Article:		The Ultimate Portable Studio
Subject:		response to meech
Date:		2005-07-04 11:04:04
From:		dmm10
Response to: response to meech
Nice article Gina. Perhaps attenuating the article's title to "My ultimate portable audio studio" would have satisfied the more finicky. To be fair to meech though, the first few years the Mbox was out the OSX drivers didn't play nicely at all and -when running- did limit audio I/O to a single application. As far as I know this is a tell tale for a significant case against using ProTools. That case being the long delays in official and stable support for new accouterments (hardware and software.) Another case could be made against ProTools for the need to always have a DigiDesign blessed hardware device attached to the machine running ProTools. (Logic's dongle is much smaller. ;) Once a setup is officially blessed by Digidesign it tends to be rock solid (according to spec. as you note with Mbox latency.) This can be a good trade-off for a brick-and-mortar professional studio. For use in a portable studio -esp. for non-veterans given the generation time of products in the current market- the historically long lag time of stable support for ProTools and its hardware product lockin would push me away from ProTools as a mobile solution. For audio editing once back in the studio fine. For mobile recording I may want to move upscale in audio interfaces to something like the MOTU Traveller, but with ProTools I'd be locked into lugging around that Digidesign blessed interface and having it plugged in just to run the ProTools application. In the article you rightly begrude the idea of wall warts in a portable setup. But a dongle that's bigger than a wall wart is unacceptable to me in a portable setup. For a future article you might explore different uses for a portable studio: live performance recording, other field capture, idea capture/exploration, rough mixing, performance effects processing, performance instrument,... Folks could really benefit from little case use stories and hacks. To start you off with a hack. In non-classical performance recording a laptop fan will usually be sufficiently far from mikes and insignificant relative to other ambient noise to not warrant much attention. When doing field recording for samples, f/x, or other purposes with a laptop (eg. you don't want to spend as much for a field recorder as you did for your laptop) the threat of the fan kicking in can be significant. Solution: Keep a couple of bags of blue-ice in the freezer and bring them along wrapped in a towel. When it comes time to record place the bag against the underside of your laptop that gets the hottest when running. In addition to acting as insulation during transport the towel can be placed under the bag of blue-ice to absorbe any condensation during use. Two bags last me for several hours of recording on a 12" PowerBook G4 in 80 degree weather. all the best, donald

Showing messages 1 through 2 of 2.

• response to meech
  2005-07-04 15:20:08  gfantsaez [Reply | View]
  
  
  Donald,
  
  I think your title suggestion is a good one. Thanks for the kind words.
  
  You write very well btw - you should consider writing articles yourself - and then everyone can yell at you :)
  
  I own Logic so I have their dongle. It's not that much smaller at all. (I can send you a digital photo of both in the palm of my hand) The iLok dongle is about a 1/2" longer with a loop for a keychain or security measures... The thing is - the Logic dongle is only for Logic. The iLok dongle is for my entire life. I have ALL my plug-in authorizations on it. I travel from studio to studio with my iLok and my plug-in folder on my iPod and with both of these items, I have my entire studio with me ALL the time. My Logic dongle ONLY allows me to open Logic. It serves NO other purpose.
  
  I too like the MOTU gear - but as I say many times now, most everyone I know uses Pro Tools. For my business and my need to collaborate from musician to musician - from studio to studio - it's important to me to stick with Pro Tools. I'm not a huge Digital Performer fan. I use MOTU's Mach Five sampler, that I LOVE, but the only thing I have heard in 2 years from MOTU's support line is a busy signal.... I also do wish Pro Tools did not need a Digi blessed interface. I agree that this is a MAJOR inconvenience. But - there is SOOO much cracked software out there. Even on OSX. It's so easy to steal software these days, Digi is protecting themselves and rightly so. People don't steal Pro Tools because they can't. If you think about it from Digi's persepctive, it's pretty smart. (I have friends with cracked versions of everything but Pro Tools).
  
  You do say 'Lugging around" the interface. The new M-Audio stuff is tiny and amazing... (see the Firewire Solo and 410)
  
  I like your idea about future articles. Maybe you should write one? LOVE your bag of ice trick!!!!
  
  Thanks again for the great feedback.
  
  Warmest regards,
  
  Gina
• Woops
  2005-07-05 14:27:53  dmm10 [Reply | View]
  
  
  Thanks for the encouragement, but apparently I don't write quite so well as I thought. When I referred to lugging a dongle for ProTools I was thinking not of the cute little iLok -tres convenient- but rather the audio interface. I know the Mbox serves as a ProTools LE dongle and assumed that the new M-Audio interface/ProTools combos would be similarly configured and thus the default dongle for most folks soaking up your advice. (Quite handy advice despite the nits we non-authors like to pick at.)
  
  Back to the dongle thing, if you'd added the cost of an iLok to the system price I would -of course- have been more specific. ;^P
  
  all the best,
  donald