With hardware almost becoming a 'taboo' word these days, DAVID MELLOR investigates what Digidesign's hardware-free recording software can offer the budget-conscious musician.

 

If you have a reasonably decent computer, then you have a tool for recording audio, given the right software. If you have an Apple Macintosh, then you will no doubt have noticed that there is a growing market in low-end -- if the manufacturers will excuse the expression -- software that will record two tracks and replay four tracks on a Digidesign Audiomedia II equipped Mac, or play back eight or more tracks without a dedicated soundcard on a suitable Power Macintosh. Potentially, this is exciting stuff -- if you have a Power Macintosh, all the audio capability is there inside your computer right now and all you need is the right software to access it. And check out the price... When compared to the cost of an 8-track recorder such as ADAT, or even a Fostex R8 analogue multitrack, the word 'bargain' springs readily to mind (even if you do have to sacrifice being able to record on more than two tracks at a time or be able to hook up eight separate outputs to a mixer to provide EQ or reverb).

Digidesign are very well known in the field of hard disk recording on the Macintosh (and increasingly so on the PC, too). In fact, they have pretty much written the book all by themselves, and what they don't know about hard disk recording probably isn't worth knowing. The professional audio world is smitten with their Pro Tools system which, when fully expanded, can handle as many tracks with as many separate inputs and outputs as would satisfy the wildest dreams of the most demanding recording engineer. Pro Tools offers all the benefits of hard disk recording together with equalisation, reverb, compression, and a multitude of other facilities, provided either with the system or as 'plug-in' extras. Those of us who can't afford Pro Tools might own or aspire to Session 8, which is basically a cut-down Pro Tools for the masses, or Sound Designer, which is reputed to be the most widely used stereo hard disk recording software in the world. So you would expect that when the Digidesign gurus get around to meditating on the subject of low cost multitrack hard disk recording software, they ought to be able to come up with something pretty hot. They know all the tricks and they should be able to put them all into a package that will wow the pants off us and trash the opposition. But before your hand dips into your wallet, hang on a moment... What about product differentiation? What if Digidesign are frightened that low cost multitrack software will knock a dent into their sales of Session 8 and even Pro Tools? Might they not consider cutting down on the feature-set, making their new low cost product very obviously entry-level?

If this is so, then all the product has to do is match the competition feature for feature and Digidesign can look forward to a healthy share of that market, while not hurting their other sales. I say this to put my review of Session into its proper perspective. If I have some criticisms to make then it is not to say that Session isn't a damn fine product, as I'm sure you will come to realise as you read on. But it doesn't do everything I would want it to do -- and I suspect you might feel the same. So let's get down to the nuts and bolts...

HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS

Okay, I know some of you are going to be disappointed that your computer isn't quite up to the demands of Session when once it was the fastest Mac on your block, but that's the price of progress. To run Session successfully you must have at least a Mac IIci (or better) fitted with a Digidesign Audiomedia II card, a similarly equipped Quadra (I'm sure a Centris would do too, but it isn't mentioned in the manual) or a Power Macintosh. What's more, you will need a bare minimum of 16 megabytes of RAM! I remember thinking that I was never going to be short of memory again when I first installed 16Mb in my computer, but now I'm sure that this time next year we'll need 32Mb just to do a bit of word processing.

You may be wondering how it is possible to get by without a soundcard on a Power Macintosh, since an Audiomedia II card still represents a pretty hefty wedge of cash to buy. The answer is that the new RISC processors used in all Power Macintoshes are so fast that they can handle the vast quantity of data that used to demand a special soundcard, and more besides. Most Power Macintoshes have built-in 16-bit sound circuitry which, in conjunction with Apple's Sound Manager software, can do everything that a separate soundcard can (with the exception of offering S/PDIF digital input and output).

This brings us to the question of analogue audio connections. Would you be happy putting your analogue audio into the harsh electrical environment inside a computer? It is usually thought that audio equipment should be very carefully designed with a suitable power supply, sensible circuit layout, and that potential sources of interference (such as screen displays) should be treated with very great care. All I can say is that I have listened to one model of Macintosh and have found its audio quality acceptable, if not as good as an Audiomedia card, but that won't account for all the other models in circulation now, and those which Apple (and others) will undoubtedly introduce in the near future. My advice: if you want a computer for audio, listen -- like you would with any other sound equipment.

If any hardware manufacturers are reading, please take note that the time is now ripe to develop an S/PDIF digital I/O interface for the Power Macintosh. If it can be external to the computer so that it doesn't take up any expansion slots, and with multiple separate analogue outputs, that would be perfect. You'll sell one to every studio, engineer, and musician with a Power Macintosh and you'll make a mint. Any takers?

