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EdisonRex

Well, DP7 is out. They don't mess around, those folks at MOTU.

And yes, I went for the upgrade, because of all of my software, DP is the one I use the most.

What did I get for the upgrade? Well. It seems I picked up some fair improvements which I am likely to use.

The built in instruments are now usable. The mono synths seem pretty good, the drum synth is very good and the sampler is easy to use. I will be using it.

The improvements to the mixing is the big draw here. It works seamlessly with the DSP based interfaces, which I happen to be using, so that's a good thing. Mixing is now better developed, you can now call up individual mixing strips and get efx and real time visuals. This is actually useful for a lot of my work, so I think this is an improvement too.

The other thing they improved which I really like is the Quickscore stuff, you can actually print decent workable sheet music now, and you can add lyrics to it too. Yay! This has been an area that needed work for years.

More efx - they have bundled in a bunch of cheesy 80's boxes, and some very interesting models of guitar amps. For a non guitar player like me, this is good news. For someone who actually plays and records guitar as their instrument, this should be even better.

Probably most importantly, the environment is aware of the new Mac environment that Snow Leopard brings, with much better multiprocessing and smoother IO, and since DSP is offloaded to the MOTU DSP-aware hardware, I can manage a bit more, hopefully.

I use DP a lot, and while I am not sure many others in this forum do, I for one am glad that they made a relatively cheap upgrade (£119) to add these features. It builds on the interface work they did for DP6, and adds things they hadn't done anything for since 5. I don't necessarily agree with the "new version every year" model, but given that there's stuff I can use right now, I'll go with it.

So now I can upgrade to 10.6 Snow Leopard on this Mac, the one I was waiting for because of DP's probable issues. Seems it's fixed now.

There are more features I am not reporting here. It's because I haven't actually tried to use them yet. I've only had it a day. Tomorrow's radio show will use some of the new features, hopefully they work like I hope they will.