Why oh why the technicalities?!

#1 I know what you mean. It's like the more sophisticated the program the worse the user interface is. I can just see the developers of the software saying, "If you can't figure out the user interface of the program then you wouldn't be able to comprehend what the program does."

#2 The bigger places like Autodesk/discreet maintain a staff of inhouse animators who give extensive feedback on the user interface of the modelling package.

You'll grow to appreciate the interface strategies in time. The tradeoff is that an interface designed for experts to get work done quickly is often not an ideal interface for new people to learn.

#3 I'm voting for an interface that hooks directly into your brain so when you mentally 'hear' your music, it takes shape into a score on the screen as well as using a Midi system that gets it's samples from your brain.

Any big corporations out there wanna give a shot? Please? PRETTY please?

Ben

#4 I guess you can call it the art world's equivelent to all the variables and such that there is with every programming language :)

Logan

#5 The standard answer is, of course, that the interface needs to be raw due to all the power the tool gives you. While there's some truth to it, its easy to argue that they could supply an alternate interface for newbies or some form of gradual interface ramping. Most don't do this.

My cynical answer is the interfaces are largely confusing so that a lot of money can be made on the backend in support and sales of videos & books (especially since many of these companies publish their own supplemental books/videos that don't come with the base package or officially endorse others for $$). The pathological case of this is Blender, which was given away for free, with money made on sales of the manual. Not surprisingly the UI was mind-bogglingly hard to learn, even if you were used to using other 3D tools.

Metacreations actually did a pretty good job of catering to newbies as well as professionals with their UIs, but clearly it wasn't too profitable since they don't quite exist anymore (at least not in the same way they used to). Some of their software is still available, but from different companies... And its all graphics based, not music creation.

On the subject of music software, for anyone who hasn't, I'd suggest looking into Fruity Loops for music creation. Its really on a different scale than Cubase, coming into things more like an old-school tracker than a professional sequencer, but you might be surprised how much functionality it has overall (if you've used it in the past, say a couple of years ago or so, give it another go with a recent version):

http://www.fruityloops.com/

Its easy to get started with, pretty deep in functionality, has good midi support and is very inexpensive compared to other packages.

#6 Very true George, Fruityloops is suprisingly in-depth, I can safely say I am starting to master it, but you are contantly learning.

#7 Odd, I thought Lightwave had a very nice interface myself. XSI is pretty good too. Maya's very tough to learn though. It has an infinite number of menus and options, I think it uses idle CPU time to generate more while it runs personally... And 3ds Max... Well, whoever designed that interface is just plain on crack. God I hate trying to work in in. Evil, evil thing...

Minako

#8 any of you tried Reason from Propellerheads ??? it has a great 19''-rack-GUI that is easy to get into and its sounds are brilliant.

#9 Yeah alex, have 'just' started using it. Hopefully it will help me take it to the next level :)

#10 I downloaded a demo of that but it seemed to only do techno stuff.

I still couldnt handle the interface and it's depressing because I'm such a computer nerd!

Ben