“And here’s your moment of zen…”
Just how much work do you think it would be for a company like Digidesign with plenty of employees to incorporate the much asked freeze function in LE/M-Powered and HD, as well as delay compensation in LE/M-Powered?
Just think about it for a second and make a guess before you read any further.
Of course I don’t know how long it would take for Digidesign, a company with plenty of employees, but for Jules Storer, sole developer of Tracktion it didn’t take very long. From a Computer Music article from 2003 (!):
CM: The track-based freeze function and full plug-in delay compensation are real bonuses for Tracktion. Were these technologies particularly difficult to implement?
JS: Actually those were some of the easiest bits – PDC took a few hours, freeze took about a day.
No kidding?! So what could be the reason other DAWs at this time didn’t have this? Jules goes on and speculates about just that.
I suspect the reason that other sequencers have had a hard time implementing these things might be that their internal audio paths are fairly hard-wired around the ‘mixer’ paradigm. Tracktion has a very flexible graph-based playback engine, so it’s easy to add functionality like this.
Make of it what you want.
damn, she’s hot.
I like these kind of posts Stiff!
By ~Jon~ ~ September 28, 2008 kl 4:29 pm
The lack of these features works towards Digidesign’s carrot-in-front-of-the-mule’s-face strategy.
It’s important that there is a key class distinction between LE and HD and thee features are two of the most important.
In the face of modern Mac power, HD is getting kinda silly and they know it. If they give LE users track freeze and delay comp, why would someone with a fast modern computer want to move to HD.
They wouldn’t.
- c
By Chad ~ September 28, 2008 kl 4:57 pm
I agree with Chad. It’s a business thing and quite honestly, Digidesign is doing its best to milk us for all we’ve got while slowly adding features to its upgrades. It would be wonderful to see a freeze track feature in version 8, though! As for delay compensation, just get quad(or more) computer with plenty of ram. That should do the trick ;D
By Lionel ~ September 28, 2008 kl 11:20 pm
I’m actually one of the few people who think there would be little difference to the HD sales if Digidesign included proper delay compensation in LE. There’s more to HD than just delay compensation. Besides, big studios will always want the best. So if that’s their reason then I think they’re just aggrevating people for no good reason.
By stiff ~ September 29, 2008 kl 1:56 am
I was told that since the computers CPU’s are busy calculating other things like where to send data, HDD issues and so on, it actually is not possible to calculate the delay compensation accurately using only the computers CPU’s. You will have to dedicate the process to something like the HD Accel cards. Hence no other DAW have “true” delay compensation. Not real time anyway.
I do not know if it is true, but in my world it makes some kind of sence.
Golsje
By Golsje ~ September 29, 2008 kl 6:47 am
I’ve heard something along the same lines actually, but I have no idea if it’s true. Anyway I guess Digidesign would have to rethink their delay compensation if they were to implement it in LE/M-Powered since the HD version depends on TDM.
By stiff ~ September 29, 2008 kl 1:06 pm
I agree with you, Stiff. There would be no impact on HD sales if they added delay comp & freeze to LE.
The problem is fear on Avid’s part, in my opinion.
They don’t want to cannibalize themselves and their whole market strategy is based on a tier system.
To be clear: I’m only speculating here. Speculating as an outsider. I don’t know this for a fact, but I have a strong suspicion I’m not too far off from the truth. It doesn’t take a genius to suss this out.
- c
By Chad ~ September 29, 2008 kl 1:08 pm