Premier Rock Forum

shagboy wrote:
and for people making generic rock on their electric guitars.


what i'm saying is, there's something to be gained and learned from everything.

Fucking A.

skinny honkie wrote:Because they do not distinguish between the states of the numbers they work with, their data workflow is essentially recorded simply by being.

Something tells me it's just a little bit different when you record from the outside onto a computer. maybe that's because the signal is transferred from an electrical one to a numerical one. Feel free to disagree.

skinny honkie wrote:re. your subjective critique, I invite you to listen to a copy of John Cage's 4'33" on a good stereo in a still room, and then argue to me that novelty can't be serious composition, and vice-versa.

sure, maybe john cage can use a computer to his advantage. But john cage is a complete hack with no talent. Feel free to disagree.

skinny honkie wrote:To recap: this is not the A vs D debate.

It became one right around when someone asked about how the process is done at EA vs. Compu-Studio. I usually get involved in these debates.

skinny honkie wrote:How's that fifty dollar pre going for ya?

good thing you ask. i haven't gotten a preamplifier yet for the ribbon mic. i have had a string of bad luck with recording equipment, so my setup is quite fucking horrible.
i recently got an old tube preamplifier for $150. it worked pretty well in the tascam porta02 4-track cassette recorder. it will be okay for dynamic microphones.




-noah

steve wrote:Literally anything that can be done on a computer can be done on tape machines

Noah wrote:What can you do with a computer that you can't with tape?

Edit without destroying the media.
Undo multiple edits non-destructively.
Redo multiple edits non-destructively.
Change pitch without changing time.
Change time without altering pitch.
View multiple time scales simultaneously.
Edit audio with the same precision and effort no matter what the time scale.
Convolve time domain Impulse Responses like that fancy Altiverb.
Convolve the frequency domain using FIR for phase shift free EQ.
Perform analysis and processing using FFT.
Granular synthesis.
Phase Vocoding.
Use any data as audio, and convert audio data to any other type.
Copy audio data exactly without generation loss.
Copy audio with only one machine (huge deal).
Transfer audio with no media to any place in the world via networking.
Have automation truly bound to audio.
Make a fully RedBook compatible CD ready for mass duplication.
Make MP3, AAC, Ogg, FLAC etc files for online distribution.
Play and edit 24+ tracks of audio on a 5-6 pound laptop.
Record 8+ tracks of nice sounding audio in the field using equipment that fits in a backpack (ask Bob Weston how great this is).


The list goes on and on. Anytime I hear someone claim there are no advantages to computer DSP, I know they have never sat down and used the tools and put any thought into considering the possibilities. Sure there are disadvantages, just like tape, but after spending the last 10 or so years using both analog and digital equipment, I can safely say I'm not doing non-digital edits ever again. I consider applications like ProTools and SuperCollider absolutely essential creative tools at this point, and I really know how to use them creatively. A lot of the FUD about digital comes from lack of familiarity, but once you understand the tools it's not so scary anymore.

All due respect to Bob Weston, but I really wish people would stop using him as an example that digital recording is good. It's just getting old.

Personally, I'm all for digital recording. I've come to terms with it with even the little exposure I've had with it. That doesn't mean that there are still some MAJOR problems to overcome.

The first is Moore's Law. How is a studio supposed to be profitable when it has to buy really expensive new hardware every 18 months? (Keep in mind that I'm not taking Moore's Law literally, but hypothetically. See Moore's Law at Wikipedia.)

The second is the presence of a monopoly. Digidesign is an evil corporation that has in it's hands the "standard" of professional digital recording. While I don't disagree that there should be a standard, I do take issue with a sigle company having you under its thumb. How do we defend from this?

The third is the lack of an archival standard. True, I have wet dreams of building giant Storage Area Networks at the studio one day to harbor all of the masters of all the records that we record. I also have wet dreams of the money that we will charge bands and labels to pay per year for that storage. But unless I come up with my own standard of archiving, and everyone just follows my lead, how do we know that we'll be able to come back to those masters in 25 years and play them in perfect condition? Twenty-five years is 16 2/3 generations of Moore's law. Are we going to care about 192k? Are the programmers going to even remember it?

I'll stop.

russ

Noah wrote:

skinny honkie wrote:Because they do not distinguish between the states of the numbers they work with, their data workflow is essentially recorded simply by being.

Something tells me it's just a little bit different when you record from the outside onto a computer. maybe that's because the signal is transferred from an electrical one to a numerical one. Feel free to disagree.