One last point on hardware. Running Session with a dedicated Audiomedia card, you will get four tracks of audio. With a low-end Power Macintosh you should get eight. With a faster Power Mac computer (eg. 8100), assuming your hard disk is also up to it, 12 or 16 audio tracks are possible with no additional hardware. I tested the software on a Power Macintosh 6100 and it could handle eight tracks just fine.

WHAT CAN IT DO?

You know how many tracks it can record and play back, so what else makes Session more than just another multitracker? Quite simply, hard disk recording gives you absolute freedom of editing. On tape, from the first track you lay down, you are locked into the pattern of verses, choruses and whatever else that goes to make up your song. As soon as you start recording, many of your options are closed off, and if a wonderful new idea comes to you halfway through the session, hard luck. Scrap the idea or scrap the recording, there is no alternative. If the same idea came to you during a hard disk recording session, however, all you would need to do would be to chop up a few segments on the screen, open up a gap, copy a bit, re-record a bit, come up with a few more ideas and... well, you could end up with a totally new song! It's a bit like sequencing, only you are doing it with real audio. You could be using any of the thousands of instruments the world has to offer, rather than just a sequencer and sampler. You can restructure vocals; edit out breaths, clicks and other noises; select from a variety of takes; edit out a bad note -- even as short as a semiquaver. With a sharp razor blade and an editing block, you may be able to do a fraction of this at a tenth of the speed on a reel-to-reel tape. On cassette -- well, forget it!

As well as being a recorder with infinite editing capabilities, Session also incorporates a mixer. Not such a rudimentary mixer as you sometimes find on the screen of a computer. This one has level, pan, mix automation, and 2-band EQ on each channel. This last point is significant. You can even get this on an Audiomedia card that doesn't have as much number-crunching capability as a Power Macintosh's processor. The only thing you don't get that you would really wish for is reverb, but you can always record some reverb into the system if you have enough tracks.

When you have enjoyed playing with all of this (if you get it for Christmas, it should take you well into March) you can start on the real fun -- recording audio to picture. Session can also play a QuickTime movie in a window, to which you can accurately spot sound effects or music, or even a voice-over. Synchronising dialogue might be a bit ambitious at this stage, since QuickTime video playback is still rather jerky, but effectively Session is an audio post-production studio on your desktop. Seasoned pros may scoff, but multimedia is a growing market and I don't doubt that people with the foresight and energy will equip themselves with a basic setup, incorporating a Power Macintosh and Digidesign Session, and just start doing it.

There is no doubt that Digidesign can make good software, but for the reasons I outlined earlier there is reason to suspect that not every feature you might possibly wish for is actually included in Session. And perhaps they have added a couple of red herrings to make the job more difficult? Fortunately, except for one point, the latter is not the case. The only thing that makes the job harder is the on-screen display. I can't deny that Session is a very beautiful piece of software to look at -- the artist that designed this mimic of a real piece of audio hardware deserves an award -- the only problem is that the windows are the wrong shape to tile neatly on the screen (as you can see from Figure 1). I use a 17" monitor, which is a good compromise between seeing enough information on the screen and being able to project an X-ray picture of my head on the opposite wall. I doubt that many potential Session owners have a 20" screen, so they will inevitably end up swapping endlessly from one window to another. Fortunately the transport bar (Figure 2) 'floats', so it is always visible, as does the QuickTime window if you want it to. But there is no satisfactory way to arrange the other windows so that you can get at everything you need instantly all the time, without wasting valuable screen real estate. Recommendation: Digidesign should provide an alternative mixer window where everything is shrunk down to a manageable width, and to hell with the aesthetics.

IN OPERATION

Once the software is installed and the hardware is configured, you are ready to record. Recording is very simple and the only new thing you will need to get used to is that the mixer window's faders are actually two sets of faders, one for input and one for playback, which position themselves automatically according to whether a track is in record mode or not. Once you are familiar with it, this isn't any kind of problem. When you have recorded some audio, then the fun begins.

I think I can better explain the good and not-so-good points by using an example. Suppose you had a backing track already recorded and a singer came in at short notice to do a vocal. She laid down a couple of takes before flying off to another engagement. Both takes were a bit dodgy in places and she had an annoying habit of dragging behind the beat.

 

 

Your first step would be to choose the overall better of the two takes and decide which parts of the other you would edit in. If you look again at Figure 1, you'll see that Session automatically draws an overview of the waveform to make finding your way around easier. Inevitably, drawing waveforms takes time, so it is possible to have only the ones you are interested in drawn for you, which is a good point. As you replay the recording you will find that you can have the display stand still or you can have it scroll continuously, which is probably more useful. There is also a page scroll mode, as is commonly found in sequencers. Cutting out a short portion of audio isn't too difficult. Simply play up to the bit that you want, stop playback and judge from the waveform where the likely start and end points are. With the selector tool (the icon to the left of the grabber hand), sweep across the waveform to highlight it, then hit the Macintosh's spacebar to audition your selection. If it's not right, adjust the start and end points using your existing Mac mousing skills.

