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.
Back Up! (Or I'll Run Over You)
by Roger Nichols
I like trying to invent things. I like trying to improve on old processes
by using the latest technology. That's why I just invented "Dead Sea
Backup", a way to store your digital audio data so that it will be
around in 2000 years when people can finally appreciate what you were trying
to do.
I say something on Discovery Channel about some stone tablets that were
dated back thousands of years. This happened just as I was reading about
the shelf life of CD-R. It hit me like a ton of bricks. Why not carve the
digital audio information onto stone tablets instead of CDs? There was no
time to waste!
I borrowed a Roland "3D plotter" from a friend. It is basically
a three dimensional plotter with a little Dremmel tool instead of a pen.
The X and Y axis works pretty much like any other plotter. You just connect
it to your computer, insert a sharpened router bit, clamp in a piece of
marble and press return.
My first calculations showed that to cut the ones and zeros into 12"
by 12" pieces of stone using a 12 point OCR font to store the 20 bit
stereo data from the Steely Dan Live album would take 1,543,500 stone tablets.
I thought this might be a little much, so I decided that Level II storage
technology for stone tablets would have to be used. The difference is that
instead of ones and zeros, the plotter would carve hex digits instead. One
character stands for four bits of data. This would bring the storage requirements
down to a reasonable 385,875 tablets. If the tablets were 1/2" thick,
which would make them stack rather nicely, then with FAA approval the stack
would reach 16,078 feet altitude. The trade-off isn't too bad, storage requirements
vs. Longevity.
Hard (disk) To Beat
There are a lot of new features coming soon to a hard disk recorder near
you. Digidesign is just about ready to launch their PCI card version of
Pro Tools (I smell PC versions of Pro Tools). It will do everything faster
and better, and also support 20/24 bit audio. The software to support the
higher resolution audio will be released later this year. Keep in mind that
everybody and their brother is now producing TDM Plug-Ins for Pro Tools.
I just received the new QSound TDM module that I will review soon, as well
as the t.c.Tools plug-in from tc electronics. Things are going to be fun
in DSP land during the next six months.
In the high end land of Sonic Solutions, new software releases due through
July will support image files that will allow you to record to CD-R machines
like the Yamaha 4x cutter. The new software will also let you playback and
upload from DDP tapes (8mm Exabyte tapes used for CD masters). Most big
mastering facilities have two or three Sonic Solutions systems networked
together. This allows different rooms to edit a project without having to
copy the audio from one computer to another.
Don't forget SADiE. If you are looking for a lot of "Bang for the Buck",
this is a pretty good choice. Their latest 3.0 software release is pretty
amazing. The thing I like best about SADiE is that all of the software upgrades
are free, and the basic software includes everything you would ever want
to do (there is one option, the CEDAR noise reduction module). EQ, compression,
pitch shift, time stretching, CD cutting with PQ code editing, DDP tape
production, verification and playback, and the fastest and easiest user
interface on the block.
So What Is Everyone Doing With This Stuff?
More and more projects are being recorded by artists at home on hard disk
systems. I just helped Edgar Meyer finish up some editing he did on his
new album for Sony Classical with Yo-Yo Ma and Mark O'Conner. He did all
of the mixing right to Sound Designer II through an Audiomedia board, and
then took it home to do all of the editing. Besides the spacing between
cuts, he wanted to perform some extensive editing between takes to improve
the overall performance. Instead of spending long expensive hours in a mastering
room, he saved enough money to pay for the editing system he used at home.
I know a guy who opened a little mastering room to master song writing demos.
Song writers bring over a box of DATs and he makes them sound like finished
records. The song writers say that they get more interest in their songs
from prospective artists because in the difference in the way the demos
sound. Great idea, why didn't I think of that.
Multi-track systems are getting a lot of use too. Bella Fleck recorded live
performances on ADATs and then loaded them into Pro Tools. He is using a
16 channel system with 32 tracks of audio. He performed all of the editing
on the multi-track data and then mixed to two tracks using the Pro Tools
mixing desk with automation and plenty of TDM plug-ins. He even did some
overdubs directly into Pro Tools. Not one minute has been spent in a real
studio.
In the past, it has been hard to work on one system at home and then move
your audio to another system for final mastering. Audio file interchange
has been a problem. The future holds hope for us, though. Avid (Digidesign's
parent company) spearheaded the OMF (Oddios My Friend?) standard for audio
file transfer. I have used it to transfer multitrack data with regions between
Pro Tools and Deck II. AIFF files can be exported by Sound Designer II and
imported to Sonic Solutions. There are a multitude of shareware utilities
that will convert data from WAV files (the most common PC audio format)
to various Macintosh formats.
TTFN
Don't forget to keep checking my web site (http://www.digital-atomics.com),
it's up to 23,000 hits since February. I am going to try to send live photos
from the Steely Dan tour this summer if I'm not too busy mastering project
studio albums.
Well, it's time to jump on my horse and ride into the sunset. The only problem
is that I am sitting at a beach on the west coast of Florida with nothing
between me and the horizon but water. If my horse can swim, I'll see you
next month.
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