Oct 02, 2018 Out with the Old, in with the New

By Robert Nelson

Greetings,

In the Audio Studio, we have relied on a very robust digital recorder: the ProTools brand. From Fall of 2009 – Summer of 2017, it always worked and never failed when we had a recording session.

Alas, we were slammed on both ends of the “planned obsolescence” technology hardware / software phenomenon. It was the very day of the Solar Eclipse, August 21, 2017. The ProTools Digital Recorder was not accepting accurate microphone inputs. That would mean that the sound recorded was not at a high enough gain (aka volume) to accurately record professional quality digital audio. What used to be pristine sound now had an overabundance of ambient noise in the mix. As a sound perfectionist, I was horrified.

I wasn’t too concerned. We have an excellent in-house Mac support group. I assumed it was related to either a necessary ProTools software upgrade or routine Mac OS issue.

You know what they say when you “assume”?

I submitted a trouble ticket and figured I would be up and running in a few hours. It took most of the day and it was problematic for Sam – in our Mac group – to fix.

What happened, in a nutshell: Our physical ProTools unit was no longer being supported with current ProTools software upgrades and at some point through the interminable Mac OS upgrades, the Audio Studio Mac could no longer properly work with the ProTools recording software. We rely on the software to capture the microphone information that plugs into the physical ProTools recorder.

Basically, ProTools would have expected us to purchase the latest model Recorder. Thus, the creative obsolescence “hostage” situation. I hate that business model in my personal tech purchases and was damned to see it play out in my job.

Throughout the entire school term, 2017 – 2018, it took a lot of extra assistance from our Mac Group to keep the Audio Studio functioning. If I had a recording that day, I made sure it was working properly hours before the session in case I had to submit more “high priority” trouble tickets. What was once routine, now I had lost confidence in the reliability of our recording equipment. Not good.

As soon as we could, Graduation 2018, we retired the obsolete ProTools unit and started looking for a replacement.

Myself and the Media Studios student, Matt McPherson, drew up a strategy.

Our goals were:

1. Find a successful replacement Recorder that wasn’t a proprietary system such as ProTools.
2. We needed a Recorder that could work with multiple recording software platforms in use such as Adobe’s Audition or Mac’s Logic.
3. We needed something predictably reliable that would not require extra assistance from the Mac Group in keeping the Audio Studio functioning.

Learning from failure: don’t over-trust YouTube videos. Since the biggest use of the Audio Studio is for Podcasting, Matt and I assumed, (there is that word again!), that a simple Mackie Digital Mixer would suffice. I use such a Mixer at radio station KRCL for off-air sound production.

Alas, that setup did not work as we could not get Adobe Audition to recognize the Mackie Interface. So, we shipped the unit back to Amazon and re-booted our search.

After consulting the Media Studios’ “tech whisperer” Tony Sams, head of Video Projects, we recognized that we needed something called a Control Surface to work with an Audio Interface.

The microphones go from the inputs in the Audio Studio Recording Space through the wall and then the XLR cables in the Control Booth plug into the Audio Interface. Then, the Control Surface unit translates that sound input data into whichever recording software we choose to use to capture the sound. In our case, a multi-track Audition digital sound recording software. (We use Audition because students have access to that through the Adobe Creative Cloud).

That setup works for us now. We use Audition, routed through a PreSonus Audio Interface / Control Surface, for podcasts and typical audio narration. Music students can easily switch to Logic to record music.

Now I have gone back to the expectation that “everything works”. And Sam, our intrepid Mac systems expert, no longer has to groan when he sees yet another Audio Studio trouble ticket cross his inbox.

Robert J. Nelson | Head of Media Studios & Audio Projects Librarian
Creativity & Innovation Services / Media Studios
robert.nelson@utah.edu