Most of the audio engineers I've met--both home and professional--are Mac people, and Avid's ProTools running on a Mac is often cited as the industry standard. But there are Windows loyalists out there.
In late 2007 I took an introductory audio production class taught by David Huber (who wrote one of the bibles on the subject, "Modern Recording Techniques") and Scott Colburn (who has produced albums by The Arcade Fire, Animal Collective, and Sun City Girls, among many others). Both of them used Nuendo from Steinberg (which is basically the upmarket version of Cubase) as their primary digital audio workstation (DAW), and they ran it on a Windows PC.
Windows 7 should offer better performance for digital audio than Vista.
A Windows XP PC, that is. Both were very diplomatic when discussing software and other gear, but they expressed pretty serious reservations about Vista. Microsoft made a ton of changes in Vista that were supposed to improve performance, including moving certain audio capabilities out of the kernel, but these experts--whose livelihood depends on having a high-performing DAW--thought it was too untested and unknown.
Although they didn't say so, I imagine that the driver incompatibilities reported with other hardware could have been an absolute nightmare with all the gear in a professional recording rig. There were also reports of unstable MIDI timing, drop-outs, latency, and other problems (many of which were addressed by Service Pack 1). They weren't alone: the general advice for audio engineers on Windows was stick with XP. (If anybody had a success story using Vista to build a DAW, I'd love to hear about it in comments.)
In case you haven't heard, Microsoft releases a new version of Windows next week. I've been using the RTM version for a few weeks now and find it far more stable and inviting than Vista was at launch. (Although a colleague did uncover a gnarly power-management problem in Media Center related to a faulty audio driver.) Now, some of the audio experts are starting to weigh in, and it looks like the work Microsoft did to improve performance and compatibility with Windows 7 are paying off in the world of audio production.
Noel Borthwick, the chief technical officer for Cakewalk--which makes a wide variety of audio software for Windows, including the Sonar DAW line--has posted a blog entry describing how the new OS should dramatically reduce latency, particularly on x64 multicore processors. (Borthwick also went into more obsessive detail on Peter Kirn's Create Digital Music blog.) His conclusion: "I will be building a new DAW soon and Windows 7 X64 will be my OS of choice."
The long and short of it? If you're building a new recording system, Windows 7 sounds like a more reasonable choice than Vista. But if you've got a system that's already working well, don't mess with it--there still might be driver incompatibilities with older gear, and upgrades from Windows XP require a clean install, meaning your old settings will be lost and you'll have to reinstall your apps.
Correction, 2:34 PDT: This post incorrectly characterized the audio-related changes that Microsoft made in Windows Vista. Microsoft moved certain audio functions out of the kernel and into the user stack.
We've known the specs for the Zune HD since May, and I've even gotten a couple brief hands-on demonstrations, but I discovered a few more surprises in the run-up to the retail release Tuesday.
(Credit:
Microsoft)
My favorite surprise on the device was a new feature called Quickplay. It solves one of the greatest problems with an MP3 player: as you add more music, it gets harder to find and immediately start playing the songs you're most excited about. Quickplay basically adds an alternate menu on the Zune home screen--it appears as collection of small album covers, offset slightly to the left of the main start menu--which automatically displays songs you've most recently played, as well as songs you've most recently added. You can also manually "pin" songs and albums to the menu. I also liked the way images (such as artist photos) drawn from the Zune Marketplace and cached to your device gradually scroll across the screen as you play a particular song, giving you more to look at than a static album cover.
Within the Zune PC software, my favorite surprise was the Smart DJ feature, which sets up an endlessly rotating playlist based on a particular song or artist. Like a lot of other Zune features, it works best if you've got a Zune Pass (which costs $14.99 a month)--in this case, it'll rotate not only through songs in your collection but also through the millions of songs in the Zune Marketplace, delivering the same kinds of surprises that Pandora fans have grown to love. If you don't have the Zune Pass, it simply draws songs from your collection, similar to how iTunes Genius works (in this case, Marketplace songs are greyed out but clickable if you want to buy them).
Zune's Smart DJ feature put together this playlist based on The Pixies. Here, it's playing a song from the Zune Marketplace--a cover of Jimi Hendrix's "Stone Free" by the group Belly.
There were also a couple of mild unfortunate surprises. First, Microsoft has removed the "squirting" feature, which let you send songs directly from one Zune to another. This feature was supposed to be a big selling point of the first Zune but was crippled by unreasonable rights restrictions that let you play songs only three times or within three days (whichever came first). Microsoft and content owners gradually loosened those restrictions, but the feature never made much difference--mainly because there were so few Zune users out there to exchange songs with. (The "first man with a telephone" problem.) Now it's gone. You can still share songs with your friends through the Zune's social-networking features--if you have a Zune Pass, then any song in any of your Zune contacts' library will be immediately playable on your machine--but that requires an active wireless connection and isn't quite as spontaneous as the Zune-to-Zune sharing. That said, I only used it a handful of times in the three years since I've had a Zune.
