Re: Stepping on silence, mojo and vintage gear

[mech <mech@m3ch.net>]

At 12:41 PM -0800 12/20/06, Richard Sales wrote:
>
>I've been using digital since Digidesign came out with Sound Tools - 
>late eighties I think it was.  I was an involuntary guinea pig for 
>them.  It was awful.

Oh no!  They got you too?  We got sold on the original Sound Tools 
for the Atari's in our studio, as well.  It worked okay for two-track 
mixdown and digital editing for about a year.  At that point, 
however, Digidesign was moving more heavily toward Macs, thanks 
mostly to having Opcode in the same building.

They'd just released the Deck add-on (which merely introduced 4-track 
capability) so we called one of their Product Specialists to see if 
there were any future plans at all for an Atari port.  However, it 
became apparent during the course of the call that we knew more about 
the technical music market than the Digidesign guys did.

After a few moments into the conversation, we were told, verbatim, 
"oh why don't you just sell that piece of sh*t and buy a REAL 
computer" (referring, of course, to a Macintosh).  Now, at that time, 
Apple's still didn't even have cross-compatibility between MIDI 
interfaces.  This meant that if you wanted to use Vision as your 
sequencer you had to buy Opcode's hardware, if you wanted to use 
Performer you had to buy MOTU's hardware, etc., etc.  Even PC's had 
it better at the hardware level, with everyone pretty much 
capitulating to Roland's MPU standard.  Of course, Atari's had MIDI 
integrated right into the computer itself.

So, to have this jerk telling us that we should dump a perfectly 
functional platform in favor of something half-baked but more 
marketable....

Well, we sold that system later the same week.  Since then, I've 
vowed never to own another piece of Digidesign product, and won't 
even work with it if I've got any say in the studio.  F*ck 'em; I 
hope they strangle.

        --m.
-- 
_______
"Somewhere between anticipation and nostalgia we should have been happy."