Some good points Charlie, but following your reasoning, for the sounds I currently have available I should have a the minimum, one each of the following computers:
- Motorola OS 6 or 7 Mac
- Power PC through OSX Mac
- Intel OSX Mac
- Win3.1 PC
- Win95 PC
- WinXP PC
- Win10 PC
on my workbench.
And I would have to mix and match the sounds from each of these machines together, not to mention synchronize them.
And even in the simplest sense, if I wanted to use a great but discontinued soft synth on XP and also use a spiffy new synth sound only available on Win10, syncing them together is a major PITA.
And how many computers from the mid 1980s still are running?
My Atari, Win DOS5/Win3.1, Motorola Mac, Win 95, Win 98, Power PC Mac, and an XP or two computers have all died.
I have 1980s synths with zero moving parts that still work today. My oldest computer is a 2002 XP ThinkPad. Synths last longer than computers.
- - -
And yes, I have thousands of sounds I'll never use. I'll probably never use the helicopter, demon from hell, sitar, bottle blow, air pad, sinosound rave, cascade, shattered, and so on (but who knows). They are fine sounds, but not for me right now.
My XV5050 alone has well over a thousand sounds in it. I use about 30 of them. I bought it used for a great price, but even if I bought it new, it would be worth it for those 30 sounds. And who knows, I might want to use more if I change the kind of music I'm playing.
But yes, there will probably be thousands of sounds I'll never use.
On the other hand, I don't play every song in a music book, I don't visit every website on the Internet, I don't listen to every station on my radio, if I watched TV, I'd never watch all the cable channels, I don't watch every video from Netflix, I don't read every article on my e-newspaper, I don't use all the settings on the microwave, I don't use every app on my computers (or tablet or phone), I don't drive on every road my tax money built, I don't even use every feature in BiaB, etc.
I don't look at it as things I'm paying for and not using. I look at the things I use.
If there are enough features on a device to make it worth my money, I buy it and don't worry about the things that I don't use. Those are simply extra features for another customer, or perhaps some day I'll find a use for them.
I buy things for the benefit they bring to me, not the extra features I don't use.
And when the soft synths and XP computers are all but gone (like Win3.1 computers and Motorola Macs), my hardware synths will probably still be working. They seem to be very rugged beasts and have outlasted a number of computers already.
Insights and incites by Notes