When do you decide it is a good time to update the software on your mixers and stage boxes?

22:29Okay. 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,

22:54updated 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

23:17networking 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

23:40new 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

24:03then 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

24:28when 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

24:50a 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

25:16the 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,

25:39test, 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.

26:12Because 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