to do a sister midi track for some automation am aware this will be effortless to make those connections to do so.
The Focusrite Mix Control on their interfaces seems to be incredibly flexible. Yesterday, got an email that stated Automap has yet another update and supportive of WIN 8 and USB 3 ports. That's great info from Roland regarding benchmarks on WIN 8. I am not being "a stick in the mud" about WIN 7, however, there's MANY people that still utilize WIN XP for audio. Not to mention all those folks that have Clavia Nord Modular that Nord seemed to have dropped them off the train and left them for dead as far as any support post WIN XP or past MAC O.S.--anyone ever wonder why Nord dropped such an innovative hardware/software integration synth?

[TweakHead]

Originally Posted by namnibor

Not to mention all those folks that have Clavia Nord Modular that Nord seemed to have dropped them off the train and left them for dead as far as any support post WIN XP or past MAC O.S.--anyone ever wonder why Nord dropped such an innovative hardware/software integration synth?

No clue. But the Nord Modular G2 isn't old enough to justify completely dropping support on the software side of it - and for this particular product, without the software the synthesizer is rendered almost useless besides the patches you have stored into its internal memory. This is what will probably happen to some of our software synthesizers of the old age. For example, just recently support was dropped on Albino 3 - which was still a very good VA software synthesizer on its own right, needing only unisson to stand up against anything in the market even today. It's a sad situation for such a lovely machines that have been used to oblivion in many modern tracks and are still mentioned a lot by many accomplished producers. But it is what it is... I guess, as far as the Modular is concerned, you can always set up a partition with an older version of windows or mac, or even a virtual machine just for being able to use the software to create new patches. But, by all means, Clavia should get a kick in the but for it. And so should Rob Papen being so greedy about his god damn presets - which btw no real producer cares for since they're mostly garbage compared to what you can do with that beast of a synthesizer programming it yourself...

When we buy a product we expect the company to keep up with the promise and at least keep supporting the stuff we paid for. There's also the powercore dsp that was able to run the virus synthesizer that is now dead, right Berni? We should gather all the music folks and kick some serious developers but if you ask me!

[namnibor]

Maybe just place a glass crystal dome over them all and all disgruntled musicians take a group fart in their general direction !!
You are not the first to have grievance toward that sound designer as there's people that own the Microwave 1 in which is dependent on large external memory card to place one's new sounds on or import new waves and sounds in that machine and will just say it's outright highway robbery what is charged for them with a damn disclaimer that they are his sounds and cannot be utilized in commercial realm nor sold in any way or form.
I say just make your own sounds because it's by very nature of trial and error and using one's ears, a person becomes a synthesis or better yet synthesis.
Do not mean to be 'snarky', but Tweakhead's words are very wise in making one's own trademark sound rather than continuing the 'cookie cutter' syndrome.

[MBTC]

Originally Posted by TweakHead

No clue. But the Nord Modular G2 isn't old enough to justify completely dropping support on the software side of it - and for this particular product, without the software the synthesizer is rendered almost useless besides the patches you have stored into its internal memory. This is what will probably happen to some of our software synthesizers of the old age. For example, just recently support was dropped on Albino 3 - which was still a very good VA software synthesizer on its own right, needing only unisson to stand up against anything in the market even today. It's a sad situation for such a lovely machines that have been used to oblivion in many modern tracks and are still mentioned a lot by many accomplished producers. But it is what it is... I guess, as far as the Modular is concerned, you can always set up a partition with an older version of windows or mac, or even a virtual machine just for being able to use the software to create new patches. But, by all means, Clavia should get a kick in the but for it. And so should Rob Papen being so greedy about his god damn presets - which btw no real producer cares for since they're mostly garbage compared to what you can do with that beast of a synthesizer programming it yourself...

When we buy a product we expect the company to keep up with the promise and at least keep supporting the stuff we paid for. There's also the powercore dsp that was able to run the virus synthesizer that is now dead, right Berni? We should gather all the music folks and kick some serious developers but if you ask me!

I'm aware of Albino support being dropped, but aside from that most of my soft synths that were purchased many years ago are still getting great support. Recent example includes e-mails I've received direct from Urs (Zebra developer) who is not too busy to care about supporting software I paid for back in 2007. Lennard, developer of Sylenth1 has also been helpful many years after the sale had long transpired.

Overall I would say software support in the soft-synth world is way better than one can expect from mainstream business software. The bottom line there is that software is not just a one-time purchase. It must exist in an ecosystem that is subject to constant change -- OS updates, driver updates, DAW/Host updates, etc will all have some impact on your software's ability to continue operating in the future. This is not a phenomenon specific to music software, but all software in general.

