Just for Fun: What music gear do you regret buying?

[James Steele]

Digital Performer, hands down. It's soooooo vastly inferior to Logic and Studio Vision Pro. I can't even install it on my iPhone. Also, it doesn't open up excel files. The manuals not even in color. Terrible, terrible software.

(sorry james, I couldn't resist)

Go sit in the corner for 1 hour with an empty Logic Studio box on your head!

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Pre digital audio, my machine of choice was the Tascam TSR 8. The auto locate and memory features were a big jump from my TEAC 2340's and I could stripe SMPTE to and end channel. Tapes were a bit pricey but the sig/noise was great.

[Frodo]

When I first got DP (v. 2.7) I didn't have a proper audio interface, but because I'd just dropped $XXXX on a computer back then (a lot more than MacPros go for now), I picked up an Audiophile card and tried to run DP through DAE. What a disaster. In less than a week, I'd used my "lunch money" (LOL) to get my first 2408. I starved for a while, but at least the rig worked. Ah, the sacrifices we make.

The only other real regret is somewhat related. I bought an Oxygen 8 sidecar keyboard and probably got three good months out of it before OSX was updated, at which point the drivers never worked again. At one point I thought I was getting Edirol, but it went to M-Audio, and we now know that M-Audio is very much tied into DAE.

Said the raven: "nevermore".

This really can't be called "regret", but my timing was really bad with buying computers at one point. I'd invested in all this junk and within a year everything went from Mac SCSI to USB. That was a royal nightmare of trying and failing to use adapters, and then having to buy so much new gear so soon which I really could not afford (but bought anyway!). Because of the USB transition I was never able to sell the old Mac SCSI gear, including two MTPAVs and two tabloid printers.

[James Steele]

But that's a 16 channel unit, eh? (EDIT... you changed the photo-- nevermind)

Friend of mine had the Tascam Model 38 8-track reel to reel and a Tascam board. Eegads, how primitive. Gives me the willys thinking about it now. It had two rack modules as I recall that were optional, each with four channels of dbx noise reduction that patched into the deck. I think the deck was RCA ins/outs if I remember. Oh the nightmares I will have if I think about that rig. It is SO much easier getting what I want from DP than that TASCAM situation!

[James Steele]

I think my first interface as an AudioMedia II card. Funny thing, I had a friend who owned an Avid editing system back then and he had some problems with it and Avid had been sending him replacement cards back and forth and he ended up having extra boards which Avid had lost track of, and he was lacking only the "Avid" audio card in order to assemble a second system. I looked at it and made his day when it was nothing more than the AMII card and told him to go to GC and he'd have a second Avid system!

Later I upgraded to a ProTools Project system (I just remembered what the terminology was for Digi's "crippled system" back then) with 882 I/O. Thing was though it ran like a dog with DP and when I switched to a MOTU PCI-324/1224 system, DP ran much faster.

[Shooshie]

Logic Studio. Well, not completely. I love WaveBurner, so that's a plus, and I've got about a jillion Apple Loops if I ever decide to use someone else's recordings and snap together a Lego-Song. And I guess I really needed to buy it for my own curiosity; people kept telling me that this or that was better in Logic than DP, and after investigating I found that not only was it not better, but it revealed how little those people understood about using DP. Oh, I considered the opposite -- that maybe I just didn't know enough about Logic, but I got help from people who DO, and that pretty well convinced me that I was seeing correctly.

So, now it gives me the ability to say positively that some features in DP really ARE better than Logic, and that's a good thing to know rather than to be guessing and wondering all the time. But I don't use it. Period. I thought I would use it for those things it "does better," but... well, that turned out to be a bust. I don't even keep it in my dock anymore; it serves me no purpose other than to investigate claims that people make about it in relation to DP, and I think I'm done with that, too.


