Melbourne Instruments Roto-Control Motorized Knobs

0:00 Welcome to Office Hours. If you're not here, especially if you're not here pre-show, you would not believe the discussions that we have. We've spent the last 10 minutes trying to figure out the name of Mike Pree from 35 years ago. If you want to ask a question, you use this thing, and we're going to talk about other ways to ask questions. But let's

0:20 get started with the rest of the show. Alexander, what's the first question? First question this morning was submitted through Show Hub. Mike Edwards in New York is asking morning everyone what does the panel think about the new roto control from melbourne instruments mr francis so this is first i've seen of it but it looks like a little set of knobs and buttons and some thankfully displays that will update uh this connects via usb and or midi

0:51 and i assume midi over usb as well i'd love to feel the switches because they look like big chunky those kind of loud clacky keyboards that some people like thankfully the knobs are motorized which is why this is in the four hundred and fifty dollar range as opposed to those little nano control devices that are like in the $80 range because this actually has motorized knobs so that

1:18 there's recall visual recall when you jump to a different product or jump to different faders because this is obviously not going to control all of your controls because there's only eight when you switch to a new bank the knobs will move to that position to display where your levels are which is really kind of the only way that you can deal with

1:39 actual control surfaces is to invest and get ones that are motorized and jump to that position big flaw with this one where are the faders i don't want to mix levels on knobs faders are a very specific device and they have a specific precision in the normal section where we use them in that unity gain section kind of three quarters of the way up a fader there's a lot more precision

2:03 in that realm than there is in the bottom of a fader and I don't see that happening in a as easily in a rotary knob and I don't want to use rotary knobs it's harder to visualize levels when rotary rotary knobs jump into place with just a little line on top of them. So really cool control. I think probably should have made it a little larger and used faders instead of rotary controls.

2:27 Courtney, what's your thought? One unique thing that I've never seen on any other rotary control device is that the knobs change functionality as you change them for different, When you map them to different things, they can be either smooth or they can have detents, like click, click, click, click, click. And they must do that by having it, you know, when it reaches a certain value, click to the next one, click to the next one, click to the next one.

2:58 Because it says here every knob does exactly how you want it with clicks. Clicks for detents for, you know, setting different settings and smooth for mixing. So that's... Mickey? Yeah, that's getting more and more popular with having those configurable encoders, which are actually not just encoders, but they're actually motors that allow you to change between like infinitely variable or having indents or clicks in them.

3:33 them. I think they're marketing this more towards folks that use the this for controlling say synths or keyboards. And that's why it's more rotary encoders as opposed to linear faders. Interesting product. I personally well, I would like to play with one but I don't think I would invest in this this specifically because this is the first time I'm hearing of this company, Melbourne

4:06 Instruments, and I don't know what their support network is like. I don't know what their reseller and their distribution network is like. So I don't want to invest in learning a specific controller just to find out 10 years down the line they're no longer around. I'm not going to invest the time into that. But interesting product. All right. Alexander, what's the next question?

4:33 Next up is from Daniel Patridge in Rochester, Minnesota. Frequently having our Gen 3 2i2 folks write, Scarlett, stop sending audio out to the mixer. They still will bring audio into the PC. Output setting in Windows never changes. USB unplug and plugging in fixes it. Never have issues with the same units on Mac. Any ideas why? What's your thought, Alexander? It's interesting. When I first read this question, somehow I missed the last part of it because to me it sounded like maybe there was a hardware failure going on.

5:04 But if the same exact piece of hardware works flawlessly on another computer with a different operating system, that tells me there is something software-related there. So first thing that I would do is with these Scarlett's – now you mentioned this is a third gen. So there's one generation behind. They have done firmware updates on these devices. One thing I would probably do is

5:30 install the latest version of Focusrite Control. Make sure the latest firmware is installed and also through Focusrite Control perform a factory reset of that device. If you're still having the issues, I'm assuming you're still using the same USB cable. So if you're taking that exact same piece of hardware to another computer using the same exact USB cable and it's working fine, it's probably

5:51 Probably software related. I hate to say it, but you may spend less time just biting the bullet and also reinstalling Windows. And also, if you have another Windows computer, try testing it there and see if it still has the same issue. Mickey? Yeah, a couple of things. I'm curious, like, if this issue occurs after a computer has perhaps gone to sleep. different computers different motherboards treat USB peripherals differently or even different

6:20 USB controllers within the same motherboard treat USB peripherals differently when the machine goes to sleep my suggestion if this is the case production machines just never never ever put them let them go to sleep just let them keep them on keep them running use them as appliances that's what you would typically do with production systems. Another thing after that with Windows, there is a functionality within Windows,

6:50 and I believe this is the default setting within Windows, which is it allows applications to take exclusive control of an audio device. device. So perhaps when you find that you're not able to output from an application to the Scarlett, maybe some other application has exclusive control or exclusive access to that Scarlett and unplugging and replugging restarts that or something. So you should

7:23 disable that functionality within Windows with every single audio device that you have, be it the physical audio interface or like a virtual audio interface like Dante Virtual Soundcard or if you use VB audio cables, disable that exclusive functionality within that device. Another thing is if you have the Focusrite control software, with that you can judge whether the error is happening within the software slash Windows side or if it's happening

7:56 happening at the Scarlett side. If you see the audio meters bouncing, but you're not hearing it coming out, then it's something within the Scarlett. But if you're not seeing any movement in the meters, then it's probably something in the software, just a troubleshooting step. Courtney? One thing I looked at is, there's a multi-channel audio interface. It probably requires the ASIO drivers. And sometimes, you know,

8:25 Focusrite installs their own version and Windows installs its own version, you might look at reloading or checking for updates in your ASIO drivers because sometimes driver issues can create problems like this. Alexander, let's go to the next question. Jeff Francis in Columbia, South Carolina is asking, do you work at higher sampling rates, 96 kHz, 192 kHz, etc.? Why or why not? How about you, Alexander? What do you do?

