I love modular, so don’t take this as an attack - but a $50 midi controller has a lot of knobs you can turn :)
But stand-alone hardware has some advantage of its own over a MIDI setup.
Well designed stand-alone hardware modules can turn on instantly, you don't have to keep their software up to date, you don't have to do any performance tuning on them or muck around with latency, they don't have to compete with other software running on your computer as software synths do, I can be pretty sure that barring hardware failure they'll still work exactly the same way 5 or 10 years down the line, etc.
In sum, stand-alone hardware offers me a lot of reliability, consistency, convenience, and performance that's often hard to match with a computer and MIDI controllers.
Of course, a computer and MIDI controllers have their own advantages and conveniences, like being able to save settings, having a virtually unlimited amount of functionality by using various software packages or writing your own, allowing the user to change or choose their preferred UI, etc.
So they're really not the same. It's best to have both!
I think if you're the kind of person has infinite patience, then yeah sure, you could probably achieve similar results, but I think for many that's not going to work.
Another aspect is the true analogue modules, which software still struggles to emulate well. This matters for some modules/synths more than others, but there is a quality difference. Again, with time, one could make a digital synth/module sound good, but for me it's the same problem of killing the creative flow.
There are also some good examples of software stability. Having used Logic and Reason since the early 2000s, you can see all the care that they’ve taken in never removing anything, and only adding new things.
cd Rack
git checkout version-of-February-22-2020
(1) yeah, I know things are not quite that simple.
I have actually composed and recorded music with open-source software, but the cost of doing so was very high, so I switched to proprietary software. Even worse, the open-source software for various reasons has had interoperability problems—you can’t export in standard formats, or that kind of thing. With proprietary software, I was less tied down, since I could export data from one program to another and continue working.
So I’m slowly working on converting the old songs I wrote with open-source tools into standard formats.
I don't know what you mean by "cannot export in standard formats", unless you're referring to something like AAF.
AAF is a closed-source proprietary standard for "session files" that fundamentally relies on utterly closed Microsoft APIs. There are some incomplete open source implementations that use a GNU efffort to reimplement those APIs but AAF is also the prime example of design-by-committee. I will never put time into trying to support AAF. Note also that AAF support is missing in major DAWs and users need to rely on 3rd party translators such as Chicken Systems AATranslator (RIP).
If you're referring to standard formats for audio files (WAV, AIFF, CAF and more), then I really don't know what you're thinking of.I cannot think of any open source audio project that has problems with exporting to "standard formats".
I'm 100% willing to pay Apple to make this problem go away for me. Core Audio is an amazing API.
For cannot export in standard formats--talking about MusicXML. Until a couple of years ago I also had problems listening to music on my Linux system; I think it was because of some patent licensing issue.
Also, note you can't use the audio APIs from macOS "classic" on macOS/OS X (and never could - Apple banned it from the start, so every single audio app that existed for macs pre OS X had to have its audio I/O completely rewritten. Apple didn't pay for this - 3rd party developers did).
I write pro-audio/music creation software for a living, and I can assure you that from this perspective, CoreAudio is definitely not an amazing API. That's without even taking into account the differences between CoreAudio on iOS and macOS.
The only Linux distributions that had problems playing patent-protected formats over the last 20 years were the ones that stuck to a strictly libre software policy. If you picked one of them (e.g. Debian), it's hardly Linux' fault that you chose a distribution one of whose raison d'etre's was to exclude any non-free formats of any kind. I used RedHat starting in 1997 and it never had a problem playing mp3 files.
Most of my analogue gear will drift tuning if you don’t warm it up for ~5min ;)
But yeah in general I agree with everything you’re saying, but I also like software. Different tools for different tasks :)
There's a Waterloo start-up that spun out of a Fourth Year Design Project, Palette [0]. Their main sell was integrations into various creative tools (ex. Adobe Creative Suite, Ableton). They recently rebranded as Monogram [1][2] after announcing new hardware.
[0] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cchu/palette-a-freeform...
[1] https://fstoppers.com/gear/palette-gear-announces-new-hardwa...
We need a new form MIDI controller with movable button and knob and LED placement. Then one could make a physical MIDI controller for any MI software instrument by placing the controls and the LEDs on a backplane in the right place.
If it's not already done, I bet it will be in the next 5 to 10 years.
Not only that, but it's not trivial to combine with DAWs because of jitter.
There are no issues with using MIDI in a DAW because of jitter: jitter is a problem of device drivers, hardware and badly implemented MIDI handling inside the DAW. It works remarkably well.
Also, isn't it safe to say that by the nature of USB MIDI interfaces, they are not well suited for MIDI operation? As in: Since USB drivers buffer messages, it causes jitter. Is that correct? Are there USB MIDI interfaces / drivers that don't have these issues otherwise?
Added to that: MIDI is mostly used for interfacing with external hardware, and as such you're dependent on the external hardware's MIDI implementation, which isn't always superb to say the least unfortunately.
Sure, USB interfaces might be problematic but it's very dependent on the precise hardware. My MOTU Ultralite AVB is basically unusable because of jitter; my MidiSport 2x2 (also USB) is extremely usable and has extremely low jitter. So you cannot make blanket statements about it being caused by using USB for MIDI.
You can also look at Open Sound Control, as it was once intended as a replacement for MIDI.
Every MIDI message (well, almost every MIDI message) has a defined semantic associated with it. The receiver of the message might choose to reinterpret that, but the default semantic is still defined by the standard.
There is not a single standard OSC message. The only thing that is standardized in OSC is the format of a message. Both the receiver and sender have to agree to a specific set of messages, with a specific set of semantics.
Trivial example: you want a MIDI-driven synth to start playing middle C. You send it a MIDI NoteOn event with the note number 60. There is no equivalent for this with OSC, not even close. You must know precisely what messages the synth will accept and which ones will mean "start playing middle C".
OSC is cool but it isn't and almost certainly will never be a replacement for MIDI.
- parameter and pot position mismatch - lack of layout - lack of labels
Basically a 50$ midi controller gives poor UX.