Is it strange looking back at the limited bit-rates you had to work with on your early machines? Strange but I think it's almost a fondness for things past - these days you have plug-ins such as BitCrusher and Lo-Fi that do it all. In those days, I was a musician and I had an interest in technology. They do say that necessity is the mother of invention and there were ideas in my head for products that didn't exist!
Is Mac the musician's choice? For someone who's serious about what they're doing, in the States at least, Mac is the better platform for music. In particular, OS X's Core Audio is wonderful because it has very low latency. Windows considers low latency to be around 200 milliseconds! Midi has become standardised now, too, so all the inter-application communication is done by the operating system, which makes it much easier.
G5? I actually just bought a new Mac but it was a G4 PowerBook as the projects I'm working on don't require anything huge. The great thing is that I can effectively take my entire studio over to a friend's house if I need to. For fun projects I use both Logic and Pro-Tools.
Should music software be made more intuitive? I think it's a lot harder to add all the wonderful features a program like Logic has than it is to make the program more intuitive. Emagic has done a great job with it so far, but they could go a little further still. By comparison, the first page of the manual for our AdrenaLinn says in big bold type I Want to Use It Right Now and gives you eight quick steps to do what you bought the product for! I think everybody should have a page like that in their manuals.
iTunes? Basically, you want to be able to get any music you want at any time for a reasonable price. Steve Jobs, who is an incredible visionary, said a few years ago that software copying would eventually lead to a point where the prices would lower to a point where people don't feel like copying it - I think the same thing is true for music. I'm very much in favour of being able to buy the music; I don't want to have to mess around with Kazaa or Morpheus. These things will find their own level. Jobs has set the standard that people will follow.
Is e-commerce getting its second wind? It never lost its first wind! The only problem was this onslaught of companies attempting to sell huge numbers of products to a slowly, but very steadily, growing number of people who were comfortable with buying goods over the internet. So the people didn't change - all these businesses came along and tried to present business plans to make huge amounts of investment capital from a market that didn't yet exist!
Roger Linn's bookmarks
Office design
www.hermanmiller.com
Music hardware
www.musiciansfriend.com
Music software
www.cakewalk.com/Products/SONAR/default.asp
Visit: www.rogerlinndesign.com
