Deck II

[Kingsley]

I was just wondering why I see so little mention of BIAS' Deck II. I've owned the program since v 2.2 or so and I find it extremely easy and reliable. I'm not a musician, so I don't need dozens of tracks and effects and MIDI, but Deck has done just about everything I've asked of it.
Still, I get the feeling it's viewed as the Gremlin of the high performance Hot Rod DAWs.
Why is that?

[rigboone]

Kingsley, I couldn't agree more with you-although you should upgrade to Deck 3.
Deck II is an awesome program-I used it for almost 2 years before my studio finally bought me a ProTools TDM system. Did you know that the original software authors of Deck(OSC)were also responsible for writing the original software for ProTools? That's why so many functions and even key commands are identical in both apps...I spoke with a Bias rep recently about the slow progression of Deck's evolution-he told me there's only ONE programmer working on Deck. Bias bought it from Macromedia, brought over the support people(Hank Hansen...my hero) and a couple of others who were from the original development team-in my opinion, they haven't put much effort into making it the world-class DAW soft it is so close to being. It desperately needs a send/aux/bus routing architechture for effects and grouping-as well as support for stereo tracks. They have added support for VST plug-ins,which is VERY cool-as well as ASIO. But we need the internal/external routing to complete the program. Version 3 also adds some really UGLY graphics to Deck...what a horrible GUI from a purely visual standpoint.
Hopefully, version 3.5 will address these MAJOR shortfalls, along with OMF import-but we'll have to wait and see. OSX is a big thing at BIAS-maybe Apple will buy them and they'll get the money, people and other resources to make Deck really be what it was intended to...a world-class DAW front end that's affordable!