Poll over at Gearsl*ts...

[MIDI Life Crisis]

... you just keep me hangin' on...

[twistedtom]

I did my duty and voted.

[cbergm7210]

What the heck. Me too.

[indytoons]

Please guys! If you hang out at GS at all you know that NOBODY does pro work in DP You also know that you don't even own a studio if you don't have at least 100k worth of tasty vintage gear....

[Killahurts]

Re: Vanilla... oh my yes... it IS a flavor of course! And I love it. As a kid it would perplex my dad when he took me to Basking Robbins and I'd order a vanilla cone. 32 fancy flavors, but I love vanilla! Vanilla gets a bum rap! LOL

Yeah, that was me too.
Oh man, I just thought of "Vanilla Bean".. had those little dark bits of real Vanilla beans in it..

Where's my dinner?!!

[toodamnhip]

So what is the main beef against DP over there? What do they say in summary?

[delcosmos]

Please guys! If you hang out at GS at all you know that NOBODY does pro work in DP

Unless you are delcosmos

[toodamnhip]

I happen to Love DP for it's features and always have. When I have done "bigger" projects, there have been long periods of time where I worked in Pro Tools and completely forgot about good ol' DP. Except that when i came back, I did indeed immediately feel back at home and said" oh wow, it's good to be back"..
However, I think there is something to learn about that..That being that, if "bad news" gets around about something and it goes out of favor, fair or not, people will FORGET about it and stop using it. They will get involved in their new program and get used to it and the old DP will be forgotten.

When I had to learn Pro Tools, oh how I bitched and moaned. And all my techs worked hard to keep me in DP so i could produce..But it got too hard to be in sync with other studios, projects etc and the EXECUTIVE producers asked me to learn Pro Tools. And for awhile, I didn't miss DP at all.

Thus, I think DP is a victim of two proverbial "sot itself in the foots"

One is not it's fault...

It has always been OS based instead of having it's own computer cards and this has made it unstable in the past...Pro Tools moved way ahead in the Prol world because it was hard to crash due to not really relying on old computers and their OS's. On an old mac, you sure as hell wouldn;t record an orchestra at Capitol like I was doing...in DP...

Number two IS DP's fault...

it has been slow to fix certain bugs and at times keep up with certain pro demands or at least, certain industry compatibilities here and there...It surely hasn;t reached out and infiltrated the Pro studio world very aggressively.
And as a result of these two issues or similar issues, fair or not, there may be a bit of a stigma against DP which shows at gear sluts and other such high brow places...

Maybe there is a third aspect that is also NOT DP's fault...it doesn;t cost a fortune and can be afforded by the "layman"...

Well, there are my two cents...

I have always loved the program while being critical of certain bugs and long standing un fixed issues...

I hope those things , even though fixed in DP 7, haven;t shot good ol DP in it's "professional foot"...

Now you guys are going to shoot me..uh oh...

just remember, I love DP..lol

[newrigel]

See, these polls are meaningless. Someone over on the motu forum is upset because DP isn't getting enough votes in this poll, so their forum members are coming over to vote DP's numbers up.

Hilarious! I can't believe I read that. Like we're some cult of mobsters that go over and tilt the scales with a DAW that's only developed for a platform that has 10% market share...I'll say it again... What the heck? Whatever man.

[jlaudon]

If you read the thread over at GS, it's hilarious.. now we're being called carpetbaggers...

[Shooshie]

See, these polls are meaningless. Someone over on the motu forum is upset because DP isn't getting enough votes in this poll, so their forum members are coming over to vote DP's numbers up.

Hilarious! I can't believe I read that. Like we're some cult of mobsters that go over and tilt the scales with a DAW that's only developed for a platform that has 10% market share...I'll say it again... What the heck? Whatever man.

Maybe they should have clarified that it was a closed poll: certain users were not allowed to vote! Was there a stipulation that you have to be a regular reader of GS to vote? I didn't create an account just for that; I've been a member for years, I think. (I just don't admit it in polite company)

Hey! That gives me a great idea. We should have a poll in this forum regarding which is your favorite DAW. I think the results would be MOST illuminating. I'm betting that we might see that DP is really the One True DAW after all.

