Yes, safe to say audiotool has been slowly crumbling over the years, but now Audiotools roots are being dug up, everything that AT stood for is being taken advantage of and destroyed. Even I can see that and i only have two years of experiance. In 2023 there was a time where FL studio, Ableton, and other DAWS( or atleast thats when i first noticed them.) were uncommonly used in audiotool. Now they are a decently sized part of Audiotool, in my opinion AT should be used for AT!!! not these other DAWS. I am not impressed by any song from those "artists" who use other daws on a platform where creativity was the brightest, where sounds had to be refined and tested, not some premade orchestra from FL studio. ( yes audiotool has presets but they all sound shit, without the refinement of other tools.) in other words, the hard work and sincerity of Audiotool is disappearing and being pushed out by incompotent "artists" who use other DAWS on audiotool because they dont get any listens on other platforms. like i hear a banger and then i go check the studio picture and i see one single audio sample tool, ARE YOU KIDDING ME, YOUR TELLING ME ALL YOU DID WAS PUT SOME CHORDS IN A SONG and proceed to slap into AT probe. 😔😢 Zero hard work.
let me know your opinion.
Create an account or Login to write a comment.
-
-
i have been here for 10 years, as much as i hate audiotool now i don't agree with anything here. since day one, audiotool has always been a breeding ground for artists to grow and develop their skills. eventually all artists move from audiotool. and since they have a following here already it just makes sense to post stuff here. using presets are fine. hiphop/trap is built around basically just taking a sample and putting a beat on it. if you're having fun with what you're doing and you enjoy the sound, then you're doing it the correct way. you don't need to work hard for this. (this is coming from a guy who uses zero presets and records real instruments and vocals)
my assumption the rise of outsider daw uploads is due to the fact that audiotool is just old and there's not enough innovation for artists to use the studio. plus the userbase just growing out of the daw and not being replaced by newbies as much as in the past.
-
i used to think this too, but lately i've been realizing how corrosive to creativity the spirit of "you have to make everything from scratch because other people's presets are shit" is. it's been hard working on music i feel proud of because this mentality i got from audiotool made me feel like i have to constantly prove myself. and the music i make doesn't even require that much sound design,,, in more electronic spaces it's just brutal. i remember you would get made fun of if your track was made solely of presets. there's a real bad prejudice based off perceived effort spent on the music posted here and it's rlly just producer brainworms
i think as artists when we find music we like on here we all wanna be inspired by it and feel like we can learn something, but then the snapshot or the assets list makes us feel cheated. as a community we would be better off abandoning that judgement because it would take so much pressure off everyone. it would be cool if most people posting from outside DAWs were interested in becoming proficient in the studio but tbh it's much healthier for ppl not to care. the people who want to push themselves with audiotool's studio will do it regardless. the only line that actually should be drawn is with generative ai
-
I don't think it's necessarily bad that you want to make everything from scratch. It requires a large set of tools and techniques to pull off, which can help you in the long run. There's a kind of sportsmanship to it. What I could agree with, is that it shouldn't be required. Outside of AT, presets are commonplace. But I personally like to see the hard work and creativity of recording your own samples, making your own sounds etc. and those are good skills if you want to be an independent person. No matter where.
-
I also agree with generative AI, and hey, even popular songs everywhere, electronic or not, have people using presets. Spitfire Labs, Native Instruments and its countless tools, you name it. I'm too lazy to make my own piano most of the time, so I'll just find a preset in the AT library that matches the energy of my track/song. And isn't AT supposed to be a place where COMMUNITY-made presets can be shared? There's literally an OPTION to show/hide your preset from the community if you don't want other people to be using it. 95% of the time I'll also tweak the presets I use.. I don't want people judging me for using a dubstep growl that actually sounds rather different compared to the original.
-
thank you for this opinion, yes i agree on the generative ai.
-
-
[a comment downvoted by multiple users] 
No one is forcing you to stay. If you're unhappy with a free DAW and need to police production ethics to randos on the internet, then by all means, go somewhere else.
Your intro is so dramatic and sounds like something I’d hear in a right leaning newspaper, but replace audiotool with “Britain”. 🤣 It’s what YOU make of it. Audiotool has always been this way and uploading samples/ songs from other DAWs has always been controversial… but the site has persisted. At face value the recent competition results are outrageous, but the competition was open to external entries since the beginning.
Echoing Kai’s opinion: Audiotool software was made to make music creation accessible from anywhere to anyone with a computer. People move on and as a site matures (audiotool is 17 years old now I think?) it changes. And much like pop music, the songs at the top of the chart may not reflect your music tastes. Reconsider why you are here in the first place.