Posts Tagged ‘Pro Tools’
The Mixing Room
Oct.13.2009
The Mixing Room is a facility that features two identical — except for the color — 5.1 surround sound audio post-production suites. Designed by Wes Lachot, the rooms feature Pro Tools HD3, C|24 consoles and monitors by Blue Sky.
Love the design work by Wes Lachot.
Eleven
Oct.06.2008
Digidesign recently released a software plugin for electric guitar called Eleven. I brought down the demo this evening. I had a few minutes to play around with it and I laid down the following instrumental track:
The track is a bit rough as it was a series of quick passes — no edits just straight playing like the good old days. I used an existing session for the multi-track drums. I played the Fender Jazz bass for the bass track, I played a Korg Triton Synth for the three synth tracks and I played my Fender Strat for the three electric guitar tracks. All of the instruments went direct into Radial JDI boxes and through Millenia Media preamps straight into Pro Tools.
I have to say that I was pretty impressed with the sounds from the software plug-in.
Motown
Apr.28.2004
I picked up Michael McDonald’s Motown CD. This project was produced by Simon Climie and recorded and mixed entirely within the Pro Tools HD environment. I was quite impressed with the overall sound of the album particularly the bass tracks. What was also very interesting was the number of credits given to Pro Tools on this album. Even the Sony Oxford Plug-ins were given an honorable mention. Here is an excerpt from Simon’s take on the project:
Simon recently produced Michael McDonald’s latest album, ‘Motown’, which was released in the UK in May this year. “This was the first album I recorded using Pro Tools HD,” says Simon. “Michael’s vocals are amazing! The album sounds incredible in 5.1 too and it’s selling like hot cakes in America – it’s through ‘gold’ already. All the reviews say that his vocals sound amazing – thanks to HD! We also worked with new arrangements of some great Motown material. The record company wanted Michael to duet with the original artists, so within the hour, we had time-stretched Marvin Gaye’s original vocal into the new Michael MacDonald version and sent off an MP3 file for approval via DigiDelivery. They were amazed.”
Simon believes that the Pro Tools HD system enhances creativity. “It gives me much more of an active involvement and affects the recording process in a big way,” he comments. “We do a lot of editing of the structure of the song as we go, such as making a double length intro or lengthening the guitar section, and I can even arrange the master track while I’m recording something else. I can go through the session and mute things without it stopping or crashing – I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing this in Logic, by the way! Traditionally, with a recording session, the band would go away while something was tried out but, with Pro Tools, you can do this on the fly. If we had to go back to the old way of working now and do an SSL-style recall, everyone would be so impatient and angry and you’d lose the moment completely. Pro Tools, a great engineer and the vibe of a big studio with a good live room, is the perfect combination and can only enhance the performance of the musicians. There’s no multitrack tape to worry about – I can just get on and manage the production. It’s pretty limitless.”
Simon continues, “You can almost be at mix status before you finish recording.”
Technology Woes
Apr.05.2004
I have a lot of technology in the studio. I am always looking for ways to use technology effectively to solve audio engineering problems. One problem that I used to face was how to remote control Pro Tools. In the past I used to set up in the control room and try to manage guitar, console, transport control, monitors, keyboards and mice with varying degrees of success and frustration. All that changed when I discovered remote desktop.
I use a notebook computer on the wireless LAN that connects to the Pro Tools workstation through remote desktop. The notebook then becomes the Pro Tools workstation. The monitor and keyboard on the notebook controls Pro Tools remotely. This allows me to set up in one of the talent rooms and control my studio remotely via the notebook. Very cool. Except something happened. I tried to connect to my network and I received a “network not accessible” error. Thus began a prolonged and strange battle with technology.
My first step was to search Google to see if anyone else had this experience. Turns out that most of the world has run into it if they network more than one computer. I found a Microsoft article on the issue here. This knowledge base article precisely described the symptoms I was experiencing: I could not browse other computers in the workgroup, I could not access shared folders or files, I received the dreaded error message: “Workgroup Name is not accessible. You may not have permission to use this network resource”.
The cause was due to NetBIOS over TCP/IP not being turned on and the computer browser service not being started. The resolution is to turn on NetBIOS and to ensure the computer browser service is started. So I tried the resolution.
Didn’t work. Nada. Zip. Still got the same error message.
I crawled on the web for several hours last night and avoided some much needed sleep in the process. Dozens of suggested actions to resolve the problem were discovered and all of them failed. I don’t know why the notebook would no longer see my network. It worked fine for almost a year.
And then I found the answer.
Most networks provision an address for each machine on a network. This address, known as an IP address, is often provisioned through a DHCP service. Some networks operate as broadcast networks and some operate as point-to-point. If you happen to connect a notebook computer to a different network, one that uses point-to-point, then the DHCP service might make a small change in your computer’s registery file.
If a parameter is *optionally* set by *some* DHCP server then that parameter will persist in the registry regardless of any other actions you might try. The parameter is “DhcpNodeType”. Not all DHCP servers set this parameter. I obviously had the misfortune of connecting to another network, which I often do when I travel, where the DHCP service changed this parameter. My network’s DHCP server does not change the parameter and that is why the notebook failed to join the workgroup and gave the error message. This is because my network is set up using the default “broadcast” node type and the persisting DhcpNodeType parameter continued to tell the malfunctioning machine to be a “point-to-point” node. The two types do not talk to each other.
The Solution: check the registry for the DhcpNodeType parameter. If the value is 2 then change it to 1 and reboot. Optionally one may choose the value 4 or 8 to have a computer work in both environments.
Registry Location:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Netbt\Parameters
Key: DhcpNodeType
Value Type: REG_DWORD – Number
Valid Range: 1,2,4,8 (B -node, P-node, M-node, H-node)
Default: 1 or 8 based on the WINS server configuration
Description: This optional parameter specifies the NBT node type. It is written by the DHCP client service, if enabled. This parameter determines what methods NetBT uses to register and resolve names. A B-node system uses broadcasts. A P -node system uses only point- to-point name queries to a name server (WINS). An M -node system broadcasts first, and then queries the name server. An H -node system queries the name server first, and then broadcasts. Resolution through LMHOSTS and/or DNS, if enabled, follows these methods. If this key is not present, the system defaults to B -node if there are no WINS servers configured for the network. The system defaults to H -node if there is at least one WINS server configured.
By the way, there is another optional parameter at the same registry location that one may add which will override any DHCP server value placed in the DhcpNodeType.
NodeType
Key: Netbt\Parameters
Value Type: REG_DWORD – Number
Valid Range: 1 – 8
Default: 1
Description: This parameter specifies the NBT node type. It is an optional parameter that, if present, will override the DhcpNodeType parameter.
I weep for Microsoft. What a sad journey to make to ensure that your computer connects easily to a peer-to-peer network. “Hey”, tech support asks, “Didja happen to check whether you are B-node or P-node?”
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