[Ardour-Dev] Ardour-Dev Digest, Vol 60, Issue 18

[Morley Tuttle]

Hi,
another silent reader (author of Gatecrasher and Sodasound blogs). I
had originally intended to help with the manuals, but life has
catastrophically gotten in the way lately.

That aside, I have noticed your connection to Trinity Audio's
machines, and Harrison Consoles. On the home studio side of things, I
have begun to be of the opinion that machines with single-processors,
typewriter keyboards, mice and USB ports, which maintain their mojo on
the internet are always going to be a poor impostor of a machine which
has microphone jacks, knobs and faders, and a "turn it on and press
the transport controls to operate" design methodology. Perhaps a way
to improve funding is to work with a hardware developer who wants to
put out some truly cool hardware products.
Trinity's machines would do better with more than two inputs, and
Harrison's Machines are off the radar for most of us. What might seem
irrelevant are the $700 - $1000 dollar machines put out by Tascam,
Mackie and Yamaha which are the equivalent of a real-time multi-track
studio in a suitcase, and never even attempt to moonlight with graphic
design, games and web browsing. I think Tascam should stick to rusty
tape by the way.
Ardour offers features which none of these products have caught up
with, but vicy-versy. What would be involved in applying the Ardour
code to scalable machine architectures of this nature, and building
the development and maintenance cost into the cost of those machines?

My current career change won't take forever. Neither will the
depression, if the batting average of my spidey-sense holds out.
There's lots of folks buying pocket-recorders, and hard-disk recorders
up to 32 inputs or so and all the way down to four - the film guys
probably would like those,  when they're hanging on a belay in a parka
with a fuzzy shotgun on a broomstick and a pair of headphones on.
Another thing which would be really cool, is a machine which provides
the automation and preset functionality of a Yamaha console with a cat
5 snake to an open-standard preamp box (drop in preamp circuits of
choice before conversion?). Something which works on a pair of
six-volt batteries maybe? I know that adding channels adds power
consumption in the analog circuitry.

Once I'm working again, I'd use paypal to support software. But I like
picking up machinery at the local store, even after I got my ZaReason
box shipped to me from California (I had to fondle the memory to get
it to turn on). I'm going to be in the mood to buy a machine like that
soon I think.

Morley Tuttle