The trouble is with claiming some tools are 'cheating' is where does the cheating start? If you re-record a take is that cheating? Drop ins are they cheating? Using your standards they must be.
What's the difference between using audiosnap to tweak some timing and re-recording it? Not much.

If that's the case I'm pretty sure that'll make just about every musician that has ever stepped foot in a studio a 'cheat'.

If audiosnap and the like were some sort of magic process that took any old garbage and polished it into some virtuoso performance you'd have a point but the fact of the matter is they don't.

As an engineer, I'm very *interested* in how things are made, but I have no rules about how I think things should be made. As a listener, I don't care at all. I'm not listening to how things are made, I'm listening to the things themselves.

John T


What about sequenced material? Is that all bad?

See above...

You know that battle at the end of Star Wars, with the Death Star? They're not really in space. It's a scandal.

wasn't there a VST called Turd Polisher at some point?

John T


Regarding performance, what about punch ins and comps? They're cheating, surely?

As always, people retreat to this all or nothing position, and try to make it about the letter of the law, when it's the spirit of the law that's being broken. People who are excellent musicians, putting it out there on the edge to capture a moment sometimes will make mistakes. It's to the benefit of music to fix a couple mistakes in such a performance so as not to lose it. You are making a small sacrifice to retain what is otherwise an excellent performance.
 
That is at the opposite end of the spectrum from what is common now, and the two have no moral equivalency at all.
 

John T


You know that battle at the end of Star Wars, with the Death Star? They're not really in space. It's a scandal.

Actually that's a good point. Everyone KNOWS they aren't in space. They aren't misrepresenting anything. OTOH, if a star in a movie publically claimed (or even by omission allowed it to be believed) that he did some amazing stunt in a movie when in fact he didn't, and that was found out, he would be ridiculed for that. And for good reason.

FastBikerBoy

What's the difference between using audiosnap to tweak some timing and re-recording it? Not much.

Uhh.... because if you rerecord it and get it right, then you actually can do it. If you can't do it and use Autosnap because you probably aren't ever going to get it right, that's not remotely the same thing.

 

Well, the thing is, you yourself frame it in an all-or-nothing way. You raise it basically as an ethical objection. People using these tools are "cheating" and lacking "balls". You further say that you think people should just put out what they can really do. So the reason people are pointing out these exceptions is that your own argument sort of demands that they don't be exceptions. Where you've actually ended up at is "there are some tools I approve of the use of and some I don't". Which is okay, as a preference, but I don't think you can reasonably stretch that preference the distance you have done, ie: the claim that people using a tool you wouldn't are talentless con artists.

I still don't get the problem anyway. If I'm listening to a great record, and it really is a great record, totally mesmerising and fulfilling and exciting and all of that stuff, then what does it matter how it was made?