8:56 Well, if I have a console that can do 96, I'm always going to choose 96 because I just think it sounds better. Right, right. Also, latency is going to be different. Latency will be lower comparatively to 48 kilohertz at the same buffer. So that's one of the reasons why. When recording in a studio, I tend to stick with 96. I've never bothered with, I just find there's, yes, I've tested converters at 192 and I find

9:21 that's just diminishing returns after 96 and just makes my files just absolutely gargantuan in comparison. So I've never really felt a need for that. I think that there are, when it comes to converters, the converters matter more than just the sample rate. Cause I think, you know, you'll see a $200 interface that advertises it can do 192 kilohertz sample rate, but you know, a much higher end converter, say a $5,000 high end ADD converter at 96,

9:50 it's still going to sound better, right? So it's the number, the higher number doesn't automatically mean you're going to have better sound quality. It does also mean that your files are going to be bigger. If I money no object and if I had the patience, I've never worked with it, but I've had people absolutely rave about DSD audio, which is not PCM based.

10:13 And people tell me that, in fact, actually PS Audio in their Colorado facility, they're a company that makes hi-fi equipment they actually just a couple years ago they opened up a recording studio and they're obsessed with dsd audio and i always hear paul mcgowan talking about how um how it's the closest thing to analog that you're going to get but it's a pain to work with

10:35 because you're working with a system that can you can't really edit it like it has to actually be converted back to pcm after like you can't just work with it in pro tools after you've recorded DSD. So if I were to go with something higher fidelity, I would probably get like a radar system or something that recorded DSD audio. For a PCM-based system, I probably wouldn't bother

10:57 with anything above 96. So I'm sorry I was giggling, but when I hear audio people talk about gargantuan files, I'm like, oh, Alexander, come on. For audio. Okay. For audio, it's big. Okay. Mickey, your thoughts? Yeah, I go graduate with files for audio. Higher sampling rates. Speaking in terms of live sound environment, if there are no other dependencies, I will run the board at 96

11:33 because that allows for lower latency input-output in terms of the board's actual processing. But if something relies on the board being 48kHz, then I'll have to run at that lower sample rate. With regards to location sound, post-production sound, 48kHz is the broadcast standard for film and TV. But if I am doing both location sound and post-production sound on a narrative or say a long form, say documentary or unscripted program, I will record in 96 kilohertz and do post in 96.

12:17 My reasoning for that is I find I am able to do much, much cleaner and more natural sounding noise suppression when pushed harder at 96 kilohertz compared to 48 kilohertz. But I won't do that if another house is doing post-production sound. Because again, the standard is 48 kilohertz. If the spec sheet says 48, I'm going to deliver 48. It's only when I'm also the one doing post-it, I will record the 96.

12:46 Now, when I'm doing sound effects gathering, always 192. No reason. Gargantuan files, like hours of sound effects gathering, you know a couple gigabytes so you know a dozen gigabit 10 20 gigabytes that's not gargantuan for at all um i'll just always do 192 when i'm doing sound effects gathering except for ambience recording where and i'm rolling for 30 minutes at a time i'll do that at 96 and i'm not gonna

13:13 stretch and push and pull ambience nearly as much as say when i'm recording firearms or or recording car crashes. I'll do 96 kilohertz for those. For the more detailed or larger sound effects, that's when I'm gonna do 192. This file is so big, it won't even fit on my zip drive. Jeff Francis. So let's recap, because Alexander and Mickey had some great, great answers.

13:45 Mixers, reasons why. Low latency, lower latency in live sound. So running your mixers at higher sample rates gives you lower latency. And as Mickey talked about, stretching sound effects. So if you're going to pitch things down and you're going to lengthen them, you've taken something that was 192. If you drop it by a factor of four, now it's essentially 48 kilohertz. So don't start at 48 kilohertz and make it a 12 kilohertz file.

14:13 Processing. noise reduction those kind of things work better at you know 96 or something like that there are some other nonlinear processing dynamics is nonlinear limiters are nonlinear distortion is nonlinear nonlinear those will create harmonics above 24 kilohertz that's a great place to have 96 kilohertz you don't have to use 96 killers to get those benefits you could up sample and and many plugins do this.

