I disagree that software has a tendency to dumb everything down to the lowest common denominator, simplifying and automating things is the purpose of software in the first place, but there's a huge amount of software out there that is as powerful as it needs to be. To name a few examples: Blender, DaVinci Resolve, almost everything Adobe makes, and JetBrain's IDEs.
(This is only tangentially relevant to this thread, but the iOS App Store doesn't allow extensions or scriptable apps, and I believe those rules will single-handedly assure iPad only ever has marginal impact on creative fields until those rules are removed.)
1: https://blog.robenkleene.com/2019/08/07/apples-app-stores-ha...
There’s a large ecosystem of iOS music making apps and the iPad is actually an excellent interface for some applications, e.g. a kaoss pad.
For instance have a look at what Korg and Moog have available in the app store. Or check out drambo.
I think the "no windows" and sandboxed apps/files paradigms are very limiting for pro work.
And you really need lots of customisable keyboard shortcuts for most pro work, most iOS apps are extremely lacking in this department.
I work primarily with Logic (been using it for 20 years) but the form factor of an iPad is pretty nice - it fits perfectly on music stands and laptops don't. If Macbook screens would tilt 180 degrees, all the way flat, you might be able to use them on music stands too - but they don't.
If you are both playing and recording a real instrument at the same time, having the iPad on the the piano/music stand in front of you is very useful. Many people use Logic Remote on iPad on the stand, and Logic on MBP for actual recording at the same time. But not sure why you should need two devices.
Touch screen is nice for some things too, like mixing or quickly toggling things.
AUv3 plugins are meant to be able to run on both MacOS and iOS in the near future (this has caused some concern in the plugin dev community, because of different pricing models). Just in iOS they are apps you install from the app store, because everything that executes code needs to be a sandboxed app in iOS.
In any case, I am still waiting for Logic Pro or Ableton to be ported to the iPad.
Actually I was impressed with what people do in GarageBand on ios. Unfortunately I haven't found anything comparable for Android. Only ridiculous $20/month apps.
Google would have to rip the heart out of Android and fix it for real time programming properly like OS X did way back in like 10.2?.
However, don't get me wrong, iOS isn't great--it's just at least possible. The fact that you can't actually send a defined packet (just a bag of bytes and you don't know how many until the call--"HAH! HAH! You device decided to prioritize something in the OS and your latency just quadrupled--sucks to be you.") to the Audio system on iOS is infuriating.
However, at least it's possible on iOS. On Android, not so much.
Didn't know. Looks like I'm little closer to replacing my android with iphone
2)The form factor of an iPad makes more sense in my music setup, in that I don’t need to haul podium or standing desk on stage as well as my instruments.
3. In producing tracks, most of my time is spent twiddling knobs, adjusting levels, etc, rather than dealing with external audio interfaces or doing fine grained, fiddly things with a mouse. But now iOS supports a mouse, so I could even do that...
For instance, an iPad would be a great place to experiment and get an idea down, and then you could bring the idea to your other, more professionally oriented tools.
When Lightroom moved from v6 (iirc) to Creative Cloud a stunning amount of functionality seems to have been lost for the sake of making it idiot friendly.
I spent so many hours playing with that thing. Don't get me wrong, I still do, but now I have to make all those tweaks manually instead of rolling the dice and hoping for a gem. Sadly, I don't find nearly as many gems as I used to when I was able to roll the dice.
A couple of results came up, one is an official PDF about scripting AE CS6, the other a website about AE scripting. I assume most of the stuff from the AE CS6 PDF applies to AE CC as well.
https://blogs.adobe.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/48/files/2012/0...
From the PDF:
> When you use Adobe After Effects, you create projects, compositions, and render queue items along with all of the elements that they contain: footage, images, solids, layers, masks, effects, and properties. Each of these items, in scripting terms, is an object. This guide describes the ExtendScript objects that have been defined for After Effects projects.
I think it might be worthwhile to look into whether scripting might be used in order to randomize effects and effect parameters. My immediate guess would be that yes it would be possible. I didn't look into it closely, and if it turns out to be a dead end then I apologise for that but anyways I figured I might mention this in case it might be useful to you. Also, of course since I didn't look into it closely I can not make any guesses as to how much work it would take to get the type of functionality that you want.
