All information in these pages is copyright (c) 1989-2003 by Roger Nichols.
All rights reserved. Permission for personal reference only, and may not
be reproduced by any method without written permission.
Welcome to the Workstation Blues
by Roger Nichols
Christmas is just around the corner, and it is waiting to mug you, beat
you sensless and take all of your hard earned money. If you can't think
of anything else to waste your money on, how about the quietest consoles
known to man or multiple synchronized digital multi-track machines that
will allow you to record so many tracks that it will be impossible to find
a place to mix them.
Don't forget the digital audio workstation. You will be able to play with
the newest, latest, whiz-bang digital audio workstations that are guaranteed
to save you time and effort when editing your next project. Or...... maybe
not! Maybe it takes longer to do your editing on a hard disk based editor?
How about this little scenario. You have decided to mix directly to your
new hard disk based digital audio workstation with a 650 Megabyte hard disk
so that you can store over an hours worth of material. Great, so now you
take all of your new equipment into the studio to start mixing. Everything
is going just fine. You finish mixing the first half of the album and then
realize that you don't have enough room on your hard disk for the whole
album. You forgot to allot space for the two different versions of one of
the tunes or the TV mixes of all of the tunes. Boy, this stuff eats up hard
disk space pretty quickly. Well you guess that you are going to have to
off-load some of the tunes to make room for the ones that you haven't mixed
yet. Your choices are to copy the mixes to a DAT machine or some other digital
audio two track machine that has the appropriate digital interface, backup
everything to a streaming tape backup device compatible with your system,
copy all of the data to a bunch of removeable hard disks, copy everything
to a removeable optical disk drive, or backup onto 600 or so floppy disks.
I think one of the questions they ask when you call the suicide hot line
now is "are you attempting to backup digital audio data onto floppy
disks?"
This is just the beginning of your problems. After you have spent half your
life getting your digital information in and out of your workstation and
have managed to get your album edited and sequenced, how are you going to
get it to mastering? A lot of mastering facilities have some sort of hard
disk based editing system, but I'll bet two tickets to the next Steely Dan
concert that the hard disk based system at Bernie Grundman's or Bob Ludwig's
is not the same brand as the one that you bought. So once again you have
to down-load your data to a format that can be used by the mastering facility.
This time saving device has just cost you another hour or two. Was it all
worth it? Only time will tell.
I think that digital audio workstations can save time. There are editing
and sequencing tasks that can be done on a hard disk system that are impossible
in a longitudinal system. I think that the bottle-neck is in the storage
media adopted by the system. Erasable optical disk seems to be the way to
go. More and more manufacturers are turning to this type of media for storage.
The problem is that the data storage is not compatible from system to system.
You can not take a disk written on one system and read it on another system.
There are enough different sources of hard disk based workstations that
virtually every studio could own a system built by a different manufacturer.
Let me assure you that I am not against digital audio workstations, quite
the contrary. I have been using a hard disk based editing system since 1981.
I needed it so badly that I had to build it myself. It was based around
an S-100 computer system with a Micropolis 32 Megabyte 8" hard disk
system and a digital interface to the 3M digital multi-track...It's name
was Wendel. I used it on the Donald Fagen "Nightfly" album to
do things that couldn't be accomplished any other way.
Digital audio workstations today are becoming even more valuable as production
tools, but standards have to be agreed upon between manufacturers to not
only enable the transfer of digital audio data between systems, but to transfer
editing information from system to system. In the land of video editing
a CMX compatible edit decision list is transportable between systems with
excellent results. The same thing needs to happen in the land of digital
audio workstations before everyone will have one.
So when you sit on Santa's lap (pervert) and he asks you which workstation
you want, tell him that Roger said that you should wait until you can perform
some edits on your digidesign system,take the optical disc to your friends
Sonic Solutions to clean up some background noise and then go on to the
mastering facility where they have a D.A.R. SoundStation II for mastering.
Now you've got something!
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