14:43 One key thing to remember is that every converter, A to D converter, D to A converter, is not working at 96 or 48 or 192. It's working at like 11 megahertz. And the only thing that brings you down is math. So when you switch the converter from 48 to 96, all you're doing is doing one less divide by two. So every converter is oversampled

15:07 and working at typically 11 megahertz or something even higher nowadays. And so what changes when you change from 48 to 96 is just the math that happens. And so you are actually accepting slightly more noise by going to a higher sampling rate. I will work at 96 most commonly. I will reluctantly work at 192 when I'm handed 192 files, when I'm handed some other project, just because not every device in the world works at 192.

15:40 I'm talking about just music recording. And I'm fine with 48 if that's what I'm handed, but I'll tend to work at 96, mainly for noise reduction operations. And Alexander, if you want to talk about DSD, that's probably another question, but I was actually there in one of the first DSD shoot offs, which was a live band in the recording studio mixed through an analog mixer and we could A-B between 24-bit digital, DSD,

16:13 analog tape, and the actual input live as the band was playing. DSD was very good and that was an early stage of DSD. There is, and I'm drawing a blank as I think it's Pyramix, or that is one DAW that works natively in DSD, direct stream digital. Courtney, why don't you wrap this up? Well, after all these audio experts, I concur with Mickey,

16:40 I record at 48. If you're recording for post-production sound, just dialogue, 48 is the standard. Recording at 192, you know, it used to make a difference when, you know, the A to D converters use the sample rate coming in, but now everything's oversampled, you know, like Jeff Francis was saying. So that is no longer a worry. My question is to the professors here

17:05 of audio, what about this latency? Because it would seem to me, you know, audio latency is, the speed of audio through air is really slow. So, you know, speeding up the latency a couple of nanoseconds doesn't seem like it would make a difference because people sitting at different seats in the auditorium in a live sound situation or not, does it have to do with the A to D

17:31 converters? And I would think that is counterintuitive because an A to D converter has to work, you know, at 96 and 192, has to work on, you know, twice as many samples or four times as many samples to achieve its conversion. So it's going to, the processor is going to be spending more time on a higher sample rate. So is that going to, how's that reduce latency?

17:55 I don't understand. Help me, man. Help me. I don't understand. Jeff, do you have a response to that? Latency is generally in samples. So if the samples are going, it's a fixed amount of samples that it It needs to do the work to do the math. And so if the samples are going faster, the latency is a lower amount of time. And why is a lower amount of time good is usually talking about monitors.

18:19 For the musicians hearing themselves, foldback monitors, that low latency is really important. Less important for the audience that's 70 feet away. way. But if you have speakers in your ears and you're singing, you're hearing yourself both through bone conduction and through the latent monitor. All right, let's go to the next question. This is a QR code submission from Guy Cochran in Seattle. When is AV2 coming?

18:51 And let's go to our Floridian Jeff. Jeff? So this is pretty interesting and there's funny timing with this. I'll show you this first article which says, no I don't want to show you that one, let me show you this one, because in early 2025 they said, hey according to the Alliance for Open Media, we expect this by the end of 2025. Well that didn't happen, so let's get rid of that.

19:17 Now they say, wow, this is happening pretty quickly. It was just released in June of 2026. Look how fast things are moving. So relative standard there. However, this seems fascinating, what they talk about for this AV2 codec. First of all, it's free, so no royalty issues there. The Open Media Alliance, Google has already showed this on Chrome. It's not supported in Chrome yet, but they've shown it playing in Chrome.

19:47 and a lot of great things on paper, 30% greater compression efficiency than AV1, so this is pretty cool. They've said it's going to be in Chrome, and they say here that it's going to start, YouTube's going to start supporting it. Problem is, as they point out, currently at least there's no hardware support. It's just will-be software support initially. Now, Captain Obvious here drew us a diagram on this website

20:15 site in case any of this would be unclear to you. If you want something that is production deployment ready and mature, use the one that is ready and mature. And then if you only want to evaluate, they suggest that you just evaluate the one that's new. So I'll give you a link if you need this diagram. Now, don't be mistaken, as I just was, for a hardware device that, you know,

20:41 says AV2, but it's a field recorder from Tascam, audio recorder. So that doesn't apply. But it's very fascinating nonetheless. Courtney? Yeah, until something becomes a standard, everybody has to support it. And that's the problem. FFmpeg is still emerging as AV2 encoding. And it's all CPU-based. Intel is considering putting it, building it into their chips because all their chips for the past, I don't know,

21:08 seven or eight generations have HEVC and H.264 hardware encoding built onto the chip itself, acceleration for that. So they're thinking of incorporating AV2 encoding into the next round of chips, but they're not out yet. And I don't know what Apple's plans are for putting a hardware AV2 encoder into their chipset. So if you're just watching the show live, you know, or if you're actually, more importantly, if you're just watching the show on YouTube,

21:43 maybe, you know, some random Thursday afternoon, you're missing half the show. So if you go to this QR code and go to officehours.global slash join, you can get access to our backend Q&A system, how a lot of the questions are coming in. There's other ways. But there's also like a backend chat, a whole bunch, there's a whole community of people involved there. So

22:05 You may want to consider doing that. You really are missing half the show. Alexander, let's go to the next question. This one's coming in from Daniel Patridge in Rochester, Minnesota. When do you decide it is a good time to update the software on your mixers and stage boxes? What do you do, Alexander? You know, when it's not a good time is the day before a show.