This is where my earlier point about not providing every useful feature comes in. What you can't do in this software is scrub; there is no way you can slide the mouse back and forth and hear audio playing in proportion to the direction and speed of the mouse. Okay, in some other systems the scrub function works so badly that it is practically useless anyway, but I know for a fact that this particular software/hardware combination could have had an excellent scrub facility, taking into account that it is mouse-driven, but it has been left out for some reason. Seeing as there is no scrub facility available, I would have presumed that there would have been alternative options to play up to the start, play up to the end, and play from the end, all of which are present in Sound Designer and which I use all the time. No, I'm afraid, if you have a long selection, the only way to check the end is to audition the whole thing. Yawn...

Still, short segments of audio aren't too much of a problem, and once you have copied or split off a line of the vocal from the rest, you will find that you can name it and see it in the audio regions 'bin' on the right of the track display. A lovely feature is that each region you create remembers its original start time, so whatever you do to it, you can always get back to where you started -- you can also set a user start time, if you wish. Taking this a stage further, each region can have a sync point. Suppose, for instance, you had a sound which you wanted to repeat in time with an existing rhythm. If the sound has an obvious impulse at the start, then you can sync it with no problem. But if there is an 'up beat' before the main impulse, you will be fiddling around trying to match every occurrence to the rhythm. Not with Session though -- you just match it using the sync point. You can set a grid in time values or in bars and beats, which means that you can quantise audio almost like a sequencer quantises MIDI notes.

Going back to our hypothetical 'problem' vocal. Undoubtedly, you will find that when you have created a segment it will need adjustment, and this is possible with the grabber tool simply by sliding the end points backwards or forwards. You will inevitably also want to fade segments in and out, since a sharp audio cutoff is often noticeable. I'm afraid this area of the software needs some work, Digidesign. I would like simply to highlight the portion of the region I want to fade and hit Command-F, and have a default fade profile applied. I want it to fade all the way down to zero even if the portion I have highlighted doesn't exactly correspond to the end of the region. I would also like fades to be calculated a little faster, because I know it's possible (Deck 2.2). Being able to batch fades rather than calculate them individually would also be useful.

Moving segments around in time is easy with Session, as is moving them from one track to another. When moving segments vertically, it is important to have the option to maintain their exact position in time, which is straightforward here. However, I think it is a pity that Session will not allow two tracks to be grouped together into a stereo pair, so whatever edits you do to one are automatically done to the other. This shouldn't be too hard to implement, but I don't think it is widely recognised as a priority at this level. One more thing... I would have liked an easy way to butt two segments accurately together without having to zoom in and make very careful adjustments.

One last point on the creation and manipulation of audio regions. I may only have a humble Quadra 650 computer, but I don't think it's unreasonable criticism to say that the interaction between the mouse and the display is not as smooth as it could be. The way the grabber hand flashes on and off while you are moving a segment is irritating and I've seen better.

MIXING SESSION

Once the audio is split up and you have rearranged segments to perfection, then the next step, assuming that you didn't need to bounce tracks (which is perfectly possible in the digital domain) is mixing. Of course, the interest here is mainly in the mix automation and Figure 3 shows the relevant display. Automation can be performed by moving the screen faders and pan controls manually (fader grouping is possible -- a very important feature) or by drawing an automation 'curve' directly onto the screen. Either way it works perfectly well, although I did notice a bit of audible jerkiness if I tried to move the mouse too quickly. Automation data can be edited and copied from one track to another, so matching up a stereo pair isn't a problem. However, I'm not sure that this is the utmost Digidesign (and others) can manage. What happens if you need to move the audio in time? Sadly, the automation does not follow and you will have to take some trouble to move all the break points accurately to match the audio once more, even if you can adjust several break points at the same time. Segment-based and scene-based mix automation are both incredibly useful techniques that really ought to be incorporated in future versions of Session. Aside from this, the only real quibble I have about the automation is that if something has been recorded at too low a level, there is nothing you can do about it. A 'normalise' function would have been the expected bare minimum, and it would take the provision of gain change of individual segments to make me totally happy.

The provision of 2-band EQ on each Session track is a technological marvel (Figure 4). Don't forget that everything you ask the computer to do in real time involves extra processing power. According to the range of numbers the software shows on the screen, the scope of the EQ is excellent and either of the two bands can function as high-pass or low-pass filters, high or low shelf, or parametric with gain, frequency and bandwidth controls. Having said that, looks can be deceiving... I tried Mark Of The Unicorn's Digital Performer v1.6 with an Audiomedia card and the same Digidesign Digital Audio Engine (DAE) software, and although the EQ doesn't look much different on the screen in terms of Hertz and decibels, it certainly sounds a good deal more powerful. I know that in this configuration only one EQ is possible per card, but I have to say that it is Digidesign's figures that don't seem to be corresponding to what I hear.

