Revival post 2: Where is it all going Ted???

ICN

brettzy wrote: »

How about installing a AD/DA chip in your brain post hearing which transmits to your DAW????

You'd better be pretty sure about Brainmidi v.1.0.0 before you part with your cash.

"Oh no - I've crashed!"

hahaha!

cornbb

Great thread. Its a tough one to call - Moore's law will undoubtedly put more power in our hands in the future but the big question is what are we going to do with it? More speed and memory are always welcome but its not like sample rates are going to continue going through the roof. Most people would agree that 192kHz is more than enough, anything more than that would be pretty pointless as its unlikely either our ears or mics will be able to tell the difference... Its also unlikely track counts will need to increase exponentially.

I guess more power is always welcome to run more complex algorithms - a.k.a. plugins. I'm sure R&D into things like hardware modelling/emulation, potential uses of the FFT and algorithmically-generated music will always continue.

I agree that the really interesting developments are going to happen in the fields of usability and human-computer interaction. The mouse really should have no place in mixing! Multi-touch would indeed be great, as would further developements in haptic/hardware control surfaces. The likes of the lemur and the ReacTable are really the first tools of their kind so its interesting to see how technologies like that will mature and ease themselves into everyone's workflow.

Software DAWs (with the exception of the likes of Ableton Live) have been closely modelled on real-life mixing desks that haven't fundamentally changed since the beginning of recorded music. It will be interesting to see if the fundamentals of audio routing and mixing ever change somehow, although I can't really see how at the moment.

And finally - when the hell are we going to get something to replace MIDI?? MIDI is great but it has obvious shortcomings and could do with a rethink after being around for over 25 years. I know OSC is slowly but surely being implemented in some products and talk of General MIDI 2 has been around for a while but the "industry" doesn't seem to be interested, probably due to the fact that MIDI is an open protocol and not controlled by any vested interest in particular. Which is probably a good thing come to think of it...

sei046

What about a 3d interface where your Vst synths, or even live performances are represented by their respective instruments in the 3d plane and you can move around and move the mics and amps and people around and tweak their amp settings in real time(equivalent to recording fader movements). SO even after things are recorded they can be manipulated in this way. give a much more practical approach to how to mix things

Niall - Dahlia

More power but more power-hungry plugins, and I suspect coders might get lazy with the power they have at their disposal, less optimized algorithms? No matter how many cores we'll still be having maxed out sessions.

But damn I'm tired and this thread is fizzing my brain.

Oh, solving the piracy problem in the music business, does that count?

cornbb

sei046 wrote: »

What about a 3d interface where your Vst synths, or even live performances are represented by their respective instruments in the 3d plane and you can move around and move the mics and amps and people around and tweak their amp settings in real time(equivalent to recording fader movements). SO even after things are recorded they can be manipulated in this way. give a much more practical approach to how to mix things

I think thats a really interesting idea - it ties the DSP modelling thing and the usability thing together nicely. I dunno about the whole 3D plane thing, I've a feeling its been tried and abandoned before in the human-computer interaction field. An integrated virtual environment for placing mics, tweaking effects and routing signals would nevertheless be cool. Something like a version of Reaktor geared more towards acoustic/recorded music perhaps.

Niall - Dahlia wrote: »

More power but more power-hungry plugins, and I suspect coders might get lazy with the power they have at their disposal, less optimized algorithms? No matter how many cores we'll still be having maxed out sessions.

But damn I'm tired and this thread is fizzing my brain.

Oh, solving the piracy problem in the music business, does that count?

Algorithms never become less optimised. Occasionally its necessary to implement them in an environment where the most efficient/speedy language can't be used for practical purposes. E.g.: C is a very efficient language for doing anything mathematical or anything DSP related but its almost impossible to effectively write a large or even medium sized application in C. Therefore C++ is generally used - it is ever so slightly less efficient at its core but it makes it the task of writing a useful application do-able. So I agree that while the computing power available to us will always become maxed out, it will only be because there will be cooler toys at our disposal and more of em! Its been the same for computing in general as it has been for audio production.

Its likely that more and more algorithms will be developed and used practically. I researched the phase vocoder extensively in college - the more power it has available to it and the more it is optimised, the more useful a tool it will be. It essentially allows an audio signal to be manipulated in the frequency domain as opposed to the time domain, so given enough computing power, individual frequencies can be manipulated with pinpoint accuracy. Applications of this include high quality time stretching/compressing without affecting frequencies and vice versa, resynthesis, and EQs with tens of thousands of bands. Watch this space!

As for the piracy thing, thats another general computer science question. It seems that no-one has ever developed copy protection that someone hasn't managed to crack after enough trying.

PaulBrewer

I've seen a huge revival in analogue and outboard in the last couple of years.
We've seen it over here and the UK seems to be heading in that direction too.

The model for todays Pro and Semi-Pro studio seems to be -

1. A decent room, more and more just 1 where everything is done there. Though often 2 as well.

2. Great monitors, if ya can't hear it, ya can't control it.

3. Maybe 1 great mic that gets used on many things, the better your mic the less 'repairing, EQ etc.' will be needed

4. A good pair of pres, maybe with digi out, maybe not

5. A compressor, stereo usually, again multi use.

6. Your DAW of choice. While Logic is busting through, PT is still the Big Dawg.

There are some major products being launched at Frankfurt this year that are reflecting that trend, ie a DAW with a few choice bits of analogue.

People seem to be 'yearning' for the good ole days a bit and seem to feel that while DAWs are terrific they're not the primo choice for everything.

Summing Mixers represent that very well.....

studiorat

dav nagle wrote: »

Voice Recognition

I can see it in the control room now... "Stop! in the name of love!"

Jesus!!!!

"How do I stop it from doing that"!!!

There...
Ok we'll PLAY that again... Aghhhhh!!!