While Opcode practically pioneered the friendly MIDI sequencer field, in the past couple of years their once industry premier Vision has been feature squeezed by several audio recording/sequencer hybrids. The old Vision had to compete on the low end with Cakewalk's Metro and on the high end with Mark of the Unicorn's Digital Performer, emagic's Logic Audio, Steinberg's Cubase VST, as well as Opcode's own Studio Vision Professional. Metro afforded low cost, low system requirement audio and MIDI while the others threw in support for high end audio hardware as well as features that could fill a bath tub. The old Vision sat in a quite uncomfortable middle.
Vision DSP is a new product that can be considered a 99 44/100 % solution since it gathered up almost all the expected high end features, wrapped them up in the exact same easy-to-use face of it's big brother and Opcode priced it at reasonable middle. The things that VDSP is missing are few and far between: it cannot use the very high end TDM hardware (which, if you can afford it, you wouldn't care about saving a few dollars on software) and it is missing SVPro's cool audio-to-MIDI/MIDI-to-audio feature (an Opcode patented technology that turns recorded sounds into MIDI events and can reshuffle the actual sounds based the events).
Once you get past the installation and the annoying copy protection detour, VDSP is an intuitive sequencing package that pays homage to it's Mac heritage. Opcode almost defined what GUI-based sequencers should do a decade ago and VDSP puts a premium on intuitive ease of use and useful features rather than the "sysex-jock" type fascinations that other powerful packages have. The VDSP user interface happens to be very friendly and tries very successfully to be fun and cater to the creative side of the MIDI user.
The MIDI section has all the right features as well as a powerful Pulse editor for creating drum tracks in a better-that-beatbox fashion (e.g., snappy looking display, easy controller editing, intelligent algorithmic auto composing, etc.). The Strip Chart editing of MIDI data like velocity and mod wheel data is great, possibly the best on the market. The Notation window, while admittedly more feature modest than standalone music layout apps, is just what you need during a typical sequencing/recording session. They have implemented notation on-screen editing in a truly intuitive fashion that I wish all music programs where the note's pitch, starting and duration is controlled in an analogous way to the methods used in standard 'MIDI piano roll' window's method.
Those of you who have old fashioned MIDI keyboards and modules will be delighted to note that with VDSP Opcode also includes a free copy of Galaxy, their synthesizer patch librarian, and integrates it seamlessly, thanks to OMS, so that you can see the actual names of patches, not mere numbers, as you select them. Galaxy is the original universal patch librarian and Opcode provides a slew of MIDI device profiles and an upgrade path to Galaxy Plus which allows patch creation and editing. There is a single strange omission from Galaxy in that it cannot directly import sysex data which is raw MIDI patch information which happens to be the most common format found on the 'Net for share/freeware sounds.
VSDP's audio recording aspects are top notch, supporting a fair number of tracks if you have a fast machine. There is a very flexible virtual console setup for recording and mix down with its own automation and audio processing and that's where the DSP comes in. By adding the ability to accept audio plug ins from third party developers and by supplying some really good sounding ones out of the box they provide the user a great startup basis for audio effects processing. VDSP supports Adobe Premiere and VST plug in formats and supplies a bunch of EQ, filtering, reverb, and flange type plug ins for free. You can easily lose dozens of man-hours playing with these effects alone. There are some other important audio processing features like a great time stretcher/compressor. Besides a built-in audio track editor, Opcode includes a mini-version of BIAS Peak to do the really detailed waveform level editing.
A nice addition for multimedia types is easy Quick Time audio/MIDI import and subsequent movie audio editing and creation. For those of you who do QT moovies, VDSP is a good bet as the audio and music generator for almost any task at hand. Vision does not (yet) support some of the new plug in formats that are tied very closely to competing sequencer products such as MAS 2.0 (Mark of the Unicorns Performer based) or ReWire (Steinberg's software synth direct to mix down standard) among a few others but they do support all the popular ones right now and more are promised for the near future.
VDSP is designed to worked closely with Mac hardware and performed flawlessly using standard Mac audio ports. Any other audio card hardware that provides Sound Manager, DAE (Digidesign) or ASIO drivers will also work with VDSP. While high end TDM support is the province of SVPro and other more expensive packages, it is important to realize that VDSP fully supports 24-bit audio recording/processing so if you get high quality audio hardware and drivers it will take advantage of the improved sound conversion system. No other package at this price will do this. VDSP also works with supported OMS (Open MIDI System which configures the overall music production system) compliant synthesizer cards as well as the new crop of software based synths and samplers like the Bitheadz Retro and Unity products.
VDSP is nominally supported on a wide range of PowerPC Mac's, specifically 603's on up recommended, but the truth is that sequencing and audio together do take their toll on CPU usage so you really do need as fast a Mac as possible to take advantage of all the goodies. You can still use it on more modest rigs by limiting the audio tracks/effects and doing a bit of Extensions Manager editing. VDSP does not like virtual memory like most other audio products but the MIDI section will function under VM after the warning.
VDSP shares a very comprehensive set of paper based reference manuals with SVPro, which are divided into four main books, not including the Start Up guide, of MIDI, audio, Galaxy and OMS. They are well written and augmented by a disk based tutorial. They are also PDF'ed if you like that format.
If there are any complaints to be made they mostly hover around copy protection which has finally been revised to allow floppy disk-less installs on iMac's and B&W G3's. The BIAS software has to be authorized separately. Why Mac users are forced to undergo these complications to the installation process while PC folks usually just copy is perplexing.
Vision DSP in many ways is the ideal package for the serious MIDI/audio recordist starting from scratch since its ease of use, combined with its vast set of usable features and added software makes up a great creative toolbox to create uncompromised music and sound effects at a reasonable cost.
Opcode, as of June 1st, has decided to make the Mac MIDI
buff an offer that is tough to pass up by dropping the cost of VDSP almost
in half and unbundling the paper documentation and third party tools. VDSP
can be downloaded for $59 minus paper docs and tech support. An addtional
$139 provides you with the full version which provides real manuals, one year of tech support, and the CD. That price is down from the previous price of $349. Given the high quality 24-bit
audio support, VDSP becomes very hard to ignore since now a Mac with VDSP is
the most cost effective and powerful MIDI/audio system around regardless of platform.
