Back in the old days…

As I finish yet another evening of audio mixing for one of my clients, it comes as no surprise that I often have flashbacks to the way my job used to be.

I started my first business when I was 13 and I called it “Net Box”. Speaking of names… the list of potential names that my father & I had come up with was huge – but virtually all of my choices were already taken, or too close to an existing business name. Net Box eventually became Net Box Multimedia Services, as I decided the name didn’t really fit all of th A/V stuff I was getting into at the time. But, I digress.

Back when I was 13 or 14, I started doing some audio mixing for a client who my brother danced for at the time (this client ran a dance studio). I remember taking a day off school each time she came ’round to mix her end-of-year concert music (merely because it took so damn long).

Why? Well technology just wasn’t as good back then. Remixing was done manually… two tapes decks, two CD players and a Tandy mixer in between – and then a really slow (by today’s standards) 486 computer with 16MB of RAM running “Goldwave” as my recording medium. It was all the rage. My PC often struggled – the hard drive unable to keep up, resulting in stutters in the recording, meaning we’d have to go and do it all over again. Hence the 6 hours to mix 2 hours of music. Onto tape. *shudder*… those were the days. I remember trying to cut a swear-word out of a song and overlay it with a chorus that didn’t have the swear word. I think it to something like 50 takes and became my client’s most expensive mix ever, LOL. These days it takes less than 30 seconds.

Speaking of these days… everything’s just that much faster. Rip the tracks from the client-supplied CD, whack it into Audition and start working on it. Made an error? Just click ‘undo’. Need to remix 6 tracks together? Use the multitrack editor. Piece of p1ss really.

Sadly it means that instead of charging for 6 hours of work, today’s invoices are usually down to about a sixth of that – but then again, I think my hourly rate has more than tripled from those golden years back in 1994. That said, the costs of everything else has also increased accordingly. GoldWave cost me something like $40 back then… add a zero and you’re almost at Audition’s price. My computer itself is also quite expensive (probably costing $2K a year if I factor in rolling upgrades and software costs), but then again – it’s a beast.

I can leave everything open and do the required music mixing for my clients – and it doesn’t even blink. And by everything, I mean a game of Red Alert 3 running minimised, Microsoft Outlook (and we all know how much of a RAM-whore Outlook is), FireFox with at least 30 tabs open not to mention a CD ripping program and 2 audio editing applications (yes, I still use GoldWave for a few minor things, even today [YAY for a lifetime of free software updates on that application, though!]).

So what do I like about today’s computing age when it comes to audio mixing? I like the fact that everything’s fast… mixing is instant and exporting to a plethora of formats just… works. Clients come in with their CDs and leave with extended mixes with 6 extra chorus’s and 3 swear words seamlessly removed. Oh, and the bass enhanced. Or the volume increased. I also like Sony’s MiniDisc. Yes… it never took off in RetailLand[TM], but it’s still widely used in the A/V world.

I’ve been using MDs for my end of year production clients for over 7 years now… the quality of a CD with the convenience of instant-track changes and the safety of an enclosed casing that’s dust-free, scratch-free and skip-free. Tapes are out (of course), CDs jump and scratch and computers generally (still!) aren’t reliable enough in live environments. So MD it is (although I must admit that it’s getting harder and harder to find blank MD’s – only A/V suppliers seem to carry them these days – even JB doesn’t tock ‘em anymore).

So what do I hate about today’s computing age when it comes to audio mixing? MP3s and Apple’s shithouse (excuse my language, but they should all just burn in hell) iPods. You see, clients will occasionally come in with MP3 CDs full of songs. That’s fine if the MP3 files are encoded at 256kbit/s or higher, but they rarely are – especially if said client just downloads them off the internet (legally or otherwise). So the songs sound like crap on proper concert speakers like the ones I hire for my clients. It’s almost like we should just bring a set of PC speakers to the show. LOL.

Allow me to digress for a moment. For those unaware, MP3 files are so compact because the really-high and really-low frequencies are stripped from the file… keeping the size down. This is normally find for PC speakers or headphones, because they generally can’t reproduce these frequencies very well anyway – but on $10,000+ concert speakers that CAN reproduce these frequencies… it just sounds terrible – flat and muddy.

So that’s my main grip with MP3 – they’ve become so core to society and the internet that clients ust think you can use them for high-end production audio. Not so. My other gripe is with the iPod. Some clients bring an iPod along to their mixing sessions. As soon as I see it I’ll generally start with “I hope your music’s not on that?”. As a device, I guess I don’t mind it – it looks small and it would probably work well as a door wedge. But the software side of it shits me.

I plug it in and attempt to browse to it with Windows Explorer. There’s all these hidden files and while there are a few .MP3 files, lots are .ACC or .M4A files. After spending 30 minutes (which the client is paying for) trying to find out what HXZ6J.mp4 is really called, I drag the required song file off the iWasteOfTime and onto my desktop – so far so good. Then I take the file into an audio editing program… unable to read / unable to open.

So I try Winamp – it has an iPod plugin or something. It seems to see all of the files on the clients iPod – awesome. I use the search function in Winamp to find the track by its proper name – got it. Then theres an option to right-click and copy to my computer. Sweet. It dumps it into my MyMusic folder or something like that. This method kind-of works, but again only 2 out of every 10 files will work – the others won’t load or open in audio editing software for whatever reason. I try then in GoldWave and while they open, the track itself, when played, is just 3 or 4 minutes of static at 100% volume. almost blew my eardrums out. Maybe I need to buy the iEarDrumFixerUpperKit to get my hearing back? Doh.

This is why I hate the iPod – it’s too restrictive. Just do what other MP3 players do and just dump the damn song on there in MP3 format?!?! Bloody hell.

But the good news, out of all of this, is that there is light at the end of the tunnel for clients with low-quality MP3′s or iDieDieDie!! devices. BigPond music and a few other Aussie sites sell DRM-free, high-quality MP3′s for the measly sum of ~$1.65 per track. In most cases, I will recommend that the client sits with me right there and then and replaces their 128kbit/sec MP3 (that they downloaded off LimeWire) with a proper, high-quality and legit version of the track from, say, Bigpond music. That way we can do the mixing with a high-quality original and work with it from there.

I suggest the same to my clients that insist on bring iPods over… they can either pay an hourly rate for me to attempt to retreive the files off their device with a 20% success rate (sometimes to find that the file itself is of a too low quality) or pay $1.65 and buy the high-quality, guaranteed-to-work MP3 file off the net and begin work immediately. All clients choose the latter option.

PS: How has technology changed your line of work? Do you struggle with so-called “user friendly” and “smart” devices like the iPod – where they’re designed to be “easy to use” but just make things harder for the non-novices out there? How do you think technology will shape the future of the audio industry – or your own industry? Let me know via the comments below!

Goodnight