ProTools vs. Ardour. Why spend the money 791

mista twista

This brings me to two thoughts:

(1) What's so difficult about backing up your data? Plug in a Firewire drive and drag the current version of teh project folder to it. It takes a little time because disk read-write times are finite and significant for an hour's worth of 24-track recording. But it will run unattended. If you back up on a stack of CDs, yes, that's a pain but there are better methods that perform the same function and use the same procedures.

(2) If you feel that you have to do backups, your system isn't reliable. There SHOULD BE no need to make backups. Unfortunately experience (with any system) tells us that we're not there yet.

Not really. Changing the oil in your car means that the engine will run for 200,000 miles. Backing up a project means that you have a better chance of starting it up again tomorrow.

Me neigher, but it involves using something that I already know. I don't use Ghost for day-to-day backups, I just copy files. There are a lot of programs that I use that I have to get the manual out just about every time I start them up because I don't use them often enough to remember how to do things. This is a problem, but there's a chance that at some point I might remember something between uses.

I think that it's because it's not backed by a large corporation with a mbuttive advertising budget and a well established market share.

I miss the days when I could do that, but I wouldn't want to record a band that way.

There are "easy to use" Linux applications. Perhaps Ardour is one. A lot of people use Open Office which is practically indistinguishable from the equivalent Microsoft programs. When the public accepts buying a box with a CPU inside and Linux, an office program, a web browser, e-mail program, and some ISP signup invitations pre-installed, a certain portion of the population will buy it and never change anything in it. Just like a PC or Mac. Didn't WalMart try selling something like this a few years ago?

But the computer business thrives on new and better applications, and users want to use those programs. If you can guarantee that if is says on the "Requirements" portion of the box: "Linux" and not a half a page of versions and distributions with certain patches, then people willl buy it. But we're not there yet either.