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Jacob Rosenberg, the author of the Premiere Pro 2.0 Studio Techniques, just let me know that if you go to Peachpit Press’ website and buy his book using the special code EE-TIPS-MAR1 you will get 35% off the cover price AND free shipping. It’s a limited time offer, and I don’t know how long it will last. It’d be great for any Premiere Pro users out there (or for someone who wants to become a Premiere Pro user).
A user tipped me off to a seminar that’s going to be put on in Minneapolis in July for radio editors. The morning session includes production tips in Audition and Pro Tools, and the afternoon session is about producing effective imaging. I don’t know anything about the folks that are putting the show on, but it sounds like a good opportunity if you’re in the area! There are more details here.
Our own Adobe Design Center has posted a great essay by Tina Blaine, a member of the Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center faculty, titled New Music for the Masses. In the essay Tina explores some of the new trends in music-oriented video games, toys, and how they’re leading to some of the other new interfaces for music creation. Some examples are things like Elektroplankton for the Nintendo DS, which can be described as much more of a “music toy” than a game, and the Playstation 2 game Guitar Hero, where players wield plastic electric guitars in order to simulate wailing guitar licks and move your way up from playing in local basements to selling out stadiums to a worldwide rock tour.
(On a personal note, I had the opportunity to play Guitar Hero at a friends’ house while on a trip a while back and it was wicked fun. I started the game just kind of going through the motions and by the end I had to restrain myself from kicking over the TV like an amp stack or smashing the plastic toy guitar to pieces like the legends of old. Good times.)
The essay goes on to discuss more technology that offers unique inputs to music, like the MIDI-driving exoskeleton I blogged about in January and some super-cool conceptual interfaces where moving physical objects around on a board influence the total mix or instruments used in a composition. The technology is a long way from being mainstream (and perhaps never will be) but looking both forward at this stream of high-tech gizmos for music as well as at the current technology being used for music-related games I can’t help but feel like we’re on the threshold of someone putting together a few new key elements to create another breakthrough. Technology has always influenced music production, from creating better drums with stone tools, to violins with precision steel tools, to guitars and amp stacks with electricity, and on up the chain. Are Wacom-type tablets the next step? Or cameras that pick up a performer’s movements and convert them to music? Are we primed for the next technology-enabled jump in musical style/influence/instrument/production/sound?
On of our engineers spotted the new Focal Easy Guide to Adobe Audition 2.0 in the wild. It's another that I haven't seen yet, but its emphasis on step-by-step guides seems like it would be very handy and Focal's previous books have been well received. I checked around and it seems like it's available at the usual suspects, plus Focal Press books generally end up in most bookstores that have a good technical section.
From where I sit (as an audio guy in the middle of a company that spends its time thinking visually) I love seeing the intersection of graphics and audio come up again and again. The latest example is this roundup of applications that use the input from a Wacom drawing tablet to control music in one form or another. I have no idea if any of these things are useful but they certainly look fun.
Some of you may have already noticed, but we've posted a PDF on the main Audition page about why Audition is great for podcasting. It's not a how-to, but it goes over some of the main reasons some top-tier podcasters like using Audition for what they do.
When I first mentioned podcasting I got a lot of questions about why I (and others) thought that Audition was great for the task. A while back I started to try to write out a post to summarize, but then I decided I should talk to some podcasters, and then some folks inside Adobe started asking questions, and one thing lead to another and I had this huge list I wanted to post that wasn't the clearest since it came from what was at that point a 4-page post. It’s in interesting sidenote, but I think I hit a variation of “information paralysis” where overwhelming data leads to NO action and I just sat on it for a while. Luckily, there’s a lot of talented people here who I could enlist the help of to help with the content and make it readable (since writing/layout aren't my strongest skills) and this condensed 2-page PDF is the result. I hope it's helpful.
Besides the comment spam this morning I also saw that informIT.com has a sample chapter of the Adobe Audition 2 Classroom in a Book posted on their site. It’s the next-best thing to finding the book on a shelf and scanning through it to see if it’s something that would be useful to you, and not everyone has that option.
I checked my email this morning only to discover that I had more than 570 new comments. Of course, they all looked like spam so I unceremoniously deleted them all. If you commented over the last couple days and your comment hasn't appeared please re-post it--it got caught up in the flood.
A few more great reviews have come across my desk in the last couple weeks, including:
I'm especially happy to see more reviews appearing in the radio-related sources so our large contingent of broadcast folks can see how version 2 is behaving in the field. The music pubs can talk about creative control (which is important) but only the radio magazines know what it's like to try to put together 17 spots. Today. Before 3. :)