sonofableep

riddle me this: if my OS is getting more awesome with each iteration, and my music software gets a +1 version number every year, and my hardware is keeping pace with moore’s law…how come i still experience the same basic DAW (digital audio workstation) problems in 2009 that i had in 1999?  by now i should be composing music by waving my hands in front of some levitating plasma orb, not trying to track down why my sequencer is having audio dropouts.

there seems to be a zero-sum game between improvements and impediments going on here.  is there some kind of efficiency squad over at microsoft that works to free up OS overhead…only to have the apps team fill it all right back up?  do the authors of my music software view ever-increasing computing power as justification for adding superfluous eye candy and features of increasingly limited appeal, while simultaneously de-prioritizing things like “optimization” and “stability”?  hey, who needs to optimize when CPUs will be twice as fast by the time this thing actually ships, right?  i guess the flip side to moore’s law is, “every two years software & operating systems can safely double in bloat and inefficiency”.

and longevity?  i can pull out a ’59 les paul (in the alternate universe where i own one), plug it in, and it will make the same beautiful noises it made a decade ago.  but there’s no guarantee that my favorite synth plugin will work five years from now.  some incompatibility is sure to crop up between future versions of the OS, the host software, the 3rd party authorization scheme, the plugin itself…*something* will fail, rendering said plugin obsolete.  that’s nutty.  you’d certainly think twice before buying a particular mic / instrument / etc. if you knew it had an expiration date, but that’s just the way it goes with DAWs.

somebody reading this is probably thinking, “run protools on a mac, dummy”.  well yeah, maybe.  but then i’d miss out on all the fun of spyware and viruses.