analogika

Brian Auger explained to me that he always hated Leslies because he played so fast that he constantly had the feeling it was eating notes when the horn was facing away from him. The only recordings of his I’ve seen where he plays through a Leslie, it was on stop.

I do, absolutely. They are working very, very hard at making it absolutely insufferable without a subscription (on mobile, where most of my consumption takes place — my adblocker works great on macOS). It's still a daily routine, though.

YouTube fucked everybody over when they removed the incentive to post content that isn't purely self-promotion towards the end of 2022. I never really made any meaningful money from YouTube, but when they cut my revenue down to 1/3 for the same amount of plays, what used to be a proposition that *might* reimburse my time over a period of three or five years turned into a big "fuck you, why bother". But apart from that, yes, 2023 saw a BUNCH of people emerging from the strains and helplessness of the Covid years with a newly-found handle on what mental health (and mental illness) actually means. There's been a pretty fundamental change in how the subject is communicated and how it's perceived, in my experience. And that's a DAMN good thing. Because back in the '90s, when I was still acutely suffering from depression, the world was a very different place in that regard.

I think the fascination with instruments explicitly designed to strike terror into enemy forces is kind of similar to, say pyrotechnics at a Rammstein concert. They're literally awe-some, in a way that requires us to overcome base instincts.

Have you actually verified that FireWire no longer works? There are numerous reports of people using FireWire hardware on Ventura, including this one: https://www.logicprohelp.com/forums/topic/152534-apple-kills-firewire/?do=findComment&comment=889396

There's a place for recording THROUGH tape: recording to tape, but immediately piping the read head tracks into the DAW. You don't get the gelling effect of magnetic crossbleed between the tracks from letting the multitrack tape sit for a day or two, but you do get the dynamic distortion of the actual tape. That's not funny. That's literally the use-case description.

You’re right! "An Analog multitrack recording mixed to Sony 1610 digital format" from the credits section here: https://www.the-alan-parsons-project.com/eye-in-the-sky Thanks for prompting me to check. That’s as "horse's mouth" as it gets, methinks.

My Electro 2 hasn't failed me even once in the 18 years and hundreds of gigs I've owned it, the Stage 2 had zero issues in the three years I had it, and the Stage 3 had the loosening mod wheel connector of the first production run (fixed in ten minutes), and had dirt under two of the key sensors two years ago or so. I've had that for over six years, now.

Nobody I’ve ever met claims it’s a recent invention. The idea of not losing your career over it, or even going to jail, is a fairly recent invention, though. My father didn’t have that option.

Not a single keyboard plugged in, but hey — that was a great part played live on the 303 at 2:05. Wireless audio and MIDI back in 1985!

There was also a note about the Lexicon reverb being too clean (for the first productions), and a cheap, crappy digital reverb being the warm vibe that she liked better.

Ah, I get it. For our production, a baseline M1 Air is completely adequate on any of the positions (we’ve just replaced a production machine with a 16GB M1 Air, and it’s not even ticking over). And I guess the distances here are different. I don’t think we’ve played anywhere more than an hour from being able to buy a new machine. I also don’t play small two-man shows with a MacBook, so there’s always at least two or three MacBooks along with other crew, or several more on location. YMMV.

Apple has a WAY lower market share in Germany, but every major electronics store carries them — same as in the US. No need to seek out an Apple Store (we have 16, for a population of 83 million). So buying a new Mac on short notice is really easy, and there’s little need to weigh specs and motherboards vs. proper connectors and CPUs etc, nor any need to configure the system: buy the cheapest Mac, turn it on, load Logic or MainStage: done. As for borrowing one in an emergency: Especially on production (this being the music business) probability is 100% of finding a usable Mac on the premises.

“Clearly” meaning “absolutely done on 32-track digital Mitsubishi tape machines that were the current standard at the time”. 😉 The digital studio age began around 1980. Alan Parsons’ “Eye in the Sky” was a digital production AFAIK and released in 1982. A good rundown of what made the sound, here: http://www.muzines.co.uk/articles/enya-watermark/4506

Genuine curiosity: How is this not true for Macs? Our stage machines are all Macs — redundant MacBooks running Logic, and another for MainStage — and last-ditch contingency plan is to grab or buy any random Mac nearby, download/transfer Logic or MainStage to that, and run the show.

