DP12 release date?

[Michael Canavan]

MOTU could do a lot of things to get a younger audience. One major one is roll back the whole, "we're an adult company now." routine, the unicorn should come back, it was never that embarrassing unlike maybe Fruity Loops where I get a bit of rebranding makes sense. Gen Z is all about unicorns so go with it. Bring back the old t shirt, a lot of modern electronica is going for an 80's early 90's etc. aesthetic.

The youtube presence is lackluster at best.

The other one is their own advocate/developer for control surfaces and other goodies. Moss does this for Reaper and Bitwig, and it's pretty cool to see.

[James Steele]

I agree about bringing back the unicorn logo. The block letter MOTU image is too corporate and sterile. This site was originally “Unicornation.com” and I always liked that better.

[stubbsonic]

which almost sounds like coronation which invests one with great power.

[Michael Canavan]

Somebody pointed out no Black Friday sale on upgrades this year. Not sure what's going on with DP, but no NAMM and no upgrade sale., I suppose DP12 could be coming out soon? dunno?

[monkey man]

At the risk of sounding repetitive, I've been saying these two things for many years:

Bring back the unicorn and heck, why not the actual name as opposed to the meaningless acronym?
Throw in a shedload of built-in VI's - synths, electronic & acoustic drums and a bread-and-butter ROMpler-style one for good measure.

Personally, my decision as to whether or not to run a complicated hybrid system, with all its attendant routing and interfacing complexities and expenses, would be made a heck of a lot easier by the ROMpler idea alone. I'd be able to rest easy knowing that it'd always be present-and-supported due to its default-inclusion status.

A "flexible"(!), transparent set of time-stretching / matching / quantising features that just do the job "under-the-hood" without the need for any head-scratching would appeal to me as well as many of the youngsters I'm bettin'.

EDIT
I've been shot-down for my heavily-expanded-VI-suite suggestion for what, decades now(?), but I still stand by it. Nothing to write home about added since DP6. I hate to say it, but that's pathetic in my book. Embarrassing too when I try to talk someone into buying DP.

[Rick Cornish]

I've been shot-down for my heavily-expanded-VI-suite suggestion for what, decades now(?), but I still stand by it. Nothing to write home about added since DP6. I hate to say it, but that's pathetic in my book.

Agree, Monkey Man. The MOTU VIs included in DP are pathetic. I can't use them (except, maybe, for testing). And the old MachFive VIs won't even run under the current macOS. My 2¢: MOTU should either completely rewrite the included VIs or just leave them out.

One more thought: MachFive 3 had the ability to read and decode all kinds of sample CDs. (I actually keep an old MacBook Air running High Sierra around for just that purpose.) That might be useful for those of us who still have collections Kurzweil, Akai, and other sample disks laying around.

[Michael Canavan]

At the risk of sounding repetitive, I've been saying these two things for many years:

Bring back the unicorn and heck, why not the actual name as opposed to the meaningless acronym?
Throw in a shedload of built-in VI's - synths, electronic & acoustic drums and a bread-and-butter ROMpler-style one for good measure.

Personally, my decision as to whether or not to run a complicated hybrid system, with all its attendant routing and interfacing complexities and expenses, would be made a heck of a lot easier by the ROMpler idea alone. I'd be able to rest easy knowing that it'd always be present-and-supported due to its default-inclusion status.

A "flexible"(!), transparent set of time-stretching / matching / quantising features that just do the job "under-the-hood" without the need for any head-scratching would appeal to me as well as many of the youngsters I'm bettin'.

EDIT
I've been shot-down for my heavily-expanded-VI-suite suggestion for what, decades now(?), but I still stand by it. Nothing to write home about added since DP6. I hate to say it, but that's pathetic in my book. Embarrassing too when I try to talk someone into buying DP.

