A Barking Dog

In a few hours we head back to the States. We’ll be about 30 hours short of six weeks. We’ve had a pretty good time, though there were some rough spots scheduling wise. I’d reckon I’ll have some more pics or random thoughts. Thanks BTW for the good comments from several of you.

I’ve got about a week until we do a short run in the States with a touring package show. I’ll be mixing all three acts and setting up my own rig. At least I’ve got my own rig, PM5D, 16 12AMs and R4s for sides. Got a day off in LA in about a week. We’re at the Hollywood Bowl, ping me if you want to hook up on the 23rd. During the week off I’ll pack for the move to Vegas. By mid Sept I should be settled in down there.

Every piece of pro audio gear that uses soft knob or digital control needs to have at the very least, three basic functions available on the front panel, usable without asking someone how or having to page through a manual. You should be able to store presets, recall presets and select devices all without elaborate interfaces. Three simple buttons named “store”, “recall” and “select”. As an added bonus, a “flat” or “compare” control would be nice as well. What I don’t wish to do is scroll through multiple pages to be able to do basic things.

For a couple of days I’ve been able to use a piece I’ve known about for a while, but haven’t really used. And to find out, I wasn’t really missing much. The device in question was the Driverack 480R controlling three Driverack 442s. If you just step up to it, you may have a hell of a time figuring out what the hell is going on with the unit. Were this a tour, it would have been sent home after one night. It’s not that I can’t learn it, I use some of the most sophisticated devices known to pro audio. I shouldn’t need to do things like program hotkeys and page through menus to do basic things. Select device channels, store presets, recall presets. My day can be quite busy and if you can’t provide me with the three basic knobs in a quick, easy to use function, we aren’t going to work together very much. If at all. I got more important things to do than learn yet another device. Select, store, recall. That’s what I need to do.

The device sounds good enough though there are others I would prefer. I shouldn’t need to think about it being device 3, channel 4. It’s mix 12. I shouldn’t have to program a hotkey to select. It’s the 12th equalizer, it should come up on the 12th key. No intervention required on my part. The three basic functions should be available, without paging, at all times of the operation. The interface of the Driverack family is very modal. In terms of software interface, modality is the concept where different controls do different things and respond in different ways depending on what state the controls are in. It’s been studied for a while in software and user interface engineering and it’s considered to be non productive, or even hostile to the user. For example, a simple function, or what should be a simple function such as copying presets from one equalizer to another instead of being a two step process, copying your preset to another device, is incredibly non intuitive. If you don’t have a manual or someone that knows how, you aren’t likely to figure it out on your own. Pressing and holding the “previous page” button to copy is hardly intuitive as is pressing and holding the “next page” button to paste. Of course, you need to know the device and channel number to be able to paste the info. It’s not equalizer 12, it’s device 3, channel 4.

Contrast this to the interface on the tc EQ Station. The EQ Station has buttons for select, store, recall, copy, paste and flat. Bingo. It’s how we use the equalizers. Not only that, but when you add the first 8 eqs, they are eqs 1-8. Address a second device and those are eqs 9-16, not device 2, channel 4 for eq number 12. In less than two minutes, I could drive an EQ Station pretty much in every way I needed to do a show. With the 480R/442 within two minutes I was ready to take a baseball bat to the unit. Hold the page keys for cut and paste? You gotta be joking. There are two pages in the manual dedicated to storing a preset. It ain’t a Masters Thesis gang. Press store. Do you wish to store in bank number X? Either select the bank and press “yes” or accept the default. It shouldn’t be any more difficult than that. To abort a save how about a “cancel”? How is pressing “program/config” intuitive? Unless I’d read the book (not always possible) or had someone that knows with me (they might not speak my language) I would have no clue.

The Driverack family tries to be the jack of all trades, though ends up being the master of none. While the device itself functions reasonably well the interface is hobbled by a lack of direct access to basic features and key combinations that you’ll need a cheat sheet or device sherpa just to do simple things. With dbx looking to replace the BSS Omnidrive line the dbx engineers are going to need to get a better handle on interface design if they wish to keep the market penetration that BSS has garnered over the years.

There has been a question as to what happened during said crash. Basically a hard lockup of the surface, done twice to confirm that indeed was the case. I was having a hard time syncing the Powerbook to the surface. Studio Manager and the Mac have been pretty finicky over the last year or so I’ve been using it. My SM/DM2k/Mac experience (as documented at the LAB) was fraught with peril. Great peril. You’d think with Yamaha being as big as they are, the software/hardware integration would be a bit tighter in the Mac side. I don’t expect iTunes/iPod sort of marriage but something better than that hacked together Mac version.

