Friday, May 02, 2008

May Day and Music Upgrades

Friday May 2, 2008

Hi all! Friday brings lovely spring weather and slightly cooler temps. The topic for tonight is music software and the focus will be on upgrades. Software for music creation runs the gamut from free trackers to pricey studio packages. I've always tended toward the applications somewhere in the middle of the price/performance curve. The sneaky “gotcha” that underlies building a library of cheaper programs comes when a new version of your favorite music tool is rolled out. The good news is that the upgrade is usually available at a decent discount from the maker to users of the earlier versions. The bad news if that if you go through enough of these incremental updates, you end up paying a higher cumulative amount. I suppose this problem applies to buying the premium, flagship products as well, but when you're on a tight budget you feel the pinch a bit more. I actually ended up about 3 versions behind the current Acid Music Studio release until I could raise enough to upgrade. Some music software companies also offer the option of upgrading to a higher version (again at a reasonable discount) once you've purchased one of their entry-level products. I've been a long time user of the Orion Pro music production package and have been very happy with it. Orion formerly came in to flavors: Orion Pro, and Orion Platinum. With the relase of Orion 7.5 on May 1, the old Pro version has been dr
opped. Synapse software, the makers of Orion, are graciously offering Pro users an upgrade to the current version for a limited time. It would ordinarily be great to get the latest version of Orion for about a quarter of the retail list price, but even that fractional amount is a stretch for some of us on a tight software budget. Until free or open source stuff catches up to the performance level of commercial apps, I'll have to keep trying to play catch up when I can.

The picture of the week was created using Project Dogwaffle.

Click on the image for a full-sized view


The loops of the week are some big bass runs.

The PC game of the week is still Command and Conquer 3.


The book of the week is The Plot: The Secret Story of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion by Will Eisner. A graphic novel that is the final work of a great comics innovator.


Send your comments and feedback and I’ll read it all and respond to some of it.

Bye for now!