Quote:
Originally Posted by rmoretti49
I am happy enough with my Spire Studio, but remain quite annoyed with the lack of a comprehensive manual. Yes, I can find some tutorials on the Izotope website. But they are incomplete, and often enough do not answer the questions I have. It is as if the developers thought that by not creating a manual, their device was automatically completely, thoroughly intuitive. Spire is indeed pretty intuitive but not that intuitive. I use mine with an Android tablet, and the screens are not the same as they are for the Apple application.
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This was a strong impression I was left with too, and given that the hardware and the software's capabilities are good, frustrating. One can figure out things eventually based on what you want to do it, but it's not like it's so complex that an approximately 20 "page" PDF manual couldn't cover some basic workflows or explain briefly what was happening behind the scenes with the Izotope software auto-magical handling of the audio.
If I wasn't otherwise occupied, I would think about contacting Izotope and offer to write that manual myself. That would be a nice project for someone interested in that sort of work and wanting something they could show potential employers, or as and extra-credit educational project. At my age none of this applies, but if I was a young'un...
One reason that might be harder to do, and one reason Izotope may not have done it, is part of the Unique Selling Proposition of the Spire: that it uses phones/tablets as it's user interface that they do not control. As you mention, your screens on whatever version of Android you are using don't look like what you see in some tutorials, and even the same generation of Apple IOS doesn't work exactly the same on the iPhones as on iPads. This is sort of a devil's bargain. On one hand it allows the Spire to have a much richer user interface that something like a Zoom handheld with a tiny low-res LCD screen, on the other hand, the owners and controllers of that user interface and underlying hardware can change, fork, or otherwise trouble someone like Izotope or a third-party writing a manual.
My guess is the happy users on this thread have figured out that they want to do with it (most things seem "intuitive" once you've learned them
) or are working with workflows that are different than mine.
This Spire hardware really does offer a way to do no-drama one or two track at a time multitracking for guitars and vocals without need to understand basic recording setup (the sound check level control, the Izotope presets/"secret sauce"...). These are good reasons some here love theirs.