When a software company's revenue stream dissolves, there is simply nothing left to continue paying employees. It's not a matter of ripping off the consumer, it's a matter of survival. This is one reason the industry has gone more toward "software as a service", such that people pay a monthly or annual fee to use software on a per-user license level. This helps rid them of the false thinking that "okay I bought this software, it should work forever".

With all of that said, I think all my VST plug-ins have an amazing record of continuing to work, regardless of whether I update them. I think that says something about the relatively non-volatile nature of the VST specification; it is not something that tends to get affected by Windows or OSX updates for example.

Dedicated hardware that attaches to your computer is another matter, as there is usually some type of proprietary driver or software (i.e. Automap) involved. I'm not sure why the Powercore DSP was discontinued, but I suspect there was a point at which it was clear that sales growth would not sustain support costs (only a guess.... typically when something makes a lot of money it tends to not get discontinued).

I have worked at companies where I've witnessed absolute tragedy with regard to engineering staff cuts. By that, I mean that decisions were made by douchebag bean-counters and upper management know-nothings that resulted in the layoffs of key engineers that were required to keep the product line going. Yes, the layoffs were made without the realization by management and accounting types that they just cut off the lifeline to their own company by firing the only few guys that understood how things worked. The stupidity can be that rampant. So I have seen products be discontinued because of that sort of error in management, but it's not the only cause of course.

Overall, I think we should be thankful at the type of software and gear (or in many cases software INSTEAD of gear) that we can buy these days. When I first got into electronic music, you could easily spend $20k (which would probably be more like 3 or 4 times that in today's money) and still not have enough to produce a professional track. And in those days, a typical synthesizer cost several thousand dollars but was almost guaranteed to be discontinued a couple of years later. I think all products undergo this type of lifecycle.

At the end of the day though, with a software based environment, in theory if you are content with what you have, it's irrelevant that the software has been discontinued. Like namnibor said, some people still run XP!! If they plan to evolve they are kind of screwed because they are sitting on a ticking time bomb.... some software update will eventually come along that will make them regret that, unless they decide to lock down their system, no more updates or new software, and just consider that the last music making box they will need for the rest of their lives. In fact they could just image the hard drive and carry the environment forward to a new PC whenever their current hardware's life came to an end. I've heard of things much more absurd.... I know some people kept their original Atari ST sequencing environments going, as-is without modification or maintenance for something like 20 years! For all I know there may still be some out there doing all their production on them or Amigas.

For me I don't think I could ever just lock things down and fall outside the normal lifecycle of updates and deprecation of products. Trying new things is part of what keeps me inspired and interested in the hobby of synths. And none of my investment in softsynths has required any physical repair .... I've seen guys already having to replace keys in the keybed of their Virus Tis!!

[TweakHead]

I agree with what you just said. But on the other hand: if you consider such things as the Adobe's Creative Suite, how many people do you think have really explored the possibilities of the third version, let alone the latest? More often then not, we already have the tools we need at our disposal and marketing gets us excited about the latest advances. But we tend not to think it through, the really hard question, which is: do I really need this new features? So if there's someone out there still relying on their Amiga for Midi orchestration of instruments, that system is rock solid and stable for doing so.

I read an interview with Fat Boy Slim in some magazine (it's a few months old, might have been Future Music or something like that, can search for it if you guys want) where he stated that he was used to his good old Akai MPC and couldn't get his head around Ableton Live that he now owns. The simple change in the interface and the way of working made one of the most successful players on the EDM scene of the 90's feeling like he's got to catch the pace and start from 0. My opinion about that: if it works for you, keep it! Specially when it comes to hardware, there's no such thing as out of fashion. Who would imagine in the 90's that analogue would make such a return? Back then people were simply considering digital to be the obvious evolution, adding more polyphony, more complex waves and types of synthesis into the mix.

You're a software developer. So you can shed some light into this, I'm sure. I'm the kind of person who think that the system requirements for such things as an Office Suite are simply mad. It's been doing just the same thing for as long as I can remember and one of this days it will take a 4 year old top notch gaming computer to run the new version of Microsoft Word that I'm sure will be great but will still be focused on "word processing". I came to such conclusions after setting up a machine (a laptop) with a Linux operating system (mint 14 cinnamon) that comes packed with an Office Suite and tons of tools that work exactly like those we usually pay big bucks for. I'm not going for value for the money here, I'm going for performance and the feeling I get that companies push the limits in order for people to keep buying new hardware to run it - while having the exact approximate performance they had before, just with more fancy looks and color schemes.

