Computer Music magazine helped me understand the basics of how to setup a DIY digital recording studio in 2001-2002. Around this time, I was reading a CM article about trade schools for learning audio engineering and saw one mentioned in Emeryville, CA (Expression Digital Arts, or similar; they've had many name changes). I alreadu wanted to move to the Bay Area and it turned out to be across from San Francisco (Berkeley and Oakland adjacent). I called admissions the next day and had an appointment to tour the facilities by lunch. I flew out a month later for the tour.
It was the fastest progression from idea to execution on any major decision in my life. It was one of the best decisions I ever made. I didn’t complete the program, but got what I needed for my own musicianship and production. Music never got beyond a hobby, but I learned a great deal there. Later, I was well-placed geographically to enter a career in tech.
I’ll miss these magazines, even though I’ve rarely bought physical copies in the last decade. I've got multiple boxes of issues going back many years because even as the software changed, the tips on mixing techniques were timeless. It’s the end of an era.
Not everything on the internet is "half-assed Wikihow articles or one-size-fits-all OpenAI-hallucinated slop." If that's your view of all internet content I recommend learning to find good information, which is more accessible and prevalent than anytime in history. That is why magazines are dying - the interent provides anything a magazine does, but with more depth, more solid authors, and more accessible.
If a magazine article is too shallow, or above your head, or below your level, then you're stuck. But with the internet and basic searching skills, you can find any level of content, in writing, in video, with projects and how-to's, detailed explanations, teardowns, DIYs stuf, fundamental technical specs and protocols, and on and on.
And not everyone lived in New York or London. Your average bookshop in a Dutch provincial town wasn't carrying this magazine lol.
(The internet opened up the world for all of us living in the boonies- Amsterdam was a 2 hour train ride away.
I barely knew Japan existed until I could pirate Gundam and Naruto from Kazaa).
I routinely find the stuff I want on the first page of search, solid, deep content. Do people simply not know how to search?
Most any topic has a wikipedia article on page 1, which is always a good gateway to learn an intro to something, and usually has links to much deeper content.
Some tests:
"chess" returns all pretty good content.
"electronic music" - all good stuff, from wikipedia, to subreddits on EDM and related, to encyc britannica, and one news story.
"how to cook salmon" - again all really good stuff: first few are simple and correct recipes, then a few videos, some reddit topics. Not a single crappy link.
"who is quincy jones" - wikipedia hit top, news that he died today (quite a good set of links, no crackpot sites), his website, his instagram, National Endowment of the Arts link, encyclopedia britannica link. "does quantum entanglement violate local realism?" All good. Even pop stuff like "does taylor swift or the beatles have more grammys" has all good, solid hits: wikipedia, grammy.com, reddit post, quora, forbes, NYT,BBC, popvortex with a list of all grammys. Every link answered the question, is not wikihow, and is not AI generated.
Yep, as I expected. My guess is you didn't actually try and just made a claim without evidence.
Give me some topics for which the "the vast majority of content and most certainly the most common content the major search engines serve up" is "half-assed Wikihow articles or one-size-fits-all OpenAI-hallucinated slop."
I found zero out of dozens of links on some widespread topic checks.
I'm still sad whenever I think about ACM Queue halting print, it was a window into such a different way of thinking to teenage self taught PHP idiot me and the print format helped me slow down and think since I already had plenty to do and read online.
They gave it all up. Major publishers had teams of sales people with deep relationships with all of the ad spenders. They gave that up to doubleclick so they could sell eyeballs to purveyors of penis enhancement drugs for $0.25 per eyeball. Then per 1000 eyeballs, then per 1000 clicks.
Then they let Google scrape everything for SEO.
They never should have followed online content, they should have led.
if we didn't have the rat race everyone could just contribute the best knowledge and content and free software to the world. but instead of fixing the rat race we focus on literally everything else to conform to it.
If you're interested, Tape Op and Sound On Sound still offer subscriptions and have catered to the (more sensible) pro market for decades. FM has been an outlier, though I have good memories of ripping samples from their cover CDs in the 90s.
RIP magazines. The tutorials in Future Music and Computer Music were excellent. Curated downloads were nice also (and could often be used in the tutorials.) And guitar technique tutorials are basically timeless.
I actually enjoy reading ads (not to mention reviews and tutorials for various products) in music magazines. It's disappointing that companies seem to have switched to junky web ads instead.
