Future Music Technology

[DonaldM]

As a new year begins, I've been reflecting a bit on what new technologies we might see in the months ahead for creating and producing music. So, I thought I'd pose a couple questions here.

First, what predictions does anyone have as to the next technological advance in music production?

Secondly, what technology would you like to see in the near future?

I'm not necessarily thinking here of desired improvements for Pro Tools specifically, but more generally what sort of new technologies, hardware or software we might see in music or audio production and what would we like to see?

One thing I expect to see sooner rather than later is that SSDs will replace traditional HD's on most systems and become smaller, faster and cheaper. I expect in a couple years a 4tb SDD will be about the size of our iLoks and we won't need separate drives for OS/sessions/samples and all that. We'll just have 1 large SDD with separate files spaces for whatever we want. We'll be a the point where speed will simply not be an issue.

I don't think touch screen anything will replace our mouses. Not because the technology isn't good...it is; but because its impractical. Its too tough to manipulate touch screens as it is (typing on your iPhone, for example). I think most will still prefer some sort of mouse or similar device. Maybe a laser pointer, but something other than our fat fingers!

I'm sure you all have ideas. What do you think?

[Craig F]

Not that I would not like large SSDs from what I've read about die size and reliability I don't think we will see 4TB thumb drives that are reliable any time soon

I agree with your assessment of touch screens

Wireless devices is were I think we will see a lot of development

[dr_daw]

I agree with Craig_F on the Wifi device situation. I'm on the fence about touch screens, for those of us (and I'm not even that old...in my mind) that came from learning on an analogue desk. There's something to be said about what that cat in this forum is working on. "Alien Touch" I believe he's calling it, that is surely the way things are going...not this year.

I don't know how many times after working on my iPad and I go sit at my drum kit and try to touch my screen to get iTunes to play :P I always feel like such an idiot.

Craig, Wireless technology has been a can of worms on here in the past (as you surely know) Care to elaborate on what your thoughts are?

[SpinningDisk]

I agree about touch screens. It doesn't seem piratical. It's gotta be a pain in the ass. I'm sure Windex won't mind😊

How about something like Kinect but with hand or finger movement? If I can grab a bowling ball and toss it down the lane, then why can't I twist some knobs or raise some faders? I know there's a long way to go. You know. Like Kinect on the Xbox.

Someone take the S6 and make it into a smaller more affordable footprint.

📀

[Craig F]

Originally Posted by dr_daw

Craig, Wireless technology has been a can of worms on here in the past (as you surely know) Care to elaborate on what your thoughts are?

I'm thinking we will see more things that were USB go wireless
USB Mic : WiFi Mic
USB DI cable : Blue Tooth DI pod on a 1/4" plug
things like that

I don't know how practical they will be but I'm sure somewhere, someone it is truing to build it

[Darryl Ramm]

The future of SSDs for use in computers that is interesting for us is probably less likely around USB keys/dongle size SSDs and more specific designs targeting high performance PCIe 3 based direct attach devices. That's most likely M.2/NGFF formats in laptops and 2.5" PCIe/NVMe in high-end desktop and servers. There is just not enough fan-out inside the small USB sticks and that whole market is not targeted at performance.

But hopefully we'll see density/prices continue to increase and expect to be able to carry around huge sample libraries etc. on a USB stick and copy them over to a internal HDD or SSD (as some folks already do today) or run them from the disk if you are lucky with performance. (read performance is much easier to achieve on an SSD than write performance).

You'll see 2.5" SSD drives that plug directly into these NVMe/PCIe connectors or even hot plug slots on high end PCs. That's starting to happen in the server market where Dell and Micron teamed up with these 2.5" SSDs that hot plug into the front of a Dell server (e.g. see http://www.storagereview.com/micron_...lerator_review). Its going to be a bit messier in Mac land if everything is hanging off Thunderbolt. Maybe there will be Raid/JBOD boxes that support NVMe drives, but Thunderbolt may start becoming a performance bottleneck, one of the reasons I'm not happy that the new Mac Pro does not have any internal PCIe expansion/storage (besides the one internal (M2/NGFF like but maybe proprietary) SSD they have inside).

And over the next few years you'll see use of HDDs squeezed even more than they are today, there is just no long term future for HDDs. They will rapidly go away once SSD cost/GB gets closer to that of commodity 4800 rpm HDD. SSDs may even take on HDD as replacements for backup and archiving and I expect many of us will rely more on fast-online backup and archive services once Gbps to the curb networking is more pervasive. Folks like Facebook are already pushing for SSD drives optimized for warm or cold storage and archiving in their data centers and that will trickle down to others as SSD and Flash chip vendors start tailoring products for that use.

Samsung and others have announced pretty impressive roadmaps for SSD technology. You'll see 3D/stacked chip construction to boost density and lower cost without overly needing to just reduce NAND cell size (and therefore avioid increasing cell wear effects). All this stuff is likely to come into high end enterprise drives then trickle down to consumer drives as manufacturing yield allows, so you can kind of guess what out drives will look like in a few years time. e.g. see http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/...the-enterprise

And LAN networking technology will hopefully keep advancing. 802.11ac starts to gets WiFi close to the ballpark of 1Gb Ethernet. Anybody lucky to have played with 100Gbit/sec Ethernet will know how stunningly fast this can be. I don't have a feel for how long it will be until we have 40/100Gbit Ethernet on many desktop computers. Years I expect. But you can't stand in the way of Ethernet. I'd not be in a hurry to say build say a FC SAN nowadays.

[DonaldM]

Darrel - I think I only understood about half of that. I'm just not a computer whiz and don't know all the terms and abbreviations.But I suspect you're right about ethernet. And I suspect wireless everything to be coming as well. My concern about off-site backups, especially on a cloud service, remains: security! There's just too many idiots out there who, unfortunately, have nothing better to do with their time and skills then invent ways to make other people's lives difficult - hence all the viruses and spyware crap we all have to deal with. Cloud based backups are just another target for these low-lifes. I'm probably overly paranoid on this, but having been hit twice with significant virus damage, despite all my precautions, I tend to err on the side of extreme caution.

Heck, I won't even use a credit card online anymore, preferring Paypal (because I can control the balance in there) and online service gift cards.

[DonaldM]

Originally Posted by SpinningDisk

How about something like Kinect but with hand or finger movement? If I can grab a bowling ball and toss it down the lane, then why can't I twist some knobs or raise some faders? I know there's a long way to go. You know. Like Kinect on the Xbox.

Someone take the S6 and make it into a smaller more affordable footprint.

📀

I like that concept a lot. Something smaller I can actually hold, but that has actual buttons and sliders to control stuff, even wirelessly, would be useful. I could use it right now, actually. If I'm working alone in my studio...which is most of the time...and I want to lay down a vocal track or some other acoustic instrument, guitar say, it is really difficult to set up the PT tracks to record, then race over to the mic area, which I have sectioned off in my studio room, and start playing or singing. I'd like to be able to control PT remotely from the vocal booth. I tried some app that was supposed to do that on my iPad...but again...big fingers and lots of frustration!

[SpinningDisk]

Hi Donald,
Yeah that would be cool but what I actually mean is not actually physically touching anything. Just put your fingers in the air and turn knobs without physically touching them like the Xbox. Also, how about voice commands. Say, Computer: set up four vcl tracks and one master fader. It does it.
When you are in the other room using some sort of connect, you would be able to faders and knobs Without Touching anything. No need for iPad, iPhone, special apps etc.. Or just use voice commands😊

Oh yeah, and a smaller S6😚

📀

[SpinningDisk]

I believe wireless in the studio is right around the corner. Would be nice to get rid of cables.

📀