Shoosh

[Shooshie]

I happen to Love DP for it's features and always have. When I have done "bigger" projects, there have been long periods of time where I worked in Pro Tools and completely forgot about good ol' DP. Except that when i came back, I did indeed immediately feel back at home and said" oh wow, it's good to be back"..
However, I think there is something to learn about that..That being that, if "bad news" gets around about something and it goes out of favor, fair or not, people will FORGET about it and stop using it. They will get involved in their new program and get used to it and the old DP will be forgotten.

When I had to learn Pro Tools, oh how I bitched and moaned. And all my techs worked hard to keep me in DP so i could produce..But it got too hard to be in sync with other studios, projects etc and the EXECUTIVE producers asked me to learn Pro Tools. And for awhile, I didn't miss DP at all.

Thus, I think DP is a victim of two proverbial "sot itself in the foots"

One is not it's fault...

It has always been OS based instead of having it's own computer cards and this has made it unstable in the past...Pro Tools moved way ahead in the Prol world because it was hard to crash due to not really relying on old computers and their OS's. On an old mac, you sure as hell wouldn;t record an orchestra at Capitol like I was doing...in DP...

Number two IS DP's fault...

it has been slow to fix certain bugs and at times keep up with certain pro demands or at least, certain industry compatibilities here and there...It surely hasn;t reached out and infiltrated the Pro studio world very aggressively.
And as a result of these two issues or similar issues, fair or not, there may be a bit of a stigma against DP which shows at gear sluts and other such high brow places...

Maybe there is a third aspect that is also NOT DP's fault...it doesn;t cost a fortune and can be afforded by the "layman"...

Well, there are my two cents...

I have always loved the program while being critical of certain bugs and long standing un fixed issues...

I hope those things , even though fixed in DP 7, haven;t shot good ol DP in it's "professional foot"...

Now you guys are going to shoot me..uh oh...

just remember, I love DP..lol

Hey, 2DamHip! Time to whack your knuckles with a Pro Tools HD| 2 Accel System - PCIe board! No, seriously, your points are valid in the sense that they have been repeated in the studio world so much that people believe them. I mean, those actually are the reasons cited by all the "pros" who don't like it when you use other "tools." There were two basic flaws with those reasons, though:

1) the reliability factor was very inconsistent. It was largely due to operator error. To keep DP running flawlessly, you had to set up your Mac a certain way. I knew how to do that, and I never crashed. Ever. Well... there was one plugin that had a bug in it in about version 2.7, but I knew how to dodge that bug, so it was never a problem after the time it crashed and I experimented with it to figure it out. But there again, I knew how to use even that plug without crashing, so it was inconsistent. Maybe the next guy didn't know that. Still, the absolute truth is that no other DAW could be more stable as DP in the hands of someone who knew the Mac setup tricks, and that was a Mac thing, not a DP thing.

2) In the late days of the 68040 chip and the early PPC, there simply was not enough RAM or CPU speed for DP to handle more than a few tracks. For that matter, most Pro Tools users didn't go further than about 4 tracks in those days, and that cost $25,000. (1992 prices) By 2000, the G3 had made way for the G4, and we could install enough RAM for it to be useful. At this time I could handle 80 channels of audio without crashing. I could handle up to about 50 channels with smooth automation control in real-time. At 80 channels, I had to draw the automation, but it played back smoothly. Meanwhile, the best studios at that time usually could record up to 36 channels of audio. Some could do 48 with two phase-locked Studer 24-track machines, whether digital or analog. So, let's just say that DP was exceeding expectations by the year 2000, but the studio gossip was slow to catch up. I was still hearing the arguments from 1995, as if the Mac had never gotten any faster or more powerful.

So, 1) DP was absolutely stable in the hands of a real pro, and 2) you could record the largest orchestra in the world in DP without a problem. As far as accuracy, DP's internal 32 bit floating point trumped Pro Tools 24 bit fixed point, making the audio actually of higher quality until you got to the conversion to analog, and then it depended on your external hardware for either setup. So, you can see that the arguments against DP were invalid in a literal sense, though they could be very valid in particular cases, such as a user who did not know the Mac setup tricks, or a user who had an old Mac. But the hard truth is that by the year 2001, DP was outperforming Pro Tools, and for a fraction of the cost.

