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On Mar 11, 2004, at 11:01 PM, Loopers-Delight-d-request@loopers-delight.com wrote: >> I've been thinking about this a lot, and I still think >> hardware loopers may be on the way out. Nah. Like guitars are on the way out, replaced by synthesizers? Or like synthesizers are on the way out, replaced by samplers? Or samplers are on the way out, replaced by virtual analog synthesizers? Purpose built tools, those things stick around forever, if they're even halfway useful. Software tools get abandoned and systems dependent upon them become difficult to maintain. I knew a guy who was really dependent on a Powerbook 140 running, I believe, Mastertrax. It was this great sequencing program that did everything he wanted it to and very little of anything else, and he had his two-man band doing wacky covers with all the other parts being handled by the computer. His program wouldn't run on any version of the OS made after '95 or so, the OS wouldn't run on any computer made after about '97, and now he's got hundreds of files on floppy in Mastertrax song format. Sure you can find parts for ancient powerbooks on eBay cheap, but who the hell wants to bother with piecing together vintage computers? Or following some never-ending upgrade path in both hardware and software? We're talking hundreds of songs that have to be converted and doublechecked everytime you switch to some new freeware sequencing program. And we're talking about technology that's only a decade or so old. Other people have brought up the point that you're more likely to develop a deep relationship with a tool that has a fixed feature set, rather than some software-based thing that can be reconfigured and extended and changed in a thousand different ways. But it's worth noting again: the ability to easily add features may be more of a detriment than an advantage. When it's difficult or expensive to change something, you spend a lot more time considering how important the feature really is. TravisH