Can you describe what it is about the DP experience that you feel is superior?
In short, sound quality, interoperability, ease and power of editing, scalability/open-endedness.
At the cost of rock-solid, never-fail, dedicated-box reliability – although that difference becomes negligible if you dedicate/prioritize the Mac to audio.
Computers fuck up. Fact of life. Hardware boxes fuck up too, just less often. Anything with a hard drive in it is susceptible to disk crashes and such. Buy enough RAM and hard drive space and you greatly minimize those factors on a Mac. RAM is the NUMERO UNO upgrade to make to any Mac (or
computer at all, really).
What about the user interface?
DP is a very customizable workspace that adapts and adjusts to your needs/wants/workflow in a variety of ways. You set up the windows you want, where you want, how you want, on as many monitors as you want, as big or as small as you want – and you can just save the screensets and switch them around as needs dictate. Try that on a VS or any all in one box.
What effects are easily (i.e. cheaply) available?
Any MAS plug in, including lots of built-in effects, some of which actually sound quite good.
Masterworks EQ is marvelously good and I use it on everything from mixing to mastering.
Cheaply available are any plug ins that count, really. There’s a MAS or AU version of nearly anything and DP natively supports both. They also run VST plug ins using a “wrapper” software you can buy and install.
Are there Melodyne-like plugins? Autotune?
Funny you mention Melodyne, DP features built-in, non-destructive pitch correction and automation very similar to Melodyne, very similar.
And, yes, both Melodyne and AutoTune are fully supported widely used.
> I really wish I could see it in action.
Any major music chain store will have a copy to show you. I’d be pretty surprised if they didn’t have it running somewhere (er, no, I wouldn’t but that’s another post!). Unfortunately or wisely depending on your point of view, MOTU has never made a demo available. They view AudioDesk that comes with the hardware as the demo, I suppose (and it pretty much is).
One reason it attracts me is the idea of carrying a laptop around with me rather than a big dedicated box.
Mhmmm. ABSOLUTELY. One of the major reasons to get out of the box and into the Mac with your audio. It all usually ends up in a computer eventually nowadays anyway, why resist the inevitable? – grin -
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