Cheshire Omnimedia

Just a quick reminder for today’s Studio Moral of the Day: Only you can prevent forest fires.

I mean, actually, that only you can say no to Quicktime. Updates that is. I should have listened to my own advice.

The other day I was having troubles on my PC with the transport stopping as soon as I press play. It’d backqueue a few milliseconds, and then stall out. After a few attempts, it’d let you play. Further exploration revealed that I was in AIFF as opposed to WAV. (More on why I prefer BWAV over AIFF in a later SMotD.)

I presume that the side grade to a non-standard QT release is what did me. Transcoding for a music video is what got me, I think.

Today’s post is an obit for Gigastudio. I’ve been running GS 2.5 on a standalone PC for a number of years now. It’s been a real workhorse here, so I’m kind of sad to see it go. This is from Tascam so it’s not too suprising. (The old joke goes you can’t spell Tascam without scam!)

I’ve worked with a few other soft-samplers for Protools and they all seem to be a bit buggy. Native Instruments pianos sound great, but can really flake out. (Using a Mac for my experience here.) I know it seems old fashioned, but the standalone thing worked really well. I ran two midi cables to my Giga machine, and ran a light-pipe back into PT. Lovely! Pretty low latency, and Giga rarely messed up once you got it going. Great sample sets. The first samples I’ve heard that can pass as “real.”

I remember cutting the Twistin’ Trees album. I originally recorded all of the piano tracks late at night on a concert length Steinway. It sounded simply amazing. . . until I got the tracks back on monitors and realized a few key notes were out of tune. I recut everything via midi through Gigapiano (the included one with GS 2) It sounded GREAT! The mastering engineer asked where I cut the piano. I was sold at that point.

A few caveats of course. I’ve never been able to register my software, despite trying the several times I’ve reinstalled over the years. Another is that on one particular mobo I couldn’t get the midi inputs to show up in the sampler. Everything was greyed out. No matter what voodoo I tried, no luck. I had to reinstall windows from the ground up, and it worked. The sample editor (if you’re really trying to make a GS “instrument”) is an absolute pain in the butt. I’d rather code something in assembly (note: I don’t know anything about assembly.)

Flaws included, I look back with fond memories. Of course, I’ll keep using the version I have, but now I’ll never get to know GS 3, and certainly not the short lived 4.

(Pouring coffee onto floor) Here’s one for my homie:

Giga, I hardly knew thee!

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

Earlier I posted about the rumor of a new plug-in for the SSL suite offered by Waves.

The G-Channel appears to be available for a paid upgrade of $153 for those that have a lapsed WUP.

This is all speculation, but I imagine if the sales/support people are talking about it over email with customers, it’s probably due in the next few months. I imagine this is Waves ammunition for the next AES in San Fransisco- though they’ve certainly been busy as of late with the JJP line.

Here’s the source:
http://www.gearslutz.com/

And my post at the Gearslutz new product section:
http://www.gearslutz.com/board/new-product-alert/

Breaking rumor: with waveshell 6.0 SSL users will get a “G” channel!

More details and speculation when I get back from the studio. Whoo hoo!