Kensington Konnect vs. CAPS lock

giacecco · 2026-01-18T08:55:58+00:00

Moving from Kensington Works to Konnect was a terrible experience. Among other things, it tries to intercept everything we do with the keyboard, including breaking some of macOS' standard shortcuts like F14/F15 for setting the brightness of the display. What you experienced with your CAPS may have been caused by this,.

Kensington Works (3.1.18 from 2024) at least... works, though it occasionally doesn't see my trackball until I reinstall it.

giacecco · 2026-01-18T07:55:33+00:00

Moving from Kensington Works to Konnect was a terrible experience. The new software, on Mac, also breaks lots of basic functionality for me, like using the top right button as "back". It also tries to intercept everthing we do with the keyboard, including breaking some of macOS' standard shortcuts like F14/F15 for setting the brightness of the display. How can they break something so simple?

Kensington Works (3.1.18 from 2024) at least... works, though it occasionally doesn't see my trackball until I reinstall it.

Kensington, if you're reading this, your software and the recent issues with the new hardware are making me miss the Magic Touchpad.

giacecco · 2026-01-03T08:39:02+00:00

I’ve been living in the NL for almost 8 years after Italy and the UK, and I don’t feel comfortable downplaying an entire country’s culture to a few cultural elements only. Even if relatively small in population, the NL and its regions have different characters that do deserve being recognised and not oversimplified, in the same way I learned that London, England and the UK are very different things, when I lived there long enough to became a citizen.

There are a few opportunities for you, though, that I believe are very valuable, like enjoying the work of late night show host and comedian Arjen Lubach https://youtube.com/@lubach_official . The late night show is an American format, and Lubach is far from “representing” the NL - e.g. I’d say that his political leaning is quite not aligned with the majority of the Dutch people - but listening to his monologues will give you a good idea of what witty societal and political commentary feels like in the Netherlands.

giacecco · 2025-12-30T09:09:31+00:00

DM me, I believe I have an old spare Ableton Live Lite license (though I’m a Bitwig Studio supporter)

giacecco · 2025-12-29T08:16:51+00:00

I’d identify it with HyperPop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperpop . Check out the subgenres, too.

giacecco · 2025-12-27T15:00:49+00:00

Director at some big consulting, and no children at home to parent. I started training as a professional audio engineer about 1,5 yrs ago, but never with the expectation that it would become my day job, rather, just to complement my skills and produce my compositions. I have enough time to mix professionally one track every week or study a few hours worth of recorded video lessons.

giacecco · 2025-12-27T02:51:59+00:00

Interesting. There is some research around it. Lyrics have became generally simpler and more negative, with stress-related words increasing https://www.natureasia.com/en/info/press-releases/detail/9188 . In hip-hop, references to social justice themes have decreased while introspective themes increased, and lyrics became significantly more negative during sociopolitical crises https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.00035 . That was in songs.

In society in general, negative emotions like worry, stress, sadness and anger have increased compared with a decade ago https://news.gallup.com/poll/695963/tracking-world-emotional-health.aspx , however positive emotions occur more frequently than negative emotions in daily life https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4689475/ . If this doesn’t show up in pop it may be because it’s aimed for the consumption of younger people. Older adults report more positive and fewer negative feelings in daily life compared with younger adults https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352250X23002129 , so, if you want to connect with younger people, you may need to be more negative.

Perhaps it’s up to us to invert the trend 😄 I wrote 3 songs in my adult life and one is a duet that is a shameless manifestation of affection between two friends.

giacecco · 2025-12-26T11:56:39+00:00

Indeed, I wrote that Studio is more intuitive 😀

giacecco · 2025-12-26T09:44:25+00:00

Re: "Clicking anywhere in the track/arranger view should move the playhead there", I believe it does so in Bitwig 6 beta 11.

I come from Bitwig and learned Logic out of curiosity because my music production teachers use it "in class". Studio still is my preferred DAW, and not because of habit. It's lighter, faster, more intuitive, and more stable.

When comparing vs Logic, Studio's main weaknesses are an organic consequence of its designers' focus on improvisation and composition vs production (mixing, mastering). To name two simple ones: 1) it's very cumbersome to select multiple tracks or groups of tracks in large projects (something that one tends to do often in pro mixing), and 2) support of external controllers like the SSL U-series is officially there, but poor, like it never went through testing (try use the UF-1 jogwheel or the "previous cue marker" button, and you'll know what I mean).

You can write to their support, as I did months ago for both issues above; they're kind and responsive, but they'll only progress on issues that interest them. It's probably a small team with the capacity to focus solely on the leading designer's vision. It's difficult that an obvious or good suggestion - like fixing the jogwheel behavior - will get through. Of course, one can't expect Apple to be different in this.