In music software this isn't exactly true, because all it takes is to launch Diva and you get the feeling that evolution is actually happening here. But I'm sure there's much more love involved and honest hard work as well, compared to big greedy as hell companies such as Microsoft. Many times we're buying what we already have and worked just fine over and over and if there's a brand new processor that's like a million times faster then our first computer, the coders surely will find a way to make it slow again by using redundant code, by wasting system resources on needless stuff that sits next to the clock and stuff like that.

One of the advantages of music hardware to me is that it's out of this equation. 2 cents.

[namnibor]

THAT is exactly why my dedicated DAW PC build is indeed *just* for efficiently doing audio and some video editing and with Reaper, I am guaranteed a few years at least in future of absolutely free upgrades and features that even to this day the so called industry standard, AVID Pro Tools users, still do not have the flexibility and even some cool features that an open source DAW in which the dedicated developers *actively and fervently* listen to their huge user base in order to implement or even improve/tweak things; at $60. for a non-commercial license, this pleases me because even on the Cockos Reaper Forum, you get support from people that do not have pretentious snarky attitudes. You would be surprised at how many Pro Tools users have switched and AVID being asses, they have gone out of their way to ensure that REWIRE is a mess if a Reaper user tries to integrate within AVID products to include the video editing products AVID owns.
I am not trying to "sell" Reaper to anyone but their philosophy is very much akin to how LINUX is to Microsoft/Apple, giving people freedom to say even remain working perfectly fine on a 3.0 version of Reaper while a 4.7 newest edition is out.
Consumerism and marketing irks the hell out of me and some people really are slaves to it to point on another forum someone was actually trying to tell me that I was a "dinosaur musician" for preferring hardware synths and I did not feed into the argument when they started down the path that the Virus is surpassed by software/vsti and how the Virus sounds "thin" and how effects are only way it sounds beyond thin! All I replied with is, "...and this is coming from someone that utilizes vsti's solely and has no issues oxymoronically stating/boasting about how they had plethora of vsti effects at their disposal for much better sound design than hardware?!!!"

As far as midi controllers go, Novation's announcement few days ago of new Automap upgrade ALSO added Automap to ALL their LEGACY controllers as well! That is very smart and progressive thinking. Am liking Novation/Focusrite more and more as I see a company that ALSO listens to their customers and has excellent customer support.
Early morning coffee rant over!!

[MBTC]

Originally Posted by TweakHead

I agree with what you just said. But on the other hand: if you consider such things as the Adobe's Creative Suite, how many people do you think have really explored the possibilities of the third version, let alone the latest? More often then not, we already have the tools we need at our disposal and marketing gets us excited about the latest advances. But we tend not to think it through, the really hard question, which is: do I really need this new features? So if there's someone out there still relying on their Amiga for Midi orchestration of instruments, that system is rock solid and stable for doing so.

Adobe CS is one of those apps that I have to own, as a course of work, but it's really a side tool that's not essential to the primary type of work I do, soI tend to not always keep it upgraded to the latest and greatest and when I do upgrade, I just pass the cost along to clients.

But keep in mind Adobe CS is geared toward guys that develop graphics for web, desktop apps and mobile devices. That landscape is always changing (particularly mobile) and new features emerge to cover different scenarios. They may be features that don't matter to you or me if we are not professional graphics designers (I'm certainly not), but they might matter to alarge portion of the community.

The question then becomes, if you don't need professional-grade software, could you get by with something like Photoshop Elements or whatever their low-end offering is? Or maybe you could use something much less expensive altogether like Pixelmator for Mac, or the completely free-of-charge Paint.Net for Windows?

The scenario is just like the difference in buying a $300 home grade lawnmower versus a $3000 professional grade mower. Buy what you need and the maintenance costwill fall in line with your needs.

With software, the maintenance cost is not only to cover new features, but to cover the cost of the labor *just to keep what you have going*. Most of the time, software will not just continue working without maintenance attention, because of the evolving landscape of updates around it.

Originally Posted by TweakHead

I readan interview with Fat Boy Slim in some magazine (it's a few months old, mighthave been Future Music or something like that, can search for it if you guyswant) where he stated that he was used to his good old Akai MPC and couldn'tget his head around Ableton Live that he now owns. The simple change in theinterface and the way of working made one of the most successful players on theEDM scene of the 90's feeling like he's got to catch the pace and start from 0. My opinion about that: if it works for you, keep it! Specially when it comes tohardware, there's no such thing as out of fashion. Who would imagine in the90's that analogue would make such a return? Back then people were simplyconsidering digital to be the obvious evolution, adding more polyphony, morecomplex waves and types of synthesis into the mix.