This particular instance appears to be the fault of the surface ROM version, according to the folks at West Audio in Norway, owners of said desk. Big shout out to Ben at West and Tom and Jos at PAP as well as to our wonderful hosts at Silda Jazz. I’m seeing the surface on the MIDI mapping screen, the proper options are in the System Setup drop down, but communication times out. I try it a few times, then look to see if the Editor communication option is set. I ask Ben if the surface is set to the proper ID and port number. He says he doesn’t know, usually another guy is with the surface but Ben knows a pretty good bit about it. He did one thing I hadn’t even though of by assigning the graphics to the first 12 user defined buttons. Easy thing, but great idea. The surface ID is set but the port is blank so I set it. I go about my business with the screen and trackpad until I need to SEL an input. Nothing. None of the encoders or surface controls work. I troll around making sure it’s locked up. I summon the crew to inform them. They’re very concernd and serious. I’m almost giddy at the prospect of giving some of the more diehard PM5D zealots a taste of reality. A good rule of thumb for touring gear, it’s not if it breaks, it’s when it breaks. The same is true for hundred dollar mics and hundred thousand dollar consoles. Use it long or hard enough, and it will eventually break. It’s just how it is.

The surface has locked hard, we shut the amps off and reboot. At this point, it’s still passing audio in the state it was when it crashed I just don’t have any control over it. We reboot, but instead of gracefully coming back up, I see the “Red Screen of Death” informing me there is some sort of checksum error and I should reinitialize the surface. No way, that will wipe everything. I proceed with a firm “cancel” and the surface starts to boot. It appears at first everything comes back up, but my trackpad tap doesn’t work. I check my eqs. My user prefs button doesn’t work and my stored settings don’t come up. I do have a generic graphic starting point stored in a lib that I revert to, but my tweaks are long gone. A few other things were Gone With The Wind as well. We rebooted to confirm that it was the change of editor port that caused it to crash. I’d hate for it to be something else and not find out until the gig. Sure enough, it was the editor port selection option. By this time Ben was on the blower to the shop and had the low down. Apparently, someone from Yamaha over here told them there was a problem with that version of firmware (which happened to be 1.11) and told them not to hook a PC to the surface.

I’m glad it didn’t happen during the gig. It would suck to have a dozen mon graphics come up flat on the reboot. That kind of thing could ruin your day.

I just wanted to to take the time to mention to some of the PM5D Moonies that it is indeed possible to crash a PM5D hard. So hard some data loss is possible. A few hours ago the one I’ve got with me in Norway right now crashed hard twice in a row. I didn’t need my prefs and user key settings anyway. It wasn’t that big of a disaster, except for losing my softpatch inserted eqs. During a show that would have been a potential disaster has I not stored the basic settings in a lib. I’ve warmed up to the surface since I first started using it about a year ago, though I’d still prefer a D1 or D5 and also wouldn’t mind getting my hands on a Digidesign Venue.

One of the sycophants posted a few times at the LAB bashing some of the other surfaces and I thought he was being a punk about it. It’s possible to crash any surface. That’s a harsh reality that we’ll have to live with as surfaces become the norm. Sure it’s silly and immature, but I just wanted to stick it in JP’s face.

There is another “professional” audio forum open on the Web. It’s actually the rebirth of FOH Mag’s FOH Online forum. Full disclosure, I talked a few times with the publisher of the mag to do some sort of forum. We never did get the hook up for me to feel totally comfortable. For me to be involved in something like that again, I need to be in complete control of every step of the process. Control freak? Yes, perhaps but I’ve got track record and I’d rather rely on that than risk my rep (whatever that is) on someone else for bascially a few bucks.

One of the things that has soured me to the forum I started 10 years ago and sheparded for the better part of that time is that it’s not longer the dominion of working pros. It’s not bad that part timers and others interested particpate. I’ve always been all about that. What’s happened though is some of these folks create so much noise that it’s not worth having to wade through it to participate. The last thing I need is some dork trying to tell me how it is, when I’ve been doing this, for real, full time, since the time he was four or five years old. I’m all for new ideas but most of these guys are sans clue and the ones that do often times are drowned out by the bottomfeeders that spend more time posting than gigging.

The publisher emailed me a few days ago and asked me for me thoughts.

