Phalde must be in his late fifties, is built like brick wall, and has a streak dyed of turquoise through his graying hair and beard. I’m told he can be seen hammering away at many of the machinations throughout Academy Island, but in the Component Workshop he is most happy.
Funnily enough, customizing the Components of DigiChips requires small tools and surgical precision, and so seeing Phalde wiring away at his small handmade desk is less “swinging berserker” and more “golem squeezing into tiny cubicle, surrounded by potted plants”.
Customizing DigiChips allows for a range of effects: from changing its Element, its Ability, or in rare cases, fusing two DigiChips together. With the ability to customize a Deck to that level, I plan on coming here often.
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I actually put off using Ardour for a long while, because it does cost money for the official binary download. I’ve always been pretty keen to use no-cost tools, so that e.g. even kids without their parent’s credit card could download and explore the project files. I know I was in that position as a kid.
But after trying many different FOSS DAWs, it does seem that Ardour is the most fully-featured, and really the only one that is good for a variety of professional workflows. It turns out their free demo is pretty unlimited, and that you can legally download a legal binary via several Linux’ app repositories.
I’ll still keep trying other open-source DAWs as they come out. But I should admit that now that I am using Ardour and have developed my skills in synthesis, I feel like I have finally reached my 4-year goal of making 100%-synthesized-open-source music at the same quality as what I was creating with the commercial Roland instruments in Soundworlds Datapedia.
Now that is exciting!
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_software: Cardinal + Ardour
_download: ComponentWorkshop.wav
_project: ComponentWorkshop-SOURCE.zip
_license: CC0 / Public Domain dedicated