Sooo… a Mac? 😉

I WANT MY VGA OUTPUT 😆

I'm gonna say fake. Icelanders are crazy, but there is no way anybody is relaxing in a hot spring that close to hurling molten rock. Ah — a couple seconds of google search checks out: https://newsmeter.in/fact-check/image-of-people-relaxing-near-volcanic-eruptions-is-morphed-683312

So does Logic. 😉 I kind of get what you're saying, but really: There is no shortage of fully functional dual G5 machines still around, at twenty years of age. "Long product life" is not a Wintel hallmark. I have a functional Macintosh SE from 1990 in the basement, and my 2000 iMac DV *should* still work (though the Firewire port blew years ago, due to Apple not following their own spec for bus power surge protection). Those machines no longer get updates, but — apart from Firewire, which was why I retired the iMac — they should still do exactly what they could when they were last set up. Any Mac released prior to September 2022 is perfectly capable of working with Firewire audio interfaces — you just have to apply the old maxim of "set it and forget it" that virtually all studios went by back in the 1990s.

Yeah, Merriam-Webster's. Would you agree, then, that neither the Atari ST nor the Commodore C64 could be considered "obsolete", since people are still using them? Or would you agree with me that the definition you cited is completely useless in our context? Also, I haven't been on gearslu…gearspace in a looooong time, but from what I remember, the people making the most noise on those forums back in the day whenever company x (usually Apple) made some decision certainly weren't the ones busy running studios. I'm not saying I can't relate. I'm saying that a) this has been obviously coming for almost FIFTEEN YEARS, and b) there are two very, very simple solutions here: 1) don't upgrade 2) use hardware that works with your outboard stuff. I'm not affected, either, but that's because I opted for a hardware manufacturer who doesn't believe in planned obsolescence: as I wrote, Metric Halo offers upgrades for ALL their hardware, going back TWENTY years. I propose that every single interface manufacturer KNOWS how computer evolution works and knowingly plans for x years of support, regardless of what Apple may or may not do. MH Labs is the only manufacturer I know that actually offers hardware upgrades to take into account the inevitable hardware changes. I don't think any other manufacturer expects their hardware to be used twenty or more years. It may just come down to this: How much would it cost Apple, going forward through multiple generations of macOS, and how much money are the people still using fifteen-year-old interfaces likely to make Apple? There may be other issues, as well, including people in charge of maintaining the CoreAudio Firewire stack having left the company. I do know audio over Firewire is a complex issue, as I recall BJ from Metric Halo actually having coded a fix for a long-standing FW bug in Mac OS X, which was incorporated into a later release. Maybe they're streamlining architectures across iPad/macOS and throwing out everything that won't make sense on both platforms (no point in adding Firewire to iPad)... Who knows? BTW, I doubt that there is a significant number of people still using DV cams and their 720p resolution for much else other than retro charm. We actually used my wife's DV cam precisely for that, last year. Our iPhone cameras surpassed DV quality a decade ago. 😉

I just Googled "iPod battery class action" and found that it referred to battery life of the first three generations not holding up to marketing claims in some cases. It has nothing at all to do with batteries not being replaceable. (In fact, a friend of mine replaced the battery of his 1st-gen 10 GB iPod himself at some point. Mine 5 GB was fine for years and years.)

