Anybody here wish Opcode didn't go out of bidnis?

[hurricaneduane]

I've been trying desperately to switch from SVPro 4.51 to this DP thing and I have nothing but heart ache to show for it. Mac OS X sucks with it's hidden hierarchy (just like WINDOWS) and it has taken SO much of the creative energy and thrown it headlong in to COMPUTING that it just plain and simply SUCKS.

Opcode had all this stuff figured out YEARS ago!!!! I mean, working on a PMac 7100 and one of those old serial interfaces (what was it, Studio 3?) my MIDI gear worked like ...well, like it was supposed to work. Now, with the new Macs and software like DP5.13 and "Leopard", and a MTPATV, I am constantly struggling with computing issues. I can't even begin to write a fricking song.

An I the only one. Admittedly, I am an older dog learning newer tricks, but is there anyone out there who can re"f***in"late?

Just blowin' off a little steam. And son't EVEN get me started about Mach 'frickin' 5.

[James Steele]

Thanks for your very helpful contribution to this board after only 2 posts. Could you please watch your language and post rants in the appropriate forum. I'll move it for you. Thanks.

[Guitar Gaz]

People on this forum are probably tired of me constantly going on about Opcode Vision DSP. It has taken me many years to get to grips with DP after switching - and I think that DP seems clunky in comparison with Vision DSP. DP is deep and full of functionality - but so much less intuitive. However, once you get used to it - it does grow on you. But it has taken me a long time - Vision was a great program and very intuitive and great for producing music - sometimes with DP you get stuck on how to do things as they are not immediately obvious which can kill the creativity. I have had to come to terms with the loss of a great program........

[SixStringGeek]

I can relate to your annoyance - I am also a Studio Vision victim - in fact I've just recently gotten the rest of my older stuff moved.

Opcode had a real knack for this stuff - pity they had such lousy management and were eaten by Gibson (YTF did Gibson buy that company if they were just going to drop all the products anyhow?).

DP is a different kind of thing and I think the the biggest annoyance I have with DP vs Vision is Vision works in chunks - it excels at helping you build short sequences, then arranging them into longer compositions. The chunks orientation just isn't there in DP and my productivity/creativity suffers.

THE killer feature for me was the 'type a sequence letter and it'll queue it up for play'. I'd make a bunch of variations on a theme, then spend a whole lot of time playing them in various orders using this feature until I got things to really flow.

If there is anything MOTU could do to make Vision users feel at home, it is to provide better chunk oriented features.[/i]

[Guitar Gaz]

THE killer feature for me was the 'type a sequence letter and it'll queue it up for play'. I'd make a bunch of variations on a theme, then spend a whole lot of time playing them in various orders using this feature until I got things to really flow.

If there is anything MOTU could do to make Vision users feel at home, it is to provide better chunk oriented features.[/i]

Amen to that - this is the single most annoying thing about DP - why do you have to wait when you switch from one chunk to another? And the queueing function is rubbish - this was the easiest part of Vision in auditioning sequences in different orders. DP wants you to do one long sequence - and changing the order or length of sections becomes a major exercise. Working in small chunks is way better.

[emulatorloo]

I am going to treat your post seriously (although I wonder if you are really serious).

Mac OS X sucks

Actually to me OS 9 sucks. Crashy, can't do more than one thing at once, etc. I boot it up and I think "windows '95".

Everyday I thank the computer gods for DP 5.13 and OS X.

I am constantly struggling with computing issues. I can't even begin to write a fricking song.

Weird because my OS X machines are rock solid. My 7100 was a FREAKSHOW.

-------------

OTOH I have several machines here that run os9 and SVP 4x very well.

Beige g3, Blue g3, Gray dual g4.

Nothing is stopping you from using a similar machine.

In fact, those machines are XTREMELY cheap on ebay.

Get one and run SVP if that would make you happy.

--
Some good resources for you if you don't know about them already:

http://vision.agektmr.com/

http://www.fm-music.com/v/

--

[James Steele]

I also owned Studio Vision and was a big fan. It just plain ran FASTER too. It was efficient from day one. Also it was uncluttered and easy on the eyes for me. And yep... subsequences was an awesome feature and it was very easy to craft songs this way by moving around 4 or 8 bar components and working out song structure.

Frankly, I sort of regret that MOTU never made a "Digital Freestyle" as Freestyle sort of let you do the same thing. I think it was unfortunate that Freestyle never went further, but I suppose had digital audio capability been added to freestyle it would have made overlapped DP too much.

[greeny]

I often boot up StudioVisionPro on the old Mac in order to work fast doing anything with MIDI, especially when I have a major composing or arranging job on hand. After all these years since Opcode's death there hasn't been a more musically vast, intelligent and friendly sequencer out there on the market. These guys were simply brilliant and way ahead of the pack.

But now I use DP everyday for the lack of anything better and dependable, for dependable and stable it is and that means a lot; I've also got Live4, CubaseSX3, ProTools5, Melodyne3.1 and Sibelius3 and don't like any of them half as much as I do StudioVision.

DP on the other hand is nice because it gets the job done but I find its working-architecture a bit of a clumsy, dumb and dated platform with cumbersome silly layers of flags, boxes and whistles. Over the years DP has in my view had a bit too many face lifts and add-ons and has thus become top-heavy and consequently slow in its handling. Motu could seriously consider redesigning another version of DP, they probably will some day, at least I hope so.

