buzz forums

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esp81 wrote:wow, seriously? seek help man.

+1

Joachip wrote: One of my friends had this experience when he tried Ableton.

Me too! I love Buzz with his unique features but it is too complicated, not enough tutorials. The great interest, for me, of a commercialisation would be to use one part of the money to make a huge effort of documentation with tutorials and videos. My way was in the past years : Buzz then Samplitude then Buzz then Samplitude then Buzz, then Ableton then Buzz then Ableton (because it is difficult to leave Buzz, I always come back) and now with Ableton 9, I am lucky. I find it is faster and much more intuitive. I am more creative with it. I'm sorry.
Best regards
beuze

I am surprised that you go from Buzz to Ableton, Beuze, I was amazed at how crappy the interface of Ableton looks, i.e. the basic design of it, the tiny thin buttons, the strange use of their own (terrible) font rendering, and everything about it I absolutely hate. I can't believe they can release a supposedly 'professional' DAW like that, and seem to do everything possible to make it look as crappy as possible. When you compare its looks to the likes of Reaper or FL Studio, it astonishes me that more people aren't complaining about it, since you are, after all, LOOKING at it all day. I presume the functionality must override the terrible looking interface.

mosis wrote: I was amazed at how crappy the interface of Ableton looks,

(Excuse me, Mosis, for my bad english!)

For me, Ableton's look is classical-modern, beautiful but almost all is too tiny. I don'nt have 20 years and it is a serious problem. If I use it, it is because I have now a large screen.
I don't like the look of Reaper and FL (good for teenagers, not for me)
The look of Buzz is not particularly modern but it is no important. That is the best look of all DAWs because the Machines view is extremely relaxing, that is the more important thing for me.
And now the speed: very important for the creativity's flow. My arguments seem perhaps ridiculous because very personal : I don't like the function keys because I don't work on a table, and for me, consequently, there are already two arguments for not use Buzz : Play/Stop and Loop.
In Samplitude and Ableton Play/Stop = Spacebar, wonderful, all is very, very fast.
In Samplitude the marking procedure for looping is excellent : only select with the mouse on the timeline, that's it. In Ableton not so fast.
But the song loading's speed of Buzz is incredible. Ableton is very low, it is annoying.
I work much with samples, and that is the weak point of Buzz (OK, it is a tracker!). In Ableton it is really cool, all the waves in the left column with preview function.
The MIDI features of Ableton are cool too. Excellent piano-roll.
What makes for you the superiority of Buzz ( would you say e.g. The Buzz FX ( Joachims Comp, Automaton Eqs, Reverbs, etc...) are better than Ableton's FX?
For me the unique in Buzz is (I don't speak here of the myriad of deep functions) : Templates, Polac VSTi loader, Peer Machines, Jeskola Note Matrix. But my knowledge of Polac and the Peer Machines is partially. A simple youtube video of ALL the functions of these machines would be very helpful.
For me are Buzz and Ableton the best composition softwares, and I follow always the evolution of Buzz (the new Buzz was a really big step).

Best regards
beuze

I wouldn't wipe my ass with a screenshot of Fruity Loops's old-thinking, over-styled, and over-emphasized toy design. They've added some nice features over the years, it's just a shame the UI is so horrid.

mosis wrote: ~A BIG RANT~

Sorry, dude.

Phew!

I use Ableton a lot. And I don't find it to be ugly looking. The truth is Ableton is one hell of a live DAW, you can loop anything on the fly to the set BPM, which opens a world of functionality when it comes to live performances. Also gotta love the Ableton zoom.. Buzz for the heavy tweaking, Live for live. This does not have to become "the DAW haters association". Buzz is still one of a kind (although Max/DSP…), but it can't do everything. I've been using the Harrison Mixbus too, it's been on sale for $25 on Don'tCrack for months. Great >>sounding<< DAW. Long live Buzz!

P.S. Valance Drakes uses Fruity.

not enough tutorials

this is definitely an aspect of buzz which could be improved by the community. there are a lot of great buzz tutorials out there, but not enough, and a lot of them are outdated. buzz is definitely complicated, but no more than any other daw or tracker, i would even argue that buzz is less complicated and easier to use than other daw software (in my experience anyway).

the documentation could use an update, the wiki needs some love. i look at projects like mixxx and think about how far buzz could go with that kind of organization of effort, and mixxx is free. if you take projects like that into account and look at how much has been documented, changed, and accomplished by the community, all on a volunteer basis, it takes the question of commercialization and throws it out the window.

buzz might be a little too casual for that kind of management, but with a little direction i bet we could at the least improve on the documentation.

if somebody would just make a buzz dubstep tutorial it would positively explode.

Funnily enough I've also found the online & offline guides for Buzz vs Ableton to be quite the eye opener. Earlier this year I finally took the plunge and bought Ableton 9 - I'd been tracking since '92-ish so it was quite the change ! Though whereas the resources for getting help on Buzz are pretty much just limited to this place (and probably around a dozen Youtube tutorials tops), you can barely move on the internet for Ableton videos / text tutorials, downloadable step-by-step resources, books.

I mean that's not to say any is better or worse - just that whereas back in the early '00s I was blindly hooking machines together and finding my way 'round the GUI (took me about 5 years to finally get my head around Peer Machines !), within a very short period of time everything in Ableton was pretty much doable (or within seconds Google-able!)

Bloody love Buzz though, keep going back to the thing and wishing I could somehow merge the workflow of both DAWs together. I'm just so much quicker knocking together something quickly in Buzz than in Ableton (I guess over a decades use would do that !)

mcbpete wrote: Earlier this year I finally took the plunge and bought Ableton 9 - I'd been tracking since '92-ish so it was quite the change !

Bloody love Buzz though, keep going back to the thing and wishing I could somehow merge the workflow of both DAWs together. I'm just so much quicker knocking together something quickly in Buzz than in Ableton (I guess over a decades use would do that !)

I too bought Ableton Standard at the Sales over xmas, big change like you said but I'm just getting to the point where I need really good audio and automation support so I had to take the plunge. Besides FL, which I don't rate, it's can at times be close in ideals of Buzz (pattern based sequencing for example, which is really what got me interested in the first place). Ableton is far from perfect though and I still fire up buzz occaisonally to play around or punch out some quick ideas/loops - I still prefer programming beats in Buzz! And when you start using Ableton you certainly appreciate how well optimised Buzz and Polac VSTi loader is, my brand new i7 4770k w/ SSD, 16GB RAM & RME 9632 PCI Interface is regularly bought to its knees once things get going! That would never happen in Buzz

How good would be to be able to load Buzz into Ableton as a VSTi or something

Absolutely - if that were to happen.... Well I couldn't imagine a more perfect DAW combo.
It's the programming really that I'm struggling to make the transition with. I was so quick in Buzz in laying down ideas with the trusty ol' step sequencer, but Ableton's Pianoroll is just such a different mindset I feel like I'm learning to make music from scratch again.

Apparently the guys who make Renoise are working on a thing called Redux which is going to be like a tracker interface that works directly with any DAW (rather than the current method of having to use Rewire), there's also reViSiT which treats an Impulse Tracker clone as a VSTi, but I've not tried that yet ....