22:29 Okay. So basically, anyone that I know, including me, if you're a touring live sound engineer, if you go off tour and you know you're going to be not working for a couple months, that is usually the time when you have that off time and you have enough breathing room to really, if you do need to update things, that's when computers get patched and updated,

22:54 updated and that's when consoles get updated because you need to make sure that things are tested working and everything's reliable before you go back in so that's when I do it is when I have off time when I'm not in the middle of a project you know there are certain you know sometimes when you do firmware updates on consoles sometimes if there's major code changes to the

23:17 networking because a lot of these things rely on that you have to make sure that the stage boxes are also updated. So for example, like in our rental fleet, I've got these PreSonus Studio Live Series 3 consoles, and I've discovered that a lot of the consoles in our fleet are still running like the original firmware, and they've fixed literally hundreds of bugs. They've added

23:40 new features, and a lot of people, unfortunately, that work for the company are not super technical. They just don't bother checking this stuff. And the thing is, I discovered once you update the firmware on the console the stage boxes also need a major firmware because PreSonus in this particular example did major code changes to the networking code stack in there and so if you updated the firmware on the console and

24:03 then connected the stage box guess what you've got no data passing because of those code changes so you have to update the stage boxes so those are always something you know you or you have to check both of those so whenever you're not working on a project. Jeff Francis. So when to do it? Well there's a time after sound check and before the show called doors

24:28 when the audience comes in. No, that is not the time to do it. So as Alexander said, you need to make sure that everything is working together. Check the actual release notes because there's There's a lot of good information in there to see whether you need to or not. And Alex made a really good point about he's working from a rental house, but if you're

24:50 a user that rents things sometimes or goes into other venues, talk to the other venues you work with. Or if you have a rental company that you pull from, see where they are and see when they update. because oftentimes what happens in a town is someone updates and then a rio arrives at a venue as a rental for one show and all of a sudden that rio is newer than what the venue has and now

25:16 the venue has to update that day during the show because they need this extra rio to do extra inputs for this rider of this one show and it's a newer firmware and it won't be seen by the console So be in touch with the community where you work and find out what version and, you know, find the slow time in your season and, and test, update,

25:39 test, and then everybody update. What's your thought, Mickey? Mickey A hundred percent agree with Jeff regarding, uh, communicating with your, um, with your community, like the people that you work with, we do exactly that. The same things, like even with our computers and our versions of Pro Tools, versions of Mac OS, versions of all our plugins. We collaborate with studios all across the globe and we want to work at the same version of the software.

26:12 Because if we're using, say, a noise suppression plugin and everyone is using Super Noise Suppression 2000 thousand and i upgrade to super noise suppression 3000 and i deliver tracks that i say oh they sound great but everyone who opens a project say is that a no this sounds like no well it better it uh it should be um but but yeah uh operate at within the same versions of software and uh firmware as

26:45 your community so that you can easily collaborate with them now um there are uh different reasons reasons that one should update their firmware. One is a necessity. If there's a show stopper bug or some new functionality that is required to actually get the job done, then you do that a couple of days before the event, giving you ample time to test everything, make sure

27:13 everything is operational. But if it's just your regular software or firmware update maintenance, maintenance, find a period in time where, yeah, it's a slow part of the year where there is ample time for you to get either a replacement unit or a service unit from your vendor so that if something happens during the firmware update, there's enough time for you to troubleshoot,

27:41 call your vendor, hey, my firmware update failed, my console won't boot. I'm going to give this to you give me a replacement unit or a service unit while your actual console is being repaired for us that's usually that one week in between Christmas and New Year that's where all our updates happen and that's a very very busy time for me I'm sorry

28:11 I'm not looking at the right screen what's next Courtney Yeah, between Thanksgiving. But be forewarned that a lot of technicians at the manufacturers won't be in between Thanksgiving and Christmas sometimes because that's when they take their vacations. So, yeah, be careful. Especially, I agree with everybody else, is make sure you have some time off and go back and make sure that you can roll back.

28:37 because, you know, like the Behringer Flow 4V, you know, sometimes when they update their firmware, they break features that worked in the previous version. So this happens frequently. So make sure, especially if your board does any type of automation, SMPTE timecode, automation, or presets, go back and load some of your old automation files and run them through their SMPTE triggers to make sure everything's triggering and happening the right way

29:05 because, like I say, an update can break things. And until you test on the old file, the things that were recorded and set with the old files, you don't know if they're going to work with the new version of the firmware. And Jeff Francis? And we're all very careful when we're on a show about clean power, reliable power, and clean cabling. When you're doing firmware updates,

29:30 you need to be more attuned to this because what you don't want is someone to trip over a power cable and yank the power out during a firmware update that's gonna be the thing that triggers breaking the device and having to get a replacement from from the manufacturers so be really careful when you're doing these firmware updates you know we do these kind of things in the shop we've got stuff on a bench there's cables

29:53 everywhere soldering irons you know your coffee whatever you know firmware updates are not a time to be nonchalant be very careful about that and you know When it's doing its update, keep everyone away from it, let it do its thing, and let it finish. You know, Mickey, I didn't realize you were making software. That's really cool. I'm glad that you're branching out. You know, I'd be very curious, briefly, what's the worst software update story

30:27 you have participated in or experienced. I believe that all the stories we hear about, you know, like nightmares about software update, I really think most of them are theoretical. I think people are fairly careful. Maybe I'm wrong, but... What? People? As in generally speaking, people are really careful? That's the silliest thing I've ever heard. Most people, including the guy I'm speaking with right now, has done a software update at the beginning of a show.

