Shasta: AI-powered audio recording and editing

Appreciate your thoughts! The suicide bit was definitely a joke, so no worries there.

I hear what you're saying, and definitely get how the sharing bit that has helped Figma take off like it has is good for the browser. I'm a bit at odds with the industry, though, in that that's probably one of the things I like least about Figma. But a lot of that is because I'm not always the best team player :].

I won't pretend to know enough about what goes into building these programs to say whether the RAM cap or native app collaboration is the more difficult thing to overcome, but it's clear to me that I would prioritize these differently from others.

On the other hand, I have absolutely no use for any collaboration (say, in Photoshop) with the work I do.

I think that cuts both ways in that while they do incrementally improve the products, they never would be industry standard if not for Adobe pushing them. Also worth noting that a lot of their portfolio was acquired once it had been threatening their turf and becoming established (Macromedia early on, Figma most recently). Their Suite approach lets them float tools for awhile before determining if they're worthwhile to continue developing or if they need to be axed, or merged into existing products.

Small fix: over time some of their tools become incredibly good for productivity.

Because they have an excellent track record of completely ignoring the glaring problems with some of their apps like become slower even though cpus and gpus are getting faster (looking at you, Lightroom team)

> Performance sucks, yes. Stability? Sometimes as well. User experience? The best

Not sure how this makes sense. If the performance is not good, and the stability is lacking, then the user experience cannot be the best. I rather use a video editor that makes me go through two menus instead of one, rather than having a video editor that crashes on me or takes ages to generate the proxy clips (or even need proxy clips for 4K and below footage).

OK I'm open to that side of things.

If Adobe pulls all the stops and produces value corresponding to what it charges, which is crazy--then, I might reconsider my views, maybe their business incentives have aligned very well now and they can become a virtuous monopoly.

You wouldn't know it from the comments on this site, though, my GOD, all negative yours is the first positive.

Further, Figma did a good thing for the end user by selling out to Adobe--at a very steep price. Their holding out for a huge price is virtuous, yes of course more money for them, but if you're selling out, charging a lot is virtuous, taking as big a bite as you can out of the giant.

Adobe CS5 user here - 12 year old software.

CS5 Master Suite w/discs and valid serial from a reputable seller on eBay still commands $200-300+ which is nuts to me. But, when I realize that I can do all of my modern graphics workflow in this 12 year old software I get it.

I would love to use some of the newer parts of the suite but the functionality of my CS5 still 100% covers my use-case. For photography I've ended up on Darktable, and if I need to manually retouch a photo there's nothing stopping me from a Darktable <> Photoshop CS5 workflow.

As much as I want to love Gimp - I can't. It is outright ineffective and lacks features compared to even my 12 year old Photoshop. The people who continue to tout it as a 1:1 replacement have never worked in a professional graphics workflow.

Also, Procreate is amazing for doing illustrations though - I really wish I had it when I was learning digital painting!

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Regardless, just wandering sharing anecdotes because I relate to your experiences. Hard agree that legacy versions of Photoshop (and honestly the entire suite) are still insanely powerful. I also find them to be way more stable than their newer counterparts. They're just objectively a better financial decision - I bought this a decade ago and I don't have a monthly $50-60 Adobe draw on my bank account.

I use the Windows version of Photoshop 7.0 still. It works out of the box with WINE as well on MacOS and Linux.

Virtually all the free alternatives to Photoshop are similar to 1995-2000 era Photoshop. In that era, gimp and Photoshop were neck-and-neck, with gimp missing color models and deep color.

Photoshop from that era was pretty simple and easy-to-write. It worked well, and so did the alternatives. Adobe invested an incredible amount into research to build a more serious moat around 2022-era Photoshop.

Yeah, I hear you. A CC subscription is not cheap, but it's pretty incredible what you get for ~$600/yr, especially compared to what's offered by other subscriptions people pay for without blinking an eye.

I'm as eager—if not more—to take on massive greedy corporations as the next person, but my guillotine would be dull well before I got to Adobe's neck.

Adobe keep adding pointless new features which I have to keep turning off in the preferences.

The new save dialog is insane. No, I don't want to save a copy just because I want to save a jpeg. Why is this even a question?

I have no idea why it isn't possible to copy/paste text with its blending options. Select All, Copy - Nope. All you get is the text, with none of the effects. (I know you can duplicate a layer - but not to a different document.)

Why does Creative Cloud install three versions? I suppose it's nice that I have v21, v22 and v23 but - why?

