Another night of nonesense but with a twist - there was a lot of talk about Zynthian!!! Of course, like so many things you had to be there to enjoy it - no, really! I can’t remember most of what we said so these notes are mostly links to web stuff we mentioned.
- 64 is twice as good as 32 - isn’t it? 64-bit Debian 12 (Bookworm) based Zynthian is getting a lot of interest and rightly so
- The audio player is very different and some say, much better. I demonstrated many of the new features
- We nearly, almost, saw a new club member! Please do come along. We need you to spice up the discussions.
- It turned into a bit of a book club at one point with recommendations for “The World in Six Songs” and “Corporation Man”. Both look like good reads.
- Is there a place to share and hear truely open and free music? Most sites that may have previously offered such a service seem to now be kinda record labels, tauting their members’ material for paid contribution. Not just free but open so that anyone can use the music in any way they wish.
- Daisy Seed seem to be trying to obfuscate their hardware designs in a bid to protect against imitation but it is not clear that such efforts are effective.
- Various efforts to build hardware controllers by various people have led to various amounts of frustration but also the consideration of how that compares with commercial products including QLab and Avid.
- Avid’s control protocol may be used in DAWs but not in hardware controllers which makes it a one-way street that, although may be nice to include in Zynthian, it doesn’t match the Zynthian ethos.
- We had a demonstration of Chorda. It looks like some fun but we are yet to see / hear how effective it is as a musical instrument. We look forward to hearing more in the (near?) future. (We have discussed in the past.)
- It can pay to go pot-luck in the auctions… One of our friends picked up a bargain Hydrasynth - although it may need some maintenance. Goodbye weekend!
- What happened to Zynthbox? The question was asked but it is quite quiet on that front. There is still progress on their github so we hope our friends are progressing towards success.
- We celebrated new family members and thought about absent club members.
It was actually quite a full night of discussion, little of which made it here so do pop in next time to experience it I.R.L… but virtually!