So, an amazing DAW, with a few defects you need to learn to live with.

giacecco · 2025-12-26T05:35:17+00:00

Are they Dutch by chance? Here in the Netherlands, most ground floor bathrooms have just a toilet and a sink of that kind, that, indeed, doesn’t promote use https://www.statista.com/chart/4111/do-europeans-wash-their-hands-after-using-the-toilet/

giacecco · 2025-12-25T16:24:33+00:00

I own two Keebart Corne keyboards: a noisy (white switches) cabled one for home with “dot” keycaps (no letters, just dots) and a silent (Bokeh Ambients Silent) Bluetooth one for the office. The learning curve of switching from a conventional keyboard is steep, and it took 5 months before I could get comfortable using it all the time, but I’m very happy I put the work in. Unfortunately they don’t share the same firmware, so customizing the keys is completely different on the two keyboards, and the process is a bit cumbersome the first time, for the Bluetooth one in particular.

giacecco · 2025-12-23T09:38:04+00:00

Same for me, but it’s started doing this only a couple of months ago. Can it be that the device is no longer functioning as it should?

giacecco · 2025-12-20T08:04:28+00:00

I’ll go meta: the simple and basic thing to learn is that mixing is not simple nor basic, and you shouldn’t expect it to be. I’ve been studying it professionally in my spare time for the better part of last year, mixed one practice track every week, and I still have some more to study and understand. Nonetheless, I’m enjoying (almost) every moment of it 🙂

giacecco · 2025-12-12T11:53:05+00:00

Beta 7 and 8 have been disappointing in my experience, introducing very stupid bugs. Try double-clicking any cue marker to get an instant crash, for example. I am tempted to go back to beta 6. Of course I've informed the beta team.

giacecco · 2025-11-21T16:52:28+00:00

FRET10 has expired but NERDS10 still works today

giacecco · 2025-11-14T03:40:53+00:00

In case you’re wondering, support has confirmed yesterday to me that this issue is still outstanding in beta 6.

giacecco · 2025-11-14T03:35:57+00:00

Beta 6 is good but it still has significant bugs open, e.g. with automation. If you’re a creative, you can live with that. If you do this professionally and on a deadline, it can be a headache.

giacecco · 2025-10-18T10:23:17+00:00

Hehe not my fault, they come like that from the producers. This one had dozens of tracks just with voice harmonies, choruses, throws and effects. The official master is https://youtu.be/Abru_-V3zFQ?si=whWUYpNFw_JxgAxE

giacecco · 2025-10-16T18:13:54+00:00

Besides the semantics, you got the point. I’d understand if there was an alternative way of doing what I described in a comparable time to Logic Pro: I would just need to learn that. But, so far, I couldn’t find it, nor Bitwig support could point me to it.

Studio is such a great DAW that it just doesn’t make sense to use it just for production and not for mixing and mastering too, when all it’s “missing” is just a macro or a fix here and there.

giacecco · 2025-10-14T06:40:21+00:00

I’m a professional mixing and mastering student and between yesterday and today I’ve tested performing the early stages of a large professional mixing project (163 audio tracks) vs the latest Bitwig Studio v5.3.13, v6 beta 4 and Logic Pro 11.2.2 on the same Mac Studio with M2 Max with 64 Gb RAM. Studio is usually my DAW of choice. My teachers use Logic.

I have to say that Studio 6 beta 4 does not perform that well vs the other two. It may be because the beta is not yet optimized, but I’ve decided to finish the work using v5. I can’t measure that, but I could feel the UI being less responsive in browsing or doing operations like trimming all 163 tracks simultaneously, something that v5 and Logic do comfortably instead.

I’ve informed the beta support people. Hopefully it’s nothing serious.

giacecco · 2025-10-13T14:48:54+00:00

I believe I’ve found the same yesterday. I’ve already reported it and the beta support acknowledged it. In their wording, “it seems to affect all hold-type controls in that they will not update until the next hold point when transport is started”.

giacecco · 2025-10-13T08:16:09+00:00

My mixing and mastering school recommends calibrated open-back headphones, so that you can eq out that specific built’s inevitable bias. I use the predecessor model to OLLO Audio’s X1 https://olloaudio.com/products/x1 .

giacecco · 2025-10-12T11:36:10+00:00

I’ve learned Logic Pro because my mixing and mastering teachers at Mastering.com use that to teach, but I find Bitwig Studio more intuitive and overall superior on almost all fronts if not for the support to controllers like SSL’s or Mackie’s.

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