The other disappointment is the complete lack of a competitor to Apple's App Store for the iPhone and iPod Touch. There will be applications, including games, but Microsoft will release them directly to users through the Zune Marketplace or within software updates. There are no public APIs for developers, no distribution model, and more surprisingly, no immediate plans to connect to the Windows Marketplace for Mobile, Microsoft's app store for Windows Mobile phones, which launches on October 6. Why? Because Microsoft wants to build only one app store, and it can't be sure that apps built for Windows Mobile will work on the Zune HD.
There's plenty of other great stuff about the Zune HD, including a built-in HD Radio, bright touch screen, high-definition video output, and all the great wireless and social-networking features introduced in previous versions. It's the best Microsoft MP3 player yet and the first to pose a credible competitor to the iPod Touch, although it's still focused on digital audio and video, while the Touch (and iPhone) is more of a portable computer.
Be sure to check back later this week for the full updated review from CNET's Donald Bell, and we'll both be posting more personal impressions of the new device as we live and work with it throughout the coming weeks.
As first reported by Paul Thurott of SuperSite for Windows, Microsoft is discontinuing the current generation of Zunes.
So long, Zune 8, we hardly knew you.
(Credit: Microsoft)Leaving aside all the easy insults--yes, we all know Microsoft never sold many of the things--and the possibility that your candy-apple red Zune 80 may someday be a collector's item, this means Microsoft has basically ceded the low end of the MP3 player market.
While the current Zunes start at $80, the Zune HD, which becomes available on September 15, will run you at least $220. This is great news for competitors such as SanDisk, whose Sansa Clip+ suddenly looks like the best deal around for folks on limited budgets.
On the other end, eliminating the 80GB and 120GB models means that folks with huge digital collections and no interest in touch screens will probably just stick with the iPod Classic, which is pretty much what was happening anyway.
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I got a few minutes of hands-on time with Microsoft's forthcoming Zune HD at a Microsoft event on Thursday, and I came away thinking that Microsoft might finally have a contender.
Of course, it inherits all the benefits of the current Zune--a more visually interesting (if not always more useful) PC client than iTunes, and the ability to subscribe to all-you-can-eat music plus 10 permanent downloads for only $14.99 a month via the Zune Pass. New features like HD Radio and high-def video output also sounded attractive when they were first revealed.
Could this be a contender?
(Credit: Microsoft)But it's one thing to read about it, and another to actually use it. I was surprised and pretty impressed with its small size--without measuring, I'd guess it's maybe two-thirds the size of an iPod Touch, and quite a bit thinner. In my hands, it felt more like an iPod Nano or perhaps one of the flash-based Zunes, although it's obviously not that small. The OLED screen offered excellent color and brightness--great for album covers, anyway--although I honestly didn't think it was a quantum leap above the iPod Touch. Then again, I was using it in a fairly dim-lit room, not in sunlight.
But the real innovation seems to be going on in user interface--how do you make a touch screen workable on such a small device? Here, Microsoft has done a solid job, taking the mixture of horizontal and vertical menus used on the current Zunes and adding particular tweaks for the touch screen. You can scroll horizontally or vertically simply by swiping your finger along, and there are multiple "ways in" to and "ways out" of the various menus and screens, which encourages exploration. When a song's playing, you control the volume by touching the screen and hitting a little plus or minus button; numbers show you absolute volume. Clearly marked "exit" buttons are usually available to get you back to the previous menu, and a physical button below the screen (you can see the black trapezoid shape on the screenshots here) takes you back to the home menu page. There was a bit of a learning curve, but after a couple minutes I was impressed by how much functionality Microsoft was able to pack into such a small screen.
There was no public Wi-Fi when I tested it, so I didn't have a chance to test the browser, but based on what I've seen demonstrated for Windows Mobile 6.5, as well as some other very well-placed rumors, I think users will be impressed and surprised at some of its features. It's a solid addition to what's still essentially a music player--not a super-device.
The timeframe for the Zune HD is still this fall. I expect it to be priced quite a bit cheaper than the iPod Touch, as CNET's Donald Bell suggested in his preview a couple months ago, but Microsoft hasn't confirmed anything on that front. Whether you end up buying one or not, at least there will be something interesting to check out in Microsoft's upcoming retail stores.
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If you're an independent musician looking for as many ways to sell and promote your music as possible, and you or a friend has some experience with software development, you'll want to check out the upcoming Rock Band Network, for which Harmonix and MTV Games plan to begin beta testing in late August.
