jgaz - Slashdot User

Comment Re:The 1990s wants its gear back (Score 1) 137

by jgaz on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @10:08AM (#59664056) Attached to: Billie Eilish Won Multiple Grammys Using Budget Studio Gear, Logic Pro X

Sorry kids, but people have been tracking keeper stuff in home studios for a really long time, and in mass digitally since the Alesis ADAT was released in the early 1990s. It was a digital 8-track system that used VHS tapes (see, we didn't have hard drives big or fast enough to record 8 simultaneous tracks yet). Even better, using time code, you slave multiple units together to achieve up to 128 tracks of 16- or 20-bit 44.1 kHz digital audio. This was unprecedented, and the unit was affordable enough and worked barely well enough (pro engineers hated them because they were cheaply built and slow compared their studio gear: "they're fuckin' VCRs, man!") that their use went mainstream. The result was easy access to a high quality tracking workflow that was portable and facilitated mixdown and mastering in professional studios. They were so successful that their optical I/O interface (ADAT Lightpipe) is still widely used today on audio gear.

Not that it means much to me, but I highly doubt these kids are the first ones to win a Grammy doing their tracking in a budget digital home studio -- that tech has existed for over 25 years.

Back in 1995, Alanis Morissette's album Jagged Little Pill won Album of the Year, supposedly most of it was produced / recorded on ADAT's and a Mackie 8 bus mixer in Glen Ballard's home studio, yes 25 years ago.

Comment Re:Mixing (Score 2) 137

by jgaz on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @09:58AM (#59664038) Attached to: Billie Eilish Won Multiple Grammys Using Budget Studio Gear, Logic Pro X

As always, you can do really good work with cheap equipment, but it will make your life harder, especially if you are a beginner.

From time to time, you see a world-class professional work with cheap equipment and produce breathtaking results. Better than what most people will ever do with top-end gear. So you start to wonder, why use top-end gear in the first place?

The reasons are things like convenience and reliability. In a good studio, you will have monitors that don't miss on any frequency, controls that are responsive and accurate, software that doesn't crash... Nothing a competent sound engineer can't work around, but said engineer would rather do his job than battle his equipment. It is especially bad for beginners. For seasoned pros, it is an annoyance and a waste of time. But if you are a beginner, it is worse: you don't know if a poor result is the result of a mistake on your part or bad tools, meaning that you don't know how to fix it and learn from your mistakes.

^ This, not to mention the fact that when it comes to the mix and master phases, the room matters just as much if not more than the equipment. If the acoustics of the room you're mixing/mastering in aren't properly treated, you really can't trust your ears and your mix won't translate to other speakers/rooms.

Comment Re:Why would you check a laptop? (Score 3, Interesting) 98

by jgaz on Thursday August 29, 2019 @09:41AM (#59136724) Attached to: More Airlines Ban MacBook Pros In Checked Luggage

Why would you check a laptop anyway under any sort of normal circumstances? Any expensive electronic gear like that is coming with me in the cabin where it is considered just fine anyway. Checking a laptop is just begging for theft or damage. I understand there are corner case reasons to check something but who is really doing this?

If you need to cary 3 or more laptops around for work along with other specialized/delicate electronics that you'd rather not check, and are flying international with tight connections and don't want to be running through the airport and passport control/etc carrying all of that.

I used to work for for a cruise line where I was flying around all of the time with a personal macbook pro, a company PC laptop for email/reports/programming audio DSP speaker processor, and a company macbook pro for audio editing, a bunch of hard drives and dongles, foldable full size keyboard (for audio editing shortcuts) audio measurement microphone and audio interface, personal photography equipment, ipad, personal phone, company phone, full size headphones as well as earbuds, and often extra random audio processing cards/equipment that I need to bring to a ship to fix a problem. That's in addition to specialty tools I'd often check.

Occasionally I'd check the company macbook pro because I knew in a pinch I could get away with using my personal macbook pro, any irreplacible data on that laptop I'd have backed up on one of the hard drives I'd cary with me, and I had a spare company macbook air that I could have sent to a ship for backup on extended projects as well as full size mac pros audio built into road cases that I'd send to ships for extended projects.

When we were doing ship builds in italy, we'd usually have very tight connections through Rome, and would have to run through the airport and passport control to make the flight.

For 4-5 years I flew 85,000+ miles a year, often with expensive tools and equipment in my checked luggage. Never once have I had anything stolen. I'd often find notes stating that my luggage had been checked, but everything was there. In my pelican cases, I'd keep a bundle of zip ties (to secure the latches from accidentally opening up) and would occasionally find different colored zip ties on the cases, meaning tsa or whatever countries security actually had zip ties on hand to re-secure bags after they checked them.

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