The example with Fat Boy Slim presents an interesting dilemma in EDM and maybe music in general..... should a musician keep using the same methods to create music or should they let their musical style evolve with the times? Now consider that in EDM, the music tends tobe highly technology dependent and appeals to people excited about technology. Technology must remain innovative to remain exciting. Somefolks will respect an artist or band for not betraying their original musicalstyle if they decide to stay the course with their musical style. Some will chastize them for not moving past it. If they do move past it, a certain percentage of folks will say their old stuff is better, without realizing theold stuff was innovative and creative at the time but would not seem ascreative if it were released in modern times. It's just a dilemma every artist faces... But for many folks in EDM,which is so tech-based, we are partially driven by the love of music but alsofor the gadget geek inside us, and that geek side of us does better wheninspired or excited by technology. This is why sometimes adding a new soft-synth to my already oversized collection sometimes inspires me to make music. Just a different UI and a different typeof sound can inspire me to explore new sound possibilities.

Originally Posted by TweakHead

You're a software developer. So you can shedsome light into this, I'm sure. I'm the kind of person who think that the system requirements for such things as an Office Suite are simply mad. It'sbeen doing just the same thing for as long as I can remember and one of thisdays it will take a 4 year old top notch gaming computer to run the new versionof Microsoft Word that I'm sure will be great but will still be focused on"word processing". I came to such conclusions after setting up amachine (a laptop) with a Linux operating system (mint 14 cinnamon) that comes packed with an Office Suite and tons of tools that work exactly like those weusually pay big bucks for. I'm not going for value for the money here, I'mgoing for performance and the feeling I get that companies push the limits inorder for people to keep buying new hardware to run it - while having the approximate performance they had before, just with more fancy looks and colorschemes.

Originally Posted by TweakHead

In music software this isn't exactly true, because all it takes is to launch Diva and you get the feeling that evolution is actually happening here. But I'msure there's much more love involved and honest hard work as well, compared tobig greedy as hell companies such as Microsoft. Many times we're buying what wealready have and worked just fine over and over and if there's a brand new processor that's like a million times faster then our first computer, thecoders surely will find a way to make it slow again by using redundant code, by wasting system resources on needless stuff that sits next to the clock andstuff like that.

Well as I said, the dilemma with software is that when a single retail priceis charged for it, some buyers have this expectation that they have justpurchased the last word processor they will ever need. They believe they have purchased something like a tangible piece of furniture that should last a lifetime with little or no maintenance.

The truth is, software is much more like a car... it is an ongoing expenseno matter what. If you don't maintain it, it will eventually fails. Maintaining it costs money. Software is similar even though our minds seem to fail to accept it as requiring constant maintenance. Accepting maintenance cost for something tangible and hard like an automobile or home is somehow easier for the human brain to accept.

Microsoft Office needs to constantly maintained by a large team ofdevelopers. Developer labor is very expensive. If nobody upgrades or ever buys the new offered feature, the product must be discontinued. At some point it would just stop working,because the operating system it works on would always be evolving. Why does the OS need to evolve? Can't they just write Windows or OSX once,call it done, then that's the last operating system version anyone would ever need? After all, doesn't it do the samething it did 30 years ago?

Well first of all, you have very real security issues to deal with in OS development. Hackers, terrorists, and general miscreants are constantly trying to chip away at the OS, sometimes forcomplex motive and sometimes just to prove they can do it.

Without constant OS updates, some hacker will eventually be able to write a trojan horse that runs on your computer and mines bitcoins whenever your computer is powered up, depositing bitcoins into his account and making sure your computer is barely usable for music and that your electricity bill quadruples from its monthly average. If nobody is constantly safeguarding the OS against that sort of thing, you are eventually toast. Changes to the OS mean eventual changes to anyor all of the software that runs atop it. That's just the way software works.

You do have the option of just disconnecting yourself from the Internet, but that's a little like protecting yourself from the germs of the world by never leaving the house, IMO. I have heard some people say they disconnect their music computer from the Internet in orderto have a more stable environment for music production, but I'm not sure that'sany better than just keeping generally good security practices.

And, at the end of the day, if you really did disconnect from the Internet with all your computers and hardware, you would at some point be dealing with failing hardware that is no longer repairable because it's no longer supportedby the company that made it (they cannot afford to keep paying the support staff for years or decades if there is no income stream to pay their salary).