Here goes…

It’s nothing special. It’s going to be the same noise fest, perhaps worse. It’s everything I said NOT to do. It’s anonymous, there is no accountability. When I’m touring, I’m a pretty busy guy and don’t need to wade through a few pages of noobs flaming each other (or worst yet) trying to flame established pros using handles on the Internet. You need to increase the participation of authoritative users. When you open it up inviting a flame fest, you lose the guys that can contribute the most and end up with a community that is anything but pro audio. Your numbers and page views will go up, but it’s got nothing to do with pro audio. It’s basically another trade pub driven forum that I think offers nothing to the working pro. Another waste of diskspace and bandwidth.

Don’t encourage anonymous arguments. Encourage insightful discussion and debate by real people, with real names. By trying to manufacture contraversy you aren’t fostering communication and debate in the industry. I’d much rather read (and respond to) insightful posts from established industry pros, rather than the rambling bullshit of some anklebiter with no clue.

Communities can not be forced to form or exist. You need to develop an environment that targets whatever demographic one is wishing to build the community around. Yet once again, the traditional trade mag publishers have failed.

After being over here for more than a month I can no longer contain my phone envy. I want one of the handsets, err I mean handys that you can’t get in the States. We’ve got the Blackberry and Treo (actually we started that craze) but in terms of regular users getting access to advanced data services we aren’t that far along. In 2000 I first saw the Nokia 9000, which has now spawned into the cameraless 9300 and the bit larger 1.3 megapixel 9500. A year ago I wouldn’t have given a shit about having a handy with a camera. When I first bought the RAZR V3 in Nov, I remember telling the sales guy how I didn’t need all the other features, I just needed a quadband phone. Now it’s a requirement to have a camera, MMS and WAP connectivity and not having it over here has cost me a few hundred Euros in WiFi fees. WiFi over here, while prevalent, isn’t really cheap averaging about 20 Euros a day compared to US$9.95, or more than 150% the cost. With a capable handy I would be able to cut that cost on some days. There is a software incompatability issue that does not allow me to use MMS and WAP over here, even though I have what Cingular considers a “worldphone”. Of course, it would be nice if the Cingular sales people actually traveled the world (let alone other states in the US) to see what compatability means.

Today with a couple of days off in Ulm (well, Neu Ulm to be exact) I needed to top up my Euro cell and headed to the Vodafone shop in the centrum. For those that have yet to visit, in most every Germany town the center of town (hence the name centrum) is pretty much the equivalent of a shopping mall. There is usually also a large church (munster) as well. In fact, the munster in Ulm is one of the tallest in Europe. I can hear it’s bells tolling the 1900 hour right now. That’s 7pm kids… The Vodafone store here in Ulm has something the other stores didn’t. Working models on the show floor with SIMs installed, ready for action. Generally you get a dummy mockup and have to ask the sales herr, or dammen for a demonstration. I’ve got my eye on the Nokia 9500 and Motorola A1000, neither of which is available in the States. Both of these handys use the Symbian OS for mobile phones.

The mockups have keyboards and screenshots in English. The real working handys were in German. I poked around the handys trying to find an option to switch them to English. On some of the other handys I had no problem. Kein problem. These two didn’t seem to have that option, so I asked. While the Vodafone staff had all the docs, they couldn’t find out how to change the language. In this shop, no one had asked before. We were refered to Moto Great Britain for an answer. After a while on hold, I asked them to give up. I decided to research it in my room and as they didn’t have any Nokia 9500s in stock I would have had to go with the Moto A1000, which would be my first choice anyway. Mind you, these aren’t run of the mill handys. Each of them, without a commitment to a contract were over 800 Euros for an unlocked SIM version.

So I troll the Moto site to download the manual of the thousand dollar cell phone I wish to buy. No luck. Again, instead of offering direct links to download something that could help sell more phones, the marketing wonks put up obsticles to prevent me from parting with my hard earned cash for this handy. I thought their gig was to convince me to do business with them, instead, it’s convincing me to avoid doing business with them. The download link didn’t work on Mac OS X and didn’t work with the Win box downstairs in the hotel business center as they don’t allow downloads to the computer.

To the marketing wonks, you need to experiecne life in the real world. Don’t restrict yourself to whatever little hamlet where you happen to live no matter if it’s Kent Washington or Frieburg Germany. Get out there and exprience the rest of the planet. Some people get this. Like Nokia for example. Make your Internet support solutions open and not restricted to a specific type of computer or interface. Except for laziness or developers not being able to cope, there is no reason why any sort of download or tech support (and even marketing) can’t be delivered no matter what the device is from a Blackberry to a Windows box to a Linux box to a Mac box. With Internet standards as mature as they are these days, there’s no reason for platform lock in when surfing the Web.