Outside of that, the only gear I don't use much of has been my 48 channel patch bay. I bought it with the anticipation of wiring things so that I could patch various devices in when I needed them, but the flexibility of doing things ITB, combined with owning 3 MOTU audio interfaces (total of 28 channels of physical TRS/XLR inputs and the same number of outputs, not to mention the ADAT/lightpipe connections), plus a 14 channel mixer, means that the patch bay has been superfluous. Oh well... I've got it if I ever need it, and it's a good one with all the normalizing and routing that a good patch bay is supposed to do.

I'm not one who really regrets getting things like this. Logic has served a purpose, and for the money ($500) it was really a bargain, even if I never use it again except for WaveBurner (which alone is worth that). The patch bay at least fills a rack space rather than leaving a glaring empty hole. (instead, I have 48 little sneering holes)

Shooshie

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Yeah, I changed the pict. Copied the wrong link. I had the 8 track version for sure.

[billf]

I can't even install it on my iPhone

I installed it on mine, but the fonts are too small to read.

[BradLyons]

For me---I don't usually regret purchasing an item because I have the fortune of trying out everything first and meeting with the manufacturer's themselves as well. BUT there was one bass guitar amp I purchased because I was offered such a great deal on it. Because of my position, I won't name the product or manufacturer....but it was a digital bass amp and I realized WHY I was offered such a great deal. Oh my word, it sounded like cardboard! LOL

[jmc]

A few years ago an acquaintance of mine was replacing a bunch of gear and sold me an old turnkey gigastudio. I powered it up occasionally but couldn't really get anything out of it as is, not having any connectivity. In order for it to work with my system I had to invest in about $1200 worth of gear. It took me a few months to save up the money and when I finally got it all together, I powered it up and the hard drive failed. I sent it to a friend of mine who does IT work, and he confirmed that the drive was beyond hope. The albatross is still sitting in the corner gathering dust. I can't imagine it is worth anything, even for parts.

[emulatorloo]

Pre digital audio, my machine of choice was the Tascam TSR 8.

This talk of the pre-digital world made me remember that for a long time my "mastering deck" was a Sony Beta HiFi machine. The stuff I was doing then was all synth, so I just went directly from the mixer to the Beta. I worked at a college 24-track recording studio then, so I would bring the betamax in and run it off to the mastering deck there.

Bizarre to think about that now.

AudioMedia and Deck was my first foray into DAW. It had four tracks. I was using Vision, I don't think there was a StudioVision Pro then. Maybe there was and I was just too cheap to get it.

Again I would record all the MIDI parts to the betamax, and then re-record them into Deck. That gave me a couple tracks for guitar or that old MS-20.

[emulatorloo]

I'm not one who really regrets getting things like this. Logic has served a purpose, and for the money ($500) it was really a bargain, even if I never use it again.

I hear you on Logic. I don't use it much, but I don't regret having it either. Studio 8 was an upgrade for me - It was good for compressor and soundtrack and waveburner even if Logic was not in the picture.

However, for what it is worth, I pull logic studio or mainstage up now and again and run it as a VI from Digital Performer. I like the EXS, and there are a couple synths that I like.

I just followed the directions at the MOTU site for using GarageBand instruments in DP:

http://www.motu.com/techsupport/technot ... 6218004846

How do I use my GarageBand instruments with DP?
GarageBand instruments can't be loaded directly in Digital Performer, but you can still use GarageBand along side DP as another instrument.

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Oh my goodness I ought to go do that right now.

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[Shooshie]

I was just doing spot-checks in the Jam-Pack folders using QuickLook in the Finder. Goodness! There are probably 15,000 musical snippets in those "loops." They cover everything from World Music (instruments I never even heard of, and I am actually into ethnomusicology on a small scale) to Orchestral, to every kind of pop, rock, new age, and so on. I think there is jazz, but I don't remember. They have animal sounds, foley sounds, machine noises, environment sounds... everything I can imagine and then another 14,975 more. That alone would have probably cost more than $500. All "free" in Logic Studio. Plus there is Garageband, and I have SoundTrack, both of which came with thousands more loops.

It's a "rich" feeling to have all those, and yet I don't even use them. Gah! I've got to try using those sometime. I played with them when Garageband came out, and haven't touched them since.

Shoosh