Fairlight Live software mixer—thoughts? Has anyone used it in production? Would you?

0:00Don't adjust your dial, you're in the right place. Welcome to Office Hours, Wednesday edition. My name's Chris and I got all my friends here. If you want to ask a question, you can use this little QR code or go to askofficehours.global. That's the thing, that's how that works. But we're going to take some questions that have already come in and we're going to talk

0:27more about how to do that. So let's see. Courtney, I think you're reading today. Good morning. Indeed I am. Good morning, Chris. Our first question comes from someone who's here on the panel today in Columbia, South Carolina. Jeff Francis asked, Fairlight Live software mixer. Thoughts? Has anyone used it in production? And would you? Go, Jeff Francis. So I've just started playing with it, and I'm talking about the Blackmagic Fairlight software only.

0:55they have hardware controllers for it but the software itself is free so it's a it's a you know looks like DaVinci Resolve mixer one of the really cool things that's built into it is it has a built-in recorder that you can ISO record all the audio within it records right to WAV files so that's something that I've been playing with so you do you know live recording or live mixing

1:21through it and you can capture everything ISO. Also I have one of these I know we all like these little Korg nano control guys and you'll notice that it plugs in and connects and we can do mute and faders and so that's a pretty inexpensive compared to the 3000 and up hardware controllers that that Blackmagic will sell you. So this is something I've just started playing with.

1:55It has some pretty good companion integration as well. So like literally there's a loudness meter in there and you can have that show up on one of your companion buttons, a live loudness meter and things. So just wanting everybody else's thoughts. I've been playing with it. I've not used it on a show yet. And I'm kind of wondering, are we still a little early in the development stage

2:16to trust this on an event? Jeff Cohen? know, EQ and compression and all that stuff, including the additional optional native plugins that you can put on different channel strips. If you're familiar with all the bussing and everything, how that works, as far as I could tell, it's all the same. So the question is,

3:03I mean, it's been around obviously for a long time independently and then part of DaVinci Resolve and it's had recording for a long time. So what is the question of course, is it's reliability, reliability, latency and everything else in live. Courtney? Yeah, I tried it early on and it didn't see all of my audio hardware. So maybe that was just the first version that didn't pull Windows correctly

3:32or maybe I didn't have the right ASIO drivers loaded that it liked. Of course, Fairlight has been in the recording, digital recording business longer than almost anybody. Starting with, you know, They were one of the first ones that had a sampler out that was used by everybody with a keyboard for playing back digital sample sound. And they've been around in the recording industry as a recorder for many, many years.

3:56I was going to ask Jeff if this new ISO recording feature has followed the black magic rule of also creating an XML file. If you're mixing live, does it record, besides the ISOs, does it record a list of what mixes were done with those ISOs? As far as I can tell, no, it does not. So it's just recording WAV files. Again, I've just kind of played with this.