11 Nov
2003
11 Nov
'03
1:58 p.m.
Thomas Webb wrote:
It's just a frikkan computer! I'm sorry, but
I'm not a
big fan of these synth workstations. They are just
crippled computers and in this case,
I love people when people makes such allegations.
Where did you get the proof that it is crippled ?
It's a full fledged PC with keyboard/mouse/USB/serial/parallel/ethernet
connectors
with two graphics cards (internal LCD + external monitor + TV-out).
You can run OpenOffice, Mozilla, Quake anything you like.
You can even format the harddrive and run Windows XP if you like
but some of the custom audio/midi gear won't work because no Windows
drivers exist.
:-)
The Mediastation has two operation modes:
keyboard/mouse-less: useful for live playing or when you do not need (or
cannot)
carry with you a keyboard/mouse.
Most of the important functions are accessible via
buttons/sliders/jogwheel so that in most
cases you do not need a keyboard/mouse.
But for example if you want to use a sample editor, a complex HDR app
like ardour
a keyboard/mouse is almost mandatory.
So I would not call this PC crippled, I'd call it more flexible than a
traditional PC because
it's input output devices are optimized for musical tasks.
withold the
cripple (but double the money). You can just make one
of those.. wouldn't be as pretty and you'd have to
muck w/ RT-linux. Or, you could pick up a laptop..
it's all the rage these days, I hear ;)
Of course a made yourself solution can be cheaper (only if your time is
worth $0)
but the target of the keyboard is the professional musicians that want
a turnkey solution or developers that want to create their own
thirdparty apps modules
without building the whole enviroment from scratch.
The possibilities are endless, the Mediastation is much more than a
keyboard.
I think good synth design, as far as hardware goes, is
knowing what features to leave out as much as
engineering them in. If it's too versatile, it is just
a frusturating, expensive computer.
To quote Domenico, the main hardware engineer of the keyboard, according
to him
the Mediastation is the Ferrari or Lamborghini of keyboards :-)
The company is small and can not produce high volume, low margin gear.
It would
be impossible to compete with the bigs.
After all Ferraris are made in Italy just like the Mediastation, let's
see what happens :-)
I think a true
show of embedded linux excellence would be something
with a mediocre processor and very small & cheap, but
is intuitive and reasonably flexible. Anyone out there
working on cool embedded designs?
There are tons of boards (just look at linuxdevices.com), but unfortunately
audio is quite demanding in terms of CPU power so you end up using
a standard ATX PC board again.
If you use a cheap embedded linux board you will have to add powerful
audio hardware, middleware layers, DSP with custom applications etc ...
that will drive up the cost again.
cheers,
Benno
http://www.linuxsampler.org