>I actually enjoy reading ads (not to mention reviews and tutorials for various products) in music magazines. It's disappointing that companies seem to have switched to junky web ads instead.
One of the things I miss most from physical media is the sense of discovery it brought, we saw ads or unexpected articles related to the magazine thematic, products or services that you didn’t know existed, same with books, browsing the shelves of the bookstore you found something new that drew you attention on the record store flipping vinyls you saw some weird album art and decided to give it a listening. Now you get ads for things you already bought or the same 5 books everyone sees because they’re “trending”, you have infinite music at your fingertips and yet get the same 10 tracks suggested every time.
The Martin Garrix interview they linked to was kinda famous for blatantly showing him using pirated software plugins: https://youtu.be/CfCmoEixxro?t=558
Just goes to show, you might build the tool that makes the next club banger or viral social platform, but good luck making anyone, pros or hobbyists, pay for it.
Between 2005 - 2010, many studios also had "a lot of water" in their computers, so to speak. (Referring to Team H2O)
Incidents like these are unfortunately common among famous electronic music producers. Your comment reminded me of Steve Aoki being caught with a pirated copy of Sylenth1.[1] I recall hearing that he obtained a legitimate license for the software afterwards.
Lastly, I recall the Sylenth1 developer around 2012 - 2015 encouraging people on Twitter to purchase the software rather than pirate it. Not sure how they found tweets mentioning piracy of the plugin, but I do think the plugin is reasonably priced compared to other plugins. Moreover, the license is perpetual.
It unfortunately leads to subscription models. That doesn't directly prevent piracy, but the lower entry cost and the potential for regular "value add" will keep more people paying up (see Reason+, Slate Digital, Roland Cloud, Splice, etc)
How so? I always figured it was simply a decryption service/library with the dongle serving as a the secret. So e.g. samples (or important information about the samples) can only be read when the dongle is present. Is that view too simple?
I'm only able to go by what R2R put in their .nfos, since I've not tried reverse engineering ilok plugins at all. But they claim that different companies use different ilok algorithms, and some of them haven't been cracked, yet.
Some seem to work a little like what you say, UVIs for example decrypt libraries against the ilok, and R2R has UVIEMU for that, but clearly it's not sufficient to crack all ilok plugins that way, or Softube's wouldn't remain uncracked.
And since ilok doesn't require a dongle anymore - there are machine and cloud licensing options too, and developers can opt in or out to each of the 3 license holder systems...
No. It's always interesting to me how music apps were the only ones adopting hardware copy protection wholeheartedly. Multi-thousand dollar scientific apps? nope. Music apps.
That’s not surprising at all. I don’t about the scientific apps you’re talking about, but I assume that their user base would be accessing them through academic site licenses. Music apps, however, would be predominantly used by hobbyists, a few of which would later make it big. The problem was/is that the price tags assumed studio budgets. But if you wanted those studio sounds at home, well the price is a big challenge until you start making solid money. Which is even fewer
Didn’t CAD automation software also adopt it? I remember MasterCam, SolidWorks and others needing hardware dongles.
The market for that is tiny compared to music but, the money made basically guaranteed given adoption rates. Even today I think there are too few contenders to pose a significant market risk to these companies.
They did. I worked in a technical college in the 90s and Autodesk and others were huge fans of the single plugged into the serial port. Was a huge problem not only daisy chaining them all together but also they would get stolen if not secured. We’d ribbon cable them back inside the case where’d there would be a many inches of dongle precariously joined. Fond memories.
I think these have modernised, because SolidWorks now uses floating e-licenses for example.
From a consumer perspective hardware dongles are mega-problematic right now because of the USB C vs USB A debacle on new laptops, and also because many AVs now block USB devices by default and require ITS admin to unblock it.
From a distributor perspective, they require shipping physical product to customers which reduces margins and can take weeks, especially-so when you talk about shipping from overseas.
Haha, surely he can afford to pay for VSTs. And Sylenth1 (a classic and still eminently usable soft synth) is reasonably priced and worth paying for.
I have a bit of sympathy though, since managing plugin licensing is a total pain. Licenses seem to break randomly, or after any OS security patch or DAW update/bug fix, and then your project no longer runs properly. Kind of the last thing you want if you are a practicing or performing musician.