There still isn't a simple "paste clipboard to new document" command - something Paintshop Pro had back in the 90s.

Does anyone at Adobe actually use PS professionally? These are all simple usability issues that could be fixed with a bit of thought. But instead we get Neural Filters - useless - and the occasional core behaviour that changes for no good reason.

I haven't used any of the Affinity apps. But are we talking about the same Photoshop?

> I counted 20 processes running the last time I had PS installed

I don't check how many background processes are running when I use Photoshop because I don't notice them at all. Almost every feature I use in it feels responsive, especially compared to how it used to be. If you're talking about telemetry, yeah, I hate that too, but I've more or less resigned to it as a necessary evil in all my professional tooling.

> The apps all take forever to load

Photoshop opens nearly instantly on my M1 Max Macbook Pro, as it did on my M1. It was slower on Intel, but what wasn't. I can open and close Photoshop three times before Discord even loads an empty window.

> drain battery if working remotely

I've never tried a remote workflow with Photoshop, so can't speak to that at all. Definitely does not seem like what the program is optimized for, and I would think battery drain would be the fault of whatever tool you're using to remote in, no? Or do you mean just working on an unplugged laptop? In which case, I find Electron apps that do one task poorly tend to be less efficient than even heavier desktop apps that 100 things well, Adobe or otherwise.

> and are far more unstable than in the past.

Sorry, what? I haven't had an Adobe app crash on me in probably eight years. I of course count that as good luck, but to say the current builds are less stable than older versions is just … insane to me. Thinking back to, say, the CS2/3 days, half my time in the program was spent Cmd+S-ing for fear of the inevitable hourly crash and loss of work. Photoshop crashes were a legitimate part of creative culture from like 1999 to 2012.

Sorry if I sound like an Adobe shill. We've just clearly had very different experiences with their products of late.

Where we are in agreement is that Blender is cool! I'm too much of a neophyte in 3D workflows to assess whether I think it's ultimately well designed (some bits seem to be … others not so much?), but it seems to run very well on the various machines I've tried it on and I have a great deal of respect for the nature of the program and the people behind it.

That's what's so frustrating about Adobe.

Given their position in the market, they could be cutting edge software performance wise and everything else. No one can say they don't have the resources.

Instead, they buy innovators (that solely exist in the first place because Adobe failed to keep up), do bare minimum to maintain, and charge rents.

Enjoy it while it lasts as I bet that Microsoft will acquire the creators of Lunacy for their Surface products.

I will check it out—thanks for the tip!

I don't think I'll be designing on an Android device any time soon, but fingers crossed for implementation!

Hopefully something like this catches on w/ smaller podcasters. Listening to shit-quality compressed internet audio in a podcast interviewing someone really interesting is just such a shame!

Holy cow. I did not know about that. And the pricing seems extremely reasonable.

Oh hey thanks!

We’ve been focusing on Shasta as a place to record and edit all kinds of spoken audio, including podcasts. As far as hosting and platform stuff, still figuring that out. But yeah, transcripts are great!

Sorry for the confusion! Applying for access is still required to access Shasta, our recording + editing app. We’ve been slowly ramping up in getting people access to it… working hard on making sure it’s a super smooth experience.

Buuuut in the meantime, we launched two of our AI features as standalone mini apps that anyone can use for free, and those are called Mic Check and Enhance Speech. They’re fun, try them out and let me know what you think.

Or, if this is a solved problem with "AI" (a nonsense name for the most part, but if that's what they call it, that's what they call it) then don't and use the tools that get the job done. I have no reason to learn how a variable transmission engine works just to go shopping, and I have no reason to learn what to look for if tools do that for me. That's the whole point of good tooling: to turn conventional "you need to learn X before you can Y" into "this is archaic and no one needs to know this anymore". Or perhaps more in line with Adobe products: no one in their right mind is going to learn how to create uniform blurs with successive blends when they can just hit "filters -> blur -> gaussian blur". The tool made the traditional approach obsolete. Here's to many more things made obsolete.

> Descript has such a head start with features I don't think Adobe will be able to catch up.

What specifically is Descript doing that Adobe couldn't do relatively easily, or isn't doing already in its other NLE products (Premiere, Audition, Rush, After Effects)?

it's not like it's a particularly out there idea, anything logical will have competition. I welcome that a large company with resources builds to market useful tools that I can expect to exist beyond the next round of funding.