It's more complicated than posting a song to iTunes, but you'll get placement on a more exclusive platform.
(Credit: MTV Games)To program songs for the game, you or your developer friend first needs a membership to Microsoft's XNA Creators' Club, which was launched a couple years ago to let independent developers create casual games to sell through the Xbox Live Marketplace; a membership costs $49.99 for four months or $99.99 for a year.
You'll then be able to get free tools and instructions from the Rock Band Creators Web site to convert your master recordings to the MIDI charts used by the game. Next, you'll have to submit your song for other creators to critique and finally to MTV Games for approval.
Once approved, the song will enter the Rock Band Network. All songs will debut exclusively for 30 days on the Xbox 360, and the Rock Band team will pick stand-out songs to make available to the Sony PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii consoles.
Under the network terms, musicians can charge between 50 cents and $3 per song, and they will keep a 30 percent cut of all sales. That may seem small, compared with the 70 percent cut musicians get for selling their songs on iTunes, which requires much less work, but Rock Band is a much more exclusive platform--you're much more likely to stand out here than among the bazillion songs available through Apple's music store.
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As predicted, Apple decided it didn't want a competitor piggybacking off its software, and the latest update to iTunes prevents Apple's iconic media-management app from recognizing the Palm Pre.
It ain't pretty, but it works: the Zune software automatically indexes songs in your iTunes library.
Pre customers have a couple of workarounds--DoubleTwist, a free app that will sync media from your Mac or PC to almost any device, sounds particularly promising. (Bonus: it was created by DVD Jon, who's been tweaking digital-media control schemes since before the iPod was born.)
But that doesn't help Palm, who recognizes that having a strong digital media story is key to competing in the consumer smartphone space. Here's my suggestion: instead of being drawn into a cat-and-mouse game with Apple, Palm should build (or acquire) its own digital media sync software, and make sure it indexes every file in the user's iTunes library. This is what Microsoft did with the Zune software (PC-only, of course, this being Microsoft), and while it's not a perfectly elegant solution--it doesn't carry playlists over, for example--it solves the problem of getting your tunes out of iTunes and onto the device of your choice.
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The group overseeing MSN Music in the United Kingdom seems to be operating off in its own little bubble, totally out of step with Microsoft's broader music and digital entertainment strategy.
Mixview, one of the many cool features in the Zune software. MSN Music? Can't touch it.
(Credit: CNET Networks)First, they launched MSN Unsigned, a half-hearted attempt to let unsigned bands promote their music on MSN. (It's devolved since then: the button on the MSN Unsigned page to "send us your music" launches your e-mail application with a barely configured note--just a subject header. Apparently you're supposed to attach something, but darned if I can find any instructions on the site.) Then they announced an overpriced, DRM-encumbered mobile music service on the same day that Microsoft announced its first layoffs ever.
Now comes the news, first broken by U.K. paper The Telegraph, that MSN is planning to launch a free streaming music service in the U.K.
Fine idea. Free music-streaming services are spreading like kudzu, a recent Morgan Stanley report by a 15-year-old intern suggests that kids expect streaming music to be free, and Microsoft has a strong advertising platform to earn money from the site.
But there's just one problem: Microsoft already has an all-you-can-eat music service--that it expects customers to pay for. It's called the Zune Pass. Yes, Microsoft's Zune sales have been abysmal, but the PC client software has evolved into a super-slick media player, and the forthcoming Zune HD is actually cool enough to give Microsoft a fighting chance in this market.
So if Microsoft's going to launch a free streaming music service, why not tie it into the Zune Marketplace and software? A free streaming-only service integrated into the Zune Web site and/or Zune software could help upsell customers to the paid version of the Zune Pass (which would allow users to download and transfer the songs to their Zune devices). More important, who's driving Microsoft's digital entertainment strategy, the Entertainment and Devices group (Zune, Xbox) or MSN? Having two groups working at cross-purposes isn't very efficient.
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Like most people who've had a chance to play with it, I've been impressed with Microsoft's Surface, the multitouch tabletop computer that the company began demonstrating about two years ago.
It drew some mockery compared with the svelte iPhone, which emerged around the same time, but it's meant for a completely different experience: collaborative public spaces rather than solo communications. Unfortunately, I haven't had much opportunity to share my excitement--apart from a handful of deployments in hotels and AT&T stores; there aren't many of these tables out in the wild yet.
Which is a shame, because Surface partners are starting to put together some interesting apps. Take, for example, this DJ application put together by design company Vectorform. It lets you string together samples and beats into a simple musical track. Vectorform demonstrated the first version last August, and now Microsoft and Vectorform have created a video demonstrating the alpha of version 2.0, which offers some new features like scratching.
The video gets shamelessly promotional in the second half, and I don't imagine this app will ever become a professional DJ's tool, but it could be fun as a diversion in a bar or lounge, especially if the same table had other musical applications on it.
