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Today, the topics include practice & performance, composition, technique, theory, and history. But not recording.

This is no accident, from the discussions on Area51, recording is intentionally left out to not clash with audio.SE. However, audio.SE didn't take off. It is now likely that audio.SE will be expanded into a Audio and Video production site, moving it's scope even further away from recording music, which is a whole world away from making pod-casts and recording gunshots, which was two of the questions asked there before.

The question is then, if whem the merge of Video into audio.SE happens, the questions related to recording music should be migrated here.

  • I don't think the site is ready for this discussion. I deleted my answer. – Lennart Regebro Apr 28 '11 at 12:55
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No.

Audio Recording should not be merged with this site, or added to this site's scope.

First, audio recording will be covered by the AV Production site. If the AV site crashes and burns, that's a discussion for then and not now.

Second, it would be bizarre and confusing for AVP to cover non-music audio and for us to cover recording music. There's a huge overlap in the techniques, technology, etc. and there's no reason that people with expertise in recording audio shouldn't be able to talk about recording music.

While it's true that many musicians have recorded music and have expertise in that area, I would expect audio engineers who record music for a living to have greater expertise. A much larger group with expertise in recording music should be present at the AVP site.

And, while it's true that many musicians may have questions about recording their music, StackExchange makes it easy to direct them to the Audio site. Moderators can also easily migrate questions to that site. A large proportion of AVP users will be able to answer their questions, as opposed to the small proportion of musicians who have done serious audio production.

I also disagree with others who think music recording, or apects of it, should be on-topic on both sites. That makes for confusion and a division of expertise. There's also no clear line between the audio-engineer-technical-aspects and the musicality-aspects, and drawing one would be likely to alienate people. Technicians wouldn't react well to being told they aren't "musical enough", and that sort of thing.

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    Wow, this is spot on. I put together an answer, but you said it so much clearer than I ever did. I may just cite this post the next time this issue comes up. – Robert Cartaino♦ Apr 27 '11 at 2:07
  • Thank you, good sir. – Matthew Read♦ Apr 27 '11 at 2:12
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    Good in theory, however check out the audio recording stats: area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/4/… worrying, worrying, worrying. Unfortunately there aren't enough experts out there willing to contribute to, which is why I think there should just be a generic site. If it ever got too big then it could be migrated out like programmers.stackexchange.com – Chris S Apr 27 '11 at 8:09
  • ...using Stackoverflow as an example. There's 400 questions on Audio recording, 450 on [Scrum] in stackoverflow. I know it's been going longer but it's the same niche, in my view. – Chris S Apr 27 '11 at 8:16
  • "There's a huge overlap in the techniques, technology, etc. " - But little overlap in audience. And there is a huge overlap in technique and technology with playing music as well. – Lennart Regebro Apr 27 '11 at 13:21
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    @ChrisS I'm not saying Audio shouldn't be merged, just that it shouldn't be merged with us. I agree that their stats are no good. They'll improve with the AVP site. – Matthew Read♦ Apr 27 '11 at 13:29
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    @Lennart I'm not sure I understand. If the audiences for the Music and AVP sites don't overlap, isn't that a reason to keep them separate? And I don't think recording techniques overlap much with playing techniques, besides obvious things like "muddied playing won't result in a clear recording". – Matthew Read♦ Apr 27 '11 at 13:31
  • @Matthew: Yes, exactly. The point is that the audiences for Music recording and Video production do not overlap, but that the audiences for Music recording and Music performance do overlap. And therefore Music recording should be a part of this site and not the Video production site. – Lennart Regebro Apr 27 '11 at 13:38
  • Also, ponder the use of tags. When you have a question about recording a guitar, what tags will you enter? Well, "recording guitar" of course. This means that on this site, filtering out recording questions will be easy. But on an AV site, you would have to also enter the tag "music" on every musical question, a tag that doesn't come natural when asking a question about recording a guitar. Questions about recording music will therefore be hard to find and follow on an AV site. – Lennart Regebro Apr 27 '11 at 13:45
  • @Lennart Oh. I wouldn't put it so absolutely, but I do agree that Music Recording and Music overlap more than Music Recording and Video Production. But AVP is not just Video. It will cover Audio Recording, and Music Recording is just a subset of that. I believe the audience for music-less Audio Recording overlaps with the audience for Music Recording strongly, much more than Music Performance/Practice/Theory overlaps with Music Recording. – Matthew Read♦ Apr 27 '11 at 13:46
  • @Lennart I don't see why the music tag would be necessary. In the rare cases guitars are recorded for completely non-musical purposes that should be specified in the question. Music would be the default assumption. – Matthew Read♦ Apr 27 '11 at 13:48
  • @Matthew: How will people, like me, interested in recording music, find the question if it isn't tagged, on a site where most questions are about completely different things? – Lennart Regebro Apr 27 '11 at 13:55
  • @Lennart Couldn't you also say that if the questions were here, they should be tagged audio-production when relevant so that interested AVP users could find it? I think that would be just as natural as tagging music on the other site. It's not a meta tag either, so I'm not sure I buy the idea than an AVP user asking about recording music wouldn't tag with music or something else useful. – Matthew Read♦ Apr 27 '11 at 14:02
  • @Matthew: Yes, you could say that. And I did say that. Except that the natural tag would be "recording", which I mentioned above. :-) Hence, users interested in recording would find it quite easily. – Lennart Regebro Apr 27 '11 at 14:04
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    Good idea, done! Too bad I didn't do it from the start, now it will be skewed. Ah well. – Lennart Regebro Apr 27 '11 at 14:23

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