Hey, I had to fight these arguments everywhere I went, because I used DP regardless of what "they" wanted me to use. I considered their ignorance to be their problem, and they needed educating. Trust me, I left a string of converts behind me. If I sound like I'm bragging or arrogant about it, it's only because I went through this so many times -- and proved DP to be a worthy victor each time -- that I know this stuff by heart.

It always started when the client said they'd been checking around with some of the top professionals in the industry, and they had gotten a unanimous consensus that if I was trying to do this in DP, then I was not a pro-level user. DP just couldn't do the stuff the "big boys" did. At this point, I'd have to sit down with the client and teach them some things. I would show them that the quality of the digital audio depended primarily on the pre-amps and converters. Once it was in the box, it was just numbers, and neither DP nor PT changed those numbers. I'd show them the steps until output, and explain that the professionals they'd consulted had been right 5 years before, but that the Mac had changed, and now DP was perfectly capable of handling the big jobs. Their consultants just hadn't received the memo.

I invited any and all to come shoot it out with me, and we'd see how the ears thought about the results. One team took me up on that using SoundScape rather than Pro Tools, but it worked the same way: outboard gear, not based on the PC's CPU. In a result that surprised even me, the jury unanimously chose Digital Performer in a blind A/B playback test. Plus, it was clearly visible that in each step of our competition, I finished my tasks in seconds, while the guy using SoundScape took minutes. What surprised me was that everyone chose DP. I thought it would be 50/50. Apparently there was something coloring the Soundscape audio, since we were using the same a/d input feeds and d/a outputs. These guys were all top audio people in Las Vegas, being the music and audio staff of the two Cirque de Soleil shows playing at that time: Mystère and "O".

But it didn't matter. People in the top studios continued to believe what they wanted to believe, and there were plenty of people who obliged them with examples by not setting up their Macs properly, and crashing DP. "SEE????" they would say. I'd offer to fix their Macs so that they wouldn't crash. Some took me up on it. Thought I was a genius, because I knew some Mac setup tricks. Geez.

So, this is the nature of the conflict for the past decade and a half. For the past 9 years, the debates always had to end with either side finding some menu item that the other side didn't have. Blah, blah, blah. In truth, it came down to knowing your tools and using them competently.

What really stung for the Pro Tools guys was that their system cost from $25,000 to $100,000, and it absolutely did not produce any better audio than DP, which cost (with Mac, audio interfaces, MIDI interface, hard drives, and so forth) less than $6,000. Studio executives simply HAD to believe that PT was better. They'd spent a fortune on it. And I grant them that its interface did run more smoothly. DP started coughing after 50 channels of audio, but only gradually. First there was a little stutter in the faders. At 80 channels you could not reliably use the faders to program automation. You had to draw it in. But it still produced the same quality audio. After some moves DP would take some time to finish processing. PT could simply jump to the next task. Up to 40 or 50 channels of audio, it was hard to distinguish the ease of use between the two.

Today even those differences are largely in the past.

So, it turns out that there's a lot of BS in the so-called truth about PT vs. DP. Always has been. Many of the people at GearSlutz simply typify that type of 1995 thinking and stereotyped "debate."

I've had to make my living with DP. I could never afford Pro Tools in those days, and since one-half of my work was in MIDI, Pro Tools was not even capable of doing it! So, from the beginning I had to learn the underlying facts about both systems. Then I had to learn how to teach my clients those facts and put them at ease about putting their money on the line. I did exactly that, and... Well? I'm still here.

Shoosh

[Killahurts]

Please guys! If you hang out at GS at all you know that NOBODY does pro work in DP

Unless you are delcosmos

Yep, you frustrate those kids over there at GS all the time. Many of them know that you have produced HUGE hit records on DP, and that you can use anything you want, period. I believe you've even come back to DP after a ride with PT, right?

You choose DP, and that burns those goofballs up.. if not PT, you ought to at least be using Logic like we're supposed to, like we tinker with in our cubicle in the office when the boss isn't looking and when we're not busy posting our confrontational bilge on Gearslutz.

[jeepbird]

I just created an account there to vote. We are now 3rd place. Gonna show them our love with DP!

[MIDI Life Crisis]

So what is the main beef against DP over there? What do they say in summary?

The main beef might be that there is no manual unless you buy the program.