So why aren't these things out there in bulk? Probably because each table costs more than $12,500 to start, with deployment and maintenance service extra. You'd have to sell a lot of extra drinks to justify that kind of expense.
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I'm not a lawyer, but I'm well-acquainted with legal filings from analyzing Microsoft's legal travails for the last nine years. I've seen a lot of aggressive lawsuits, but a copyright infringement suit filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for Middle Tennessee is one of the boldest--and, I'd argue, short-sighted--filings I've ever seen.
The suit appears to have been initiated by Music Copyright Solutions (MCS), which claims to administer copyrights for more than 45,000 compositions. MCS is named as the lead plaintiff, along with a number of songwriters including Mark Farner of Grand Funk Railroad fame. These folks allege that Microsoft, Yahoo, and RealNetworks improperly licensed the rights to more than 200 compositions that they offered as on-demand streams or limited downloads via the Zune Marketplace, Yahoo Music, and Rhapsody.
Surely these companies paid somebody for the rights to offer these songs. But there's a catch, which TechDirt pointed out earlier Tuesday: these companies may have licensed the rights to the recordings, but that doesn't mean they licensed the rights to the compositions (also known as publishing rights). As section 23 of the legal filing puts it:
In order to transmit, perform, reproduce and deliver any sound recording of any musical work via 'On-Demand Streams' or 'Limited Downloads,' Defendants must first obtain not only the rights for the sound recording itself, but also the rights for the underlying musical composition that is embodied on said musical recording.
Maybe, maybe not--that's up to the court to decide. But that's not the insane part. The insane part is that the plaintiffs are alleging that each time one of the defendants made any recording of a covered song available, that's a copyright violation, and they're seeking damages of $150,000 per violation (or the amount the defendants earned from streaming those songs, whichever is more). So, for example, the lawsuit claims that Yahoo Music offered Conway Twitty's recording of "Fifteen Years Ago" on six different greatest hits albums. The plaintiffs allege that constitutes six copyright violations, which would mean damages of $900,000. Overall, the lawsuit names more than 200 songs, and a far greater number of recordings, meaning that the potential liability for each defendant would be tens of billions of dollars--that's far greater than the total amount of revenues these companies ever earned from any of these services.
These types of cases are usually settled for a relative pittance--something much closer to what the defendant would have paid to license the songs properly in the first place. But imagine for a minute that this lawsuit actually goes to trial and the plaintiffs win damages amounting to 1 percent of what they asked for. No company would ever risk building an online music service again--the legal liability would simply be too high.
When it comes to online music, big legal music services like Zune, Yahoo Music, and Rhapsody are the copyright owners' friends--unlike file-trading networks or free on-demand streaming services, these companies actually collect money from users and disburse it to copyright owners. Perhaps the plaintiffs have a legitimate complaint. But by filing such an aggressive lawsuit to recover billions in supposed damages--I mean honestly, how many Grand Funk Railroad streams have been delivered via the Zune Marketplace?--these folks risk killing their allies and driving music back to the darknet where nobody in the value chain sees a dime.
RealNetworks began public beta-testing version 12 of its venerable RealPlayer today. Like the last version, the free RealPlayer SP (which stands for "social and portable") lets you rip streaming Flash videos from the Web to your hard drive. What's new: you can also transcode them into appropriate formats for playback on portable devices. If you're using an iPod or iPhone, the RealPlayer will even generously insert the transcoded version directly into your iTunes library.
RealPlayer SP adds an unobtrusive "Download This Video" box whenever you encounter a Flash-based video in your Web browser.
Then I remembered that one of the best features of Microsoft's new Bing search engine, which launched earlier this month, is its video search. (The predecessor to Bing, Live Search, had most of the same video search features as well.) There's nothing wrong with Google's video search, but I personally prefer the Bing interface, and I like the way the video is previewed right in the search results.
Using them together was a breeze--once installed, the RealPlayer automatically adds a small pop-up message to any embedded video in your browser (I tested it with both Internet Explorer and Firefox), asking you if you want to download the video. Transcoding takes a few minutes, particularly for long videos, but in the last half-hour I've managed to rip the new Grizzly Bear video, the reunited Pink Floyd's entire Live 8 performance, and a live version of Ozzy's "Crazy Train" with Randy Rhoads into iTunes in both video (H.264) and audio-only (MP3) formats. All came from different original sources, but all were available through Bing.
I'm particularly impressed with the RealPlayer's video-to-audio transcoder--my 8GB iPhone is way too small to fit a lot of videos on it, and transcoding video to audio files has been a bit of a hassle in the past. Now I can do it on the fly, as I download them. Kudos to RealNetworks on a nice piece of software.
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