CDM

A much more detailed and better-linked writeup: https://cdm.link/ni-insolvency/

As noted, the company has been in decline since going into private equity in 2020. Pro audio users have felt it was less and less about innovation and more about selling preset packs and slim-value upgrades, as well as increasingly onerous license management. At the same time people are distressed because the firm has a very impressive history of software and hardware products.

Inmusic (which owns Akai, Moog and several other premium pro audio brands) is a potential buyer to acquire them as they already have some product crossover in the form of NI plugins available exclusively on Akai hardware. However this would mean two flagship products that compete against each other (NI's Maschine and Akai's MPC, two very advanced drum pad/sequencing powerhouses). That would mean abandonment of Maschine, whose development was already stalled, and disappointment/bad feeling from many owners; pro audio consumers are necessarily emotional about their creative tools and tend to hold grudges.

OF course, the best of both products could be combined in a Secret Third Thing that embodied the best features of both, but the reality is that Inmusic has just released new flagship Akai MPCs (the 3rd generation of the current design paradigm), and they're such a big upgrade upgrade in both hardware and software terms that they're steamrolling their direct and indirect competition. Those flagship units (and some…

Splice[1] Studio[2] used to be version control for music software (from about 2013-2021). You could browse Ableton Live (and a few other DAWs) projects and see the tracks and rendered versions each time you saved, add metadata etc. They pivoted into the more profitable sample discovery and sales business later and dropped the less profitable studio product.

I expect over the next few years that the DAWProject[3] open source protocol for exchanging between DAWs could make it possible for some of the ideas of splice come back without having to rely heavily on undocumented binary formats.

[1]: https://splice.com/

[2]: https://cdm.link/splice-studio-is-free-backup-version-control-and-collaboration-for-your-daw/

[3]: https://github.com/bitwig/dawproject

Yes, both "master" and "slave" have been used as a pair for a long time in a number of different technical fields to describe relationships between devices. Instead of computer networking, the linked article is on a site that focuses on music technology (https://cdm.link). If you search (for example) [midi "slave"] you'll come up with a lot of hits using "slave" in a technical sense for electronic music. Here's a nice example page from that search, that goes farther to distinguish (technically and without irony) two different types of masters and slaves: https://steinberg.help/cubase_pro_artist/v10/en/cubase_nuendo/topics/synchronization/synchronization_master_and_slave_c.html.

many musicians use a stack - I sure do. It's a bunch of tools I somehow make work together.

Unless we can track down interviews with the people, I think all we have are educated guesses. It is true to say however, that these days, Amigas sell for thousands of dollars (such as https://ebay.com/itm/224602338650) because modern musicians want to use vintage tracker software in music production.

People are still putting out hardware on it. Here's something from 2020 https://cdm.link/2020/08/amiga-just-got-a-new-open-8-bit-hardware-sequencer/

> CSS was a mess, but together with React is now the best language for building GUIs.

People should stop saying this lie. To di so, they should try and look outside of the web for even a nanosecond.

Even Turbo Pascal from 1990s is a better language for describing UIs.

The "best language for building UIs" chokes on less than 1000 elements on a static page: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GF__tHjXgAAZGUA?format=jpg&name=medium

Compare that to an actual UI: https://cdm.link/app/uploads/2023/11/CleanShot-2023-11-15-at-01.18.07.png

CDs are also at risk of disc rot, which might be a non issue for hundreds of years or fail within 20 depending on the CD and storage.

From a Library of congress study:
"The mean lifetime for the disc population as a whole was calculated to be 776 years for the discs used in this study. As demonstrated in the histograms in Figures 18 and 19, that lifetime could be less than 25 years for some discs, up to 500 years for others, and even longer."

https://cdm.link/2017/02/a-generation-of-cds-is-already-rotting-and-dying/