Tag Archive for: technology

A Ticking Time Bomb

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Very odd things happen in the pro audio world. Particularly to those folks who develop software for this market. In an unrelenting quest to ensure that nobody steals software, legitimate users have to endure complicated challenge and response authorizations, hardware dongles, and hard disk serializations. Heaven help you if you need to upgrade your computer.

In what must be an ironic twist of fate, Digidesign issued a set of free audio plug-ins to their user base. Only one small problem. The plug-ins have a time bomb. Someone found out about the time bomb on July 7th due to a date error on their computer and posted this finding on the Digidesign User Conference. The actual time bomb was set for July 17th. Digidesign apparently had no advance knowledge of this other than the poster’s notice.

The brand name of the plug-ins: Bomb Factory.

Digidesign bought the plug-ins from Erik Gavriluk. There was a lot of speculation that Erik, the former owner of Bomb Factory, had deliberately time bombed the plug-ins to get back at Digidesign. Apparently Erik had a number of issues with the company.

Looking at Erik’s 12,500 square foot recording studio I would hazard to say that he did pretty well with the Bomb Factory plug-ins as well as the sale of said plug-ins to Digidesign. I doubt that he had anything to do with this time bomb at all.

As far as resolving the time bomb? Digidesign issued a patch for download. The expiration date of the software has now been removed.

Remember the Force, Luke!

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Stable.
Reliable.
Predictable.
Available.
Manageable.

I’m going to change all of these attributes of my studio environment. After many years of running Pro Tools on the Windows platform I am caving in and crossing over to the other side. Next week I will receive a dual processor 2.5GHz Apple G5 for the studio as well as another I/O for Pro Tools HD.

This will mean a big change.

I will run the two platforms in parallel while I am bringing up the Apple environment. That way I won’t be committing critical production work to the new platform until I have worked everything out. I may be in for a total surprise. Which is to say that everything just works. I’ve never had that happen before with major technology upgrades like this.

I bought a couple of books on Mac OS X and I have been playing with my daughter’s iBook so I doubt that I will have any major issues from a usability perspective. However, I do know the Windows environment exceptionally well so I will lose out on some of that familiarity.

Why the move to Apple?

In the pro audio community Apple still holds a dominant market position. For example, on the Digidesign User Conference, there are over 130,00 posts on the Pro Tools TDM system for the Mac and only 6,500 posts on the Pro Tools TDM system for Windows. Many of my favourite plugins are only available on the Mac. Most importantly? The G5 just looks like a cool machine.

I’ll let you know how the technology upheaval goes.

Wet Paint

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Decided that it was time for a new look to the blog. I elected to charge ahead with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and present the blog without using any HTML tables. The easiest tutorial I found on setting up a three column layout using CSS was here. After the first release I decided that I wanted to move to two columns. I’m not sure about the bluish green colours so I may change that later. There may be a few wrinkles in this blog as I troubleshoot the odds and ends of a major redesign.