by bones » Sun Mar 19, 2017 12:00 pm
The question you have to ask is "what do those features do?" I think it is reasonable to say that anything you want to do, you can do today on even a modestly spec'd PC. If one of those features was time-stretching, for example, then that is something you would have to do outside of Orion but would be able to do within most other sequencers. Either way, though, you can do it.
The decision you need to make, therefore, is whether being able to do 0-60 in 3 seconds is more or less important than having a top speed of 200. i.e. Is it more important to be able to do time-stretching inside your sequencer, even though that means choosing something that makes other tasks slower and/or more cumbersome, or is it something you do so rarely that it is still faster to do it externally and import the result, because of all the time you will save everywhere else?
Ultimately, it is a simple analysis if you take the time to do it. For me it is easy because there are no missing features in Orion. it does everything I could ever need or want, as well as a whole heap of things I probably won't ever use, and it does it in a simple, elegant way that makes sense. So the fact that other sequencers have new features means nothing to me because I don't need them. That's not to say there aren't some cool things in other sequencers, there definitely are, but nothing that can make up for all the things they don't do as well as Orion.
A good example is FL Studio - I got interested in it when I saw a video for the new version because it showed a couple of cool features that prompted me to download the demo and have a good look at it. But it didn't take long to discover that when I add a new instrument to a song, it doesn't automatically get assigned to the Mixer. I can hear it but it doesn't have a channel. That's just madness. If I want to hear my Monologue or my Ultranova or Sik's drums, I have to plug them in to a channel on our mixer. That's how the process works, that's how it's always worked. But not in FL Studio. Then you have the mixer, which has 104 channels, even if you only need five. OK, you can't go chopping off unused channels in a hardware mixer but, by the same token, I would never buy a 104 channel mixer because I only have four things to plug into it and a 104 channel mixer would take up far too much space (as it does on screen in FL Studio). I couldn't live with those things so I uninstalled the demo.
But that analysis will be different for everyone. We also rely very, very heavily on Orion's instruments and effects, so that's another aspect that keeps us using Orion. If, for some bizarre reason, you don't use Orion's generators and effects, that won't be such an issue for you, so your analysis might end in a different decision. The important thing is not to think that just because something has more features that it is therefore better. To go back to the sports car analogy - I use my car's ability to accelerate from 0-100 all the time but it has been many, many years since I have even tried to get it to it's maximum speed, so the fact that some other car might have a higher top speed is largely irrelevant to me, whereas it's acceleration is something I will appreciate every time I drive it.
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