advertisement

Article:
  The Ultimate Portable Studio
Subject:   response to meech
Date:   2005-07-03 22:08:51
From:   gfantsaez
if you read the article, I do not suggest the Mbox at all... In fact, the article strongly suggests against an Mbox.


You are absolutely INCORRECT about Pro Tools not sharing its drivers. I use Logic and Live and Melodyne and etc etc etc without a hitch. You seem to be a PC user with no mac experience.


Further, I explain why I suggest a Mac over PC.... I did say, "if you want to save a few bucks, go with a PC...." but most people are not technical enough to get a portable studio operating on a PC... There are MANY more steps required to get a PC working properly for audio...


I just installed a PC studio on Pro Tools the other day and where it takes one simple installer on a Mac, it took four different intallations and restarts on a PC.


I also am not talking about studio speakers. I'm talking about being portable. That's the focus of the article.


I appreciate the input, but I don't find it relevant to the article.


Sorry. Gina
Main Topics Oldest First

Showing messages 1 through 2 of 2.

  • Pro-tools Inquiry
    2005-10-01 03:16:11  scalhoun [Reply | View]

    I was wondering if anyone had any helpful info on which operating system on the PC would run Pro-Tools with the best over all performance. I was not sure if windows 2000 or XP had any performance differences while running protools?

    Thanks so much!

    Shane
  • response to meech
    2005-07-04 11:04:04  dmm10 [Reply | View]

    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