If I were him I'd consider using the pirate versions for reliability/usability but paying for new licenses yearly in order to support the plugin developers.
IMO things have changed a lot since then. Plenty of audio dev companies that didn't exist back then are thriving.
It's anecdotal but people around me are less inclined to install pirated stuff than 20+ years ago. The risk to install some malware and the consequences are higher than they were back then.
Are the risks really higher? Somehow it seems that with specialized private trackers having more prominence and public trackers like pirate bay and KAT dying out, there's actually less chance of malware because pirated content is more curated.
Why are print magazines dead, but print comics still doing so well?
I only really got into comics in the last year or so. I'm blown away by just how many different comics come out each week. They have really well done artwork, and usually contain minimal ads, at least compared to modern websites.
Granted, there's fewer pages per comic. But something tells me that the level of effort is as much or more than most print magazines, due to the artwork.
Future Music was a rare buy for me. It was always $15-$20, which is a lot to spend for a magazine that was 70% advertising in one form or another, 29% beginner how-tos, and 1% "we figured out something that might be useful to you"
Sure, the sample/vst dvds are nice enough, but if the magazine cost $8, the way it should, I wouldn't have bought the dvds for $12 separately.
Computer Music magazine helped me understand the basics of how to setup a DIY digital recording studio in 2001-2002. Around this time, I was reading a CM article about trade schools for learning audio engineering and saw one mentioned in Emeryville, CA (Expression Digital Arts, or similar; they've had many name changes). I alreadu wanted to move to the Bay Area and it turned out to be across from San Francisco (Berkeley and Oakland adjacent). I called admissions the next day and had an appointment to tour the facilities by lunch. I flew out a month later for the tour.
It was the fastest progression from idea to execution on any major decision in my life. It was one of the best decisions I ever made. I didn’t complete the program, but got what I needed for my own musicianship and production. Music never got beyond a hobby, but I learned a great deal there. Later, I was well-placed geographically to enter a career in tech.
I’ll miss these magazines, even though I’ve rarely bought physical copies in the last decade. I've got multiple boxes of issues going back many years because even as the software changed, the tips on mixing techniques were timeless. It’s the end of an era.
RIP magazines. Sad to think that they will be replaced with half-assed Wikihow articles or one-size-fits-all OpenAI-hallucinated slop.
Not everything on the internet is "half-assed Wikihow articles or one-size-fits-all OpenAI-hallucinated slop." If that's your view of all internet content I recommend learning to find good information, which is more accessible and prevalent than anytime in history. That is why magazines are dying - the interent provides anything a magazine does, but with more depth, more solid authors, and more accessible.
If a magazine article is too shallow, or above your head, or below your level, then you're stuck. But with the internet and basic searching skills, you can find any level of content, in writing, in video, with projects and how-to's, detailed explanations, teardowns, DIYs stuf, fundamental technical specs and protocols, and on and on.
And not everyone lived in New York or London. Your average bookshop in a Dutch provincial town wasn't carrying this magazine lol.
(The internet opened up the world for all of us living in the boonies- Amsterdam was a 2 hour train ride away. I barely knew Japan existed until I could pirate Gundam and Naruto from Kazaa).
Not everything, but at this point it’s the vast majority of content and most certainly the most common content the major search engines serve up.
Vast majority? That needs some proof.
I routinely find the stuff I want on the first page of search, solid, deep content. Do people simply not know how to search?
Most any topic has a wikipedia article on page 1, which is always a good gateway to learn an intro to something, and usually has links to much deeper content.
Some tests: "chess" returns all pretty good content. "electronic music" - all good stuff, from wikipedia, to subreddits on EDM and related, to encyc britannica, and one news story. "how to cook salmon" - again all really good stuff: first few are simple and correct recipes, then a few videos, some reddit topics. Not a single crappy link. "who is quincy jones" - wikipedia hit top, news that he died today (quite a good set of links, no crackpot sites), his website, his instagram, National Endowment of the Arts link, encyclopedia britannica link. "does quantum entanglement violate local realism?" All good. Even pop stuff like "does taylor swift or the beatles have more grammys" has all good, solid hits: wikipedia, grammy.com, reddit post, quora, forbes, NYT,BBC, popvortex with a list of all grammys. Every link answered the question, is not wikihow, and is not AI generated.
Yep, as I expected. My guess is you didn't actually try and just made a claim without evidence.
