Once again, Reality rears its ugly head

That it is WAY past time to get out of the industry. Now I see the kids who are one of the main causes in the downward spiral of studio rates and quality, complaining about a new generation under them of kids causing a downward spiral of rates and quality.

YOUCH!

Its by no means uncommon for a vet to take a severe tongue lashing by these types either. No respect. You can lead a horse to water but PETA will have your ass if you shove his head in it. The end of the 80's saw the average studio worker's wage go from somewhat liveable to below minimum wage. Now, 2007, its WELL below server's minimum.

Im afraid soon, this will all join snowboarding and tow-in surfing as a hobby of the rich, no longer having the counterbalance of the passionate poor.

I am SO glad for the double edged sword of our tools now being so cheap. I can carry on wreaking audio havoc, even if I have to leave for a far more lucrative job, like McDonalds.

DAW bitching

The subject of DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations) ends up being a very religious one, people have their preferences of what they've learned and tend to have trouble adapting to them. I've been testing applications, as a DAW developer, and below I will list some complaints. Note that yes, these are individual and small items, however they are in my opinion significant as they are indicative of the design of the application.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, good programmers aren't always good APPLICATION programmers.


So here goes:

• Sonar 6: (after having to restart to switch to ASIO) I go to import an hour long 15 track session, and it takes (I shit you not) 5 minutes per .WAV file to import it. And I can't do ANYTHING while it imports it. This is on an 8 core Xeon, too. I give up after 10 minutes (which were spent playing with the cat, and eating breakfast), when I get back and it was on the 3rd item.. and when I hit cancel, the first two are gone, too. UGH. Either do it quickly, or do it in the background, or both!
• Cubase SX3: Where do I go to configure my ASIO hardware? Ugh. The preferences are a joke, too.

Update: Turns out Sonar was resampling the media to its own directory which is what took so long.. No on-the-fly samplerate conversion, sad. Which means also that it lacks the ability to CHANGE a project's sample rate once you've created it. This combined with the inability to easily duplicate things like FX, make it so tedious. Also I found a way to only view one track in the track view, but then once I did that I couldnt figure out how to get back to the full track views. UGH.. I give up.

So you wanna build a better mouse trap?

Just get dumber mice.

Portability

I have hardware. Piles of it.

Some bleh, like hordes of digitech and peavy rack stuff

Some standard, like the regular complement of dbx comps and Drawmer gates

And a whole heaping helping of uber gear: Manley, API, Eventide, etc...

So you might be surprised that I almost NEVER use any of it, except during tracking. It all sits idle in a mix. You can imagine I might take quite a ribbing for this practice. I have my reasons

I like my house

I like to mix at my house

I am surrounded by a bearded dragon, a pair of guinea pigs, a Columbian boa, a pair of rats, a plated lizard and a breeding set of feeder mice

However I have to leave my ghetto paradise to track. It could be on a laptop. It could be on our P4 rackmount. It could be someone else's PC. Who knows?

I could be going between editing at home and tracking on another rig several times over the course of a month or more. What if the other PC doesnt have a plugin I've been using? Theres a somewhat functional DSP card here on my mixing computer, but what are the chances of it being on another PC? Those things barely seem to work in the first place.

I need to be able to pull up any sound I'm working on using any hardware in front of me. This precludes DSP cards. Dongles are DEFINITELY a huge no-no. This tosses out most apps and most fx plugins on the marketplace.

I need portability.

I need a small footprint app, which will run on a modest PC

I need hassle free copy protection

I need freeware plugs or better yet, an app with stock plugs that can get the job done.

Think any manufacturers can help me with that?