What are your 'pain points' in audio?
How would you like them to be healed?
How would you like them to be healed?
"Into each life a little pain must fall" - So what is causing us pain in the studio, broadcast or live sound scenarios, and what kind of medication do we need to make it go away?
I would like to pretend that the description for my article came from a long and intense study of the works of a colleague. But you can see that it wasn't by the misquotation. Actually I was reading an article in Broadcast Audio Engineering about the new version of Pro Tools where Avid's Pro Tools strategist Bobby Lombardi says (abbreviated here slightly),
"Everything is keyed around our customers to find out the pain points and solve them."
I found that an interesting way of expressing the fact that working in audio industry has always had its frustrating and difficult aspects, and the search to make the 'pain' go away is admirable.
Thinking back over the years, there have been quite a few causes of pain in audio, not in any particular order...
Connectors not connecting
Random clicks, pops and crackles from a variety of sources
Noise from analogue tape recorders
Scratchy faders and pan pots
Tuning stability of analogue synths
Microphones needing to have their pattern, pad and filter switches 'exercised' to work reliably
Earth loops
Balanced connections going 'one-legged'
Switch-on/off thumps
One-sided headphones
Many more...
The above list consists of 'gremlin' problems. But there are operational causes of pain too...
Cable management
Sagging boom microphone stands
Delays caused by digital conversion (a whole other story in its own right, considering that analogue is instant)
Latency
Zero-latency monitoring
Software instruments taking too long to load...
Buffer under runs
Running out of processing power due to too many plug-ins
Going to stop now before it gets too depressing.
Well that's just off the top of my head, I'm sure I could think of many more.
It is of course part of audio engineering to find ways to fix problems, or work around them if they can't be fixed. But I don't think that we should be accepting that problems are an integral part of what we do. I believe that audio engineering is all about achieving great sound, whether live, broadcast or in the recording studio, and anything that gets in the way of that, or slows down the process, is a problem that needs to be solved.
So, while Avid is in a mood to find out the 'pain points' for their customers, and presumably other DAW developers are too, let us know what is causing YOU pains in the studio.
Here's your chance to blow off some steam in order to always keep the creativity perfected. - Steve Aluko
No comments:
Post a Comment