Give me some topics for which the "the vast majority of content and most certainly the most common content the major search engines serve up" is "half-assed Wikihow articles or one-size-fits-all OpenAI-hallucinated slop."
I found zero out of dozens of links on some widespread topic checks.
Good luck.
I'm still sad whenever I think about ACM Queue halting print, it was a window into such a different way of thinking to teenage self taught PHP idiot me and the print format helped me slow down and think since I already had plenty to do and read online.
Too bad we could never figure out monetization and attention economy competition for publishing
They gave it all up. Major publishers had teams of sales people with deep relationships with all of the ad spenders. They gave that up to doubleclick so they could sell eyeballs to purveyors of penis enhancement drugs for $0.25 per eyeball. Then per 1000 eyeballs, then per 1000 clicks.
Then they let Google scrape everything for SEO.
They never should have followed online content, they should have led.
I think Wikipedia filled that niche pretty well.
if we didn't have the rat race everyone could just contribute the best knowledge and content and free software to the world. but instead of fixing the rat race we focus on literally everything else to conform to it.
Time to put glue on that pizza, folks.
If you're interested, Tape Op and Sound On Sound still offer subscriptions and have catered to the (more sensible) pro market for decades. FM has been an outlier, though I have good memories of ripping samples from their cover CDs in the 90s.
Yes, and the fact that Tape Op subscriptions are free (at least for the US) is mind-boggling.
others too
> Sources have also informed MusicTech that Future will be closing Computer Music, Total Guitar, Guitar Techniques and Guitar Player magazines.
RIP magazines. The tutorials in Future Music and Computer Music were excellent. Curated downloads were nice also (and could often be used in the tutorials.) And guitar technique tutorials are basically timeless.
I actually enjoy reading ads (not to mention reviews and tutorials for various products) in music magazines. It's disappointing that companies seem to have switched to junky web ads instead.
>I actually enjoy reading ads (not to mention reviews and tutorials for various products) in music magazines. It's disappointing that companies seem to have switched to junky web ads instead.
One of the things I miss most from physical media is the sense of discovery it brought, we saw ads or unexpected articles related to the magazine thematic, products or services that you didn’t know existed, same with books, browsing the shelves of the bookstore you found something new that drew you attention on the record store flipping vinyls you saw some weird album art and decided to give it a listening. Now you get ads for things you already bought or the same 5 books everyone sees because they’re “trending”, you have infinite music at your fingertips and yet get the same 10 tracks suggested every time.
I’ll miss Guitar Techniques. I feel like they missed the boat and should have integrated with Soundslice…
YouTube has some great players, but I’d often search for guitarists from Guitar Techniques that YouTube algorithms hadn’t played for me yet.
The Martin Garrix interview they linked to was kinda famous for blatantly showing him using pirated software plugins: https://youtu.be/CfCmoEixxro?t=558
Here he's using Sylenth1 licensed to "Team A.I.R." ...a well-known VST piracy org: https://audiosex.pro/threads/team-air.41932/
Just goes to show, you might build the tool that makes the next club banger or viral social platform, but good luck making anyone, pros or hobbyists, pay for it.
You mean Team AiR ;)
Between 2005 - 2010, many studios also had "a lot of water" in their computers, so to speak. (Referring to Team H2O)
Incidents like these are unfortunately common among famous electronic music producers. Your comment reminded me of Steve Aoki being caught with a pirated copy of Sylenth1.[1] I recall hearing that he obtained a legitimate license for the software afterwards.
Lastly, I recall the Sylenth1 developer around 2012 - 2015 encouraging people on Twitter to purchase the software rather than pirate it. Not sure how they found tweets mentioning piracy of the plugin, but I do think the plugin is reasonably priced compared to other plugins. Moreover, the license is perpetual.
[1] https://torrentfreak.com/avicii-and-other-djs-produce-hits-u...
It unfortunately leads to subscription models. That doesn't directly prevent piracy, but the lower entry cost and the potential for regular "value add" will keep more people paying up (see Reason+, Slate Digital, Roland Cloud, Splice, etc)
Idk. Was ilok ever cracked?
There's no one 'ilok' protection scheme, there are many. And most of them have been cracked.
How so? I always figured it was simply a decryption service/library with the dongle serving as a the secret. So e.g. samples (or important information about the samples) can only be read when the dongle is present. Is that view too simple?