Originally Posted by TweakHead

One of the advantages of music hardware to meis that it's out of this equation. 2 cents.

Sort of, but in some ways I see it as the same because hardware has a finite lifecycle, and without inbound revenue it must be discontinued and it will eventually fail and need repair, thus costing you money. What's worse, it could reach a point where itis not repairable to original spec or original parts are simply not available.

[MBTC]

Originally Posted by namnibor

THAT is exactly why my dedicated DAW PC build is indeed *just* for efficiently doing audio and some video editing and with Reaper, I am guaranteed a few years at least in future of absolutely free upgrades and features that even to this day the so called industry standard, AVID Pro Tools users, still do not have the flexibility and even some cool features that an open source DAW in which the dedicated developers *actively and fervently* listen to their huge user base in order to implement or even improve/tweak things; at $60. for a non-commercial license, this pleases me because even on the Cockos Reaper Forum, you get support from people that do not have pretentious snarky attitudes. You would be surprised at how many Pro Tools users have switched and AVID being asses, they have gone out of their way to ensure that REWIRE is a mess if a Reaper user tries to integrate within AVID products to include the video editing products AVID owns.
I am not trying to "sell" Reaper to anyone but their philosophy is very much akin to how LINUX is to Microsoft/Apple, giving people freedom to say even remain working perfectly fine on a 3.0 version of Reaper while a 4.7 newest edition is out.
Consumerism and marketing irks the hell out of me and some people really are slaves to it to point on another forum someone was actually trying to tell me that I was a "dinosaur musician" for preferring hardware synths and I did not feed into the argument when they started down the path that the Virus is surpassed by software/vsti and how the Virus sounds "thin" and how effects are only way it sounds beyond thin! All I replied with is, "...and this is coming from someone that utilizes vsti's solely and has no issues oxymoronically stating/boasting about how they had plethora of vsti effects at their disposal for much better sound design than hardware?!!!"

As far as midi controllers go, Novation's announcement few days ago of new Automap upgrade ALSO added Automap to ALL their LEGACY controllers as well! That is very smart and progressive thinking. Am liking Novation/Focusrite more and more as I see a company that ALSO listens to their customers and has excellent customer support.
Early morning coffee rant over!!

If you like the idea of all future upgrades for free, you might try FLStudio, it is "purchase once and all upgrades free for life". Their revenue model depends soley on new signups and sales of new plugins... sometimes their plugin offerings are pretty good and they may get some more of your money that way But it is nice to get the primary DAW, all new features for free etc.

About Linux, there is no comparison to Windows/OSX there, and that's one reason it has almost zero marketshare as a desktop OS, why developing for it is a fragmented clusterfuck, and why nobody goes with Linux as a audio production environment.

About software vs. hardware sound.... in the very few attempts at somewhat scientific tests I've seen, where all things are equal and in a blind test, most people cannot tell whether a given sound is coming from a soft-synth or hardware. That's not to say it is the final word, in fact I'm surprised there have not been more properly conducted scientific studies around this. But one that I have heard universal agreement on, even from the hardware vendors themselves, is that by the time the sound ends up on the final mix, nobody, even the engineers at Moog, can tell the difference between the sound of hard vs. software synths. Does anyone here really listen to EDM and believe they can correctly identify when they are hearing a HW board or soft synth? If so I could recommend a show I recently saw on TV where these self-proclaimed vampires were looking for blood donors on Craigslist... they swore that drinking human blood energized them... lol

If anyone has links to scientific tests that show hardware can be conclusively distinguishable from software in a final mix, I would be glad to read them with an open mind. Just haven't seen them to date.

[MBTC]

Meant to come back and update this thread for future reference.

The problem I ran into with Automap not working was not a Cubase issue, but the fact that I was running Cubase as an administrator (not even sure why I did that but I set the desktop icon to run as admin, and because Automap was not running as admin it could not communicate... this is why it was working in other DAWs that I don't use as much).

I also ran into a few recent freezes/audio hiccups, and I remembered a recent discussion here about Focusrite Firewire interfaces (and pretty much every other high-bandwidth Firewire devices) requiring the TI chipset on the 1394 port. So, just to eliminate possibilities I plonked a dedicated Firewire card into the PC today and disabled the built-in VIA 1394 chipset on the mobo. Only time will tell if it solves the occasional freeze, as I have not had much chance to experiment since the upgrade. If you have a strong interest in knowing if it made a difference or not, check back with me in a couple of months for some reflective thoughts on the upgrade and so forth