Do you love the computer in your studio?

Tell some people when flying at 35,000 that a computer is flying the plane and they would probably have a fit. Of course it's not a standard PC, imagine the blue screen of death as you come into land?

There's likely to be one sitting in your pocket right now that is more powerful than the one that put man on the moon.

We've come to accept the hidden world of computers in every part of our lives.

Ever since their introduction in the early 80s computers have started to part a central role in music making. At the start they were for 'weird computer types' who made electronic music but over the last few decades the core of most studios is a computer. If you want to run any modern DAW then you have to use a computer.

Just as in every other walk of life in music making a lot of the computers are hidden inside things such as mixers using proprietary operating systems, it seems that we don't mind that.

However read any forum or read the questions we get into Pro Tools Expert podcast and many of them are about issues with the computer. It seems that despite manufacturers giving detailed compatibility and set up instructions many computers don't want to play nice with our favourite DAW. This is a platform agnostic issue and is as likely to affect a Mac as much a a PC.

Let's be clear, we are not talking about the whole computer based part of music production, such as sequencers, but the need for a computer to run any audio application and in this case Pro Tools.

It led us to wonder if computers are something we simply accept as a necessary evil if we want to record audio.

Do we like the whole tech side of running a computer and the need to have a more than fundamental understanding of setting up a computer if we want to have a studio that runs smoothly. Is this what you signed up for when you got into music or post production? Or would we prefer a box with a computer inside that just worked? We've been there and had plenty of hardware based audio systems.

So take our poll and leave your comments, is the audio computer in the studio a friend or foe.