The Future of Music (Software synthesizer focused or extended operating system)

Mass storage has never been cheaper, a 2TB external drive is $60 at Amazon.

The audio production market is very small relatively speaking and there's no financial motivation to make a custom OS for it. Audio producers use Mac or Windows and 99% of the software is written for those operating systems

Only a true turbo-nerd believes the majority of commercial music can be "rendered" by software alone. Streaming over broadband connection can deliver better-than-CD-quality audio with only a small fraction of the bandwidth required by e.g. HD video.

It is not a "billion dollar" question. Almost all of the money in the music industry has absolutely nothing to do with the production of the music sounds. Most bands spend more money on hair stylists than instruments.

Synthesizers emulate real instruments by using samples. They have done this since before you were born.

There are several Linux distributions optimised for music creation or editing. The cost of doing this is quite low, making it worth the effort - unlike the cost of making an audio-oriented Windows or MacOS, which would definitely /not/ be worth the effort.

Most of the traditional "big name" audio production software is for Windows and/or Mac, but an increasing proportion of the programs and an even faster increasing proportion of the work is done on Linux (because it is better than Windows for that kind of thing, and cheaper and more flexible than MacOS).

There is no longer a lot of money in this market - the hardware is commodity, and the software is increasingly available for little or no cost.

Yes. The quality of recording, transmission, playback can far outstrip the human ear. The limits are the quality of the speakers (which are often terrible) and the original music - not the file formats, or the OS, or the synthesis or anything like that.

Some day algorithms will be developed to create melodies.

99% of the music production software people want to use is for Win or Mac

There's a huge amount of money in the plug-in biz and software instruments, effects, and recording tools are often pretty expensive, just as one example Spitfire Symphonic Brass is $700, it's 100 gigs of samples uncompressed. Priced towards the professional scoring/TV composing market:

Avid Pro Tools Ultimate is $2,600:

Why use a computer when humans are perfectly good at making formulaic music themselves. Modern country songs are the same song:

Every colored block is from a different song all of which were hit songs, chop them up and paste them together and you get another song that's just as pleasingly generic

With software like Celemony Melodyne you can take 80s hair-metal Ratt and Marvin Gaye and stitch them together and you get a third genre, Motown-metal, there was a band from San Francisco called "Journey" that sounded a lot like this:

Irish and Cajun folk music sound like endless repetition to me. That could be automated first.

My dad was a (some kind of worker) and You Done Me Wrong. The lyrics are easy too.

1.2 million electric guitars were sold in the US in 2019, which was a slightly-below-average year. Want to make money in the music business? Sell strings. Sell pedals. Sell amps. Don't sell things that will replace the musicians, 99.9% of whom make music for free. But if you _really_ want to make money, sell gold-plated sound systems to orthopedic surgeons, who have a whole lot more disposable income than guitarists.

-Jim MacArthur Harman/Lexicon, 1991-97

Frank Zappa always claimed the music industry was actually more equitable when it was mostly run by businessmen pulled from other fields who would themselves admit they knew very little about music. They didn't have preconceptions about what sound is "hot" and what isn't.

A new band would come in with a demo and the cigar-chomper in the head office would say "What is this stuff? I dunno. Do the kids like it? Well, let's spend a few bucks, toss it out there and see if it sells."

I never made big money as a musician but it probably did get me a girlfriend or three so not every benefit can be accounted for strictly in terms of income-dollars.

Some simple math:

skybuck2000 snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

Moog sells a perfect software emulation of their original synthesizer which they sold in the late '60s. The Model D.

It is one of the few pieces of software I actually bought. It works perfectly.

I also bought their other softwares. And I have the Korg iMS-20 synth as well. And Moog's "Animoog" and Magellan.

I also have Garage Band, of course.

My tuner app is called TE Tuner, and is one of the best there is.

Also the DM1 drum machine.

There are plenty of YouTube videos of folks recreating song covers using garage band. It is very versatile.

MIDI has been around for decades. And you likely do not remember the Amiga, which was used by the film industry a long time ago.

There was a time when a stage performer had a cord attached to all of his or her mics on everything they had on stage. Now folks use wireless mics and wireless earpiece monitors with very little delay or they would not be useable.

Congratulations on your first non-troll post.

You can just buy the original hardware circuit in a smaller package for $299, now:

bitrex snipped-for-privacy@example.net wrote in news:Vxf6I.27266$ snipped-for-privacy@fx10.iad:

Very nice. One of the best pieces of electronic gear ever made.

There's a view of the guts here:

They've basically just used SMT transistors, resistors, and caps where the original would've used through-hole parts and added USB, MIDI to CV converter and CV patch points in lieu of a keyboard.

The original used hand-matched transistors in several areas not sure what they're doing for that, maybe a transistor array IC.

bitrex snipped-for-privacy@example.net wrote in news:xmG6I.27455$ snipped-for-privacy@fx02.iad:

Transistors these days are a lot closer together than back then and likely little or no matching is even needed. Or is achieved easily.