FLS doesn't have a max for live equivalent, but I'd guess 90% of people don't use MFL. The edison recording workflow is hot trash IMO, or else I'd pretty readily move back to FL.
I really really enjoy using Ableton and have stuck with it for years now, but one of the first things that struck me once I swapped from FL Studio was how stupid it was that Ableton's piano roll lacked this fairly basic yet crucial tool..
As a creator it allows me to flow and shift quickly between different modes of production. It emphasizes speed and intuition, and it allows me to excute powerful moves in far fewer steps than every other DAW I use (Pro Tools, Logic, Cubase).
With the announcement of track comping (long overdue) it resolves my biggest pain point.
Particularly interesting is it’s newly integrated tempo-follow feature which allows the DAW to follow the tempo of an external audio source, such as a live drummer. This bridges the performance gap between live bands with tempos that fluctuate and electronic instruments that typically adhere to a rigid clock source. It goes a long way towards resolving a long-standing tension between live musicians and sequenced electronic music. I’m thrilled to see Ableton doubling down on it’s essence as a performance tool and cannot wait to try it out.
Reading your comment about this new feature it seems obvious to me now that if the tempos in those mp3 recordings vary independently, like they do in much recorded music, it would be impossible to sync the tracks without this new feature. Right?
What I'm describing is composing music on the fly that is locked to a master tempo and clock (like most electronic music). Jamming with another musician and staying in sync is easy if they're also using drum machines or other hardware that can clock off the same source. What Ableton's new Tempo Follow feature does is allow the DAW to listen to the audio of live musicians (say a Jazz quartet) and then automatically speed up and slow in real time when they choose to. Now, when the band pushes the tempo my sequenced instruments wont lag behind the beat and get out of sync.
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I think what you're trying to do is synchronize the tempos of two songs that both push and pull their tempos a bit. That involves compromise and maybe some automation. Let's use an example of two different kinds of songs which we'll call 1) rigid songs and 2) loose songs.
Rigid songs are like house music or techno. They're clocked exactly to a given tempo that doesn't waver throughout the song unless the composer automates it. This is common in electronic and modern pop music. These are the easiest to synchronize because they don't have any tempo variations and require far less work to tempo match. Loose songs are songs that have subtle or dramatic tempo changes: Jazz, old rock and roll records, or classical music (which usually has a lot of rubato).
What I believe you're asking about is trying to sync two loose songs or a loose song and a rigid song. Well the short answer is that you'll likely have to compromise a bit. Let's say a Led Zeppelin song hovers around 80bpm. At some points the band slows down to 78bpm and other times they push the tempo up to 84bpm before ultimately settling back to a mean tempo of 80bpm. Well if you wanted to synchronize the Zeppelin song with a rigid song you can set the Segment BPM (What you're designating as the average tempo in Clip View) to 80bpm for the Zeppelin song and then use warp markers to snap the song to the 80bpm grid in the parts where the band pushes or pulls against the tempo and deviates from the grid.
At this point you might point out that manually aligning the audio file strictly to the grid compromises the emotional excitement and groove of the Zeppelin song by quantizing the tempo. You'd be absolutely right. It really comes down to what your intention is and how much you're willing to sacrifice that quality for the sake of making two songs synchronize. Preserving that feel then becomes more of an art and involves careful adjustment of the warp markers and using your ear to gauge the results. Often the more musically exciting choice is one that doesn't adhere strictly to a grid.
It also comes down the content of the songs. Without audio examples it's hard to be too specific about what choices should be made.
Does that answer your question?
If it can synchronize with live musicians, would it not be as easy (or even easier) for it to synchronize with a recording of live-musicians?
CAD, rendering/animation, high end photo editing, and a lot of other higher end, professional software are script-able, provide libraries and APIs, and work closely with their end-users to give them what they want.
Photoshop is scriptable/extendable and Lightroom has the more intuitive GUI. Apple started the Lightroom paradigm with Aperture, which was kind of the GarageBand of photo editing softwares until Lightroom caught up with the ease of use.
