Hart's Dynamic Media Blog

My colleague Steve and I were talking about the horrible sound that so many talking head videos have, and what would improve them. He suggested that the best thing would be to include some sort of Bluetooth (or similar) lapel microphone. That would make it easy to close-mic the talent without wires and, if the quality was any good, that one thing alone would significantly increase the average audio quality of all the video being shot today.

Well, I think Steve has a crystal ball (which I'm going to insist on borrowing) because Sony just announced exactly that. Well, it doesn't come included with the camera, but is available in Japan for ¥21,000 (about $165) and I hope it will be available worldwide soon. The talking head videos of the world need it.

Posted by Hart Shafer at 04:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

There's has been some discussion about folks who purchased the download version of Adobe Audition 2 and what content beyond the program itself they should have access to. There have been some problems with people getting everything they should, and some doubts about whether the download version got the same things that boxed version customers should get.

First, I just want to say I'm sorry that there's been such a headache for some customers about this. We always strive to make these launches as smooth as possible, but we stumbled this time.

Second, while the download version doesn't have any physical goods, people who buy it should have access to all of the same content that comes in the box. Namely:

• The full manual (in PDF)
• All 4+GB of uncompressed music loops
• The Total Training videos
• The ability to register and download the registration incentive of your choice

Specifics about each of these after the jump...

The manual: After you've downloaded Audition and unzipped the file you should see a folder that contains all of the manuals for the 6 languages Audition ships in.

The loops: Your purchase confirmation email will have a link to a special Loopology page that lists the loops for download. Each category has its own zip file. For a day or so after we released the product these emails pointed to the old Loopology page instead. In addition, the Adobe store in some regions continued to send out the wrong link until very recently. If you haven't downloaded your loops, check your email again and check for the link. If the link doesn't work or takes you to the old loops, or if you don't have the email at all, contact your local customer service and they will be able to provide you with the correct link. It should be easy to tell if the loops are new: the updated page has a new section for music beds, and the zip files are much larger. Ambient.zip went from 11MB to 122MB.

The videos: Similar to the loops, download purchasers should have gotten a link to the Total Training videos to watch online. If you did not get this link, or if it's broken in your confirmation email, contact customer service and they will provide the link.

Registration: This one was certainly the biggest headache! It turns out that the system that handles fulfilling the registration incentives wasn't set up properly. When you purchase the download version you are automatically registered, but the system that handles emailing you to tell you how to download your reward didn't recognize those registrations. This should be all sorted out now. If you haven't bought the product yet, buying the download version should work now. If you already have an Adobe ID, make sure to use the same email address and that should help resolve any possible conflicts. If you're not prompted, you can go to Help->Register to register your product—but make sure to check the box allowing us to contact you, or else we won’t be allowed to send you the message with the link to the incentives! If the Register option is grayed out that means you have already been registered. Finally, if you are registered but never got the email, contact customer service in your country and they'll provide you with your link to the download. Unfortunately, since the system missed you the first time we don’t know who has and who hasn’t been contacted so we won't be able to automatically re-send the email.

Finally, we have word that some email applications (I heard this specifically about Thunderbird) were not rendering the links properly. Try copying and pasting the email text into Notepad or something similar to see if the links were just not showing up.

Clear as mud, eh? Once again, we're so sorry for the inconvenience. It's painful to think that the folks who were are most enthusiastic customers, who jumped on the downloadable upgrade right away, are the ones who were most burdened by this. I believe we have the problems fixed now, and hope that we can prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future.

Posted by Hart Shafer at 04:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (28)

Finally, we can live in the sci-fi future of music production. I mean, everyone would look cooler with their own robotic exoskeleton, right?

Posted by Hart Shafer at 02:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I'm hoping for some more interesting posts in the next couple days, but in the mean time here are a couple more quick tips for 2.0:

• Click on the tab for any panel and then press the ~ key (actually the ` key, next to the 1 on most keyboards) to maximize that panel. Press ~ again to restore it to the original size. This is great for when you just need more real estate for what you're doing that instant, like needing to see the full mixer panel with long faders during automation, or for maximizing the video panel when reviewing your work before export.
• Try using Ctrl+Shift+Click when working in the mixer and in the track controls to the left of the track. For many items (mute, solo, arm for record, input and output devices, and automation status) this will set all tracks to the same value. I use this all the time when opening a session on a new computer so that all my inputs will be set properly to my default device instead of to none.

Posted by Hart Shafer at 07:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dan on our testing team was telling me how he was putting his new monitor in portrait mode to great use for editing in the Spectral Frequency Display, so I decided to try it with one of the 24-inch monitors that we have in the office. Wow! I wish I had one of these at home!

(View large image)

Using the full length of the screen to display the frequencies and setting the spectral controls to 16384 reveals amazing detail, and almost makes the song look like a piano roll.

Posted by Hart Shafer at 07:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

(I wrote this on Saturday but didn't post it until today. I guess I was tired enough to forget to post once I got in!)

I'm on my way back from NAMM now (it's another on-the-plane post), tired and a bit bleary-eyed but excited about my personal whirlwind couple days down there. I came in the night before the show opened and had a packed two days talking to partners, the press, and customers about 2.0.

One of the things that struck me was just how crowded the whole show was. I walked onto the floor just a few minutes after the show had opened and I think it's the most packed I had seen the aisles in several years. In fact, almost everyone I talked to commented on how bustling the whole show was, from hall E with the folks who sell wood for violins to the rooms upstairs with wall-to-wall pianos, and everything in between. I'm guessing the music industry is a trailing indicator of the economy as a whole, since so much of it is driven as a passion once the basic needs (food, shelter) have been taken care of. If that's the case than the economy is trucking along here in North America at least--I've been to a lot of tradeshows that have been shrinking over the last few years, and NAMM was relatively slow the last couple years, but it was as big as ever this year. I think every space in the convention center that could have been used had a booth on it.

My personal winner of the hippest booth concept had to be Access Music, the folks that make the samplers, with their hanging rope wall. I’m not sure how inviting it made the booth, but it certainly stood out!

My winner of the most fun new product I saw had to go to Sibelius, who was showing a new sequencing product called Groovy which is specifically designed for teaching elementary school kids about music creation. Anything that helps teach more music theory to kids seems like a great thing to me.

I only wish I had the time to stay an extra day just for some time on the floor. I always feel like I’ve missed half the show and this year was no exception. I hardly saw any of the hardware on display, and was only able to check out a handful of demos. Ah, NAMM. It’s always interesting, always exhausting, and always LOUD.

Posted by Hart Shafer at 01:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Alright, it looks like the tryout download is now working as expected. The tryout link on the Adobe Audition page still links to the "notify me" page (and likely will until next week) but you can get the tryout from the main list of downloads here.

Enjoy!

Posted by Hart Shafer at 04:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Durin’s comment reminded to that I wanted to post about the fact that I was interviewed for two different podcasts before the 2.0 launch. The first was with Bruce Williams of Building the Pod. I joked that this interview was amazingly recursive--I was recorded into Audition for a podcast on creating podcasts in Audition that is entirely produced inside of Audition. Whew! Building the Pod is a weekly how-to for Audition. Even I was impressed by the power of the technology and what it promises for the future when we did the interview--even though I was in Seattle and Bruce was in Sydney we were able to do the interview via Skype over the internet and Bruce just recorded it straight into Audition

For t he second podcast I met up with Jason Lopez of Podtech.net, which produces regular podcasts on technology news and trends. Jason and I talked about the newest version, as well as some general trends in the audio industry. Jason has a background with traditional radio broadcasting as an NPR correspondent (among other things) and also produces his podcasts inside of Audition.

Finally, I don't think it's "aired" yet, but I was interviewed yesterday by Kevin Becka, technical editor for Mix Magazine, for a segment in their NAMM daily podcasts.

Posted by Hart Shafer at 10:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Some of my fell product managers were at Motion Graphics LA (MGLA) on Tuesday night to show off the production studio. Since it was mostly a graphics show the Audition section was short, but Giles Baker, the senior product manager for Premiere Pro, did a nice job with a quick showing of 2.0. The folks at Pixel Corps were kind enough to record and encode the event and now it's posted to DV Magazine's web site. They broke out the Audition section so you skip straight to it, but I'd encourage you to watch the rest of the videos if you're interested.

Note: I had some trouble when I downloaded the movie because it asked for a .tif file. I just said "search" and then canceled and then the file played fine. You'll also need the Quicktime player to view them.

Posted by Hart Shafer at 04:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, the good news is the tryout got through the posting process much faster than we had anticipated. The bad news is it won't download correctly! The web team is working right now to figure out what's going wrong and correct it so hopefully we'll fix it so the download will complete properly before the end of the day. I think I may be just as excited to get it into your hands as you all are to get it!

Posted by Hart Shafer at 04:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Just a quick note about the Adobe Audition 2.0 tryout: it’s coming as soon as we can get it out the door. It’s passed QA and so now the team is just working on getting it packaged up and put on the site. My hope is that we’ll have it up some time next week.

Posted by Hart Shafer at 04:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

It seems that airplane rides are great times to compose blog posts. Now if only I could post from the air! Anyway, first thanks for all of the kind opening comments. I'll think about an expanded biography for me and how best to introduce some of the members of the team.

I wanted to comment a few things in the screenshots that seem to have raised some eyebrows some folks who haven't gotten their hands on the product yet:

• Semicolons in the time display--This is a typical way to display time in video applications when the time is a drop-frame format. Since all of our screenshots were taken from sessions that included video that was shot at 29.97 drop, you see the semicolons. If you're working at 30fps, H:M:S, or any other non-drop format the time will be displayed with colons like always.
• Interface darkness--Some of the screenshots online are set with the darkness of the interface turned way down. Some people working to picture love the idea because it reduces eye strain when you're deep into the night and trying to keep the picture the brightest thing on the screen. Either that or because it looks cool and will impress clients. Others think it's gloomy and makes it hard to read. We tried to choose a neutral gray for the default color in all the Production Studio apps, but you can decide for yourself--there's a darkness slider in Options->Settings under the Colors tab. Note that 19 is the threshold where the hot scrubbable text (the numbers you can click and drag on in the mixer and elsewhere) turn from blue to orange, which some people dig.
• Toolbar buttons--The screenshots don't show the toolbar buttons that have been in the product way back through the Cool Edit days and some people are worried that we had gotten rid them. They're still there, but we did change them so they aren't shown by default. In our research, we found that many people thought they cluttered the screen and were confusing because they offered so many buttons to do what could be done elsewhere. We thought the best idea was to just not show them by default so anyone who wanted them can get them as they become more comfortable with the idea. Just go to View->Shortcut Bar to show them.

Posted by Hart Shafer at 11:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Our own Adobe forums moderator for Audition, ozpeter, has done a great job of cataloguing and organizing some tips, tricks, and other guidance for folks looking for information about the new version. Check it out--they are in a series of posts in their own category on the user-to-user forums.

Posted by Hart Shafer at 04:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Hello, everyone! Now that Adobe has this blogging system set up and we've launched a new version of Adobe Audition (along with the new Adobe Production Studio), I thought this would be a great time to start up my own blog.

First, the 10-second bio: my name is Hart Shafer, and in 1997 I was lucky enough to answer a want ad in the newspaper and get hired by Syntrillium Software as their sixth employee. After doing several different jobs there I started working in product management for Cool Edit 2000 and have been the product manager at Syntrillium, and then here at Adobe, ever since.

My intent is to make this blog a useful spot for news and information related to Audition as I see it from my perspective. If there's anything in particular you would like to see me include, just let me know in the comments section. I hope you find it useful, or at least interesting!

Posted by Hart Shafer at 02:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)