Music • Sound • Video • Art

I’m participating in the RECORD Betas and wanted to post a few thoughts. Note that the NDA prevents me from discussing any details or juicy stuff, but head over to Propellerheads‘ beta sign up site and get a copy for yourself.

My initial impressions were not what I would call “over the top” with enthusiasm. I actually found the interface a bit confusing at first: The screen is JAM PACKED with stuff (nothing you can’t figure out from the screenshots and micro-tutorials on the Prop’s site). On a 13″ macbook screen (my main machine was in the shop the first time I fired RECORD up), it is just too much (although the function key based focus switches help.) Anyway, I am talking about my first impressions here and my first impression was that there is a disconnect between what I was looking at on the screen (a LOT of stuff) and the product’s marketing (“stripped down recording simplicity”).

My next mental hurdle was due to my being familiar with REASON. (Note I said ‘familiar’ and not ‘expert’.) There are enough similarities in the interfaces and many methods of doing things that – as a prior user of REASON – I tend to forget that I’m not IN REASON. So when something is different, I tend to really stumble on it.

For example, the mixer in RECORD is really great and extremely capable. But to take advantage of it fully (IMHO), I have to structure my REASON racks differently.

This thing is great.

In REASON 4, I tend to use multiple Combinators as sub-mixers for various instruments (or sometimes whole sections) in a song. You don’t have to do that so much here because the mixer has a very robust per channel insert scheme and plenty of sends. So much so in fact that I think each channel can give you a lot of the functionality that a combinator formerly would have. (Again, this can be divined from the microtutorials and released info so I think I’m safe NDA wise.) Sure, I can simply use Combinators as before and plug these Combinators into a channel in the mixer and be done with it, but that is probably not the best way to go for a number of reasons I can think of (efficiency, ease of automation and editing being three).

Well, true to their word, the folks over at LogicKeyboard have set a release date of mid January for their next custom keyboard for Motu Digital Performer 6. This one is based on the original Apple Pro keyboard and at $135 is about $35 cheaper than the wireless aluminum keyboard they released a couple of months back.

Available right now is their Logickeyboard™ DP 6 keyset made for the original Apple Pro G5 keyboard and the Bluetooth Wireless version of that keyboard. With this you can simply pop the keys out of your existing keyboard and substitute the custom keyset. This is much cheaper at $90 and is likely the one I will purchase soon.

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Previous post on LogicKeyboard can be found here.

MOTU DP keyboard by Logickeyboard (no less) - Logickeyboard’s custom keyboard for Motu Digital Performer is available though only using the Ultra Thin Aluminum Apple Pro keyboard at the moment. It features all the regular letter, number, and symbol labelling found on a conventional keyboard, so it can be used as your regular keyboard. It’s a bit pricey, but Logickeyboard tells me that they are also developing a set of replacement keycaps for older style Apple keyboards. (This will be much less expensive obviously.)

Bandcamp – I’m probably a little late to announcing this party, but Bandcamp is another free music distribution/viral marketing/sell-your-music-directly-to-the-public site that looks the business. It provides “drop-dead easy tools to share your music with their friends, and most importantly we do it in a way that drives traffic back to you. We also give you complete transparency into how your music is spreading…” The last point refers to their extensive online stats which are pretty impressive. Check out the screencast.   

SoundCloud goes live – I know for sure that I’m late announcing this party, but SoundCloud officially opened to the public recently. SoundCloud is a music distribution/viral marketing/’net 2.0 kind of application with a focus a bit different from Bandcamp. SoundCloud is not really set-up for the general public to find music for downloading. (Though that is possible.) It is keyed more to helping music makers / professionals collaborate and communicate with each other. It’s a well-conceived effort, though there has been some noise around the pricing scheme for their non-free “pro” accounts. 

RadioClouds – One neat feature about SoundCloud is that the API is open to developers. One of the first applications available is called RadioClouds. With RadioClouds you can listen to a lot of new music from SoundCloud without being a member.  RadioClouds displays the name/icon of a SoundCloud member, plays the person’s most popular track, and shows the people the individual is “following” in SoundCloud via a graphical network of icons. Clicking on one of these icons will play the most popular track of the artist and also shows the individual’s network, and so on.

The app is beta so there are a couple of issues: 1) The display of old networks is persistent, so after a few clicks the screen is full of icons and lines and can get pretty confusing; 2) Sometimes when you click an icon, a random artist will play instead. In fairness, perhaps the original choice didn’t have any publicly available tracks so the app picked another for you. (In which case this is not a bug but a feature.)

In any case, you can try it out using my network here.