DP6 is here (or will be here soon, say commenters), with a badly-needed UI update and a number of new features. The results still look like DP – in the way that should appeal to current users, that is – but enhancements demonstrate that the ongoing DAW battles carry on.

DP6 New Features

In the usability category:

• Updated UI with vertical track resizing (about time, jeez!) and better zooming and resizing
• Window tabs, which are a pretty cool way of switching between windows and tabbing views a la Firefox, Safari, et al (I’m surprised we haven’t seen more tabs in music software, given their popularity in browsing)
• Inspector palettes
• Build comps by selecting from different takes, which would be exciting if we hadn’t just seen similar features elsewhere

New Effects

As welcome as these features will be, most of the buzz I’ve heard from DP users centers around the new effects plug-ins. The MasterWorks Leveler models the “Teletronix LA-2A optical leveling amplifier.” Translated into plain English, it’s an automatic gain adjustment that can have some of the dynamic-smoothing qualities of compression without their soul-sucking quality – it’s an arguably better way of adjusting dynamics. I know at least one very prominent Ableton Live and Logic lover who wants DP6 just to run this plug-in. See the full description on MOTU’s site.

Talk to everyone from armchair music production critics to dyed-in-the-wool pro engineers, and you’re likely to hear about how today’s records are over-compressed. (We think this is what Bob Dylan meant when he said records “have sound all over them.” But we made fun of him anyway.)

To audio lay people, though, it may be tough to describe exactly what this means. One music fan has taken the battle to YouTube, with a graphical and aural demonstration of exactly what the technique (technically “brick wall limiting”) does to the sound. Rather than approach this the traditional way, he takes a nice, clean 80s track and imagines what it might sound like in 2007. It’s actually not an implausible result:

(thanks to Matrix of Matrixsynth fame)

Bob Dylan’s insight into CDs continues to inspire new art. (If you’ve just joined us: Dylan rips CDs — really rips them, and a reader suggests cautionary emblems for CDs.)

Now, thesimplicity has illustrated his answer, and I’m beyond words. Tasty:

Yes, we’ll work out how to put some sort of t-shirt version together of these. Meanwhile, what’s that? Dylan shilling for Apple, so he can sell his new CD, the mastering of which he’s trashing in Rolling Stone, in a lossy, compressed digital format encoded with DRM?

Actually, it is a good song. I think I’ll skip iTunes and buy the CD.

Previous image (and my personal favorite), ready for application at your local CD store:

Dylan’s poetic non-sequiturs make great t-shirts. Something about his recent complaints just beg to be turned into brilliant designs. Arru, a breakdancing Swedish musician and designer, is the first to respond to our Dylan design challenge with these gems:

Bob Dylan puts it thusly [boombox.se]

Truly great work, Arru! I’m not sure whether to throw these on a t-shirt or print stickers and apply them to my jewel cases. (Or, even better, slip them onto the CD racks at the local Starbucks.) But if you are thinking of t-shirts, my friends over at Make have a great tutorial:

DIY t-shirt designs [Make video]

Here’s the original quote:

“New records … have sound all over them.�

“CDs are small. There’s no stature to it.�

CDM forums thread on Dylan
Wired on Dylan quotes

I admire someone like Bob Dylan who can combine producing fantastic music with producing outlandish, sometimes random statements. Vying for the dumbest music quote of the year, Bob gives us this gem:

“New records … have sound all over them.”

And goes on to say:

“CDs are small. There’s no stature to it.”

(CDs actually prefer “portability enabled.” And what’s this obsession with size?)

Now, let’s see. At this point, I could talk about how I’m no fan of over-compressed and over-produced music, while criticizing the fact that Bob has ignored the bulk of music production in favor of the big-selling labels from which he himself has made colossal wads of cash and untold fame and glory, or … come on, who am I kidding? Why are we arguing with a guy who says “I don’t know anybody who’s made a record that sounds decent in the past 20 years, really”? Not a single album? (See further discussion on Music thing and, before that, on the CDM forums if you do want to discuss.)

No, I think there’s only one proper response to this quote:

Make a t-shirt.

Bob, you’ve just become our Ted Stevens / “the internet is a series of tubes.”

So, CDMers, I encourage you to take Bob’s quote as a call to action, and design us some graphics / t-shirts / undawears / frisbees fully embracing these records with “sound all over them” and the fact that CDs are small and lack stature.

To the winner, we’ll give not wads of cash, but definitely untold fame and glory. And we’ll link to your cafepress store. Maybe that will give you wads of cash.

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.

Converting sample rate and bit depth to lower-resolution data, as you’d do when a project was finished for output to CD and online files or when converting prior to assembling a project, is a dangerous task. It’s the moment at which you can lose a lot of what you put into your sound: the spectral content that gives the result the extra ’sparkle’ you want.

A test performed by Mac developer AudioEase recently took a shot at the sound quality in BIAS Peak, the flagship audio editor and perennial Mac fave. I’ve chatted with BIAS about this, and needless to say they were unhappy about the AudioEase tests and wanted to investigate (partly because they thought they’d have no problem refuting them). Now it’s their turn to fire back, with an extensive white paper and sound fidelity test of the new Peak Pro 5 and how it converts sample rates. Peak’s new SRC engine should not only sound better than competing products, but it also drives Peak’s new tape scrubbing feature, a feature competing editors lack that sounds better than anything I’ve used. (It’s great fun, scrubbing to find exact edit points like you would with analog tape.)

I have to say, the results are pretty compelling: their evidence seems to suggest that Peak 5 has the cleanest sample rate conversion available. The results are subtle — images like the one shown here have been modified to bring artifacts into relief — but they would be audible. I’ve been very happy with the SRC I did with Peak, and with POW-r dithering for bit rate conversion, plus batch processing features, it could become your primary file converting powerhouse if you’re on the Mac.

Still skeptical? BIAS has released a full explanation, and lets you not only download their white paper but try to reproduce their results. I’d love to hear someone more knowledgable than me on these matters weigh in.

BIAS Resampling White Paper Page

Pierre Hilaire writes:

Thank you for taking my e-mail. I am a Recording Engineer who has [Cakewalk] SONAR Producer Edition Software. Can I Master songs on SONAR? I know the ideal mastering tool is Pro Tools, but how about SONAR?

This sounded like an important opportunity to correct some common misinformation — namely, that Pro Tools is the only “real” digital audio tool. Secondly, mastering, which traditionally meant making a final 2-track stereo mix from which you could produce a stereo record (though a master these days might be in surround), is a process that can be done in any Digital Audio Workstation app.

Different DAWs have different facilities for mastering, so I went to the source, and ask Steve Thomas from Cakewalk. Steve has some great insider insight into what SONAR can do on the mastering front. Read more for Steve’s answer . . .