AUDIO FOR VIDEO

Using Session to add audio to QuickTime movies is great fun. You can import audio in a number of different formats, get up to whatever fun and games you like with it, and then export it into the movie's soundtrack. The resulting movie can then be played on any other Mac with QuickTime compatible software. You may be recording music to picture, in which case you will probably use markers extensively to map out the shape of your music. If you are spotting already-recorded material, then you will need a quick and easy way to find your way around the movie. Fortunately, although there isn't an audio scrub function in Session, there is a video jog capability (I'm left wondering which should have been prioritised?). Using the selection tool you can highlight a region in the track display, even if there is no audio, and the movie will play through frame by frame. This happens if you move a region too, so it isn't difficult to spot a sound effect exactly at the right point. Also, you can spot using either the beginning of the region or the sync point as the reference.

 

 

One very useful trick that a number of pro systems can do is the ability to mark out a 'blank' region and then import audio of longer duration into it, so that it only plays for the length of the region. Add to that the ability to 'slide' the audio, in order to pick out the most suitable section, and you have a powerful timesaver that is particularly good for something fundamentally repetitive, like the footsteps of several people, but you don't want to have to go through the slog of spotting every individual sound exactly. This is also useful if you want to follow the formal method of first deciding when the audio should start and finish (which is the true meaning of spotting) and actually selecting the audio later.

VERDICT

Overall I was quite pleased with Session, but obviously you will need to check it out carefully before you buy because it has some very obvious competition. I've been tough on Digidesign in this review because they are top dogs in their field and they ought to have all the answers. The next revision of Session may answer all my niggles, but the current version of the software works straight out of the box and I don't doubt that any purchaser will be very satisfied with it.

 

SYNC POINTS

There's always someone who wants his software to do something slightly crazy (me!). In this case it's getting it to synchronise with a multitrack recorder.

Other software of this type provides continuous resynchronisation either on playback only or on record and play. Continuous resynchronisation on record and play is necessary to be absolutely sure that hard disk and multitrack will always be in step, at the cost of a slight risk to audio quality.

Session offers only trigger sync, which means that it finds the right starting place and then the two machines go their own sweet ways. In theory, even two digital machines will drift due to slight differences in their clock rates. However, I tested Session with my Fostex RD8 ADAT and sync is as near-perfect as makes hardly any difference at all. I can't guarantee that it will be the same for you, I might just have been lucky, so make sure you check out Session with your own equipment if accurate synchronisation to multitrack is important to you.

 

ARE ALL POWER MACS CREATED EQUAL?

Check this out with your local Mac guru, but it has been brought to my attention that not all Power Macintoshes have 16-bit audio capability. The internal CD-ROM may be 16-bit, but the part of the computer we are interested in may only be 8-bit.

This doesn't sound very promising for would-be Session owners so, seeing as the Mac range changes so frequently, my advice is to check that the whole system will work the way you want it to before you part with any cash.

 

QUARANTINE

Although not strictly relevant to this review, you may be interested in a little problem I encountered when I installed Session.

I allowed the Installer utility to automatically place Session and its associated files on my hard disk, and everything worked fine straight away. A couple of days later, however, I wanted to use another hard disk recording package on my computer and found that when I tried to create a new file I got a "Mac OS error", which sounded pretty grim. I did the normal things like rebuilding the Mac desktop and running Norton Utilities, but with no joy. I also ran Apple Personal Diagnostics which reported a System error, even after I reinstalled the System files from scratch. The only answer, I thought, was to reformat my hard disk, which involved painstakingly removing all the installs of the copy-protected software I use (and I nearly missed one!). Amazingly, the problem persisted.

Of course I should have realised, but the nature of the error message threw me off the track. The Session installer had quite legitimately replaced my Digisystem INIT file with the latest version, which just happened to be incompatible with my other disk recording software.

The solution to the problem, I feel, is always to make a copy of your Macintosh's Extensions folder when installing new software, and wait a few days until you are sure that all your existing software runs fine before trashing it. That way, you can easily get back to square one if you need to.

 

DIGIDESIGN SESSION 2.0 £175

PROS
• Scrolling display.
• 2-band EQ on each track.
• Sync points within segments.
• Accurate trigger sync.

CONS
• Requires 16Mb of RAM.
• The windows don't tile neatly, even on a large screen.
• No audio scrub.
• Slightly sluggish in response to mouse commands.

SUMMARY
Very capable and adequately polished for new software (and it is new, even if it does claim to be version 2.0). Some details need improving, but it will perform useful work from day one.

 

£ £175.08 inc VAT.

A Digidesign UK, The Westside Complex, Pinewood Studios, Iver Heath, Pinewood, Bucks, SL0 0NH.

T 01753 653322.

F 01753 654999.