When you hear the repeated stories about how traditional recording studios are dead, I suspect your first thought is not, “Finally! The dream of in-flight recording has its day!” or “Ah-hah! Now all the bands will move into inflatable plastic bubbles as a marketing stunt!” Yet, such things have come to pass. One involves a band you may care about and actually yields some practical tips. The other involves a band I’m almost sure you don’t care about and is a silly stunt.

Respectively:

Jamiroquai played a gig at 35,000 feet on its way to Greece for a select group of fans. I know this, because Focusrite sent out a press release. We get these kind of press releases all the time: someone used something or other (usually something expensive) somewhere in a way that’s not all that interesting. This case was different. Sure, recording a live gig in flight is a gimmick. But as a recording challenge, that means they:

1. Ran entirely on battery power.
2. Set up the whole recording rig in a standard airline row. (Coach, no less!)
3. Weathered some turbulence.
4. Had to fight a sudden outbreak of poisonous snakes. (Okay, made that one up.)

Laptops as bio-hazard? Dust problems in the desert? Just stick them in a miniature “clean room” environment. Chris Martinez of effect69 writes us with details:

Burning Man 2006: Hope & Fear the Future

When we were asked to play on the playa, I immediately thought of all of the stories of “That dust gets everywhere� and did I really want all of my precious gear getting destroyed? Would you? No! So I went to work on a plan that would help keep most of the dust and elements off of the gear. “Bio-Hazard� containment boxes a “Clean Room� of sorts. If something could keep particles from reaching the air, then I could keep particles from reaching the gear. As you can see the burners were impressed by our research on brining digital gear to the festival.

The boxes are made of 1/4� acrylic and the holes are made from 5 1/4� PVC with Large black rubber clean up gloves. Obviously, the boxes are in the 1.0 stage and if we go back to BM in 2007 2.0 should be even better. All because we love to create digital music!

Brilliant work, Chris! Now all we need is a carry-on blast chamber for the occasional bad battery on a plane.

Live from the WWDC keynote with CDM’s own Lee Sherman, Apple has the latest on their new operating system release:

1. OS X is 64-bit, top to bottom: Here’s a real demonstration of the difference between Apple and Microsoft. Windows XP x64 has been a mess; virtually no one has adopted it (despite some advocacy on the part of music developer Cakewalk), and a lot of software isn’t compatible (like, notably, any music software that relies on PACE, as well as many drivers). Now Apple will make OS X 10.5 entirely 64-bit, with seamless compatibility for 32-bit apps. Hopefully that includes Core Audio; we’ll be asking more about the details on this.
2. Automatic backup: Time Machine provides automated backup of everything you do, answering a real need as Apple has found only 26% of users polled are backing up. (I’m guessing 75% of them were lying, too.) Restore everything or some things, locally on a hard drive or on a server. It even works with applications like iPhoto. It’ll be interesting to learn more details on this; this is a feature I’ve wanted Apple to add for years.
3. Time Lord: [Demonstrating the new Time Machine UI] “Time is a dimension that recedes into your desktop,” says Lee, a la Expose. A timeline on the right side flips through earlier iterations of a folder in Finder. This is a key point, because one of the oft-overlooked needs for backup is undoing human/user error, not just recovering from a drive failure. Everything works right within the Finder. “Best backup UI ever,” says Lee.
4. New Software Bundle: Leopard will now come right out of the box with Boot Camp (for Intel Macs booting Windows), Front Row (the multimedia app), and the fun photo app Photo Booth, plus, a new app –

The modular sound and multimedia environment Max/MSP has had plenty of “celebrity” users; among the better-known is the duo Autechre. Some of their newer creations have been featured in Sound on Sound, as pictured below. But via the excellent Spanish-language audiovisual blog mediateletipos, I see that a selection of creations have been reverse-engineered by some passionate fans and are available for download. One has even been ported to Reaktor:

Reverse-engineering Autechre

I’m not really trying to be Autechre, so I’m happy just to poke around in these patches and screenshots and get some inspiration for my own patching efforts. Good stuff. Let us know what you think, and if you have any especially manic patches of your own in Max, Reaktor, or any other environment.

