I’ve been waiting for the near-ubiquitous ExpressCard slot on laptops to see some audio goodness, so one of the more welcome announcements of NAMM is that there’s now finally an ExpressCard-enabled version of the Universal Audio platform. The UAD is a DSP platform for computers, with an emphasis on high-quality, boutique mastering and effects plug-ins, including some recent, familiar emulations of classic Roland and Moog gear. UA’s stuff really does sound great, and host support has been improving (look for the key words “latency compensation” in your host of choice). So it’s about time that laptop users get in on some of the fun the desktop users have had.

The surprise is, the UAD-2 SOLO doesn’t cost that much – $500 includes the card plus the “1176SE Compressor/Limiter, Pultec EQP-1A Equalizer, RealVerb Pro Room Modeler, and CS-1 Channel Strip.” That’s a premium over native plug-ins, but then you have access to other UA plugs later on. In other news, Antares and Manley Labs signed onto UA’s platform, so more stuff is coming.

And by the way, while the forums rip into the choice of DAW, this stuff will work everywhere – even, via RTAS, Pro Tools.

Universal’s stuff isn’t for everyone, but I’m pleased that laptop users are getting something more out of a slot on their machine. (You’ll find ExpressCard on most PCs and the MacBook Pro, as well.) I hope this is the first of more hardware to come.

http://www.uaudio.com/

Mastering – spoiled for choice? This means in mastering choices, you’ve got the UAD, IK’s T-RackS 3 announced at the end of last year, and iZotope’s Ozone 4 announced at NAMM. I’ll be talking to some folks in New York who know something about mastering (i.e., are not me). (One of them is a big Cubase fan, so I expect he’ll also be all over Cubase 5 – and he makes records that make real money, whereas I make records that go nicely with experimental modern dance.)

Each of these products goes a different direction, but the honest truth is almost any DAW will start you out with a pretty great selection of effects tools, and for a small chunk of change, you can add on with something like the UAD, T-RackS, and iZotope. None of this changes your actual skill level or the quality of your ears, but it does help keep your wallet from being the major barrier.

Thanksgiving is an American holiday on this international site, but the basic ideal for which the day has come to stand – giving thanks – is a noble one. So we want to do three things here for CDM:

1. Ask you what for you’re thankful, musically speaking. It might be a synth, or a collaborator, or an album, or a song, or the metronome you’ve used since you started playing, or having more discipline practicing. It could be tech (you know the slant of this site), or not. I’ll be putting together the answers in a big, warm heap for us to share, like virtual pumpkin pie.

2. Meet CDM Notes. Like you need another mailing list, I know. This one will be different – it won’t just be an automated dump of headlines; it’ll actually be an email from me with personal notes on the week’s events in music and motion, and some exclusive tidbits not elsewhere. You don’t have to sign up for the mailing list, but this is a chance to do it if you like. And it’ll include some things to be thankful for.

3. You could win a copy of T-RackS 3 Deluxe. Whether you opt for the mailing list or not, you’ll be entered to win a copy of IK Multimedia’s latest release of their mixing and mastering suite. (I’m playing with it now; watch for a review soon.)

Enter now: http://cdm.thanksgiving.sgizmo.com/

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: