Recording - October 2011 - 6

Note to faithful writers: When sending your letters by email, please remember to include your name and where you hail from.
Studio in a rented space?
Hi, I worked at a recording studio where I read your magazine and thoroughly enjoyed it. I am thinking about opening a project studio, probably in an apartment rented in an apartment building. I am wondering about sound insulation. Do people open studios in apartments? What goes into the insulation? About how much would I have to spend on insulation? Being that it would be a rented apartment, I wouldn’t really be able to perform permanent construction; how do I deal with that? Thank you for your time,
Brandon Inhaber via email

Nowadays, any program that can do some degree of audio slicing/time/pitch-editing (like Digital Performer, for example) should, at least in theory, be able to extract MIDI note and pitch data from the analysis data that allows for the note-by-note audio editing. Of course, that doesn’t mean that those DAWs necessarily also include an audio-to-MIDI option, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find that, as more DAWs implement this kind of audio-editing capability, they also include some kind of MIDI extraction feature as well. Cheers—JA

Brandon, thanks for your letter and thanks for the compliments! Your situation isn’t unheard of; there are people who for one reason or another have to make do with spaces they can’t do much with in terms of permanent construction. Our June 2011 issue had two articles mostly about permanent studio construction, but some of the ideas there will be useful for you too. You will find some other good ideas in our website’s free Resource Library. Because you can’t punch holes in the walls or install floating walls, floors, or ceilings, you will be limited in how much sound insulation you can get away with. More importantly, you would be well advised to consult your local zoning laws and talk to your landlord before you open up for business; having clients coming into a space zoned as residential, in a building where residents expect peace and quiet at all hours (especially late at night, when musicians are often just getting revved up), is likely to get you arrested. This isn’t to say you can’t possibly do it... but there are some hoops to jump through before you can go into business for yourself. Have fun, good luck, and thanks for reading.—MM

Expanded interoperability in the Avid world
Hey Mike, thanks for using my email in your letters column (May 2011). I think I will always keep my Roland VS2400 as a recording platform, even if I start to work with an Apple MacBook Pro. But that leads me to one more question. After I read your point about Avid Pro Tools and Ableton Live being so different, I read up some more to figure out what would be best for me, I think now I would use Pro Tools as my DAW. But I am wondering: I liked your review of the Roland OCTA-CAPTURE interface (also May 2011).Would that work well with Pro Tools on a MacBook Pro? Thanks again,
Kevin S. via email

Making MIDI from audio
Hi Joe: Thanks for your article on Melodyne in the recent Recording Magazine (Melodyne In Action, May 2011). You mentioned therein that the ability to export a Standard MIDI File from an audio recording has been around for a while on other programs. Could you please tell me which ones do this? This is a feature I’ve been looking for. Thanks!
David Green via email

Joe Albano replies:
Hi David. I’ve done it (with varying degrees of success) for years (with monophonic audio files) in Logic’s “Audio-ToScore” feature (found in a Waveform Editor window minimenu); I know that Cubase has a similar feature in their Sample Editor called “Extract MIDI”. Once the MIDI note data has been pulled from the audio, it can be edited/cleaned up and then exported as a SMF using the program’s MIDI export function. A lot of programs can do drum replacement or MIDI Groove extraction, both of which convert audio notes to MIDI notes, but they don’t necessarily extract the pitch information needed to convert the audio to a MIDI melody line.

Kevin: Nice to hear from you again. Fortunately, you have picked exactly the right time in history to ask that question! Up until last fall, Avid took the same stance, sort of, that Apple does: they tried to completely control the entire audio chain, hardware and software, to ensure maximum compatibility and reliability, but in doing so, they locked out a lot of other manufacturers from the Pro Tools experience. For example, Pro Tools has its own plug-in standards— AudioSuite, RTAS, and TDM—which no other software can use, and the native version of Pro Tools can only use non-RTAS plug-ins if you first put a “shell” around them using a special program from FXpansion that makes VST plug-ins look like RTAS plug-ins. On the hardware side, the old situation was that PT required an Avid (Digidesign) interface or it wouldn’t even start. You could get Pro Tools M-Powered, which would work with an M-Audio interface, but again, if you didn’t have M-Audio hardware, the software wouldn’t work. However, in a huge step forward for compatibility, Avid made two announcements at last fall’s AES show. One was that all of its audio interface hardware would be Core Audio and ASIO compliant, so it would work with any software on any Mac (Snow Leopard) or Windows (7) machine without any hiccups. The other, and the more important one for you, is that Core Audio and ASIO drivers were finally added to Pro Tools as of version 9, so that any audio interface would work with PT at long last. So if the OCTA-CAPTURE has the feature set you need, yes, it will work with Pro Tools 9 on a MacBook Pro. Have fun learning and exploring computer audio, and thanks for reading.—MM

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RECORDING OCTOBER 2011

Recording - October 2011

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