SCALE in Multimedia
We’ve been trying to document what goes on at SCALE every year. Not just in written documents; we’ve tried audio recordings and some video with mixed success.
This year SBLUG will be assisting us with video recordings of the sessions, the keynotes, and the expo floor (props to Tom King and his crew!)
Ilan, the SCALE Chair, scored an opportunity for us to try out some spiffy new audio recording gear from a startup. That startup is the Trinity Audio Group, and they have a nifty product called the Trinity. Here’s a picture of it:
We’ll have an opportunity to test them out, as Trinity Audio has loaned SCALE two of them to try out for “man in the street” audio recordings!
Here’s what Ron, Trinity’s Creative Director had to say about them:
“SCALE will be our first true exposure as a finished unit. Because we’ve been going overtime, I have not yet buttoned up all the wonderful information that needs to be prepared for this elease. But, if your guys don’t mind sifting through some details then I have some information for them here and I also can answer any specific questions that would arise.
Our SW was built by the guys over at 64studio.com. We have a custom window environment with matchbox and some great uses of workspace.
Plus we have a tab button to quickly tab through workspaces. Everything is Jack backend even Mixxx but if you want to split two codecs I use the on board codec for the house mix and usb headphone for the cue and then I beat mix with the touchscreen which is fun once you get it down. I used the maudio session device with Mixxx and its fine but the sliders don’t really act like a 1200 TT. I actually think the touchscreen is better.
Also we have wifi and wifi radar. The onboard mic works too. We have sampled just about every usb enabled product such as mobile pre usb, fast track pro, trigger finger, oxygen, arturia, cme, many USB mics including mxl, samson g track, and even the mxl USB adapter for my condensor mics all successfully!
The software is a low latency build for multimedia and real time, plus we have some other nice offerings: Ardourino 2.2 (ardour for small screens), which has been done really nice by Free at 64studio.com; the user defined buttons work which make for great scrolling through tracks; hydrogen drums (this is nice to use the keyboard key pads of the q1 Ultra to fire the drum machine).
A special version of Audacity for Jack is out there but we also have the 260 plugins that work with Ardour and Hydrogen available to use in Audacity, which is a nice feature. Amsynth and Zynaddsubfx are our two synths which are nice to connect via in jack into Ardourino. There is CD burn software too, plus the GNOME alsa mixer, and of course Mixxx
(BTW I have proposed starting a special JackMixxx backend support for future Mixxx releases.) We also have Qtractor and an FTP program.
I want to tell you about a wonderful piece of software: IDJC, which you probably know about. I like to fire up Ardourino and while I sync a hydrogen drum track I built to a two track acapella into Ardourino, I fire up IDJC and stream a live podcast through wifi (a raw 4 track mix) over the net and then I click the mic and talk over the breaks in the song.
I figure that if I can do cases like that and the unit is still bulletproof, then chances are we have a pretty solid product. One time I connected all the stuff I mentioned above plus Amsynth and a USB Oxygen MIDI keyboard, and jammed over the net at the same time… no overruns….
There’s also a lightweight browser called Epiphany. There is an alpha keyboard too just in case. The nice thing about the touchscreen is with Ardourino you can record your fader movements and have actual fader automation on a handheld device which is pretty sweet when you fader map the plugins with your finger.”
Thanks to them for their generosity. If you see Jason, Dennis or me wandering around with one of these, feel free to stop us and ask questions.
Orv
SCALE Publicity Chair