Hi Chris,

I can so very much understand your feelings. Some weeks ago, people were airing their anger concerning the absolutely lousy software support for the Konnekt series interfaces. Nothing has changed since then. I can assure you, nothing will change. TC does not give a damn.

If you are interested, here is a post offering a brief overview of the chaos and the blatant arrogance of this company:

http://forum.tcelectronic.com/viewtopic.php?id=1150

I don't know much about 'JUCE' and I am no programmer, but I can tell you that on the audio interface side, the development of software has in the last 24 months gone from 'Wavefront Semiconductor' to 'Singing Electrons' back to TC, who are now basically patching a faulty driver instead of rewriting the code. Even now, they are not able to produce a simple control panel that does not crash. For many, drop-outs while recording or playing back are frequent and the plug-in integration is not working as promised. It's a disgrace.

In contrast, look at RME. That is a company with an impeccable attitude.

Regards,
Tom

Last edited by tjay (2008-05-02 23:25:12)

I too feel your pain and frustration. After all the promises that it will be out soon, we still have nothing. And to top it off they act like it is an inconvenience to even get the drivers out. It is because of this arrogance and downright nasty attitude I will never buy another T.C. Electronic device. I have even quit buying any new Gibson Guitars because of this.

Could it be the Gibson 'touch of death', you have to wonder....hmmm nah TC were slow and slack before that as well :-(

OH MY GAWD.. Somebody in Gibson management does have a brain left. Now if they can just make a robot guitar with a decent color. I won't hold my breath. But back to TC Electronics, yep real disappointing this company. Never ever buy any thing again from them. Thats they only way they learn. Hit them in the pocket book.

Last edited by James Faron (2008-05-03 01:13:42)

Just so it's out there, I'm not blaming TC for this particular purchase. I should have done due diligence and read the forums and such before my purchase. I saw "Win XP or higher" in the requirements, and just assumed that Vista qualified as "higher" without looking for the link at the bottom of the page.

I would mention that it would be polite of TC to expand on that "Win XP or higher" statement, though.

I would have never bought this unit if I had read these forums before hand. And I should have returned it promptly, but the notes that were in the forums strongly implied that Vista operability would be included in the 3.0 update, and as I only bought it a few days before that event, I thought it wise to wait. Then I waited some more. Now it's too late to return it, because I waited for Vista capability too long. This is also my mistake.

No, both of these things are my fault, and I fully accept that. Rather, in my post, I was pointing out TC's blatant irresponsibility in not addressing this as soon as Vista was relatively stable. And further research shows that this is endemic to almost all computer-aware TC products on all platforms. Since I know a thing or two about this business, it is blatantly obvious to me that outsourcing and corner-cutting are par for the course, at least in the department that deals with this particular area of their product line, and that's just shoddy.

Personally, I wouldn't really care about that nonsense if the damn thing worked at all, but I can't even say that. It obviously doesn't even show in the control panel on my Vista machine, and it makes my iMac so unstable it's hard to even demo the software. (In deference, my iMac is only for quick testing and hunting down problems in our product line. I don't use it for music, and it isn't "optimized" for such.)

Chris Randall
Audio Damage, Inc.
http://www.audiodamage.com

quantize wrote:

Well Gibson famously squandered buying Oberheim (or was it Opcode?!)...despite that article i would have less hope for TC in merger. They need to do what most of these companies need to do..sack most of their marketing departments, get some decent project managers and programmers and get their priorities well in order.

There is no merger its been scraped

Vista is fine for music, provided you turn Aero off. In my experience, with my computer, it is actually a bit more stable. I won't speak to anyone else's system, though.

That said, I have to run Vista, because many of our customers do. I get tired of dual-booting just to work on some tunes for half an hour or whatever, and it seemed to me to be logical to just dime my system as-is. I should also mention that I'm not a hobbyist, but a full-time professional musician; Audio Damage is my side-gig. I've done several albums with Vista now; the first couple months were a little rough, but as soon as Lynx released their true Vista drivers, my issues went away, and I'm actually quite happy with it.

I could easily dual-boot XP, but I'd hasten to point out a brief metaphor:

Say, for instance, TC had a driver for a product that worked in Win 3.1.1., but didn't work in Win95. Would the proper response of the company be to (a) update their product to Win95, or (b) wait until Win98 came out in three years (!!!) and then update it, which would probably take a few months.

That may sound outlandish, but that's _exactly_ what is occurring here, just add 10 years. While I could certainly be patient, I'm left to wonder the following issue: if it takes them 19 months to update a driver when the OS didn't change that much, what happens when it does? Or what happens when Steinberg removes VST2.4 compatibility from Cubase? Will I have to run an older version of Cubase in addition to whatever the current one is (which I _must_ run for my business) just to use my PowerCore? This entire event, plus what I've read in the Konnekt forums, doesn't leave me with a lot of confidence in TC's ability to keep their eye on the ball.

Chris Randall
Audio Damage, Inc.
http://www.audiodamage.com

Last edited by Crandall1 (2008-05-04 08:48:09)

Everything has its beginning and once it ends. So is powercore. Once brilliant device that let our Pentium III machines to operate with ease, now obsolete piece of machinery which lacks good software due to unsufficient skills of company's programmers I suppose. By the way it is interesting how lack of good software can kill the advanced piece of machinery, which is X8, probably a decent machine.

To be honest I would not refuse the role of Powercore in our music. Most of us used it for years, mostly with good results. So did I making two commercial CDs with it. But now it seems to be over.

V

Last edited by vasylek (2008-05-04 20:01:04)

vasylek wrote:

Everything has its beginning and once it ends.
...
But now it seems to be over.

Hi everyone,

The discussions going on in the PowerCore forum in the last few days so much remind me of the posts in the audio interface forum some weeks ago.

Again, I can only stress my initial point I made further up: Nothing will change.

There of course will always be new software versions, but they will never be working 100%, which is not what you expect from gear in this price-range.

I believe the days of non-native software effects are pretty much over. Even a Core 2 Duo from more than a year ago could basically do it all. In one year from now, it won't be an issue to think about. Then all this high-priced TC hardware will not be more than an expensive dongle.

In my opinion, TC are dead already, they just haven't realised it yet. The thing that made them big was well working, rugged gear which did what it promised.

Those days are over. Face it.

Last edited by tjay (2008-05-05 11:19:17)

Thinking about it, the external DSP idea might not be dead yet. Virus Ti is effectively that (oh - and a stand-alone synth too).

Purusha wrote:

Thinking about it, the external DSP idea might not be dead yet. Virus Ti is effectively that (oh - and a stand-alone synth too).

Well, a really expensive one. So far I'm only in $500 CDN on an on-sale PCI mk1, a bundled Virus  plugin, and a multi-dsp upgrade ( $180 more ) so $680 total plus tax. A Virus TI Desktop would be over 2k new.

Purusha wrote:

As far as I know though, Virus Ti is selling by the cartload, so people obviously aren't being put off by the price.

That´s because it´s a great synth and there is no native software synth that comes close.