Our friend David Battino writes from O’Reilly Digital Media site to share the massive reader response they got to the Zoom H2 recorder. (The H2 is a smaller version of the H4, which made a guest appearance of sorts on Morning Edition this week.)

Mark Nelson didn’t manage to make this his fifth portable flash recorder review in Hawaii, but he made up for it in depth. His review of the Zoom H2 is almost 5,000 words and contains surround-sound links galore as well as some nifty audio examples.

What’s especially cool was that it became a collaborative review after I asked readers what features they wanted us to test when the H2 finally shipped. They piled on with questions, driving my blog to #1 on the whole O’Reilly Network. At last count, I had close to 300 comments. One reader even wrote a Mac plugin to convert the H2’s quad recordings to 5.1.

So, there you have it: mobile recording geekery can have mass appeal!

Review

Pre-discussion

Kirsty Komuso is documenting a class project to use Wii gaming controllers to manipulate sound. The secret: feed the students pizza. (Hey, low blood sugar is most definitely not helpful when working with interactive projects.)

It is amazing what you can achieve with a class of advanced interaction design students, fuelled [sic] by 12 pizzas and a couple of toys (Wii Bluetooth remote controllers). In our class, students are designing spatial interaction projects that can take the form of art installation, informative sonification/visualisation or augmented hyper-instrument design (gesture performance interface)

Wii spatial sound control [Sonic Yoshi]

I like their approach: take the Mac-based aka.wiiremote object for Max/MSP, hook up lots of stuff, and see what happens!

Kristy also points to something I hadn’t seen before: Simon Morris has a sound project that uses skateboards as wireless sensing controllers for music. The result: the skateboarder becomes a “composer.” (And, as in traditional composition, you wipe out and fall on your ass a lot.)

Musique Concrete: Transforming Space, Sound, and the City Through Skateboarding [Project Page]
Skate/Sound Presentation at Kolin Koulu Middle School [The Real Simon Blog]

Skateboards? Nintendo? Pizza? I’m sure we’ve got the kids interested by now. Darnit, I’m hungry and want to play Zelda.

Contained in the Apple Final Cut Studio 2 announcement is a new version of Apple’s video-savvy sound editor, Soundtrack Pro. Unfortunately, Apple still hasn’t restored the a la carte, Soundtrack-only purchase option — you have to get Final Cut Studio to get Soundtrack Pro 2. But the new release does build on some of the unique interface ideas of the first version, while adding the key capabilities the first version lacked — namely, usefulness for actually creating soundtracks. And look closely at these screen shots, and you just might see something of the next Logic. (Yeah, I know, you wanted solid information, but it wouldn’t have made sense to talk about a music product like Logic at a broadcast production show like NAB, where Final Cut Studio 2 was launched. When Apple’s ready, I’m sure we’ll hear from them.)

The big news here: Apple is certainly making an effort to push how we edit, in terms of spotting for video and interfaces for surround and effects. We’ll have to see if they pulled it off, and if these paradigms can effectively “trickle up” to their flagship DAW — and whether other developers can push even further in the same direction.

New in 2:

We don’t have to wait for press releases around here; an enthusiastic Apogee employee (not from the sales and marketing end, he says) writes in to brag about Apogee’s support for the new Apple Mac Pro. Not only are drivers available today for using the Apogee Symphony PCI-Express audio card, but Apogee says the combination of Apple and Apogee hardware acheives an unheard-of 2ms latency. From Apogee’s official statement:

Apogee’s new Universal PCI-Express driver, in combination with the powerful Intel processors in the Mac Pro, lowers the latency of the Symphony PCI-Express card by over 50% into the 2ms range. This achievement is a significant increase in performance beyond other native solutions on the market and compares favorably to the latency on other hardware-based systems.

Symphony PCI Express Product Page

That’s impressively low latency for native-processed audio, and it makes native software solutions like Logic Pro, DP, and Live all the more appealing. I don’t want to get too overexcited based on marketing materials, though; anyone out there who’s lucky enough to get a Mac Pro and a Symphony card, I’m sure we’ll all be anxious to hear your real-world experiences.

Apogee’s Ensemble FireWire card also has drivers (in beta, but evidently useful) for all Intel Macs, in case you’re using that with a new Mac Pro.

