I was reading a science fiction story by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle about an alien race called the Motie. They have two arms on the right side of their bodies, and one arm on the left side. The left arm has a hand with three long fingers. This is no doubt an evolutionary change from millions of years re-booting computers after they crash. Ctrl-Alt-Del, or for the Mac guys, Ctrl-Cmd-Pwr… the three finger salute. I have tried the middle finger salute a few times, but the computer will only acknowledge the proper three-finger version.

The new Mac G4 computers are out now, and they are faster than a striped ass ape. I could swear that I would see the words on the screen even before I finished typing them. Now that is fast. I was going to use one for Pro Tools. But it only has four PCI slots. One of the slots is already filled with the video card, and one of them is needed for the Adaptec SCSI controller, which only leaves two slots for Pro Tools cards. This means that without an expansion chassis the biggest system you could have is a 24| Mix Plus system with 32 channels of I/O. This is the same drawback introduced a year ago with the G3 blue and white models. The new wrinkle is that the graphite and white G4 models no longer have an ADB port for external tablets and keyboards. This port is where the dongle is placed to allow authorization of Waves plug-ins. I have seen USB to ADB adapters, but I haven’t heard from Waves whether or not these will work with the dongle.

Speaking of Pro Tools, the new completely revamped version 5.0 is almost out. That is the good news. 5.0 will no longer support Power Mix. This is the bad news. Every single person I know who owns Pro Tools also owns a Mac G3 Powerbook for editing Pro Tools files while on the road. I have a bunch of 14 Gig 2.5" hard drives in little external enclosures that plug into the PCMCIA slot in the side of the G3 laptop. I dump my stuff onto the little drives and edit my brains out on airplane flights. When I return home I just copy over the session document, and the edits are automatically performed on the original audio. I don’t even have to transfer the audio back from the Powerbook drives. I thought that I could keep version 4.31 on the laptop, but Digidesign says that you can’t open a 5.0 session in 4.31. There is a ‘Save As’ function, but if it works as good as Track Transfer, we are going to be in big trouble.

AES Recap

I was walking around the New York 1999 AES show with my mouth hanging open. And that was before I even saw any audio gear. Meyer showed their new X-10 two way powered speaker system with servo controlled woofer. Phase and frequency response were flat as a pancake (not my pancakes) from 16Hz to 18kHz, and then only down a little up to 22kHz. A newly designed LASER-trimmed high frequency horn has wider dispersion than a domed tweeter. The woofer servo system is the same as that used to null out control surface vibrations on the Stealth fighter. I guess that makes the X-10 the first Stealth speaker. Wait! You won’t have to really buy them. Just tell your clients that you have them, they’re Stealth, right? You won’t be able to see them. I ordered a pair for my mastering room. No I didn’t. Yes I did, see them? They are right up there in the soffits, really.

Kind of Loud Technologies displayed the UREI 1176LN limiter that we all know and love. They are being re-manufactured to the same specs as the original versions. Some of the parts used in the 1176 were no longer being made, so Kind of Loud bought the assembly facility and started manufacturing the original parts. Cool. Kind of Loud produces the Surround Pan Pro plug-in for Pro Tools. They also showed a 5.1 surround reverb plug-in. That’s right, a reverb with multiple taps into the reverb field to get a cohesive surround ambience with a single plug-in.

Rimage is a company that makes a thermal transfer 300dpi CD printer. It was designed for the U.S. Government for MIL-SPEC labeling of CD-ROMs for data archival. I bought the monochrome version four years ago when they were ‘really’ expensive. I like it better than the color ink jet printers because the ink does not fade, or smear when it gets wet. The Rimage printer is 12 times faster than an inkjet, and the per-CD ink cost is about one tenth of the ink jet. It prints directly on the CD so you don’t have to use the stick-on labels. Have you ever put a CD with a label in a 40x CD-ROM drive and watched you vibrating computer walk across your desk like an out of balance washing machine? Rimage now has a full color version of the Perfect Image CD printer. I’ve already sent mine in for upgrade to the full monty version.

Mixing Metaphores

Before I was so rudely interrupted by that stupid October issue, I was talking about the project I worked on in Caracas and Cuba. I ended with some of the music on ADAT and some of the music on Sony 3348 digital 48-track tape. I ended up transferring everything digitally through a pair of Otari UFC-24 boxes into Pro Tools. I mixed all 36 songs completely in Pro Tools. All of the EQ and compression were plug-ins. I used plug-in reverbs, and one external reverb, the tc electronics M-3000. The M-3000 was fed digitally from the AES I/O on one of the ADAT Bridge interfaces. I wasn’t crazy enough to try mixing with a mouse, so I used a 32 fader Digidesign Pro Control for the mixing controls.

Because of the tight schedule, I had to mix two or three songs per day. Because of the 100% reset ability of the Pro Tools environment, I was able to do the mixing a little differently than I normally would. I selected a bunch of songs that were similar in nature; some because of mood, others because of instrumentation. I would mix one song until I got tired of it, or thought that it was pretty close to being done, save the session, and go on to another song. I now had fresh material to work on, and it was easy to cover a lot of ground rather quickly. I would get the second song almost done, and then start a third one the same way. In one day I would work on five or six songs like this, and then quit for the day. The next day I would recall each session and complete the mix. The total amount of time spent on each song was less than it would have been if I had stuck to one song until it was done. On the second day I was listening to a song that was almost done. I had a fresh perspective and could easily catch mistakes that normally would have called for a remix at a later time.

A couple of songs had to be remixed anyway. One was because the background parts were changed, and the other one because of an added flute part. Because everything was mixed in Pro Tools, all I had to do was recall the session, change the part, and print the new mix. No elaborate console recall time. No resetting of analog gear. I didn’t even have to rent any more studio time. I did it out on the patio by my pool. Way cool!

That’s Enough

Well I’m outa here for this month, I have to figure out what I want to include in my annual Christmas wish list. If there is anything that you think I should want, just send it to me. I promise I will enjoy it as much as you would have if you kept it.


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Roger really did order the Meyer X-10s… Really.