aweaselkid wrote:Couldn't agree more. I'm in my mid-20's and love DP, but there is a serious issue here. Of course you don't see it if you are in the population MOTU generally tailors and caters too, but marketing, artist-relations wise, PRODUCT TUTORIAL/EDUCATION wise? agreed, too far behind...
If you think about it, what makes it worse is DP is their flagship product, so you'd hope to hell they were hypersensitive about who they should target, how they can market their product, what competitors are doing NOW (instead of saying "we were the hottest girl at the party in 1994..."). Their hardware sucks, because it always breaks, all VIs are UVI based, so what else do they have?
I'm concerned too. I want this product to be around for when I am one of those old, getting-pushed-out-of-the-way-by-some-cocky 20-something-year-old, film composer in my fifties... And to do that, it does need to bridge to the next generation, or the product dies alongside its current users. Basic business.
Frankly, I've never met a cocky 20 something year old who knows even the most basic thing about the basic business of music and entertainment, so my recommendation is not to worry about such things. You'll learn that stuff as you get deeper in the business, and you'll find that it doesn't really matter what DAW you use. There is no DAW drama unfolding here. People are simply using tools they like to create stuff that matters to them, or for which they are being paid.
Wannabes like to make a big deal about tools, as if they bestow legitimacy on you. As a pro, I had to defend my choice of tools to people who wrote my checks. They were smart people — smart enough to do their due diligence upon hiring me — but not smart enough to understand what makes a musician "good." So, they'd call their friends who had invested in albums that had made it big and asked what tools their engineers used. The answer was always "Pro Tools, of course!" Some went so far as to say "if your guy is using anything but Pro Tools, you can't really take him seriously."
Finally, I asked them to take one of our songs to a studio and try doing it in Pro Tools. Long story short, they spent 4 days mixing it and didn't get finished. A friend dropped the 90% finished track off for me to listen to. I sat down at DP and mixed it in 4 hours, finishing the ideas they had started, and making it kick-ass in all the ways they were attempting, but taking it to a higher level. I copied their EQ, compression, and other effects by ear. It took just four hours, and I finished it, then left it on the desk of my employer.
Next day I heard from them. They couldn't believe what I did. They couldn't believe that after 4 days they had nothing complete to show for their expensive studio time. I explained to them "it's not the tool that matters. It's the person using it."
This was similar to several other such tests that happened over the years, and always with the same result: my employers always agreed never to bother me about my choice of tools again, and apologized profusely for ever doubting me.
One other such test was a double-blind shootout between DP and another DAW. With a panel of judges who were all music and audio professionals in Las Vegas, my work in DP easily won unanimously. Unanimously. Did you get that? Everybody chose DP. Recently, our friend RadioGal did the same thing in a very prestigious group of audio professionals in Sweden. Same result: they chose DP.
So, allowing for the fact that we all doubt ourselves from time to time, and we all doubt our software and hardware from time to time, the truth is that there isn't any basis for concern here. DP is quietly a leader among DAWs. Professionals use whatever they want to use. Many of us choose DP exclusively. Those who don't, have their reasons. All valid. It doesn't matter if they choose something else.
DP was designed for the classic MacOS. It took years to make it work fluently and efficiently with OSX, but now we've finally gotten over not only the transition to OSX, but also to Intel, and now to 64 bits and the Cocoa programming environment. (Not to mention its new availability for PC) Cocoa makes future improvements 10 times easier, so that adding new features and testing are much faster even for multiple platforms. We've already seen evidence of that. DP is on a roll, and many new users have come over to it. We're seeing growth, not shrinkage, of the user base.
The popular press and rumor mills aren't as influential as they think they are. They can trash DP forever, but people who use it know WHY they use it. We all can go out and buy Logic, Live, Reason, Pro Tools, or anything else any time we want to. I own Logic Studio. But it only reinforces why I use DP: it simply fits me better than any of the others.
Believe what you want, but I'm here to tell you that this is a non-problem. A Non-issue.
Shooshie