If you imagine these cards are only being used in studios, think again. Via Apogee’s news page, the 16:9 Art Installation at IRCAM/NIME 2006 let visitors spatialize sound on 144 speakers, all using a visual, painterly interface. [Project page] The resulting sounds, using two Symphony cards for 64 channels of audio, include lots of happy gurgles:

happy gurgles

Ed. note: Apogee Digital appear to have crashed their server; I’ll update once it’s back up. Guess those Mac Pro users don’t want to wait for Digidesign and HD? -PK

DIYers, ready to dive into multichannel and streaming audio? nSLAM is an open-source suite for creating your own streaming, multichannel audio applications. Sample apps (like the one shown below) and online help are included to get you started, and the “jimmies” low-level DSP objects have been broadly updated in this release for the geekiest audio gurus. It’s free, and it runs on Mac OS X and Linux. (Some of the underlying objects have been compiled for Windows, too, but apparently not the full release. Presumably you can compile for Windows if you need to; not sure there.)

The latest version of the environment runs in the free Pure Data programming environment, but a fully updated version for Max/MSP is on its way, too. (It’s always nice to me to see folks supporting both — keep it up, gang.) I’ve heard good things about the jimmies, which go back over a decade, and this project in general. I finally have a piece to try them out on, so I’ll report back!

This terrific free project comes to us by way of Canada’s Society for Arts and Technology. It’s enough to make you shout “Go, Canada!” watching the Turino Winter Olympics, eh?

If you frequent experimental music concerts and performance art events, you might have seen them: mysterious, spherical and polyhedronalish speaker arrays, looking a bit like an unmanned space probe or an alien soccer ball.

Now you can have one of your very own: Electrotap has announced they’re shipping the Hemisphere speaker array. And forget the odd looks of other speakers for a second: this sounds downright practical. It weighs just 17 lbs., but contains six Polk Audio db525 fullrange drivers. It sits on a surface. Sound fills the space, but it actually comes from the location where you’re playing. And at US$599, many of you can afford it.

Most importantly, with the flat base on the new model, you can finally discourage alien beings attending your gigs from trying to play interdimensional space hockey with it. I get kicked out of more clubs that way . . .

(Don’t miss the history of the device assembled there, with shots like the 1997 model shown below — bless those Princeton sound wizards!)

Xbox 360 is here — and with it has brought major hype, major shortages, and armed robbery of new systems. We’re going to assume that must mean it’s a big deal. Resident gaming expert W. Brent Latta looks at what the Xbox 360 might mean for digital music with a roundup of past coverage. But in short: game systems are a major new platform for music. And that could mean new ways of listening (for better or worse), and greater acceptance of high-definition, surround-sound digital media. Take it away, Brent . . . -PK

Want proof that you can’t keep on top of which DAW is best? Updates are now nearly round-the-clock, and point-one updates can bring serious features. Hot on the heels of MOTU’s free 4.6 upgrade to DP, Steinberg has over 50 new features in Cubase SL/SX 3.1, coming as a free download in August. Some of what’s new:

External hardware integration: Updated Studio Connections technology lets you monitor external hardware’s audio as if it were an internal VST. One caveat: this comes out of Steinberg’s ongoing partnership with its now-parent-company Yamaha, so your hardware manufacturer must rhyme with Lamaha.

Freeze; you’re surrounded! Dolby Digital and DTS Encoder support

Processor optimization for the latest multiprocessor Macs and PCs, plus optimization for new AMD and Intel DualCore processors and Hyperthreading (that last feature means you can now make the Kessel Run in . . . oh, never mind.)

“Equal Power” panner

MIDI delay compensation (more hardware integration, remember?), plus “freezing” of MIDI track playback

Got all that? This will have decidedly less mainstream appeal than some of the other updates announced this week, but for some Cubase hardcores and pros, it should come as good news. Of course, this update runs on Mac and PC only — sorry, Atari ST users.

Graphics, schmaphics. The future of gaming not only looks better — it sounds a lot better, too. Talk to any game composer or sound designer, and you’ll hear a lot of excitement about the amount of creativity they can exert with games. So how does the next generation compare?

Amidst all the PS3 vs. Xbox 360 comparisons, there actually hasn’t been much talk about sound, probably because all three consoles (PS3, Xbox 360, and Nintendo Revolution) will feature 5.1 surround and optical outputs. Then again, so does your DVD player. Does anything differentiate them? (Read More)

Berklee student Rian Souleles brings CDM this report on
the state of surround, straight from the mouths of some of the greatest
engineers alive.

Recently, on a Friday afternoon, about a hundred music technology students crammed into the hot sweaty live room of Berklee College of Music's
Studio A just to get a glimpse of the current state of the surround
revolution from three of the most prolific figureheads of the industry.
Comprising this trinity was the greatest living sound engineers today,
Geoff Emerick, Elliot Scheiner and George Massenburg.
George Massenburg was on site, acting as MC, while Emerick and Scheiner
were on a conference call. All of these men have jaw-dropping
discographies and accomplishments. Their importance to the art of
recording is hard to express in words.