I'm ambivalent about VI's, I think it would be great for newcomers but I do not see how financially MOTU could compete in one upgrade cycle with Reason, Logic, Bitwig, etc. Some DAWs like Live charge a premium for their Suite version with all of the instruments included. Live and Pro Tools also seem to be a in a unique position to charge far more than the rest for their DAWs so it's hard to compare to the others. MOTU do include the UVI workstation and MOTU Instrument collection which counts in some respects as a ROMpler, they might not want to compete with their old business parthers UVI for space in that area against Falcon etc. Another point with ROMplers, there are some decent cheap VI's out there, Xpand2, SampleTank4, Kontakt 8, etc. etc. All that said some more modern instruments would make sense, BPM seems to have been a MOTU project mainly, nothing like it from UVI yet really. A wavetable synth is common these days in a DAW. The simple sampler is far from enough, and to me the big advantage of embedded samplers and drum machines is instant saving of sample in the DAW.

Even more than embedded instruments some ability to sandbox plugins, to make it so only the plugin crashes when they have issues would be fantastic. Almost every crash I've had with DP is due to AU/VSTs. Bitwig do it very well, Logic and Reaper at least have it, though it's not ideal in either case.

The issue of time stretching, beat matching etc. being surrently over complex I 100% agree with, there are far too many ways to screw it up, either on your end or DP's. I recently downloaded a riff from a stick player on youtube who asked people to sample the riff and write a song around it. I had to use three different methods and DP was overtly concerned with tempo matchin the groove, ignoring that it fit perfectly into 130bpm. Very glad the performer must have originally played it to a click because otherwise it would have been a real hassle, DP wasn't fitting the loop to measures so it was ending before the 12th measure. In no DAW is something like this fool proof but a few quick settings to try before jumoing into the weeds would be fantastic. Logic has an instant setting for tempo matching audio not played to a click which is much easier than anything DP does there.

This is IMO a DAW wide issue though, DP is almost as complicated to navigate as Reaper which has a well deserved reputation as being dense and impenetrable, yes the features are there, no, there's not any easy way to access those features though. IMO MOTU should hire a UX expert to go over the entire DAW and make the whole experience less daunting when you first approach it. It's common to make fun of Logic here, but the Logic team did make basic access to playing and recording audio and MIDI pretty quick to start out with. The browsers in DP are just a mess, so far behind Logic, Live, Bitwig, and even Reaper. First off, there are 3 of them, Soundbite, Sample explorer, and the Content Browser. Even with all of that, they don't do half of what the other DAWs I'm familiar with do, Maybe that's why I've been averse to DAW browsers in general, when DP shows presets for instance in some instruments and FX but can't actually drag and drop them to the project, what's the use?

My big wish for DP12 (which I would bet is already cooked considering how long it's been since 11 was released) is for improvements to existing features: the Content browser, plugin preferences and hosting, time stretching, the preferences window should have a search function, new instrument plugins and resizable etc. Little things like the selection of Markers along with the rest of the selection so the marker moves with the selection etc.

[Michael Canavan]

One more thought: MachFive 3 had the ability to read and decode all kinds of sample CDs. (I actually keep an old MacBook Air running High Sierra around for just that purpose.) That might be useful for those of us who still have collections Kurzweil, Akai, and other sample disks laying around.

M53 was a collaboration with UVI, but even then Chicken Systems were used to get the conversions to other samplers, so UVI did not continue to pay Chicken Systems with Falcon which cannot convert sample formats. I have Chickens Translator 7, but Moss who does great work for Bitwig and Reaper also gives out some free software, and one of them is a sample format converter, pretty cool!
https://mossgrabers.de/Software/Convert ... hMoss.html

Unfortunately the only format I use often that is not supported is UVI so no M53 or Falcon conversions. At least I don't feel silly buying Translator 7.

[James Steele]

Somebody pointed out no Black Friday sale on upgrades this year. Not sure what's going on with DP, but no NAMM and no upgrade sale., I suppose DP12 could be coming out soon? dunno?