“July 2006: This is the year when mLAN FireWire Music Networking breaks loose!” Yamaha proudly proclaims on the mLAN Central website! Woo-hoo! Break it loose! Shake it down! mLAN, baby!

Uh, okay, here’s why I’m skeptical about this. mLAN is a perfectly reasonable, FireWire-based technology for interconnecting audio devices, and it does work on a handful of Yamaha pieces. But Yamaha has long claimed that mLAN would become a new industry standard format, embraced by other manufacturers. Sounds great — except, years into the mLAN format, that hasn’t happened. There’s a semi-impressive list of partner companies supposedly working on mLAN on Yamaha’s partners page. Semi-impressive because some of them (eMagic) don’t even exist any more. But good luck trying to dig up actual products on this already-modest list. While I was researching my book, I tried calling Yamaha, Korg, and Tascam, just to get them to name one product they make that uses mLAN. Korg and Tascam said, “Isn’t that a Yamaha format? You’d have to talk to them.” At best, it sounded like maybe you could get an optional expansion board. For something. Yamaha wasn’t much help, either, beyond their own gear. There are a handful of pieces of hardware out there, but it’s a tiny fraction of the overall sound market. But, of course, 2006 is going to be the year, so maybe at NAMM next week in Austin the floodgates will open and mLAN will be the hot — okay, I’m not kidding anyone here.

That said, you can now download drivers for your Yamaha-branded mLAN gear with Universal Binary support for Intel Macs, and — wait a minute. What’s this? The list of even Yamaha mLAN gear is getting shorter, because Yamaha has declared a number of its own mLAN products “legacy.” They’ll be happy to help you upgrade via a page entitled mLAN Loyalty.

I enjoy the picture, though. I think this person is driving through the Valley of Forgotten Technologies.

I’ve been proven many times wrong before, so if someone can explain to me what makes mLAN useful beyond a couple of pieces of Yamaha hardware that haven’t been redubbed “legacy,” I’d love to hear it. Knowing how these things go, I’ll probably shoot out my mouth only to have one of the mLAN engineers show up in comments. In the meantime, this one goes in the X-Files, for “did we ever really believe that was going to catch on”?

Early 2006 brought us the blockbuster Intel Mac ports — Logic, Live, Reason, and (most recently) Pro Tools LE — but now, finally, plug-ins are flooding in with Universal Intel versions. Just in over the last week:

BIAS Peak 5.2 brings Intel-native support to the old standby Mac audio editor. With Soundtrack Pro now available only as an upgrade for existing customers or as part of the Final Cut Studio bundle, Peak is likely to be many Mac users’ stereo waveform editor of choice. See my review for Macworld. Cost: Free.

Celemony’s Melodyne Software suite is up to 3.1, bringing not only Intel Mac-native support but some significant bugfixes and ReWire enhancements, as well. I got to speak to these folks at NAMM in January, and the new Melodyne is an incredible piece of software: it truly delivers on being able to stretch and re-pitch audio in a musical way. Cost: Free.

Last year, we got used to the idea of superstar Windows developer Cakewalk being “Mac guys,” just as we were getting used to the idea of Macs shipping with Intel processors. Now you get both in a single app: Cakewalk just announced they’ve updated their superb Rapture soft synth for Intel Macs. Rapture is a lot of fun, with an extensive but accessible modulation section and great-sounding anti-aliasing. It’s amusing to see Cakewalk beat a lot of long-time Mac developers to the punch. Cost: Free.

In addition to the full versions of these software, the “Lite” bundled versions of all the software included in the Pro Tools Ignition Pack are now all also Intel-ready. Cost: Free.

The message to developers here is clear: give people Intel-native versions free so they don’t have to pay for your software all over again.

So, how are Apple’s MacBooks and MacBook Pros doing for musicians? The interesting thing I’m hearing is that almost every PC user I know plans to make their next laptop a Mac. I don’t blame them; while I love the new desktop PC I built, Macs are still by far the most hassle-free mobile machines. A lot of us are waiting for the inevitable first revision to these machines, but in the meantime, people who have sprung for new Macs seem pretty happy. DJ Miles Maeda was playing on a set with me last night at Monkeytown in Brooklyn, and I got to check out his machine. He opted for the glossy 17″ display, and it looked fantastic. The extra screen real estate made it easy to monitor Ableton Live sessions on the go. He was pleased, as I have been, with how fast the Core Duo machines are. Notably, too, his computer doesn’t exhibit the high-pitched whine some of the early production-build MacBook Pros had.

