DJ Got Us Paralyzed With Decision-Fatigue

I’ve started learning to make electronic music. It’s kind of a crazy thing for me to take on because I don’t have a background in music. I was the one playing outside while you were taking piano lessons; it was fun at the time, but now I’m trying to learn music theory from scratch.

But I’m not going to whine about my lack of music fluency; I’m just pointing out something I’ve noticed about music software. I won't bore you with the details, but I'll just tell you that to be a bedroom producer, you'll need a piece of software called a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW.)

There's something weird about the DAW market. See, they can get pretty expensive, so the makers of DAWs usually let you try them for a limited time, or have a lesser, free version. So far, these are the ones I've tried out: 

• Garage Band
• Cakewalk
• Tracktion Waveform 
• Cubase 
• Studio One
• FL Studio 
• Ableton Live
• Reaper
• LMMS
• Bitwig
• Mixcraft
• Acid Pro
• QTractor

And there are many more I haven't tried. A few of the more famous ones: 

• Logic
• Pro Tools
• Ardour
• Reason
• Maschine

What I'm getting at is that there are a lot of options. And out of all those, only LMMS and QTractor are not-for-profit open source projects. The rest are by people trying to make money. 

This isn't modern capitalism! There should be only two options: the crappy one and the expensive one. Or maybe two nearly identical competitors, but people get really worked up arguing which is better. A bunch of these should have merged together. Some of them bought by big companies who lost interest and discontinued them. Statistically, if you have this large a group of tech companies, at least one would have been bought by Yahoo and mismanaged out of business. And either Google or Microsoft should have started their own competitor and run another half-dozen out of the industry. And what about changing focus? Every time there's a new buzzword in tech, one or two should have announced a pivot to the new paradigm, and now they're in cloud computing, cryptocurrencies, or A.I.

But no, somehow this is the one industry where there are dozens of options: synergies and economies of scale be damned. I'm not sure why. One explanation is that it's a labor of love. Music is a business that's very personal, and everyone wants to do it their way. 

Also, the market is at just the right size: there's a fair-sized market available when you consider both the pros and hobbyists. It's enough to keep each of the competitors going, but not enough to attract big companies that will wipe out the competition (save for Apple, which makes Garage Band and Logic, but being exclusive to the Mac, they won't push everyone else out of business.)

There's also a lot of nuances to the industry, where applications have grabbed their own little niche: Pro Tools has established itself as the standard for recording studios, while Ableton Live is the choice for Electronic Music. FL Studio has hip hop, and Logic is the choice of Apple worshippers. Reason is the best for people used to working with traditional electronic music equipment, and Reaper is beloved by the folks who think the best application is the one that can do anything, but in a really complicated way, and thus keep recommending Linux to your grandma.

It's also weird that visual art didn't work out this way. That industry is dominated by Adobe. And yet, you'd think that if any software customers would walk to the beat of their own drum, it would be visual artists. They'd be the ones to ignore the advantages of compatibility to get a product with the right intangibles, or one that's made by a little band of idealists. But no, they've given one giant company a near monopoly. The only ones walking to the beat of their own drum are the ones programming it on a drum machine. Okay, that was pretty corny, and I apologize; I wrote that thing about the artists walking to the beat of their own drum without even meaning to make a joke, and then felt like I had to do something with it, and it all went wrong.

So I don't entirely know why, but this is the one industry where things worked out the way I expected the future to look: Dozens of options, something for everyone.

Hyper Links

There's a new made-for-television golf event called TGL. It's a golf league, though I'm disappointed it doesn't stand for, "The Golf League." I've watched a few times, even though I'm not really a golf fan. I was just curious what it would be like. Strangely, I find it's like looking at an edgy work of art: I'm not entirely sure if I'm enjoying it, but it's so relentlessly weird that I can't look away.

The idea is to repackage golf in a smaller, more viewer-friendly format, with everything taking place in an indoor arena. The courses are all computer-simulated. The golfers tee off, hitting the ball at a big screen showing the virtual fairway. Then the computer figures out from the ball's trajectory where it would have landed. They either hit another drive at the screen, or, if the ball landed on the virtual green, they move to a big putting green, and putt from where the computer said the ball landed. The green can be warped and angled to simulate the lie.

Oh, and it's a team game of match golf.  With fifteen holes for some reason. There's a bunch of other rules that are still a mystery. They sometimes throw a hammer on the green, but I'm still figuring that one out. 

But the basic idea is that it's deconstructed golf: all the parts of golf, but dismantled and crammed into a new form. The shocking part is that I jokingly suggested something similar years ago: I saw a driving range with a mini golf course, and realized it could be a substitute for actual golf. And now, here it is, turned into a televised spectacle.

The whole thing is pretty bizarre. On the one hand, it's like the future we imagined, with people playing simulated sports, surrounded by a wildly enthusiastic audience. Throw in some mortal danger and it would be Rollerball.

But on the other hand, it's lacking in the polish you would expect future sports to have. I can't help thinking there is a weird inconsistency using technology in simulating real golf. Like you have this big mechanical surface that can morph itself into any hypothetical golf green, but it also has sand traps, and they're just plain old sand. Not computer-controlled magnets in the turf increasing the resistance to the golf club to simulate the resistance of sand. No, just a big pit full of sand.

One good thing is that many of the made-up holes are arrangements that would be hard to build in real life, like the tee and the hole are on opposite sides of a canyon. That's fun, but it loses something when it's just simulated, and you're not really watching the heartbreak of the golfer watching the shot come up short and bounce all the way down. Though it might be better if they got even more impossible, like the tee and green are on the roofs of different skyscrapers.

Of course, I'm now wondering what other sports could be deconstructed and remade like this. Auto racing would be an obvious possibility, since it's also a sport that takes up an inconvenient amount of room, and is difficult to watch live. You could have cars on giant treadmills, but that would be dangerous and loud, and even sillier. It would be better if they were just driving simulated cars. But they already have simulated racing; it's been part of eSports for a while now. While it does attract viewers, I don't foresee people packing an arena to watch it. Though it might be fun if — like the simulated golf — they had them drive on crazy, unreal courses. It would also be nice if the drivers could have a casual interaction with one another, like the golfers do in TGL. Maybe people would pay to see live racing simulation if they could hear Verstappen swearing at Hamilton, live and in person. (Lewis Hamilton is an investor in TGL, by the way.)

Of course, that introduces the idea that there would be some sort of interaction through the simulation; a way to get revenge within the sport. Okay, I've just reinvented Mario Kart, haven't I? But seriously, the world's top drivers playing Mario Kart: I would watch that.