31:04 I've done it during a show, Jeff. Hey, so I left the Zoom meeting once, updated Zoom, and came back in. Let's just put it this way. Show of hands. Can we see the gallery possibly? Show of hands. Who has had a catastrophic software update that screwed up a whole show? All right. One Canadian. Okay, let's go to the next question. And that wasn't a dig on Canada.

31:30 I just wanted to say I've performed various Vulcan mind techniques to bury the PTSD trauma that I've experienced. So I couldn't even tell you what those were because they are locked away in a corner of my mind. All right, this one's coming in from Douglas Carmichael. What does everyone think of the rumors of the touchscreen MacBook Pros? Would touch still be useful even if you're stretching your arm across the keyboard to use it?

31:51 How would you keep an OLED screen clean of fingerprints? How bad do you need a touchscreen, Jeff Collin? Go. Starting in reverse, you will not keep it free of fingerprints. If you use it, you'll start having fingerprints. But, I mean, there has been rumor of a touchscreen Mac for as long as there's been such a thing as a touchscreen. So that's nothing new.

32:16 All the evidence would support, no, they don't want to do this because they have two distinct lines. They have their Mac and they have their iPad. iOS, iPadOS devices. And while they have kept converging for quite some time, we see more and more of that. There's a couple reasons why they're different, touchscreen being a big one of them. I'm still hot, by the way,

32:39 mad that they have gotten rid of Launchpad. Apparently, I'm the only person that used it, but I make fun of the people that have 50 icons on their dock there, I like that nice and clean, but this is, to me, this was very intuitive because it is just like we have on our iOS devices. They've gotten rid of it, so that's a sign that they kind of are separating from having the same interface.

33:09 And then if we go on to, you know, what are they doing with the iPad? I mean, they keep making it more and more like a computer. They, you know, a little while ago they released windowing, which is really fantastic. I finally was able to get a client to get off of her old PC and convince her that, yes, all she needs to run her business is an iPad.

33:33 But when she is in the office, it is docked to a big monitor. She has windowing on her iPad. To her, it's just like using a computer. She has windows. She has multiple monitors. She has different windows on multiple monitors. all from her iPad. Then she gets to unplug it and go to the beach with it. So they show here with the keyboard,

33:58 and they keep improving their own keyboard, let alone third-party keyboards. I didn't even realize they call it the Magic Keyboard for iPads. So, no, I think there's some strong reasons, and they want more people moving to this line for this to be their computer. Yeah, we'll see. Alexander. I've never ever wanted a touchscreen MacBook Pro. However, like anything with Apple, when they do something,

34:29 they're not going to do something in a kind of cobbled-together way typically. So I'm interested in it. I'm keeping an open mind to see how well it's going to work because obviously, much like the new iPhone Duo, the folding phone, they had to really rethink the entire experience, how touch would work, how apps would operate, how they look on a folding display.

34:55 So I would hope that macOS is going to see some major enhancements to take advantage of that touchscreen. So we'll see. But I'm not super excited about it, to be honest with you. Jeff Francis? Touchscreen MacBook Pro is a big no from me, dog. You know, I have no desire to touch the screen on my Mac. I want to use a keyboard and a mouse.

35:18 I want to use keyboard shortcuts. It's infinitely faster than touching anything on the screen. Keyboard shortcuts, keyboard shortcuts, keyboard shortcuts. So, Courtney, is this the Mac that's going to make you buy a new Mac? No, because, you know, I've been using touchscreens for 10 years now in the Windows world. I have touch on all my laptops. I don't use it that often, but I tell you, when I'm browsing,

35:44 you know it's great to just be able to scroll up like this uh as far as keeping the screen clean don't eat fried chicken or cheetos while you're doing while you're you know sitting at that coffee shop or whatever at roscoe's chicken and waffles you know especially syrup is really hard to get off the screen but yeah it is i you know especially for touch target you know for you know going to a

36:09 The link is a lot easier than going down, hitting the touchpad, navigating the mouse up to the link, clicking on the link. You just go, boop, and you go to the link, and you scroll up. People are so used to using their phones these days, and they're all touch and iPads, that going to, I think a lot of Mac users have for years, because they're going from their iPad, you know,

36:31 suddenly now they're on their MacBook, they reach out and try and scroll. Oh, yeah, right, I got to do that on the touchpad. you know and they forget so i think they will appreciate the fact that touch is coming finally after 10 years in the computer industry coming to the mac it was always a marketing ploy anyway to force you to buy an ipad and a computer if you want to touch maybe jeff uh cullen well

36:58 courtney is just saying silly things right and left first he expects me to use my computer while and not be eating chicken and Cheetos so that's ridiculous but Courtney actually said exactly what my point was that I forgot to mention which is even with the duo and everything else exactly as Courtney pointed out you know it's been on Windows PCs forever and I rarely in the wild see anyone actually

37:25 using it except for the occasional poke but but as as the question points out It's Douglas, right? The question. And it's uncomfortable. It's very tiring to sit there and reach out. If you're going to use the touchscreen, you want it close to you on your lap. Courtney says that, but also admits that he rarely uses it. So I think that's the point.

