Computer Music Predictions for 2012Our hopes and dreams for 2012 in terms of music technology, gear and computer based audio production. Welcome to Rain's first combined video and written article. Below you'll find the video version of this article that's available on our RainComputersUK YouTube channel. For those who prefer to read rather than watch then you'll find the full text of the video below, including links to any of the things mentioned. Please feel free to "Like" the video, share it, comment on it and come back to us with questions or your own thoughts. Welcome to Rain first webcast of 2012 and in it we’ll be looking at some of our predictions and hopes and dreams for the year ahead. I’ve got a feeling that 2012 will be a bumper year for music technology. The industry is bored of economic crisis – it’s time to get creative and innovate and with the NAMM show just a couple of days away I can’t wait to see what’s coming up. Putting aside the Mayan promises of catastrophe and apocalypse here’s what we’d like to see in 2012: Fully 64bit Music Production With Reason 6 bringing in the long awaited 64bit ReWire at the end of 2011 a fully 64bit software studio is nearly within reach. There are two notably stubborn bits of recording software languishing in the world of 32bit – Ableton Live and Pro Tools. Live has successfully transitioned from a cool quirky loop and synth based performance tool into a fully fledged piece of production software and it’s due an update. Hopefully version 9 will bring it up to speed. Pro Tools has traditionally been slow to take on new technology – it likes to get things right and then stay there for as long as possible before doing anything that would upset it. Version 10 brought in 64bit compatibility but the core remains 32bit, probably to maintain compatibility with older hardware – although, why not have two versions like everyone else. 2012 will hopefully see them cross the divide. On the plug-in side Universal Audio UAD DSP cards still run only 32bit plug-ins straining the BitBridge technology often beyond its capability. Waves are another culprit – powerful plug-ins that are restricting the rest of an otherwise 64bit system. RAM is cheap, 16GB is a no-brainer upgrade these days, it would nice if we could use it all.Ableton Live VideoAnother prediction for Ableton Live is the inclusion of support for video loops. French company Resolumé have been coming at this from the VJ direction and their powerful video performance software is including more and more audio facilities. If Live could trigger and sync video loops like it does audio then it would have the VJ market all sown up.www.ableton.com www.resolume.com 3D Mixing 3D technology seems to be very polarising – you either love it or hate it. Although largely successful in the cinema slow sales of 3D televisions indicate that the public are less keen on the hassle of dealing with the glasses at home. In the computer gaming fraternity games such as Batman Arkham City and Skyrim have demonstrated that there’s beauty to be found in stereoscopic gaming and apparently Nvidia have now sold over half a million pairs of 3D Vision glasses. What possible relevance could this have for computer musicians? As the technology is become more affordable and more popular perhaps it’s worth exploring what could be possible in a 3D mixing environment. Currently when we view waveforms we see amplitude against time – would it not be interesting to also see frequency on another axis. The advocates of old school mixing suggest turning off the screens and using just your ears but a whole generation of computer musicians have learnt to mix visually as well as aurally – why not push this to the next level. What would it mean to visualise your mix in three dimensions, what advantage could that have? Perhaps this is a flight of fancy but the technology is there, why not play with it. Also glasses free 3D tellys are out this year – could that translate to the desktop?Windows 8 & TouchMicrosoft have hinted at a 2012 release of this completely reworked version of Windows. In our testing of the developer version it looks very good indeed and performance is going to be even better than Windows 7 (check out our article on it here). The issue that everyone is talking about is the Metro interface – the touch friendly, big button, side swiping front end – brilliant for tablets, not so brilliant is you are mousing around on a desktop computer. All the moaning seems a bit self defeating and detracts from the creative and inventive ways that could move us forward. A simple touch-pad device, next your mouse, or integrated into your keyboard would do the job without having to strain yourself using a vertical touch-screen. Microsoft are already on the ball with their Touch-Mouse where you have gesture control over Windows 7 – doesn’t take a genius to see how well this will work with Metro. Eye tracking technology is another possibility. There's a company called Tobii that's developing software that tracks your eye movements so it can see exactly where you are looking on the page and use that information to side-swipe the Metro interface. So maybe it’s time for DAW software to consider multi-touch as an option. They are already using it with iPad apps, so why don’t they let us get our hands on a more horizontally angled full size touch screen to control faders, edit notes, zoom around and start controlling our software with all our fingers without expensive peripherals.The full Windows 8 keynote speech from the Developers Conference last year is available in 9 parts on YouTube, here's the first one: iPad-tasticOf course there will be more and more cool iPad apps for controlling your software or being instruments all by themselves – but we’re still stuck with running one thing at a time and that can end up getting expensive if you want to expand. The just released iRig Mix from IK Multimedia is a good example – it’s a DJ controller for the iPad with cross faders and knobs and stuff – fabulous – but ideally you want two iPads so you can mix between two sources. So with the addition of a sub-£100 interface you’ll need about a grands worth of iPad just to use it. IK stress that you don’t NEED two, but it does highlight how the iPad is an expensive one application bit gear. With the Windows 8 tablets on the way maybe the iPad 3 can make all the difference.In the youtube video we used a clip from a guy playing a whole heap of iPads simultaneously - it's a cover of Radioheads Street Spirit (Fade Out) and is simply brilliant. Here it is in its entirety. Interface standardisation.Firewire seems to be on the way out. All the interfaces released in the last 6 months appear to be USB based. It’s time for a new standard in interface connection. USB is great but often ports are thin on the ground and almost everything else is running through them from your mouse and printer through to your dongles and controllers. Thunderbolt seemed like a likely candidate but as it’s currently only on Apple products it does rather restrict the market. There’s been a lot of talk about using the humble network socket and that sounds like a pretty groovy idea to me – it’s a standard that’s been around a long time and doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. The potential of using hubs and switches and connecting up not just interfaces but systems and other networks together seems immense – particularly if you consider Windows 8 – yeah I know I keep going on about it but that’s because the potential is brilliant. You can have your interface on your network and access it via your main Windows 8 desktop studio machine – but then you get a great idea later and pick up your windows 8 tablet, same apps, access the same files and now use the same audio interface over the network – fabulous.http://www.focusrite.com/rednet/ So yeah, lots of cool stuff this year I reckon, not to mention two new Element audio/video computers that should be arriving any day now. And finally in three weeks my wife will be giving birth to our third child and all our hopes and dreams are for an easy and uncomplicated delivery. That's all for now. |