OK, thanks, I will. I'm not talking about ADC, I'm referring to the fact that a computer's FPU or integer unit/s see only a big string of numbers, without any context, and that this string of numbers results in an output to the user. That output is in effect recording.
Purely because the string of numbers was originally a sound signal does not mean the CPU looks at it any differently.

skinny honkie wrote:That output is in effect recording.

Come again? A sound travelling through the air is not recording no matter how you look at it. It's just sound.

We just posted at the same time.

russ wrote:
The first is Moore's Law. How is a studio supposed to be profitable when it has to buy really expensive new hardware every 18 months?

When has this not been the case for anyone in the field of audio? Go back to the early 70s when multi-tracks went from 8 to 16 to 24 tracks in a few years. The same thing goes with digital multi-track DASH, those idiot ADAT things, effects devices, console automation, the list is just about endless.

The thing to put foremost with the 'Moore's Law' equation is that it's designed to show how things will become cheaper and more convenient not faster.

Also, dedicated hardware computer systems like ProTools can be used after the host hardware systems are obsolete. I know folks who still have NuBus systems in production. I would think an HD system would have a functional life longer than the computer the cards reside in. Speaking of Digi:

The second is the presence of a monopoly. Digidesign is an evil corporation that has in it's hands the "standard" of professional digital recording. While I don't disagree that there should be a standard, I do take issue with a sigle company having you under its thumb. How do we defend from this?

Yes, Digi/Avid is not the most likable company around, but I don't think they are untouchable in the market. OMF is used to move between programs and PT obliges so they can have a big chunk of the film/video production market. So that's one way to have some compatibility and interchange with ProTools systems without actually using them. To be perfectly honest, I buy and use Digi stuff because I have a decade of skills and knowledge with it and also due to the fact that everyone I know uses it.

I am constantly evaluating other solutions, but so far nothing has really been on par for digital audio handling. Those sequencer applications always have some show stopping flaw, but I do test them anyway. It might be tough to start competing with dedicated hardware DSP solutions like PT Mix and HD, but keep in mind that Digi is stuck using very old Motorola 56k technology, which is becoming harder for them to manage. Something based on Analog Devices SHARC technology would be more powerful and cheaper, but it would take serious effort from a major manufacturer to establish it in the marketplace. I would think maybe Mackie or Tascam could do it if they gave up on the idea of their ridiculous, unwieldy console designs and put everything on PCI-X cards instead.

The third is the lack of an archival standard. True, I have wet dreams of building giant Storage Area Networks at the studio one day to harbor all of the masters of all the records that we record. I also have wet dreams of the money that we will charge bands and labels to pay per year for that storage. But unless I come up with my own standard of archiving, and everyone just follows my lead, how do we know that we'll be able to come back to those masters in 25 years and play them in perfect condition? Twenty-five years is 16 2/3 generations of Moore's law. Are we going to care about 192k? Are the programmers going to even remember it?

What sort of masters? Two track or multi-track? For the finished two track masters how about just letting digital do what it does best by generating a ton of bit exact masters? I guess that's a way to encourage CD/DVD-A/SACD sales by having more masters in circulation means the greatest chance of the work surviving. Digital overcomes the scarcity issue pretty well - just think how many DVD-R(OM) drives will be produced this week.

For your long term storage of multi-tracks, maybe consider storing the audio files as headerless 32 bit floating point data. IEEE data types probably won't go away unless some major (quantum) changes in technology occur. Really, it's not the data that's incompatible but the header portion which determines the format.

Are folks more worried about computer technology being compatible in the future or by the fact that there will never be another new 2 inch tape machine ever made? From now on there will only be fewer of those decks in the world, which seems like a pretty big concern for the future of 24 track tape.

The point about archiving is that the only constant is change, and trying to freeze something in permanently time is ultimately a fool's errand. If you want your work to last then be prepared to adapt it to whatever changes come down the pipe. It takes diligence, careful thought and hard work, and what survives will be the result of those who make the effort to ensure something survives, and not the reliance on any single technology.

cgc wrote:

steve wrote:Literally anything that can be done on a computer can be done on tape machines

Edit without destroying the media.

I do it every day. I'm not dumb enough to burn the pieces I edit out of something.

Undo multiple edits non-destructively.

I do it every day.

Redo multiple edits non-destructively.

Again... Why do you assume analog edits are "destructive"? If you cut a piece of tape out, you can always put it back.

Change pitch without changing time.
Change time without altering pitch.

These are in the realm of effects, and while neither sounds very good once it's done, you can use the same processes on a tape recording that you can on a digital one.

View multiple time scales simultaneously.

I don't know what you mean, but I can look over the console and see the 2 hours worth of master tapes, the particular reel on the machine, the track sheet has all the details of the specific song I'm working on, and I can scrub the tape to have fractions-of-a-millisecond accuracy on edits. What the hell are you talking about?

