The fresh new 7.4cs2 update comes with a huge pile of bug fixes and feature enhancements, so if you’re a 7.4 owner, check it out! This will probably sort out some little instability issues I noticed with cs1. To everyone who complained about not having track color saturation control since 7.3, it’s back with this update!
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After some user complaints of pointless post censorship at the Digi User Conference (Digidesign’s official user support forum) we registered to ask for troubleshooting info with 7.4, and engage in some online digi discussion. We almost believed the myth was busted after a quite healthy and normal interaction with other users and an administrator, even after being honest about some of our discontent about some steps taken.
But indeed, just a couple days ago our IP was blocked without any warning from an admin, stopping us from registering again and blocking us indefinitely from the biggest and most important part of Digidesign’s customer support. Is this because of one single administrator that should be replaced, or a part of a bigger corporate-level conspiracy to block any negative online opinions about Pro Tools and Digidesign?
How exciting. Or scary. Or both. Almost like an old story about Rolls Royce. A man that was left stopped in an interstate because his Rolls Royce broke down called them and got a quick support to meet him up and they even did parts replacement on the site, just to make him promise he would not tell anyone what happened… The only difference is, Digidesign is not even close in kindness…
To all readers (I know you’re out there!…I hope), I know I haven’t written anything in a while. I guess I was getting ready for a quite lonely christmas as a foreign student in the US of A, because I didn’t buy a plane trip to Europe to be with my family this year… :/
Wish everyone great holidays and an awesome 2008 in advance 
A new all-included Stylus RMX package that includes all 5 SAGE Xpanders (Backbeat, Retro Funk, Burning Grooves, Liquid Grooves, Metamorphosis) for a discount price was released by our almost-industry-standard VI sampling buddies. This is a very opportunistic repackaging of this already famous product. Despite the sucky logo and website design, Spectrasonics libraries and virtual instruments (Atmosphere, Trilogy, Stylus RMX) are used by all major film studios and artists, and in record time they became respected names in a somewhat competitive industry.
Gracenote makes a music popularity world map, where you can check top artists and album charts by geographical location, in most countries (at least definitely all countries that actually have an influence in international music sales, and then some).
All you need is to have the Flash plug-in in your browser, and you can check very interesting statistics. The map uses data from the Gracenote Media Database® and shows the latest album and artist lookups in states, countries and continents around the world.
Definitely worth a check! Specially if you’re a songwriter/business person and even producer.
Line 6 teamed up with all-tube amp maker Reinhold Bogner and released a pleasant surprise to all faithful lovers of the “authentic tone”: tubes. 12AX7 in the preamp, 6L6 in the power amp, and even Celestion Vintage 30 speakers for the cabinets and combos. All tube Bogner-branded gear for super-affordable prices ranging $700 to $830.
Sounds like a great value, and it is. But I admit I was expecting better - even from Line 6 - and specially from Bogner. Read on… More…
Finally! Elastic Audio, new beat detective features, re-written Audio Engine (according to Digidesign engineers at AES), and it runs… apparently… kinda faster in some computers. Well yeah, that part is complicated. Some people say it feels faster, while other users are outraged about how slow 7.4 is. Confused?
Digidesign takes pleasure in removing small features that everyone was happy about, like the possibility to change interface track color saturation. If you want to color tracks in 7.4, you now only have an on/off toggle, and a fixed color shade for each color.
But those are the only negative points, apparently. Overall, Pro Tools 7.4 seems to be a very nice update that will support Windows Vista and OS X Leopard. If only it didn’t cost you from $40 to $79 to get it, and that’s if you already own 7.3!… You can download your copy from the DigiStore.
But that is the price to pay if you want to use Pro Tools. The industry standard that still doesn’t support Automatic Plug-in Delay Compensation in the LE edition
Don’t get me wrong. I love Pro Tools. But long time users tend to get bitter.
Wow. The famous acoustic guitar maker announced three Taylor Solid body models with new proprietary pickups. It’s a completely original design by Bob Taylor, as opposed to a Gibson/Fender/PRS copy, that most players started expecting lately. Prices range from $1,748 to $3,098 and they seem to be very blues-oriented, although I can’t confirm that before I get my hands on one.
Visit Taylor Guitars for a trailer.
Also known as New York compression for its use in the formerly-known-as “New yorker” or ultra-compressed mixing style (which actually leaked to the west coast even before the Lord-Alge brothers made it popular).
Very simple concept: bus the audio to a new auxiliar (”parallel”… you guessed it) and apply compression separately in that auxiliar (like you should be doing with reverbs and delays) and then mixing it with the unaltered audio, keeping the attack of the original audio and using mostly the decay modification of compression. Tutorial by Mutant Audio (but you don’t have to use Fruity Loops…). Haha. Fruity Loops. Heh
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Monitor Speaker-maker KRK released rugged protection grills for VXT4/6 reference monitors. After a while, that’s something new - recent studio fashion dictates that studio monitors should show their speaker cones bare naked. Right? But now, for around $60/pair, KRK sells these grills to retrofit your VXTs.
