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

sei046

Ok lads we saw the tape to digital move... Whats next....
And who is the next protools? Its looking like Logic is going to move ahead in the future. Apple certainly know what they are at. If they got the whole integrated system jobby like protools they would be away with it...

But then after that! Moores Law, Whats the distant future for music production? We Will want 8,600,455 autotunes on at once. Organic Transistors??

studiorat

sei046 wrote: »

Ok lads we saw the tape to digital move... Whats next....
And who is the next protools? Its looking like Logic is going to move ahead in the future. Apple certainly know what they are at. If they got the whole integrated system jobby like protools they would be away with it...

But then after that! Moores Law, Whats the distant future for music production? We Will want 8,600,455 autotunes on at once. Organic Transistors??

The wireless studio maybe? Or how about the fact that you can get more RAM in a computer now than the Hard Drive on my old Mac/Performer rig?

Organic Transistors? I'd settle for Free Range!

ICN

16 core Intel chips.

Infinite-ish instances of SD HD's in normal sized machines.

Computer keyboards with pots / keys / faders / crossfaders and X/Y pad.

dEaTH oF tHE moUSe!!

sei046

but sure 16 core will be with us in no time Im sure! After that i mean. And maybe we are limiting ourselves a bit. EXPAND YOUR MIND!!!! recording in 3d? Prooper 3d?

studiorat

Huge storage with no moving parts.

sei046

esplain

ICN

studiorat wrote: »

Huge storage with no moving parts.

Thats SD isnt it?

Flash drives will be one of the biggest changes I think.

Everything will get smaller / more efficient and hopefully cheaper (after a while anyway )

studiorat

"I predict that one day computers will be big as a house and only the very wealthy will be able to afford them"

ICN

"I think there is a world market for about five computers"

Thomas J Watson - Head of IBM. 1943.

(I think its a slight misquote - but its still funny)

ICN

Here's a wish for the future.. Long Term.

I have a dream, that one day.. Software / hardware will only be released after extensive testing.

If needed - Version updates will be released regularly.

Not after lots of pleading from the customers.




In the short-term - a cutdown version of Logic Studio without all the Apple loops.

jtsuited

multitouch screens. the eventual end of hardware outboard and the rise of things like SSL duende, focusrite liquidmix, etc.

Don't know if Logic is going to dominate the market in the same way current trends would predict. there's always some big upgrade round the corner on many other apps, so you never can say for definite.

sei046

well silicon will last another little while alright but when it goes, and quantum computing hits our studios. How do we see this affecting workflow and the way we do things? no "it will be faster" answers.

ICN

jtsuited wrote: »

multitouch screens..

Yup.. The mouse is on its way to the Retirement home.

I've probably got all the names wrong - but those Reac cubes / tables(??) - they're a glimpse into the future.

The Jazzmutant Lemur and Dexter. Really cool.. But F***ing expensive.

You certainly wouldnt put a cup of tea or a can on one without a coaster! LOL

sei046

Ye i can see the lemur being the way forward. More interactive music. But even in our manipulation of compressors and reverb etc. If you can imagine their parameters mapped to a continuim type surface.

ICN

Before anyone says it..

Flux Capacitor PCIe cards.



And any day now..

Skynet "Terminator DAW"

It'll literally blast all of the competition from the face of the earth with its advanced features.

jtsuited

lemurs/dexters have been making me salivate since they came out. User-designable interface? Love a bit of that.
It's bizarre to think people can go out and spend a huge amount of money on big glorified midi controllers that are dressed up as old big SSLs etc, and not realise the potential of things like the lemur.

sei046

i know. but its hard to get away from good old faders you can realy feel. What about theremin type control!!?? that would be cool. Control a mix and frequencies with your hands in the air. Can see a lot of accidental remixes

jtsuited

have you seen the wii controllers people have managed to get to work with Max. Pretty cool. A little bit toy-like, but in a few years all the big companies will be selling technology inspired by these type of gadgets.

sei046

Ye tha type of idea. I can Def see music having more of a physical role

dav nagle

What about a tracking ball that controls every parameter of a DAW. You say the word 'Compressor',it pops up on screen. The compressor instantly is synced to your tracking ball! You say what you want and it pops up on the screen and gives you full control!

