Cheshire Omnimedia

Just a quick report: I’ve been away for the last few days because I’ve been on RAGBRAI. Will be back at it soon!

Today I was in the studio and came to the following conclusion: I love
Audioslave.

People are quick to criticize, and I understand where they’re coming
from. The band has two very tough acts to follow: Rage Against The
Machine and Soundgarden.

I would still argue that they set the modern rock benchmark for this
decade. Their second record, Revelations, had a ton of hits. All of
the singles deserved the airplay they recieved, too.

Just calling it like I see it.

If you’re reading the title and thinking What the hell does this have to do with audio? you’re right to be confused.

The other day I was recording a client and we got to the point of “well, I played a note, can’t you just make it longer?” Of course I can. But why should I?

Which brings me to my point:

If you want Brandon Lee in your film right now, you better be ready with wide pockets to cut a check to ILM as he’s sadly no longer, well, hireable. They have a whole slew of tricks to put the deceaseds’ likeness in celluloid.

But let’s say you have Hugh Grant in your film. Why not just film another take?

And that’s the crux of my idea today. We as engineers have crazy tools. It seems like magic to “mere mortals.” And it really is- we can change pitch, length, timing with some effort.

But if we don’t have to, why not just run another take?

. . . on your studio computer.

The Studio Moral of the Day goes like this:  You shouldn’t have your DAW connected to the web.  That goes for Macs as well as PCs.

Why Macs?  Because they’re essentially PCs in terms of interest to the hacking community.  I mean, sure they’re different under the hood.  But if you believe that your Mac is safe just because it’s a Mac.  Well. . . Keep on thinking that.  Your clients will come to me!!! (I keed, I keed!)

Taking that a step further, one of the best practices is to Dual Boot your computer if your studio comp is also your personal comp.  That essentially allows you to have an OS for play and an OS for work.  My laptop has a stripped down version of Windows XP for remote work.  Games, typing, browsing, iTunes, all that’s on the other OS.

Another thing that people forget about:  On your “work OS” if you’re dual booting, you should disable auto updating.  On that Apple side, seemingly innocent updates to Quicktime can bring your DAW to it’s knees.  Same thing on the PC: an update to Internet Explorer could do you in.

So today I was updating the studio comp to the Waveshell 6.0 and it came time to pay the piper. The studio WUP license update was about $100. Not too bad, you might think. But there’s a few catch-ya’s.

1) You have to re-up everything. Not just the Waves SSL license, but everything has to be 6.0. According to the info when you go to update, anyway.

2) The studio’s fee was in the ball park of $180 as we also had to move our Renn Suite up to 6.0. My personal fee, as I have my own license, is $180. For the SSL alone. Total pain going to Waves for me to go G-Channel: $210.

I had heard that Waves was going to a $200 flat fee maximum for WUP. I was sadly mistaken. It’s $200 per bundle. Too bad that means my Musicians II is separate from the SSL Suite. (Though I shouldn’t complain, as I bought Musicians II for $40 based on apparent fluke pricing direct from Waves.)

Why the difference for the studio and me on the standalone cost? I was an original adopter for the SSL suite. Literally the first week it was out I had it running on my personal rig.

Ahhhh. . . the burden of being the first kid on the block.

I’m not Anti-WUP like many people. The change in Waves pricing strategy recently is very welcome as you used to have to pay quite a bit more for WUP. And I like (relatively) inexpensive upgrade paths.

But I still like to complain when it comes to hard earned $$$.

Forums are buzzing over the Waves recent dropping of their APA product line. A quick look at their website reveals that all evidence of the thing is gone.

What does this mean? Native processing is here in a big way. People have been running native for quite some time, but I think with quad-core processing and multi-gig ram we’ve gotten to the point where we can’t max out our processors.

Literally, the state of the business is such that processing has far outstripped needs for audio production. Of course we’ll have more elaborate algorithms in our plugin’s (TDM Tubetech is quite a beast, for example) but we’ve fallen behind Moore’s law.

At the house of Digi is where things get interesting. For the uninitiated, their HD line uses proprietary pci/pci-e cards and separate rack interfaces for I/O. There’s low-latency processing on the cards using custom chips (TDM). You can use their usual native RTAS plugins like in their LE series.

Digi’s I/O plan will probably stay the same. Dedicated cards will feed I/O boxes, but I suspect the days of TDM might be numbered. It’ll take a few years, and most likely the next Protools HD line (which we’re waaaaay overdue for and will likely ship in the next nine months) will still have TDM processing.

It’s just that it shouldn’t.

Gearslutz bemoan Waves APA