37:44 It's not a great experience either. Yeah, I think this is one of those features. I think this is one of those features where there's been so much, I'll come to you, Mickey, Mickey, there's just been so much clamoring that Apple's like, okay, fine. Here's your stupid touchscreen laptop. Mickey, finish this up with this. Yeah, I can see how having a touchscreen can be really popular with folks who do,

38:14 especially if it is a high quality, very accurate screen that you can use a stylus on, like Wacom level screen that can be popular with the graphic design folks. But at least with that I do, I'm never going to use a touchscreen. I absolutely hated the series or the generation of MacBooks that had the touch bar there. Just give me the function keys.

38:44 I need the function keys. I don't need your fancy smart, oh, do you want to do this little touch bar thing? But definitely for folks who want to draw, like say use Illustrator on a MacBook that can either fold flat or totally flip over like the Lenovo Yoga lines wherein the screen folds completely back on itself. And you can use it as a drawing tablet.

39:13 I can see how that could be popular. I think you're onto something there, Mickey. I think the surprise would be, can I flip it all the way over? I don't think it's going to happen. I think they're just going to make it a touchscreen. And I agree. I will say this about keeping it clean. Our friend, Mr. Bache, Jason Bache, he turned me on to this Woosh stuff.

39:39 I don't know if you guys have ever used this, but it's a great screen cleaner. It comes with a little microfiber. I always thought that was a toilet bowl cleaner. It's actually not. but yeah thanks for thanks for that let's go to the next question uh what all right next up is coming in from really quick because mickey actually brought up a great point which is

39:59 everyone was furious about the whatever it is touch bar or whatever and and and i felt the same at the time it was silly but but now as i use other people's with it you know especially now that we're used to setting up things on the stream deck we already have all these kind of functions already mapped out. Now there's some interesting uses of the touch bar,

40:24 but it's just theoretical. All right, moving on to the next question. Dennis Carmichael is asking, I've been looking at the new iPad mini with OLED, but it doesn't have ProMotion. Would the display be jerkier without ProMotion or is ProMotion an improvement on conventional Apple displays? It will likely be completely unusable. A doorstop, can't use it, no of no use whatsoever mickey or alexander what's your thought now that i've used displays with pro

40:54 motion i cannot go back because they just feel they don't feel as fluid it's the ability for those that don't know pro motion a lot it's a variable refresh rate it allows the display to go all the way up to 120 hertz and it is just when you when it there's a direct connection that i I feel between the finger and the screen and the interface and what am I experiencing and it is a

41:19 much smoother experience being able to scroll like that I'm not saying that this I think that this device will have its place in certain scenarios but the problem I have with this it is a lot less appealing now because it is $200 more than the previous model and repeat that $200 more than the previous model without promotion on a tiny little display all right once you

41:48 keep going Alexander what's the next question all right guy Cochran in Seattle Washington asked what's new with the MacBook Pro m6 Jeff all right a 14 inch version and yet not a 16 inch version yet so that's all I know so far and kind of waiting to see what processors end up, if it's just a basic M6, or if we get the whatever they call them,

42:14 the M6 Pros and Maxes and Ultras. I guess probably we'll get an M6 Pro in the 14 and probably an M6 Max and an Ultra in the 16 when it comes out, but who knows. Don't we sound spoiled when we say, it's just a normal M6. Come on. I'm still working in M1. Me too. And happy. Yeah, I have an M1 studio and an M3 something laptop.

42:45 It might be a Max. I can't remember. Anyway, next question. All right, this one is coming in from Tommy Shantz in St. Paul, Minnesota. What is your main DAW? That's Digital Audio Workstation. And why? Jeff Cohen, what do you use? My soapbox, thank you very much. which Reaper is my daily driver. And because of how extensible it is and how powerful it is,

43:11 despite the visual aesthetics of it, they definitely opted for function over form. So people look at it and it is by no means a modern interface. That said, it's extremely powerful. And I've talked about the scripting and you can build practically any function, Everything is completely reprogrammable. Every function, every keyboard function, everything. You can combine different functions into the equivalent of like a macro.

43:45 You can step things. You can do loops. You can do all this kind of stuff. And then you can do even more powerful JavaScript, Lua. And I've done many, many customizations that have just made things extremely fast. And by the way, that's the main point, is it lets me do things really, really fast compared to any other editor I've tried. And now, especially with AI

44:09 and the ability to code scripts in a couple of minutes of an idea versus a weekend is phenomenal. I mean, I've added more functionality in the past few months than I had in the past few years. So that's my main reason. It ultimately comes down to speed and everything is laid out exactly where I want. I'm left-handed, so I want different things

44:31 on the left side of the keyboard compared to where my mouse hand is. It just all makes it faster. But I will say it is a steeper learning curve because of the user interface. Alexander, what do you use? I use, well, I grew up learning Pro Tools, but these days most of my workflow is all video, So I'm pretty much doing all my video and audio work inside of DaVinci Resolve Studio

