The Yamaha AN1x Synthesizer mailing list

From: "waylayer ..." <waylayer1@...>


> Taking your advice, I simply put the midi IN cord into the AN1X midi OUT,
> and instantly I had midi!! Woohoo!! Thanks...the best solution is usually
> the simplest :). By the way, I was using it with SimSynth, a great program
> that can simulate a wide variety of synth sounds. As for a sequencer, I
have
> an older version of Cubase, but I heard some good things about Logic
> Platinum, so I might have to check that out. Thanks again.

Glad to be able of help. Actually, I keep messing these up myself as well. I
usually plug them in and see if it works: if not, I switch them.

As for Logic Audio, I had heard good stories about that as well. You know,
enthousiastic users praising it high into the sky.

I tried it myself, on two different occassions, and ditched this load of
crap off my hard disk. Emagic has a really funny idea of what the user
interface of a program should look like, and keeping to either the Windows
or the Macintosh GUI conventions is a novelty that hasn't made it to their
part of Germany yet.

You can build your complete studio environment in Logic - which in your case
would just be your AN1x, so it looks a bit overkill - and after that you can
work from there. The key phrase here is 'after that'. Logic has a learning
curve that is alarmingly steep. Now people tell me that that is the price to
pay for its complexity, but I've been around in computerland for quite a
while now, and I can tell you that the people behind Logic simply cannot
build a decent, orthogonal and - oh, the irony - logical user interface.

The menus are needlessly cluttered and complicated, the help function is a
laugh (it names all the menu functions and nothing more). Performing a
certain action on an object (like right-clicking with the mouse) gives
different responses at different times, and it doesn't respond like any
other program would.

Don't get me wrong: Logic is powerful and flexible, very much so. But the
implementation is rather poorly conceived.

As for Cubase, I didn't bother to try it, since it won't run under Windows
NT.

Cakewalk is OK, because it *does* adhere to programming conventions, and
it's reasonably easy to navigate. But I also feel limited by it.

So I'm in favour of a hardware sequencer, or a software sequencer that works
like one, complete with transport controls in a seperate box.

Oh well.

- Peter