I am so sick of the DAW paradigm! For all it’s features and ease of use, when it’s working, the overall loss of productivity is INSANE!!! I have maybe 3 days out of 10 where I just turn my rigg on and go to work. The other 7 days, I’m losing time (sometimes only 20 minutes, other times several hours) tracking down issues: Updates, bugs, drivers, app incompatibilities, “it worked last night, why doesn’t it work now?,” “who knows whats wrong with it?,” waiting for answers from the forums, waiting for someone to answer from product support IF there is any product support, etc.
When I was using hard disk recorders with a desk, I sat down every day and did my work! This morning Windows 10 did some kind of system update. This afternoon, I had an idea for a new song that I wanted to get down. So I fired up Nuendo, only to be told that my eLicense was bad! Usually a quick re-seat of the dongle would take care of that. Not this time. I ran the maintenance app. Only 5 out of 6 points cleared. I had to totally re-install a new license update, by which time the aggravation had totally wiped my idea for the song away. If I’d been using my old setup of a desk and a recorder, I’d have turned both on and recorded my idea, done! Each only does the one thing it does perfectly and reliably so, there’s no guess work. The rare occasion when something broke, you only had to replace that one part while the unit was in the shop. Life was so much simpler then!
Working on a HDR and desk might not be as fast as the DAW, but I’m sure the overall output would far surpass it. The only bottle neck, that I can think of, would be the offloading of files to the DAW for editing and then re-importing those edits back into the HDR. I know you can’t stop progress and the march of time and all of that, but after a while, this crap really gets old!
Rant over!