About seven years ago, I bought a Mark of the Unicorn (MOTU) 2408 to do some home recording on my PC. The MOTU on my PC was easily the worst piece of technology I’ve ever owned. And communicating with their unicorn-loving tech support was an exercise in pain and endurance that would make a 12-hour call to a New Delhi call center seem like a walk in the park.

That said, I ran a nice little DAW program called ‘Cool Edit Pro’, which had a gentle learning curve and a surprisingly rich feature set. When my hard drive crashed, though, I had to upgrade my software, and was disappointed to discover that Cool Edit had been purchased by Adobe and rechristened ‘Audition’. I bought the new version from Adobe, and discovered that it was a crash-tastic piece of software that seemed to specialize in making my PC freeze irrevocably. Using Audition in combination with the MOTU was about as pleasant as having your nuts chewed off by rats.

Eventually I ditched it altogether, and went back to recording on ADATs.

A year or so ago, my long-simmering dislike of Microsoft was raised to a boil with the release of Vista. I took my PC to hazardous waste disposal day (true story) and bought a Mac. I hooked the ol’ MOTU up to the Mac, and was stunned how nicely the two played together.

The version of MOTU’s entry-level DAW program, AudioDesk, that I had wasn’t compatible with OSX, so I bit the bullet and called MOTU’s unicorn-loving sales staff and purchased an upgrade.

After using the old Cool Edit, I found AudioDesk’s user interface to be needlessly complicated. Many of the things that would only take a moment in Cool Edit seemed to take forever in AudioDesk. Editing volume envelopes, muting tracks, editing pan envelopes, were all unpleasant. But mixing down was especially unpleasant and laborious. I had to bounce everything to disk, then add the result to my soundbites window, and then export the soundbite. I could never figure out how to get a master VU meter on my edit screen, for example. I could never figure out how to normalize my mixes. And any wave editing had to be done in an external program. Hideous.

Worse, though, was that the output didn’t sound good to me. AudioDesk’s plugins sucked. The EQ, Reverb, and compression that shipped with it sounded terrible. The output was conspicuously worse that what I got from Cool Edit.

But what really turned me off from AudioDesk was that it was a closed system that used a proprietary plugin format (MAS) that was incompatible with any of the other plugins on the market. If I wanted good plugins, I would have to upgrade to MOTU’s top-of-the-line product, Digital Performer. So not only was the product frustratingly bad-sounding, it was crippled and incapable of ever sounding better.

I have often wondered why companies sell crippled versions of their products as an enticement to upgrade to their more expensive offerings. If I have an unpleasant experience with a product, I will switch to a competitor. And that’s what I’ve finally done. After a year of hating AudioDesk, I just bought Logic, which has a cleaner, more elegenant interface and manuals which, though they appear well-written, I have not yet had to consult. Remember: never buy a piece of equipment that’s named after a frigging unicorn.

Therefore, I’m out of MOTU’s unicorn kingdom club.