All information in these pages is copyright (c) 1989-2003 by Roger Nichols.
All rights reserved. Permission for personal reference only, and may not
be reproduced by any method without written permission.
Tales of a Blithering MIDIot.
by Roger Nichols
I have mentioned before that technology takes advantage of its users. When
there were only five or six television channels, there was nothing worth
watching. When cable TV arrived on the scene there were 40 channels of nothing
to watch. Now there are satellite dishes with hundreds of channels. There
is still nothing worth watching, it just takes longer each day to surf through
the choices to convince yourself that there is nothing to watch.
I have noticed the same thing with on-line services. They are now all offering
connection to the Internet. They have lowered their prices to make you think
that you are getting a great deal, but as more and more people connect,
the response time gets worse and it takes you longer to do whatever it was
you were doing than it did before when you were paying a higher rate, so
it ends up costing you more in the long run.
Synthesizers now come with billions of presets so that you won't have to
spend a lot of time programming in the sound that you want. Great, but it
takes you longer to search through the presets than it would have taken
to program your sound from scratch.
Computers were supposed to make things easier for us. The word processor
and electronic mail (e-mail) were supposed to lessen the amount of paper
used for communication. Well, because of computer generated documents, we
are using ten times as much paper.
Automation for mixing comes to mind as an aid that was supposed to save
time in the studio. I used to mix three songs per day. Now it is three days
per song. This is because the computer has made it easier for me to get
much more detailed when making mix adjustments. I can now spend more time
in the studio taking advantage of this time saving device.
I read somewhere that 90% of all owners have never set the clock on the
front, and that they are all flashing 12:00. Someone has come up with the
answer. It is a VCR that plugs into your phone line. The VCR calls up the
time signal and automatically sets the clock for you. I guess the VCR design
team really had nothing to do that day.
JBL & Stuff
As I write this column, I am sitting by the pool at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel
in Palm Springs, California. It is JBL's 50th anniversary. They are having
a big bash for all of their international distributors and a few press people.
I snuck in.
They theme for the meetings was "teamwork", pulling together to
get the job done. There was a guest speaker who knows all about working
together as a team, Jim Lovell, commander of Apollo XIII. Talk about teamwork!
He told the whole story, and it was much worse than it seemed in the movie
version. This guy was 200,000 miles away trying to change the course of
his space craft so that he could get back to earth. I no longer have any
reason to get mad when installing Digidesign software eats my hard disc.
It is no big thing if my cat pulls the tape out of my ADAT. Lovell was in
deep space doo-doo and pulled it off. I am impressed.
Speaking of Digidesign, I did get a copy of Session to try out. It uses
the same copy protection scheme as Pro Tools 3.1. It does not like the Mac
IIci with the Daystar 601 card. I tried installing the new software and
it ate all of the installs currently on my hard disk for Pro Tools 3.0,
Sound Designer 2.8, Masterlist CD 1.0, my TDM install, and probably a few
other things that I haven't found yet.
I mentioned the problem with PT 3.1 last Summer, but nothing got resolved.
Pace, the company that makes the copy protection for Digidesign said that
they knew of the problem last May and sent the fix to Digidesign. Digidesign
decided to go ahead and release Pro Tools 3.1 without fixing the protection
scheme, even though they had the fix in their hot little hands. It is now
January and they have not sent any fixes. I will try once more to try to
talk Digidesing into changing their protection scheme to the dreaded DONGLE.
My E-Magic sequencer uses the dongle method, and after a dozen hard disk
crashes I can still use E-Magic without any problems. I can even have the
software installed on multiple hard disks without worrying about losing
an install. Just plug in the dongle and you are in business.
Internet Comments
I noticed on the Internet that some people are interested in computer based
track sheets. I have been using Fastforms by Power-Up Software. This is
a pretty simple program for form generation and printing no the Mac. You
basically draw the form on your computer screen and name each field where
data will be entered. The data entered into each form is stored in a database.
You can print a form with the data in the blanks, or you can print out blank
forms for hand entering the data. I use Fastforms for DAT J-cards, CD labels,
track sheets, cassette J-cards, and tape box labels.
Opcode used to make a Mac based program called Track Chart, but I am not
sure if it is still available or still supported. Track Chart lets you group
tracks together in stereo pairs and enter icons denoting live tracks, drum
tracks, or sequencer tracks. Track Charts lets you display your track information
as a track sheet (with any number of tracks you choose) or as a time line.