This is no rant but a reminder that Opcode's StudioVisionPro (RIP 1998) for many many people I know still acts as a measuring ruler against which many other sequencers are evaluated - DP is about average, a GM utility vehicle compared to a vintage Alfa-Romeo.... Long live SVP! (and Alpha Romeo!)

Please don't flame me for not being a super-great DP fan - I just use it for a living, and that's it - and that ain't too bad, right?

Merry Xmas!

[BradLyons]

OH yeah, I sure miss the days of trying to configure Free MIDI with OMS! By the way, the fact that you're using Leopard would be the reason stuff isn't working.

[rcannonp]

OH yeah, I sure miss the days of trying to configure Free MIDI with OMS!

...as well as troubleshooting extension conflicts and having to restart with different extension sets depending on what I want to do. It really bums me out that I can now run DP and my printer at the same time.

[BradLyons]

OH yeah, I sure miss the days of trying to configure Free MIDI with OMS!

...as well as troubleshooting extension conflicts and having to restart with different extension sets depending on what I want to do. It really bums me out that I can now run DP and my printer at the same time.

Well I can run DP and Sonar at the same time on the same machine, how's that one for ya!

[MIDI Life Crisis]

I too fought the switch from SVP to DP. For years I couldn't load an SVP file because the authorizations had gotten messed up.

Recently I discovered an old Mac I ned to my wife's 2nd grade class WAS able to run SVP. And yes, it booted fast, and loaded my old files like a charm, and exported them to SMFs for DP to digest.

It was like finding an old pair of sneakers. Perfect fit, comfortable, familiar.

But the competitive world of composing, designing and creating great soundtracks just doesn't work with those old sneakers. You need new running shoes. DO offers those new shows. To push the analogy a bit further, Leopard provided new insoles to my Mac. I can still run just a fast, but it's more enjoyable to do so.

[Shooshie]

Well, here's where I step in as the alien to the Opcode-friendly gathering. I started out with Performer (actually with several other apps, but Performer was the first really good one). By the time I tried Vision, I was pretty well-immersed in Performer. I found Vision lacking and slow. It wasn't made for orchestral arranging, and it seemed awkward for that. I remember thinking at the time that it was really good for making lead sheets and writing songs. But for more complicated music, it just didn't have the right tools. At least, that was what I thought.

I've heard people rant about Vision's superiority for 15 years, and it reminds me of Logic users. They go on about Logic's superiority over DP, and yet the more they talk, the more I realize that they really don't know what DP can do. But the same thing works both ways. I realized that my opinion of Vision was based on a very inadequate knowledge of what it can do, so I guess it all balanced out. My guess is that both apps were pretty darned incredible. I know that Performer was, and everyone I know who USED Vision thinks that Vision was without peer, so I can only conclude that they were both great, just different.

I find the same thing happening now with Logic. The more I use it, the less I like it. But surely there are some things about it that I'm missing. How could that many people be wrong? I mean, BILLIONS of people think Logic is the greatest DAW on earth. It's got to be pretty good, doncha think? But I haven't found the key yet. It's just not as good as DP, in my opinion.

By the way I think that people who are having trouble with the Chunk-Chaining thing might simply try opening a Song Window and dropping your chunks in there. Maybe it's not as intuitive or easy as Vision, but it works, and I always found it to be fast and simple. If you were doing a song list of 100 songs, that wouldn't be the best way to do it, obviously. But up to about 20 or 30 will work.

HurricaneDuane's problems are less with DP than OS X. All I can say is that it was hard for all of us at first. But ask who would go back. I doubt that you'd get any takers. There's a funny thing about progress. Things get better, but there are tradeoffs. The OS has eaten up the processor speeds, so that these monstrous machines we have now barely do any more actual functional work than our old 68040 desktops of 1993, or our 9600's from 1998. It's always relative. But in return we get all kinds of perks, and when you get used to them they seem pretty nice.

Back to Vision; I was sad to see it go, and was outraged at the WAY it went. If it had simply lost user interest, and gone out of business, then that would be acceptable, but that was far from the case. Gibson simply killed it. Like a kid getting a pet rabbit for Easter, then not feeding it and letting it starve in its cage in his closet, Gibson just simply neglected Opcode, and Vision died of suffocation and starvation, and that was not right. I hope the music world will boycott Gibson for that. It's not right that a man with money can simply buy other people's dreams and kill them, just because he CAN.

I'd better stop here before I get mad, or before I incite a riot.

Shooshie

[BradLyons]

Yeah Shooshie, I never understood why Gibson bought Opcode.....

[Guitar Gaz]

I don't think there is anything you could do in Vision that you can't do in DP - it just seems convoluted having got used to working a certain way. And I'm liking DP a lot more now - but its just those moments when you are in a hurry to get something down that you revert to basic memories of an ingrained working method. Doing it in small chunks seems to work for me and chaining them for simultaneous or sequential play seems more logical than putting them in a Song window and then merging them as a new bigger chunk. You can then get confused with which chunk to work on. And there is that annoying few seconds delay when switching chunks. God I'm such a whinger ! You just have to get used to DP's methods which are different. The audio side is great though !