WHAT IS FENDER STUDIO PRO 8 ??????

[Crossinger]

I can absolutely blame Fender for taking my Professional production suite that I've spent 15 years learning since the first version and butchering its ongoing development to chase money.

Well within my rights there.

Your rights end where mine begin, and vice versa. That's how mutual respect works.
If you have to destroy something which is already thriving in order to cater to someone else's needs, you're doing it wrong.

Of course, I don't want to deny you your right to complain. On the other hand, I see it this way:

1. The market for “professionals” is small—even Apple can't survive on professionals alone. You have to target the mass market.
2. Sales are only possible through volume; the more licenses sold, the better. This applies to the army of amateur and hobby musicians, “producers”, beatmakers, etc. out there.
3. Fender Studio Pro (Studio One) didn't become a toy overnight. The new features may not appeal to you, but they definitely add value for others.
4. There have also been features in the past (ATMOS, for example) that were aimed purely at the professional market and were of no interest to hobbyists.

 

[Surf.Whammy]

Fender Studio Pro 8 is more iconic than PreSonus Studio One Pro 7.2.3.

[NOTE: An icon is an audio or visual object that you understand after the first time you hear or see it, like a Traffic Light, Stop Sign, AT&T Long Distance Tone or iPhone Incoming Message Tone. The stylized Coca-Cola name is iconic, as are the McDonald's Golden Arches, and the Kick Drum, Snare Drum, and Bass in the Intro to "Billie Jean" (Michael Jackson). ]

The Graphic User Interface (GUI) for Fender Studio Pro 8 is crisper and more intuitive, with one of the obvious improvements being what happens when you double-click on a Channel or a Track in the Mixer. This is an elegant bit of GUI designing and software engineering, and it's a new GUI behavior.

Being able to click on a Channel Tab to see that Channel's Inserts is icing on the cake and makes this a "goto" feature for me, since I use VST effect plug-ins instead of the Channel volume sliders to set levels (more precise and less visually cluttered, plus it makes the LED level indicators meaningful and consistent).

Once you learn how a VST effect plug-in works, you can make a lot of changes without needing to see the VST effect plug-in's GUI, although there are times when you want to see its GUI. This new behavior is going to save me a lot of time and make it possible to focus more on the music and less on messing with computer stuff.

For reference, as a degreed Computer Scientist and a software engineer starting with the first version of Windows in January 1987 or thereabout and then in 2001 becoming fascinated with macOS and Aqua followed by switching to the Mac, in part after being vastly annoyed when Microsoft ruined Visual Basic with the ".NET" mess and, of course, by the introduction of the original iPod which required an Apple computer, I assure you the "double-click Channel Overview" feature represents hundreds of hours of individual work by each of the graphic designers, software engineers, and quality assurance experts.

The information is available--which we know because it's used in Automation--so it's not a mystery; but getting the information, packaging it, and making it happen smoothly and intuitively is a lot of designing, developing, building, and testing work.

 

[TimC340]

While I very much like the Channel Overview, I do hope that it will become possible for third-party VSTs to have dedicated GUIs in that view, similar to the native ones. The controls included in the generic GUIs are arbitrary and, while they can be edited, there simply isn't room to get a representative set of controls on to that GUI as they are formatted just now. Yes, it's a simple task to open the full VST GUI, but for the Channel Overview to reach its potential, getting more controls accessible is key.

 

[Crossinger]

While I very much like the Channel Overview, I do hope that it will become possible for third-party VSTs to have dedicated GUIs in that view, similar to the native ones.

I think this requires additional code on the plugin side. And while this is not entirely impossible (some 3rd party dynamics plugins support the compression indicator in the mixer), it requires additional effort by the developer for a single DAW. Also it is unclear if Fender/Presonus has disclosed the necessary technical details.

 

[TonalDynamics]

Of course, I don't want to deny you your right to complain. On the other hand, I see it this way:

1. The market for “professionals” is small—even Apple can't survive on professionals alone. You have to target the mass market.
2. Sales are only possible through volume; the more licenses sold, the better. This applies to the army of amateur and hobby musicians, “producers”, beatmakers, etc. out there.
3. Fender Studio Pro (Studio One) didn't become a toy overnight. The new features may not appeal to you, but they definitely add value for others.
4. There have also been features in the past (ATMOS, for example) that were aimed purely at the professional market and were of no interest to hobbyists.

You're strawmanning though, I never said they shouldn't pursue those markets, I said they have sabotaged Studio One Pro to do this.
'Fender Studio' could have entirely been its own product, and it's what many of us here believed would happen.
Atmos happened in 6.5 my guy. The features/updates aimed at PROs since then have been scant.

The market for “professionals” is small—even Apple can't survive on professionals alone. You have to target the mass market.

You can do that in a separate product without neutering the development of an existing, thriving DAW in an attempt to appeal to noobies.

You can be exceptional or you can have mass appeal; very few products or services of any sort ever manage to do both, they all gravitate towards one business model or the other.

So it's not 'let's cater to the PRO and hobbyist market', it's 'let's cater to hobbyists and guitar players while leaving professionals out in the cold because we have bigger fish to fry'

The Fender CEO made this crystal clear shortly after the acquisition.

 

[TimC340]

That CEO is now in the process of clearing his desk, so I'd anticipate a change of style over the next year or so!

I do agree that Fender could and probably should have introduced a tier structure for the DAW family that could have introduced a more entry-level and guitarist-focussed PC/Mac/Linux product to interface with the Fender Studio mobile product, while still bringing those guitar-focussed features into the flagship DAW. The renaming was perhaps inevitable, but it could have been handled so much better by priming the existing user base through pre-release communication. But communication has never been PreSonus's style.

 

[Davey]

I said they have sabotaged Studio One Pro

You've got a funny definition of sabotage. All Fender have done so far is taken what would probably have been Studio One V7.5, stuck a Fender badge on it and called it version 8. There are some decent tweaks and fixes in there as well as some new plugins we probably didn't need but can choose to ignore or use.

I think you need to wait to see the next major update or two before declaring it as sabotage.

 

[TonalDynamics]

You've got a funny definition of sabotage. All Fender have done so far is taken what would probably have been Studio One V7.5, stuck a Fender badge on it and called it version 8. There are some decent tweaks and fixes in there as well as some new plugins we probably didn't need but can choose to ignore or use.

I think you need to wait to see the next major update or two before declaring it as sabotage.

I'm talking about what they've done since version 7 dude...

 

[Crossinger]

Atmos happened in 6.5 my guy. The features/updates aimed at PROs since then have been scant.

You can do that in a separate product without neutering the development of an existing, thriving DAW in an attempt to appeal to noobies.

I know that this was 6.5. It was an example, and I agree that the development of v7 was lackluster for pros and hobbyists alike.

'Fender Studio' could have entirely been its own product, and it's what many of us here believed would happen.

Who is "us"? I didn't believe a split second that this would happen. Presonus (the Hamburg developer team) doesn't have the capacities to maintain two distinct versions in the long run. That might work for corporate sized Yamaha/Steinberg with Cubase (which even has Artist and Entry level versions) and Nuendo.

And generally speaking: I have a hard time getting what you mean with "professional" versions. If you earn money with the tool, then you are a professional. In the same way as others produce high selling music with Ableton Live, Bitwig, Fruity Loops.

Studio One seemingly did work for you in the past and paid your bills - fine! But even for professionals the hackneyed saying applies: Buy it for what it is today, not for what it might be in the future.

The Fender CEO made this crystal clear shortly after the acquisition.

That CEO is history now: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-rel...ts-new-chief-executive-officer-302653600.html