I'm only able to go by what R2R put in their .nfos, since I've not tried reverse engineering ilok plugins at all. But they claim that different companies use different ilok algorithms, and some of them haven't been cracked, yet.
Some seem to work a little like what you say, UVIs for example decrypt libraries against the ilok, and R2R has UVIEMU for that, but clearly it's not sufficient to crack all ilok plugins that way, or Softube's wouldn't remain uncracked.
And since ilok doesn't require a dongle anymore - there are machine and cloud licensing options too, and developers can opt in or out to each of the 3 license holder systems...
Yes, by R2R
No. It's always interesting to me how music apps were the only ones adopting hardware copy protection wholeheartedly. Multi-thousand dollar scientific apps? nope. Music apps.
That’s not surprising at all. I don’t about the scientific apps you’re talking about, but I assume that their user base would be accessing them through academic site licenses. Music apps, however, would be predominantly used by hobbyists, a few of which would later make it big. The problem was/is that the price tags assumed studio budgets. But if you wanted those studio sounds at home, well the price is a big challenge until you start making solid money. Which is even fewer
Didn’t CAD automation software also adopt it? I remember MasterCam, SolidWorks and others needing hardware dongles.
The market for that is tiny compared to music but, the money made basically guaranteed given adoption rates. Even today I think there are too few contenders to pose a significant market risk to these companies.
They did. I worked in a technical college in the 90s and Autodesk and others were huge fans of the single plugged into the serial port. Was a huge problem not only daisy chaining them all together but also they would get stolen if not secured. We’d ribbon cable them back inside the case where’d there would be a many inches of dongle precariously joined. Fond memories.
I think these have modernised, because SolidWorks now uses floating e-licenses for example.
From a consumer perspective hardware dongles are mega-problematic right now because of the USB C vs USB A debacle on new laptops, and also because many AVs now block USB devices by default and require ITS admin to unblock it.
From a distributor perspective, they require shipping physical product to customers which reduces margins and can take weeks, especially-so when you talk about shipping from overseas.
CAD/CAM has mostly been FlexLM protected for as long as I remember. Flex used a hardware dongle for a while, but then moved away from it.
Haha, surely he can afford to pay for VSTs. And Sylenth1 (a classic and still eminently usable soft synth) is reasonably priced and worth paying for.
I have a bit of sympathy though, since managing plugin licensing is a total pain. Licenses seem to break randomly, or after any OS security patch or DAW update/bug fix, and then your project no longer runs properly. Kind of the last thing you want if you are a practicing or performing musician.
If I were him I'd consider using the pirate versions for reliability/usability but paying for new licenses yearly in order to support the plugin developers.
IMO things have changed a lot since then. Plenty of audio dev companies that didn't exist back then are thriving.
It's anecdotal but people around me are less inclined to install pirated stuff than 20+ years ago. The risk to install some malware and the consequences are higher than they were back then.
Are the risks really higher? Somehow it seems that with specialized private trackers having more prominence and public trackers like pirate bay and KAT dying out, there's actually less chance of malware because pirated content is more curated.
Yes: https://www.welivesecurity.com/2019/06/20/loudminer-mining-c...
Maybe but otoh we now have so much critical information stored in our computers (credit cards, personal documents, passwords, etc).
Why are print magazines dead, but print comics still doing so well?
I only really got into comics in the last year or so. I'm blown away by just how many different comics come out each week. They have really well done artwork, and usually contain minimal ads, at least compared to modern websites.
Granted, there's fewer pages per comic. But something tells me that the level of effort is as much or more than most print magazines, due to the artwork.
information has an expiration date, unlike art
Future Music was a rare buy for me. It was always $15-$20, which is a lot to spend for a magazine that was 70% advertising in one form or another, 29% beginner how-tos, and 1% "we figured out something that might be useful to you"
Sure, the sample/vst dvds are nice enough, but if the magazine cost $8, the way it should, I wouldn't have bought the dvds for $12 separately.
Was a big fan of PC Format in the mid 90s ;)
Until some point: I wonder if the their style changed too much or I as a teenager changed too much?
Or those vibes carried on somewhere else?
Any magazines worth subscribing to still, tech focused or not? I literally only get spam and christmas card from mom in my mailbox.
2600 is worth subscribing to. You can do it electronically or in print. You can even buy a lifetime subscription for $260.