Oh, come on. By your definition, nothing is ever "obsolete", because somewhere on this planet, there's at least two people still using it, either because they require it to support some other (non-) obsolete piece of kit, or just for shits and giggles. My friend just bought a Sinclair ZX80. I'm sure it's not obsolete tech, despite being a home computer from 1982, because, hey, he's still using it. Just like the Commodore C64 he has. Apple has supported Firewire for more than a decade since the last release of machines that had it. I get where you're coming from: in studio hardware, lifespans are figured in decades, not years. I'd venture that anybody who bought Firewire hardware after 2012 knew exactly what they were getting into and did so just to stave off the inevitable. The interface protocol had a 25-year run — that's longer than just about anything except USB-A and fuckin' VGA. You want an editor for your Emulator II+ (not "obsolete", since people are still using it), you go find an old SE/30. I didn't mention floppy drives for that very reason. Every possible scenario involving floppies had a functionally identical or better alternative. That's absolutely NOT how it went down at the time. IDE/ATA was only useful for storage, and only really for internal storage, since cable lengths were limited. SCSI was used in a HUGE number of pro scenarios, for a number of non-storage devices (like scanners). SCSI allowed more devices, daisy-chaining, and had higher and more stable bandwidth. The argument that the SCSI drive was going to die in a few years, anyway, is as disingenuous as the argument that you shouldn't be complaining, since who would rely on Firewire hardware at least a decade old? It's a cough away from dying, anyway, right? 😉 Apple dropped the ExpressCard slots from all MacBooks Pro except the 17" in 2009. Thunderbolt wasn't available until February 2011. But yeah, I concede, since Apple at least offered a single model with ExpressCard to tide over the external chassis users until Thunderbolt was ready. "64-bit software wasn't an issue when it wasn't an issue", heh. The issue was (and still is) that every single bit of software that was fully functioning but no longer in active development died. Every hardware driver, every tool, every plugin, everything. I still have plugins I *loved* using, like Backwards Machine by The Sound Guy, that I really miss. Other software was at the mercy of the vendor. Just like when UAD refused to update drivers for their Firewire interfaces, even though they would still work perfectly. But they knew Firewire was deprecated and would be removed two or three OS versions later, and would rather sell you a new interface sooner than later — if they could pin the blame on Apple. I've actually read reports where Firewire continued to work just fine in Ventura on systems that had been upgraded from Monterey. I haven't tested or thoroughly researched, but it would make sense, since technically, kernel extensions are still supported AFAIK. Also, I don't trust ChatGPT to "reason" or justify anything — I don't trust it for information I haven't verified, either, having had it explicitly lie to me before. But again: the "convincing" technical reason is that, to make it work, it would need a team to budget time and effort on making it work. For a market that, as a matter of course, uses thirty-year-old hardware to support thirty-year-old hardware (that SE/30 for your Emulator II+ again...). What now? What are you talking about here? Funny you mention that, because Tascam stopped supporting my 4-channel USB-1 US-428 interface after just a few years. Just stopped upgrading the drivers, and they stopped working at around 10.3 or so. The reason I'll never buy any computer-related products from that company.

The last thing I want on my Mac is an old Mini DisplayPort/Thunderbolt 2 socket. Seriously? The adapter works fine, the protocols are downward-compatible. It’s not like FireWire, where it’s a completely different protocol that needs to be supported.

Argh. The infamous NVIDIA graphics chip issue of 2007-2008. Apple offered an extended repair program for three years from date of purchase for those machines. But that just got you the same machine… I know so many people who got bitten by that. Some managed to resuscitate their machines by baking the MLB, but man…

It’s a *little* more complicated than that. In my understanding, Apple has moved all tasks formerly handled by kernel extensions — drivers, in particular — into userspace for stability and security reasons. This is a Good Thing, as the kernel runs in its own space, and bad code in a device driver can’t affect it. Like with any transition, it means that any functionality you want needs to be REBUILT for the new format. Apple hasn’t deliberately removed functionality; they’ve opted not to invest the effort into obsolete tech (yes, it IS obsolete when no new tech device reliant on the format has been released in over a decade — we’re talking about the computer business, not the studio hardware business). The complaints are always the same — Apple dropped SCSI, their MacBooks dropped the PC Card slot („what the hell is ‚pro‘ about these machines?“ quoth my sound engineer friend), they went 64-bit (which affected not just drivers, but every single bit of legacy software in existence), it goes on and on. In the scope of things, I suppose a FireWire interface that’s at least a decade old and written-off several times over, sitting in a market where a significant number of users are of the „set it up and don’t touch it as long as it works“ mindset, really isn’t much of a concern — for Apple.