44:59 But if I have to do a project in for editing or recording that is music based I'm probably gonna use Pro Tools and it's it's not just good. It's not because I think it's the best It's just that's what I learned on its muscle memory. There's so many great digital audio works these Workstations these days you have so much choice. So There are lots of other DAWs that have a tons of advantages now over Pro Tools

45:23 I mean what used to be called studio one that pre Sonos made which is now fender something studio because they bought pre Sonos is Incredibly powerful logic is incredibly powerful They all these dogs have so much value Packed in them into them in terms of like the the sheer amount of free sample libraries that they give you with their virtual Instruments they all sound great. So I would say just pick one because I really don't want this to be a battle

45:49 We always focus on well what? What DAW reigns supreme? What hardware reigns supreme? The thing is, these days, everything is so good now. It doesn't really matter. Mickey, what's your choice? What's your tool? So, yeah, for me, my go-to is good old CoolEdit 2000. Lovely piece of software. But seriously, my go-to is Pro Tools. It is, I guess you would say, the most widely used DAW in the post-production world and also to an extent in the music world, especially when it comes to mixing.

46:28 So if you want to be able to collaborate with productions all across the world, it's sort of the tool of choice. and also if you want to be able to use other tools that are very useful to workflows most of them are with Pro Tools and I do want to show just very briefly going back to what we were discussing earlier about sample rates

46:54 this is a some sound effects a recording of fireworks recorded at 192 kilohertz and this is it being played back in real time And here is the same section, but if you play it back in, I'm not sure if that's the same section, but, or I think this is it. If you play it back 192 kilohertz, brought down to 48, so slowed down four times, it sounds massive.

47:32 so you can get the much bigger sounding sound effects uh especially you know firearms fireworks when you slow it down sorry for the tangent there yeah tangent away uh courtney mr courtney sorry i need a sound workstation to find the mute button on my computer uh yeah Yeah, I tried Pro Tools. I didn't like the interface. And my problem is different than anybody else.

48:01 I don't work a lot in sound. I work a lot in video. So the need for me to edit audio was pretty limited. So I'm not a regular user. Here's my first audio workstation was Saw Software Audio Workshop by Bob Lentini. Available on the Windows 1993. Worked great, except for one thing. He didn't put over, you know, failover. When you're summing sounds together, it would sound awful because he didn't check for overflow in each of the samples.

48:35 So anytime you'd go above zero dB. And I had a great knockdown argument with Bob Lentini at NAB one year about, hey, you don't put it in. And he said, but then I would only be able to process half as many. If I checked for overflow, I'd only be able to process half as many channels. I said, well, if you have to go back and redo something because something went over, how much time are you saving?

48:58 These days, I'm using this. Audacity, I like it because it's free. They came out with Audacity 4. It looks much more colorful. It's much more intuitive. It has a lot of better tools to it. It still doesn't deal with time code. But for doing general stuff like that, it's free. I can put it on all of my 50 different laptops without having to pay a license fee to the avid people.

49:22 Doesn't it look like we're having fun here? If you want to get involved and you might want to volunteer, there's ways to do that. If you go to officehours.global.com slash volunteer, you can maybe even just observe on the back end crew. You'd be surprised how many people it takes to put on this show. And if you're persistent, you may even be able to work on that crew.

49:42 If you want to get involved and help but you don't have the time, officehours.global.com slash donate. donate. Office hours is a 501c3, and at least in the States, those donations that you send to pay to pay for all the servers and whatnot, that might be a tax deduction. Talk to your accountant. Let's go to the next question. This one's coming in from David Brady in New York City, New York.

50:07 Found a Tascam HS2000 in the e-waste bin, tested it, and worked. Should I rescue it or let it go? David stay out of the trash can. Alexander what's your thought? You know I'm not familiar with this unit but I took a look at it. First of all it's really cool that you found this because it looks like a really capable and still useful recorder.

50:26 It can, let me just sort of pull it up on the screen here. So yeah two channel recorder. If you look at the back it's cool that it has a digital in AES, AEBU. So if you've got a console or something that or even audio interface that can send digital signal you can still get a nice high quality recording into it i looked at the spec sheet

50:46 and uh it looks like it'll record 24-bit and look at that we were just talking about sample rates you can do 192 kilohertz and have gargantuan file sizes all right let's go to the next question that's good well played paul who's in austin texas is asking for field recording what are the key workflow advantages of a dedicated recorder recorder like a sound devices mix pre over a high quality USB interface and laptop why make the jump

51:17 from an interface to a dedicated unit go ahead Jeff Cohen okay well the name is right there field recorder so if if you're going somewhere where you want to set up a laptop and all that stuff and bring it with you great if not you have that and to point out depending on what you already have a lot of people will simply use that as their audio interface but then

51:43 they can grab it and go Mickey what's your thoughts yeah I think it's important to distinguish exactly what type of field recording you're talking about the Paul but generally speaking it's a matter of do you want the way be able to move fast move fast both in terms of getting things configured configured properly and all that, much faster to do it on a field recorder that's a single-purpose device

