[RWP] Audio slates in Reaper, is there any point?

[John Schucker]

No, you shouldn't do anything, but what you want. My point wasn't to say 
"see he's handed down the truth, get rid of all your hardware". But 
there's this idea that you'll see if you look at other posts he's done 
where, oh you need this crazy expensive thing, you need that specific 
hardware, you need that multi-thousand dollar plug or microphone or you 
may as well not even bother. And so what he does a lot of the time is 
test that stuff. And his point is, hey if you really don't want to spend 
thousands on a hardware console, you don't actually have to because you 
can do the same thing with the digital stuff.

Obviously, for us as blind users, we might need something different. 
Maybe hardware still gives us much better access than any given digital 
thing. But the point is, it's not a necessity, in terms of what you need 
to record. Take feel. People go oh well you need analog this and that 
because digital destroys the feel, or digital is too sterile and stuff. 
But again, a lot of that is how people use it. If you quantize all your 
drum tracks, or snap to grid or whatever, just as an example, yeah, 
you're destroying the feel, because humans don't play snapped to a grid. 
So just don't do that. I can guarantee you, you can record tracks that 
are completely out of sync with each other in digital, just like you can 
in analog. You shouldn't do that, but the point being, if you have a bad 
band recording, you can keep that badness in digital, just like analog, 
if you're so inclined. Because again, digital is just replacing tape 
with a different medium, deep down.

So by all means, if a control surface can't give you all the 
accessibility you need yet, or that plug that emulates your favorite 
compressor ever isn't accessible, or it is accessible but you think the 
hardware compressor still sounds better, by all means, go for it, buy 
yourself some hardware. I'm with Scott, if announcing takes helps your 
workflow, go for it. But like both of us said, you can essentially do 
that with your screen reader instead. And you can do that because the 
screen reader's provided us with a new way to label things. But again, 
notice at bottom, it's still doing the exact same thing as going "blah, 
take 73". That's why I was saying, digital isn't really anything 
special. I'm not trying to take away from anything it's done, it's done 
a lot. But let's remember, at base, it's still doing the exact same 
stuff hardware was doing. Recording a take is recording a take, whether 
that's on 2 In. tape, a micro cassette recorder, or your super duper 
Protools studio rig. So don't make it more mysterious than it has to be. 
It can be complicated enough already, depending on what you're trying to do.