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Comment by VBprogrammer | Hacker News Reader

I would caution against using the music creation applications as good examples of iPad applications. Firstly, musicians rarely skim on their gear, if an iPad and a $10 App will do the same job as a bit of hardware costing twice the price more than half of them will buy the hardware. I've not used a synth very much but I doubt a touch screen provides an adequate replacement for the musical keyboard, nevermind the more natural feel of real buttons and knobs. Finally, any reasonably serious musician will buy a sound card priced in the hundreds of dollars, they will not be happy with a 3 1/4 inch analog output from one of their primary tools.

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The touch screen will not provide an adequate replacement for buttons and knobs - if you emulate buttons and knobs, that is. With capacitive multi-touch, there's a real opportunity to rethink the interface here. Interaction in the past was limited to what hardware can do in real life, so why should we keep those limitations now that they don't exist? The music world, unfortunately, has this "old-school" mentality for the most part. The focus is on previous hits and successes with synths and hardware that worked in the past (in this case the Electribe), not with what could be created with new ones. There's a real opportunity here that will take time to play out.

As for the sound card - I agree, the DAC in the iPad is probably similar to the other iDevices in the past.. Pretty good for consumer standards, but poor by pro standards - not to mention multiple outs, ins, etc. Where the iPad stands to gain the most is as a remote controller for a larger rig running on a laptop - via Bluetooth or Wifi. Heck the audio jack could be used for modulated data and have it interpreted by the host machine as a control input, a la Serato et al. Ever since the $2k Lemur people have been hungering for this - it will happen sooner or later!

I find it very hard to imagine an interface that will replace the spring controlled hardware knob that controls the volume of sound coming out of my computer, and I have seen and used a stupefying amount of gadgets that enable me to control sound.

Consider that the passion of musicians to produce their music has led to eons of refinement in interface and design, A material technology which the hi tech world with its planned obsolescence paradigm does not often appreciate.

All innovation is welcome and exciting, few things in the world of a musician brings more joy then a discovery of a new sound, or a new technique he can learn.

but you know? that guitar interface? it just works.

... Of course the touch screen is exciting for musicians... check out Amit Pitaru/Zach Gage bring Sonic Wire Sculptor. its fun

For music instruments, multitouch is an amazing revolution. For too long, we've been restricted to either very expensive control surfaces with physical knobs and faders, or software solutions which required a mouse and only let us move one virtual fader or knob at a time.

Now, I can turn a 10" screen into any imaginable control surface, including using all 10 fingers to move multiple objects at the same time. It's heaven. The iPad does what you would have had to spend $thousands for previously in the recording/mixing world.

any reasonably serious musician

Snobbish bullshit like this is a bigger threat to creativity than anything the iPad does or doesn't do.

My apologizes if that came off wrongly. It was intended as my observation of musicians who do not produce music solely as a hobby. Obviously most of the people I know come from a fairly technical background, while plenty of people still produce amazing music on a bargain store 8 track, there are lots of people who will complain about sound quality differences that a normal person could not pick out if their life depended on it.

Haven't spent much time around musicians, have you? Any reasonably serious musician will have a no compromises, no excuses approach to sound quality, and that includes paying top dollar for the absolute highest quality gear you can get. Thousands -- or even tens of thousands -- of dollars is not an uncommon asking price for a single piece of kit, like a speaker or a mixing desk (knobs only; no GUI bullshit; mixing is about listening and feeling, not pointing and clicking). If it's top quality then there will be musicians and sound engineers clamoring to pay. You may pay twice the price for a 1% increase in sound quality, but a serious musician can hear that 1%, and it will drive him nuts. You may think it's snobbish, but that's reality in the pro music world.

You don't understand. I'm not saying that musicians don't care about sound quality. What I am saying is that judging seriousness by the price of your gear is a giant pile of bullshit.

More specifically, I'm saying I think doing so is a part of what keeps people out of making music--the idea that you have to be "serious" about it by spending a lot of money on recording gear or it somehow doesn't count. Far too often it's just the opposite: people just blow money on the gear because buying things is fun and they tell themselves they need it to make better music. And hey, maybe people will end up buying some iPads for that stupid reason, too. The point is that the cost of the gear and "seriousness" are not so directly related. I don't mean there is never a relation, only that you can't really draw this kind of generalized meritocratic conclusion about the art and artist from something so independent of their actual merit as the tools they use.

You may think it's snobbish, but that's reality in the pro music world.

Again, I wasn't saying that desiring the best sound quality is snobbish. What I think is snobbish is assuming that only professional musicians are serious, or that someone who involves an iPad in their musical process is somehow inherently less serious than one who doesn't.

I would caution against writing off touch screens so readily. Take a look at the Misa Digital Guitar (http://www.youtube.com/misadigital), for example.

Jordan Rudess, the keyboardist for Dream Theater, has an iPhone (loaded up with various synthesizer apps) as one of his (many, often expensive) instruments.

EDIT: Here he is playing the iPhone in the middle of his keyboard solo, live: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONGpprZBkrs

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