Edit audio with the same precision and effort no matter what the time scale.

Still don't know what you mean, but I can make an edit on tape that is accurate (by that I mean repeatable) to a resolution of... I don't know... 30microseconds. And every edit I make will have about that precision. What do you mean?

Convolve time domain Impulse Responses like that fancy Altiverb.
Convolve the frequency domain using FIR for phase shift free EQ.
Perform analysis and processing using FFT.
Granular synthesis.
Phase Vocoding.

All of these are effects processes, which I also have access to. I have liked FIR eq since I first bought one ten years ago, the Quantec XL, and I use it often.

Use any data as audio, and convert audio data to any other type.

This is not a recording process, but a translation process. It was first done by analog sound artists who played films (could be seismograph plates, ECG printouts, sonar ... any analog data) over optical playback systems (like used in cinema systems). This is not just possible in the analog domain, it was invented in the analog domain.

Copy audio data exactly without generation loss.

While there is some change in sound with repeated generations, there is much less need for duplicate copies in the analog domain, as the masters don't disappear into computer glitches.

Copy audio with only one machine (huge deal).

I do it every day, making bounces, compiled tracks, crossfades... If you mean making a duplicate copy, we have another machine for that, but as I said, it isn't often necessary because the masters are so robust.

Transfer audio with no media to any place in the world via networking.

Well, your recording program doesn't do that either, but if something is going to be sent across the world, I can do it physically. You get your mail, so that is evidence that the system works.

Have automation truly bound to audio.

If you mean that mix changes are built into the master, we call that a "printed" mix -- every time you play the stereo master, those changes happen exactly the same -- it's "automatic." If you decide you want to change something, you print it again, and there you go, another "automatic" mix.

Make a fully RedBook compatible CD ready for mass duplication.

You're right. This is generally done by mastering houses if the project is worth it, and byt a CDR machine if not. Again, this is a translation process, not a recording process, but I can still do it from an analog master.

Make MP3, AAC, Ogg, FLAC etc files for online distribution.

That's essentially the same process as a CD.

Play and edit 24+ tracks of audio on a 5-6 pound laptop.

So... you make records listening to those little speakers? Really? And that's an advantage? Okay.

Record 8+ tracks of nice sounding audio in the field using equipment that fits in a backpack (ask Bob Weston how great this is).

Uh, there are analog systems that are this compact, like the 8-track cassette machines Biznono and Bubbanono use to write the New Year material, but if you asked Bob Weston which he would prefer, a backpack with some crap in it, or a proper studio, I think he might not be using the backpack because it is the best option, but rather a more convenient one.

The list goes on and on. Anytime I hear someone claim there are no advantages to computer DSP, I know they have never sat down and used the tools and put any thought into considering the possibilities. Sure there are disadvantages, just like tape, but after spending the last 10 or so years using both analog and digital equipment, I can safely say I'm not doing non-digital edits ever again. I consider applications like ProTools and SuperCollider absolutely essential creative tools at this point, and I really know how to use them creatively. A lot of the FUD about digital comes from lack of familiarity, but once you understand the tools it's not so scary anymore.

Thank you for explaining to me all this stuff I don't know anything about and have "never" used. I understand that there is a generation of engineers who consider ProTools and SuperCollider absolutely essential. I appreciate that the records they make now on their laptops are obviously "better" than all the records made in the century prior. This perspective is theirs to have, but I cannot agree with it.

If I ever thought that I needed "more powerful tools," then I might be seduced by the convenience and inexpensive flash of computer systems. Unfortunately for the industry, the areas where "powerful tools" have been brought to bear are not areas where I'm having any trouble.

If I can't solve the problems I have using conventional analog studio technologies (which occasionally require outboard equipment, but are defined by the analog master tape), then I probably wouldn't be able to solve them digitally.

I don't feel like my studio is ever "holding me back," and I'd be shocked if that was genuinely true for anyone. It's a little like hypertext being "better" than paper, because now people don't have to write "mere" novels. Those new forms of web fiction are obviously "better" than books, because "you can do all these new things with the tools..."

I have been through my reasons for not using digital systems many times, but this is a nice encapsulation of why I don't see them as having any real advantages for me. They allow more manipulation faster, it's true, but I've never had records improve with more manipulation. Almost all improvement comes from the beginning stages -- the recording and playing. All the tweaking afterwards is a giant diverson, and (I am convinced) makes adjustments of trivial value.

Didn't we already have this discussion here like a year ago? Steve's energy at dismantling the arguments for digital recording is infinite. I believe he has probably heard them all by now at least a thousand times. CGC you're just screaming at a wall.

a wall of bees