As a long time electronic music producer, I make sure once installed my primary software is never updated as a rule[0]. My flow doesn’t make bouncing everything to audio feasible and there is nothing worse than opening a project you have worked on for a few months to find that it sounds… different. Counter-intuitively, learning to predict and deal with crashes and working around known bugs on the fly is way easier than stopping everything and spending days debugging what exactly messed up your sound—you have a few hundred of interwired devices, and if it turns out that a small change in some arpeggiator timing algorithm or macro wiring, intentional or inadvertently caused by some improvement, is impossible to completely revert, lost inspiration aside you may feel some pretty dark emotions because the thing as you knew it is basically gone.
So while the App Store model of forced updates was barely acceptable in case of toys for sketching ideas like Figure, Reason Compact, iKaossilator, etc., with my primary DAW? and I have to pay for these updates, too? For as long as App Store offers no requisite controls, proper desktop software (and of course all hardware) will rule, and I know I’m not alone with such a flow.
[0] The only exception is if all tracks I started in this version were finished, and that never happens. Otherwise the new version gets installed on a new machine, I’m not in rush.
This is a reasonable concern; this would be worth raising to Apple if you have a channel to do so. Being able to pin apps to specific versions may indeed be a requirement if your livelihood depends on their stability.
Ableton on an old machine, Bitwig on a new machine. Got burned with Bitwig minor version update changing my sound, thankfully they keep links to older versions! I guess they know this may be an issue.
So while the App Store model of forced updates was barely acceptable in case of toys for sketching ideas like Figure, Reason Compact, iKaossilator, etc., with my primary DAW? and I have to pay for these updates, too? For as long as App Store offers no requisite controls, proper desktop software (and of course all hardware) will rule, and I know I’m not alone with such a flow.
[0] The only exception is if all tracks I started in this version were finished, and that never happens. Otherwise the new version gets installed on a new machine, I’m not in rush.