If you have a Studio 3 MIDI interface you can feed the audio from any track
into the audio input of the Studio 3 and along with time code or MTC Track
Chart will detect where there is audio information and where there is blank
tape. This information is displayed in the time line so that you can see
where you have spaces in your recording. It works great for those times
when you need to find a few empty bars to stick in some percussion or guitar
lick. "I know there is no vocal in the bridge, but it looks like we
already stuck something in there on that track. Oh, now I remember, it was
the barking Moose sample we recorded late last night".
Last but not least, InFORMed by Shana Corp. Is the top end in form generation
and distribution. A suite of programs called InFORMed Designer, InFORMed
Manager, InFORMed Number Server, and InFORMed Revision Distributor provide
all the functions you will ever need to maintain form based information
in your studio. InFORMed is designed to work on a Mac network. After the
forms are laid out, any user on the network can "check out" a
form from the form library where he can fill it out locally. InFORMed issues
a serial number to any new form, keeps track of who is using it and what
information was entered into it. This is the perfect setup for a studio
with more than one room. Work orders can be checked out by the engineer
who is working on the project, and later by the accountant for entry into
the billing system. I would rate this one 4 stars.
Digital Software
There are a couple of software packages that I have been playing with that
you should know about. The first one is AD-1 Pro Audio Analyzer by Intelligent
Devices. It is basically a digital meter/ spectrum analyzer/ phase scope/
waveform monitor for the Mac. It comes in two versions, one that runs under
Digidesign's TDM buss, and another that is stand alone. The stand alone
version requires either a Power PC Mac or a Digidesign DSP board.
The Supermeter section of the display shows digital audio levels on a 242
segment meter with a resolution of a tenth of a dB. There are actually five
meter bars so that you can see stereo peak, average and phase information
all at the same time. The Spectrum Display is a 1024 point FFT display with
0.1 dB resolution and floating peak display for long term spectral information
viewing. The Phase Scope works like an old analog phase scope to display
the phase relationship between the left and right channels. The Waveform
Monitor displays a running history of the digital audio passing through
the system. You have your choice of stereo, summed mono, or L/R difference.
You can see past clipping events and evaluate compression and fade shapes
with this display. The prices are $349 for the stand alone version and $449
for the TDM version. I like it.
Apogee Electronics has been shipping Master Tools with UV22 for about a
year now. Master Tools provides a unique metering environment for your digital
audio as well as a way to preserve the high resolution audio that is available
on the Digidesign TDM buss. The metering front end of Master Tools shows
a three dimensional history of the audio levels and phase relationship as
they go by. In addition to levels, Master Tools displays DC offset, and
allows you to perform DSP processing on the digital audio. You can remove
DC; swap the left and right channels; reverse the phase of left, right,
or both channels; mute any channel; and add UV22 processing to your digital
audio before it comes out of Digidesign at 16 bits. The UV22 processing
is the best noise shaping I have ever heard. I use it for the Steely Dan
stuff. The live album was mixes 20 bit and then run through UV22 during
mastering. If you care anything about the quality of your audio, you will
get Master Tools. It is $795 and you can check it out on Apogee's Web Site
at http://www.apogeedigital.com.
These software packages are cheap when you compare them with the hardware
to do the same thing. Tektronix makes a hardware digital phase display and
meter for $5800. The Sony DMU-30 meter, which is the standard for digital
audio mastering, is about $2500. The Apogee UV1000 hardware processor is
around $4000. The hardware to swap channels, flip phase, mute tracks, and
remove DC will cost much more than $2500. So just think about how much money
you will be saving by buying both of these packages.
One Last Thing
I have had my Yamaha 02R digital console for two weeks now, and I am still
amazed by the quality they have squeezed into such an inexpensive box. I
am using it as the main console in my new mastering room. The extra faders
I don't use are controlling external boxes like the TC M5000 via MIDI. Way
hip.
Well I have successfully met another deadline (almost... only one day late)
and am on my way to the NAMM show in Anahiem, California. I have a few empty
spaces in my new rack that need to be filled up. Don't tell my wife I was
there buying equipment, she thinks I am just off somewhere having an affair.
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