Let us know your experiences if you pick one up. Software is rapidly approaching critical mass for many people to make the switch.

Rivalries are good: they keep software developers competitive, leapfrogging each other in features. They keep the pressure on, and having seen what happens when one company gets a monopoly (Microsoft Office, I’m looking at you), progress generally slows. Notation users have benefited from the Finale/Sibelius rivalry, and that competition continues to produce better and better notation software. Finale 2007 looks like it will continue that trend.

Now, I’ve gotten in trouble before when I’ve said Finale was blatantly copying its music notation rival Sibelius. But I don’t think anyone can argue with me this time. The major features in Sibelius 4: parts linked to full score, and integrated video support and film scoring features. The major features in Finale 2007, based on a marketing email I just got from Finale:

1. Parts linked to full score
2. Integrated video support and film scoring features
3. Intel Mac native support

Sounds familiar, huh? Now, honestly, these were really features that both packages would inevitably add, so I’m glad to see Finale continuing to level the playing field.

We posted a review by our own Jaymis Loveday of Behringer’s BCD2000 DJ computer control surface. It’s a useful piece of kit, with DJ-style mixer controls, scratch surfaces, and built-in audio. Only one problem: Mac drivers and the product itself appear to be MIA.

Update 2006-01-13: We have learned that a BCD2000 user, Evinyatar has released an OSX compatible driver (Universal Binary, MIDI functions only), and has plans for more customizations. -JL

Behringer’s North American PR rep Derrick Davis tells us the BCD2000 isn’t shipping in quantity yet; Jaymis got his hands on a limited-release shipment. The Mac is currently unsupported; that much we can confirm, as we’ve received a couple of reports in which Mac users tell us they’ve been unable to get it working. (The device itself is not class-compliant and requires drivers for the control surface to communicate with the computer.) Behringer expects to ship in quantity soon, though Davis didn’t know whether Mac drivers would be included. It would be surprising if they were not, given the BCD’s fader and rotary controller siblings (The BCF- and BCR2000, respectively) are Mac-compatible. But, really, we won’t know until it ships. Stay tuned.

Software companies are constantly claiming they offer “console-grade” processing, and comparing their effects to the legendary console effects from SSL (Solid State Logic). Well, now SSL themselves are getting into the DAW game, with a software/hardware solution called Duende. SSL has announced Duende is now shipping for Mac, coming to Windows in the fall:

Duende — Console-Grade Processing for your DAW [Solid State Logic]

SSL Duende includes channel and dynamics processing and the Stereo Bus Compressor for mastering. These are not native plug-ins; you connect a sleek, silver DSP hardware rack to your computer via FireWire. It’s too early to say whether the resulting product will live up to the hype, and you certainly shouldn’t ask me, since I’m about as far as you can get from a mastering engineer. Audio Damage’s Chris Randall has developed a minor obsession over the gear at Analog Industries, and points to first impressions at gearslutz.com.

There is reason to be skeptical, as always, about the ability of digital processing to live up to analog processing. Legendary engineer George Massenburg noted in comments earlier this year that digital compressor emulations lose something versus the analog originals, even as EQs are fairly easily emulated digitally. That makes sense given how digital audio processing works, though I’m sure nothing is likely to resolve the analog vs. digital debate in our lifetimes. The big question here to me is really value, and in that category, the SSL offering will have to compete with other DSP platforms. Universal Audio’s UAD-1, TC Electronic’s PowerCore, and, at the higher end, Digidesign’s TDM platform all have a much broader selection of plug-ins, and there’s the affordable new Focusrite Liquid Channel. I’ll be anxious to hear how Duende fits in, though you can’t beat putting the SSL brand on the faceplate.

If you want to win one of these, Music thing gets the scoop on a Peter Gabriel remix contest; the prize is the Duende.