52:12 that's designed to do one thing and do it well. And also move fast, literally, like physically move fast. If you need to run and chase something that you need to capture two blocks from here, like having a sound recorder on a harness in a bag, you can move much faster with that, you know holding your grabbing a boom pole and swing it around at the same time then having to

52:39 deal with a laptop and an audio interface and USB cables and all that but the answer would vary depending on exactly what type of field recording you're talking about yeah if you've never seen a really qualified field recordist with their bag over their shoulder and all the other stuff that they have with them it's it's a thing of beauty it's really it's really great watching somebody

53:02 of work like that. Courtney? Yeah, it depends on whether you're recording sound effects or field recording dialogue. You know, you want a sound card if you got, you know, eight people on wireless mics, you know, you want to have a sound card with maybe a laptop hooked up to it. But, you know, field recording can also be, you know, like Mickey said, you're in a bag. All right, let's say you

53:23 want to get the sound of shushing down that side of that hill on your skis. You know, you're going You've got to throw, holding a laptop with an interface and all the wires and holding the microphone out in front of your skis, that's going to be a little difficult unless you've got a built-in, you know, a recorder. Also, the other thing, if you're tracking in the field, you're just trying to capture tracks.

53:46 You're not going to be using plug-ins and doing sound cancellation or reverb or any of the other myriad of plug-ins that will run in your laptop. top, you're just going to want to record the clean A to D converter that's built into the interface, you know, built into your recorder and record clean tracks that are unmodified. So I always go for the simplest recorder possible that records the bit rate that I want to,

54:11 has good quality preamps on the input, and everything else is left to post-production. Mickey, I know you have one more thing to ask, but I was going to ask you, you, what's the most wireless receiver or wireless receivers and or transmitters, because I know that you transmit also, you've ever configured in a bag? In one single bag? Yeah. I guess 15, 16 channels of receive.

54:36 And you have nowadays, you have four channel receivers. So four of those allows you to receive 16 channels. At that point, I'm not really mixing. I'm just tracking. But yeah, that's the largest track out I've done in one single bag. And were you transmitting out of that bag also? Or just capturing? Yeah, camera hop and also for producer, director, monitor. So 16 receives and two outs, minimum of two outs.

55:08 One or two outs because most of the time, the hops that you're feeding camera can be the same signal that you're feeding to your director and your producer and your script supervisor and all that. But there are times that you have to, different people want different mixes, so you kind of have to add up on the transmitters there. And in terms of what I was going to say,

55:31 oh, I was going to add, field recording also could mean, possibly mean like, say, multi-tracking a concert or something like that. With that, I would typically still go with a hardware recorder, not something like a MixPre, but something larger that can do 64 channels of record. And I would also use a laptop or two for backup recordings. And for those, yes, I would use a laptop,

55:59 but not when, you know, it's a situation wherein you have to move fast. Okay. Let's go to the next question. This one's coming in from Brett Weigelar in Western Australia. Have any of the Vibe coders been using Raya to explore firmware? It made an NDI-HX codec for OBS and created an audio-video sync for my Rodecaster Video S that can monitor and audio adjust and a few other things.

56:30 Curious what others have built. Jeff? I'm a big fan of coding things that weren't meant to be, and I waited if anyone else had a direct answer to that one. But this is pretty cool. If anyone saw this going around, someone said, I don't like the interface for my YouTube TV that's on all these Xiaomi and others. And so he just sat down

56:58 and figured out a way to replace it, or an Android TV, I should say, and released it out to GitHub. And I've seen lots of people now doing videos about it. And this is a quick demo of what looks like he intentionally made it look very similar, but very clean, got rid of ads and all that kind of stuff. So pretty cool what you can do with devices

57:18 that you wouldn't think you can change. And let's go to the last question. Last question is coming in from Paul Valhus in Austin, Texas. What's a usable wireless battery-powered self-contained microphone with noise cancellation recording built in? Mickey, make it brief. What is it? yeah um i i'm gonna assume that by usable you mean like decent enough quality to uh put out there

57:44 i would say none i don't really understand what wireless but self-contained means um a microphone with built-in noise cancellation no thank you never never never no thanks but recording built in no thanks all right that's that for this episode so i'm doing a little math here uh just wanted to say you know it's interesting we've been doing this for so long it seems like old hat but

58:07 this is 2 409 episodes of uh office hours that we've done here you know there was a day when hitting 2400 we would have had a cake and candles and stuff like that but here we are 2409 and just plugging away uh if we had gotten on the uh the bus today and gone around and answered all these questions it would have taken us 35 000 miles of driving that's a lot of diesel fuel and that

58:32 could also be measured in kilometers 57 000 kilometers or 279 is that million million bananas for scale so thanks for being with us uh we've enjoyed chatting with you we'll see you next time later later let's hear some more of those gunshots mickey come on so did anyone use this board as i did in my college radio station when talking about knobs

59:02 this is so this is the first the first mixer that i used in the first studio that i worked i had one of those gate is that a gates or a um i can't see it close enough i don't know even if i find the i don't remember the exact one but it was just the giant loser collins we had a collins board

59:19 oh thank you mickey hey mickey can you explain that i don't understand why one is deep and bassy and one is crackly she can't hear you over the fireworks so the um what the audio um