as a new orchestral composer, I bought vsl to allow me to do either orchestral sketches or finished works - in either case, I'm learning my orchestral composing with vsl as my orchestra.
To this end, there is a LOT of information that I want to pick up that is purely musical - orchestration, theme writing, whatever. Stuff that is platform and technology independent. We have a ton of talented people on this forum who can contribute fantastic musical information - I would love to see a place where that can be concentrated. It also is very valuable when you want to go back and search for some orchestration discussion not to have to sift through thousands of "performance tool crashing!!!" messages.
I do agree that if you spliter the forum too much, it becomes less useful, and clearly there IS a lot of overlap - an orchestration discussion can very quickly become how to layer samples to get a great sound. So, can we somehow combine them? For instance (I'm spitballing here), when someone posts to the new orchestration forum, the main VSL forum gets a post also which is just the header of the other post, but one that people can't respond to, much like when a moderator moves a topic from one forum to another. So, the orchestration topic can be miles long on the music forum, but there will be a "KingIdiot: How to get that big string sound - ON THE MUSIC FORUM" post in the main vsl post. Or something. But it seems that we could combine the two. Or maybe that's too much work and we just make a new forum. Or maybe we don't.
As a second thought, does your bb server allow for the categorizing of posts? If when someone started a post, they could pick from a list saying that this is a music/tech/giga/rant post, one could do a visual scan or even sort on that data while keeping everything in the same forum.
my, too, sense-
-d-