Loss Of Faith, tepid digital waters Options

[jesse]

I am feeling rather defeated. last year i purchased an imac 800mgz, 256, and I have yet to match the stability of my fostex fourtrack. the consept of latency is entirely new to me. So I ask myself, and all of you, why would anyone purchase a 2500$ (canadian) machine then purchase 150 dollars worth of software (tracktion) and another 250 on a decent usb interface. currently i am using imic (60$) and i hate it. Back in the good old days, when a fourtrack cost 300 bucks (1994) there was no such animal as "latency". why then ten years and 3000 dollars later do i find myself in a less productive and more expencive situation? And all for a marginal increase in sound quality. My question is this: how much more do I have to spend to be able to find a program and input/output device that is comperable to the fostex cassette machine i had (still do) ten years ago? Have I gone through all this just eliminate the dreaded tape hiss?! Does anyone else feel like they have been hoodwinked by the glitz and gloss of a sleaker digital future?
I am only twenty-seven and already the future looks dimmer than the past.
...triing hard not to become a luddite...

[terrywil]

Software, hardware, learning curves.... One only has to read the many comments on this forum to see that what we're dealing with is challenging to say the least. How do you plug this in to make that work for such and so. I know from my own experience that learning Logic, getting it all running, took a long time. It's often frustrating. Then, you have the built-in problem of upgrades - of the computers, the software, the peripherals. And more and more money. Some lament - "Gimme a good ol' acoustic guitar" - and I can see their point. Some even claim that computer music is not really music at all. It's sampled and contrived and artificial. A drum loop is not a real musician.

So, do we all feel guilty? Using those musicians that never get tired? Do we stop plunking down our cash for those new apps? For that extra 1 gig of RAM? For the program that will do something never heard before? Are we going to give it up?

Of course not! This thing we're into has a beautiful and intense excitement, a travelling into truly new musical territory. A lot of people sense this and they get involved in it. It's my feeling that this new musical territory is just the beginning of fabulous things to come. People are creating incredible new music - people are excited - people are involved in something that doesn't happen very often - a real artistic revolution.

I got Garritan Personal Orchestra. It has samples of every instrument in the symphony orchestra. You can lay one or a bunch of these instruments out on your keyboard using the full version of Kontakt. Now... just sit back for a second and think about that. This is really something.

I truly sympathize with Jesse who initiated this thread. You gotta hang in there. Check the settings, try to be patient when you want to trash it all.