I have absolutely NO inside info on this, but I fear we will never see MOTU at NAMM again. I know it costs A LOT of money to exhibit at NAMM, and several companies have opted out of the show feeling it's not a significant return on investment... at least as far as their financial bottom line is concerned. They can disseminate product info easily through other means these days.

My feeling on that is there's still the problem of perception. That is to say, what does it look like, and what rumors start circulating when your competitors are still there and you're not?

It's a shame as it seems certain that the days of our big MOTUnation NAMM dinners are over. The past few years I've met up for dinner with a few folks but not like "the old days." And unfortunately, no MOTU folks since they haven't exhibited at NAMM since before the pandemic.

I'm still attending this year, but re-evaluating whether I will in the future.

[James Steele]

Unfortunately the only format I use often that is not supported is UVI so no M53 or Falcon conversions. At least I don't feel silly buying Translator 7.

I know it's on sale right now for half off. I've been considering it.

[Rick Cornish]

M53 was a collaboration with UVI, but even then Chicken Systems were used to get the conversions to other samplers, so UVI did not continue to pay Chicken Systems with Falcon which cannot convert sample formats. I have Chickens Translator 7, but Moss who does great work for Bitwig and Reaper also gives out some free software, and one of them is a sample format converter, pretty cool!
https://mossgrabers.de/Software/Convert ... hMoss.html

Unfortunately the only format I use often that is not supported is UVI so no M53 or Falcon conversions. At least I don't feel silly buying Translator 7.

Thanks for the info, Michael… this is all news to me (and some welcome news, too).

ConvertWithMoss looks pretty good, but I could justify $75 for Translator 7 (available here), which will also give me files I can read in Falcon.

Thanks again!

[Michael Canavan]

Translator 7 gets bad reviews from the online forum crowd and flatly I think it's undeserved, it's a bit more complex than you would expect and it's likely the first few attempts to convert formats will turn out badly, but it's a matter of adjusting settings. Obviously since a lot of modern libraries use the samplers built in FX you're not going to get a 100% replication in those cases.

I have old NI libraries from Kompact that I've translated to UVI and MPC, plus old EXS files to UVI and Kontakt. Works well. For $75 IMO it's worth it, it's not Apple silicon native yet, but it runs fine as a Rosetta app.

[James Steele]

I know many years ago I successfully used it to port many of my favorite Ensoniq EPS16+ instruments over to MachFive (Falcon) and Kontakt. Of course, those were the days when floppy drivers were not uncommon and there were utilities to read EPS 16+ formatted discs. I believe that can still be done, but it's much more involved involving disk images, etc. I actually did buy a SCSI2SD device that attaches to my EPS16's SCSI port and allows a SD card to emulate an attached SCSI drive. It works great. No moving parts and instruments load fast! Unfortunately because of the design of the EPS it requires external power.

These days, I don't think there are any other EPS instruments I'd need to port over, so it would just be a case I suppose of moving certain sounds from one soft sampler to another. I own Falcon and Kontakt, so not sure I'd have a need. Still, when it's on sale, I'm tempted just to have it in my toolbox.

[mikehalloran]

…
A "flexible"(!), transparent set of time-stretching / matching / quantising features that just do the job "under-the-hood" without the need for any head-scratching would appeal to me as well as many of the youngsters I'm bettin'.
…

Goodgawd yes!

I do a lot of time stretching and pitch shifting inside DP but only to small degrees and using Pure DSP. Melodyne opens in its own window and I'm quite used to that now.

Any ambitious scaling is done using ZTX—which works quite well—but I use it outside DP in TwistedWave. Life is just too short to spend hours making it work inside DP and line everything up. In TW, I can specify exact timing and re-use the settings on multiple tracks which is much faster.

[monkey man]

Wow, thank you for the encouraging (in that you didn't dismiss my wish-list outright) responses guys.

Fantastic to know I'm not alone on most of that stuff.