The old way: they charged a max of $200 per bundle. Which is fine. If you own Mercury. Otherwise the fees add up. It’s not too impossible to go over $200 with the old way.

I’m in the boat of having 4 different Waves products. ( I should post a shootout of the CLA stuff…) My WUP would likely be over the max.

Of course, I don’t have to stay current. At the rate that Apple releases os upgrades, that’s not an option for many.

WUP by the way, is the annual maintenance agreement for Waves. It stands for Waves Update Plan.

A quick shout out to Griffle.com, where I’ve been doing some consulting. Check out the 3×5 trio on the TV tab. Yours truly directed and edited!

http://www.gearslutz.com/board/so-much-gear-so-little-time/414034-no-booth-digidesign-years-aes-new-post.html

There’s been rampant speculation in recent years that Digis parent company, Avid, has been on shakey footing. It could be that the combined effects of the economic slowdown with decreased earnings at Avid made for some cost cutting.

I think is safe to assume that there’s no new hardware for HD users, and no major updates to PT8 or Le. There is however M-Powered support for Mackie, perhaps a combo booth is in order?

Prepro is probably the easiest to underestimate in the recording process. It took me quite a few sessions to figure that out as there’s not the clear cut path to follow in my market as far as learning the ropes.

Let’s look at the basic premise of prepro: the producers of the project (bands, producers, engineers) talk over what they hope to end with and how they’re going to achieve it. Will everybody play together at the same time? Is everybody rehearsed, songs selected? Budget? Studio? Schedule?Deliverables? Click track? Rental gear? Do instruments need some tlc from a tech? Etc etc.

At a home studio or pro room ( or any combo of the two ) this simple process is the key to many problems that usually come up later.

It’s a painful lesson to learn, but once you get in the mode of planning, the sessions go sooooo much better. There’s quite a bit less drama in the studio with this short meeting.

Here’s a quick look at what your backup directory should look like. Note the date convention: year, month, day.

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.

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!

Looking around on the web reveals that more and more D2’s are starting to die en masse.  I’d still steer clear.

The culprit? I believe it’s the enclosure to one of my quadra 500 gig drives. During heavy use (such as batch exporting) the drive will “disappear.” Power’s still on (the Lacie support people will always blame this first. As if the power supply is the root of everything that can go wrong with their drives.)

Now I’m backed up (See this tip) so I’m not sweating bullets, but you do lose a few hours of productivity if a drive goes down.

My chain, for anyone who runs into this in the future: Dell E1705 ->Digi002R -> 500gig Lacie Quadra -> (Via FW800) 500gig Lacie Quadra.

My $.02: Avoid Lacie like the plague. A studio I work for lost one three weeks ago and then another started limping the other day. Combined with today’s experience, do yourself a favor. Skip Lacie all together.