Same for their graphical programming thing ("grid" I think). A nice hybrid between skeumorphic and digital with e.g. stylized wires hanging down in gravity, but becoming transparent when crossing components.
Also super nice that most "visualizations" are also interactive (see the direct manipulation of the envelope at the end of the following vid)
Ableton is a beast, I haven't used it as much, but I know.
I think with virtually any software out there, there are tools that cater to both audiences.
Though, Ableton has been flat since 1.0 it seems.
I think it's quite the contrary. Look at the history of Logic, Cubase, Sonar, etc. For most of their time they didn't have flat UI. Ableton is the exception.
Can someone explain to me the point of a GUI knob?
Is it just the analogy to physical knobs on mixers that makes people comfortable with them in GUIs?
You could also ask users to just type in a number, but that interrupts the flow and pushes some other data out of their short-term memory. Composers and audio engineers would probably prefer to keep that part of their brain free to focus on other things.
Sliders can also be laid out in an array (as on a mixing console) to give at a glance a graphical representation of relative levels. Another example is on the classic "two turntable" DJ mixing setup where a horizontally-oriented slider is used to control the balance between left and right.
Knobs' advantage is they are particularly space-efficient.
So you tend to see sliders used for the primary controls in situations where its useful to compare them side-by-side, and everything else as a knob.
Virtual knobs (and sliders) invite experimentation where a numeric control or text box doesn’t (so much). You can play with them. The dragging action gives you a little bit of tactile feedback.
Just as a file isn't only a file, but an entity in a filesystem, a sound is not just a sound, but an entity in a sound environment.
The whole point of physical knobs is to leverage a person's thumb and forefinger (or tennis muscle if it's a huge knob) to twist precisely and efficiently to a desired position. With the two most popular digital input devices that torque doesn't exist-- you can't "twist" a mouse or tweak a touchscreen to change the position of a knob.
At least in most of the audio GUIs I've seen that use knobs, the author seems to have no idea that their skeuomorphic interface actually degrades interactivity. E.g., if they had simply used a slider the user could swipe their finger efficiently to quickly change several sliders in a row.
Even worse-- with a knob you have a similar "90-degree ambiguity" problem as with touchpad scrolling. Do you use dx, dy, or some other algo to choose the relationship between touch/drag and knob rotation?
Even worst, some devs try to "bring the torque back" by coupling the knob movement to the distance of the mouse from the center of the knob. I really wish someone would feed this awful behavior back into the physical world, and ship a mixing board with knobs that only update their value if you twist them using an included set of "knob tongs" :)
more words: scroll wheel with disengagable "clutch"
Typing is usually out of the question since you need to do it by ear. Some controls obviously have numberic input in combination with the knobs, for extra flexibility (e.g. if you made some notes with settings and just want to enter them).
Many of the values use mappings that make little sense as numbers. E.g. a knob marked 0..10 could mean a filter cutoff frequency from 20 to the nyquist frequency, logarithmically. Entering values in a text box with such arbitrary limits is a terrible experience (is it 20...22000...or 20..48000? or 0..1? or 0..100%?). Knobs hide the complexity of the logarithmic mapping and it's easy to to quickly set a value by ear.
In a few cases the knobs are decorative and could just as well have been e.g. most fixed step knobs could be combo boxes. For example a vintage synth often had a rotary knob to select between 3 options (waveform, for example) so now you can see that in ui's too. Doing that in a computer interface is purely for visual appeal.
Sure, you could map a knob to a slider or anything really, but it makes the interaction easier
I don’t see the problem? If you give me a numeric input that doesn’t allow me to drag or swipe to change values then I’ll swiftly be looking for a different app.
This skeuomorphism isn't without cause.
You need knobs and sliders to convey information visually.
It would look a lot like FL Studio, which caters more towards that end of the market.
GarageBand on the other hand...
I'd say the opposite: Ableton is more focused and simpler, streamlining lots of stuff (live VSTs) without being less powerful. Kinda Apple-ish in a way.
In other fields of software development instead we dumb everything down to the lowest denominator, and power users can't be at their most productive because we're scared of complexity and build around the casual, computer illiterate user.
Imagine what Ableton would look like if they were only optimising for the user that wants to put a couple of pre-made loops together and call it a song.