ICN

Up / down & Left / Right are just too restrictive and old school now.

You have all these X / Y options on Native Instruments synths that let you morph between different sounds.

Hard to maximise the potential without the right controller.

The designers have moved on from the mouse..


I did a customer survey for Native Instruments yesterday (dont want to be name dropping.. ).

It was all about Keyboard / Midi controllers and what features you would like to see in one.

I've got Reaktor 5. I think it would be great to have a NI "real" soft synth with an X / Y pad / Joystick / arpeggiator / pots / faders (maybe even a crossfader for Traktor).. that could be tweaked as you would a real synth.

Suppose it would make sense for them to release "Kore 3" with all of these features. Its the next generation, with lots of different synthesis and sampling options.

So that's something that will be coming on for NI sometime soon-ish.

jtsuited

NI should release Kore 3 with a load of x/y controllers. it could be called the megakaoss! And then korg would get all annoyed. but yeah good idea about what NI should do.

Oh and come out with a new super-duper subtractive synth. Massive seems kind of dated now.

ICN

sei046 wrote: »

i know. but its hard to get away from good old faders you can realy feel. What about theremin type control!!?? that would be cool. Control a mix and frequencies with your hands in the air. Can see a lot of accidental remixes

Roland have a thing called a D Beam.. You wave your hand over it to control different parameters.

jtsuited

i've used the d-beam once in front of a couple of music technology students and i felt like a twat!! i've never been one to get embarassed that easily but they were looking at me as if i had ten heads. pretty funny really.

the d-beam is actually a fairly good idea, but it never took off on a larger scale. that could also have to do with it came out at a time when hardware digital synths were on their way out.

ICN

jtsuited wrote: »

NI should release Kore 3 with a load of x/y controllers. it could be called the megakaoss!

Yeah - It would be an absolute destroyer!!

I tried the demo of Massive for a while. Had a really good mess around with it, but it didnt really do it for me in the end.

However I found Reaktor absolutely amazing - lots of really inspirational sounds.. and thats just scratching the surface.

Massive just sounded a little too ordinary IMO.

It would be excellent to be able to build your own synth in Reaktor and then have the NI synth to control it!!

ICN

The D Beam sounds interesting.


I've seem some of those circuit bent keyboards on Ebay & some "Build your own" w/sites. I cant describe it correctly without looking up all the correct terms (!) - but they have filters / modulators hooked up to cells that measure light. You run you hand over them - or cover them up to add a bit of randomness or to (attempt to..) control the sound being made.

I think anything like that - which is going to introduce a bit of feeling into what you are doing is a great idea.

jtsuited

i really love reaktor but it's a little bit time consuming. massive is very ordinary sounding, yet strangely at the same time it's way to keen on the mental as a bag of badgers, in your face, distorted, feedbacked presets. It's not the most ergonomic for designing your own patches on either.

studiorat

Here's a link to my mates water based controller. Check out his emotion sensing chairs too!!

2-bit myspace blog

jtsuited

studiorat wrote: »

Here's a link to my mates water based controller. Check out his emotion sensing chairs too!!

2-bit myspace blog

excellent stuff!!!!:D

ICN

studiorat wrote: »

Here's a link to my mates water based controller. Check out his emotion sensing chairs too!!

2-bit myspace blog

There was only a slight chance of electrocution before, but now.. LOL!

Great idea.

Now I'd like to see someone hook up a pH sensor to midi via toilet tissue..

or possibly hooking something up to someones jaws.

The future is bright. I'm bored.

brettzy

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

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

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!!!