Do you use any 10-year-old software?

[rasputin1963]

 

Generally it's thought that software just keeps getting better and better,   easily eclipsing any software that might have come before it.

 

But do you have some "pet" software that's now quite old (in Internet years) ?   Hanging onto it because it does its unique thing quite well,    and nothing better has replaced it?

 

I still use Craig Anderton's QUADRAFUZZ DX  plugin for DAW's .    I just like its sound and its intuitive GUI.   It must be about 10 years old now,  if not older.

 

You?

[nat whilk II]

Oh yeah, I use some pretty old stuff here and there.  My first purchase of Native Instrument's Komplete was Komplete 2 in 2004.  So that's almost 10 years.  Some of the VSTs from that release have been phased out (Pro53, Spektral Delay, B4) but I've still got them loaded up for occasional use.

 

I'm actually toying with the idea of putting together a frankenstein PC that can run Windows 95/98 so I can revive my old Korg Oasys PCI card.  And play Myst while I'm at it. I've still got a bunch of old games lying around in storage

 

Oh yeah, I'm still using Office 2003, too.  Why bother with climbing a learning curve in order to accomplish the exact same tasks with no gain in efficiency?? 

 

nat whilk ii

[MrKnobs]

Much of my sofware is ten years old or nearly so.  I have MxView for my MX2424 hard disk recorder, which thankfully still runs in legacy mode under XP.  For that matter, my XP is probably ten years old and my MS Office is 2002!  

I have a copy of Smaart audio analysis software that is SUPER expensive, I sure don't want to have buy an update for that.  My copy of Adobe Photoshop is CS2, which is probably 10 years old also.

And you know what? All of this old stuff still works just fine.  MS is nice enough to supply converters so I can read new Office documents, so I'm all set.

I remember my big boss at work (who is not a computer guy) why we shouldn't retire a computer we had with Windows NT on it.  It was a server, running a training program for another government agency.  They'd paid us a lot of money to develop that software for them, but my boss's issue was that they weren't paying us anything to maintain it.  I told him, "That works out just right as we're not paying anything to maintain it."

He first tried this approach:  "Terry, the software is obsolete, and the computer will eventually break."  I explained to him that a computer will still do what it does for decades, still run the same programs, still work.  Any part of the computer can be replaced fairly inexpensively and, as long as we have the weekly backup, it'll be right back where it was short of a nuclear war.

So he tried the other approach.  "They paid us to develop this software, they're using it for free!  Shouldn't they pay us some more money?"  I said "Yeah, and they will, when they decide they want more training modules put on it.  That's when we bring up the old, obsolete computer issue and ask for money for new hardware.  Think of it this way:  are they more likely to give us money if we cut them off and upset them or if they're using the software and think wouldn't it be nice if...."

Old is good.  Still does what you need, don't fix it.  Go new when you need some new function.  Let the application you want done drive the software purchase, then let the software you need to run drive the hardware purchase."

Terry D.

[blue2blue]

You bet. I'm not sure how much, but plenty. You have to keep in mind that my primary, my desktop, is from 2006.

Probably the oldest full application I use is Ecco, an outliner with personal organizer aspirations. It's from 1993, for Windows 3.1, and the company's been out of business for a while, but the software has been updated and extended in a defacto open source style by a few different coders to do things like allow it to work with the Internet, etc.

 

[Geoff Grace]

It's hard to have that kind of backward compatibility on Mac machines because of the migration first to UNIX based OS X and then to Intel hardware. Early versions of OS X had a Classic wrapper for OS 9 applications. When Apple migrated to Intel hardware, they dropped the Classic wrapper. Early Intel versions of OS X had a Rosetta wrapper for Power PC Mac OS X software; but Apple dropped that support with OS X Lion a couple of years ago.

I'm currently running both Lion and the last version of OS X that can access Rosetta programs, so it's possible that I have software that's nearly a decade old but no older than that.

That said, I have plenty of software upgrades of programs I originally purchased back in the '90s

[Lee Knight]

Vox Studio is a Telephony audio converter program. It's 10. No other program offers ALL of the telephony IVR files types that it does. Sun, Dialogic, Mu-law and all of their permeatations. That software has made me a living.

 

They've recently updated it so I will be putting the new one on a new win 7 machine. But you can bet I won't be tossing the old box with the legacy version.

[Mark L]

The 16-track that I use is about 10 years old

 

[MikeRivers]

Quite a bit. I've been using Lotus 1-2-3 with a general ledger macro-based template to keep my business books for probably 25 years. I tried to migrate it to Excel but some of the macros don't translate and I'm not smart enough to modify it myself. I haven't found an equivalent for Excel that's as useful for me as this one.

I'm pretty much using Sound Forge for straightforward audio editing since it's now integrated pretty nicely with CD burning,, but I still like Fast Edit.

My FTP client of choice is WS_FTP95LE. I got it to move files between my Mackie HDR24/96 and the computer and it still works, at least through WinXP. Haven't tried it under Win7. There are newer versions, but they're not free.

And of course the Mackie hard disk recorders are from 1999 and are still running. Probably some other old stuff, too, that I use too often to think about. 

[WRGKMC]

I have plenty of older plugins I use regularly. Many are simple tools for specific needs.  I may even choose them over newer tools that do the same thing. Maybe its because I know them so well and can dial them to quickly target what I want them to do, or maybe they just give me the tone I'm looking for. 

Chances are if I do use a newer plug I wind up tweaking them to do the job the older plug was doing. I find this happens often. I'll get a new plug out tweak its many parameters to get what I want, then I'll mute that plug and stick in my old standby and bingo, it sounds as good if not better than all the tweaks I put into that newer plug.

If anything, I may use newer plugs to find new sounds for mixing. I may for example, try out the presets and see if I like someone else's idea of a good standard setting. Sometimes it leads to making other changes to the mix to make it fit and you wind up with something pretty cool. Other times you find your mix is dependent on what was actually tracked and if you're doing solo work, tracking the same way all the time, it may be you've already found the corrects plugins to make that material sound as good its it can sound, kind of like all roads lead to Rome.

[Rabid]

NI's B4. It was dropped by NI and replaced by a Kore sample pack. I finally bought that sample pack ... a few months before they dropped Kore.

 

Techno Toys Seq-303 - I used this up until my last DAW upgrade and could not get it to functions anymore. This was a fun piece of software and the one I most hated to loose over the years.

[E-money]

I was using Sonar version 2 up until a month or 2 ago.  I still use MS Office 97 and Outlook Express 6 at home.

[mcmike100]

I'm using 25 yo samples from an Akai S900 in Kontakt and Gigastudio. And Gigastudio is almost 10years old.

[Bryan H]

 

I use Texture 4.25 as my primary sequencer (1 mb ram) and Texture Live when I work. "Virtually a one finger operation and can change the arrangement on the fly"

 

Gotta be early 1980s, but I am just so comfortable with the architecture as it still manages to do anything I need. To speed various tasks I also have "Borlands Superkey" and both run within "Dosbox" and my OS is Win 7 Ultimate.

 

Everything else "Reaper, Kontakt, Superior drummer, Trilian etc is up to date, however NI B4 is also in there, using "Jbridge".

 

To be fair, the learning curve to modern sequencers is just a bridge too far for me, but my current results hold credibility against my competition in the live playing market, so there is just no need to upgrade.

 

really enjoy this forum.

 

cheers

 

Bryan

[Phil O'Keefe]

Welcome Bryan. What kind of music are you into?