AES in general

[Scott Goldberg]

Just some information that I thought I would share. I saw three software exhibits that just blew me away. First, being a Serato Pitch user, I went home and immediately upgraded (free) to 2.4 as it has some great new features and to me, still sound the best when it comes to time compression and expansion.

Second is a hat's off to Steve Massey. He had a small booth and was demoing all of his plug-ins that people are raving about. They are fabulous and you can download demo versions of most plug-ins for free and they don't have a time limit. You just don't get any presets and there are no bypasses on some of them. The L2007, and the CB4 along with the tape head all sound great. He's also got a distortion plug-in that looked interesting, modeled after the rat. I used the L2007 in conjunction with Master-X and it worked quite well. I think Izoptope is probably the "one" for people who are willing to shell out a couple of hundred bucks but this is free and it works great. Hat's off Steve!

Third was a total blow out for sample library lovers. Chris Stone's company "Audio Impressions" makes a PC based midi driven sample library that is so impressive that I was left sppechless. He did a demo for me of all orchestral stuff and the nuances that he captured, along with the GUI he designed himself was beyond words. I don't have enough energy in me tonight to tell you of all the fantastic sounds, feature, and ease of use that his orchestral stuff sounded, but it was as real as anything I've ever heard, times 10. He is truly a genius. You'd have to experience it to believe it. I was truly dumbfounded, and I am not impressed that easy.

At any rate, that's my report on some of the software that I saw.

P.S. Pro Tools new midi and it's eleven plug-in ROCKS!

[tal herzberg]

This was the 17th AES show I've attended since my first one in 1992, and by all means the most depressing one.

It was tiny (10 short isles, took me less than 2 hours to walk the entire floor), many name vendors were missing, while others who did exhibit think they might not bother next year.

I might be wrong, but it seemed like there were no more than 500 visitors, super light attendance. It is about time someone at AES understand that San Francisco is a wrong city to host this event, only LA and NY (really only LA).

PT8 was the only announcement worth mentioning, and indeed it loox and feelz great, with lots of cool new and useful features.

The most noticeable element was the older age group most attendants belonged to. The AES has miserably failed in streaming new blood into the organization, the blood of today's mainstream users.

NAMM is where these users can be seen, and I suspect the AES show will eventually get absorbed into either the NAB or NAMM shows.

Aside from catching up with a handful of colleagues and old friends, it was 100% waste of my time and $.

Bummer.

[stoox]

What was the Eleven Free plugin like?
did they show it?
what were the limitations?

[Scott Goldberg]

Sorry it was such a bummer for you. :-( Scott :)

[John_Toolbox]

Third was a total blow out for sample library lovers. Chris Stone's company "Audio Impressions" makes a PC based midi driven sample library that is so impressive that I was left sppechless. He did a demo for me of all orchestral stuff and the nuances that he captured, along with the GUI he designed himself was beyond words. I don't have enough energy in me tonight to tell you of all the fantastic sounds, feature, and ease of use that his orchestral stuff sounded, but it was as real as anything I've ever heard, times 10. He is truly a genius. You'd have to experience it to believe it. I was truly dumbfounded, and I am not impressed that easy.

Cool! Someone filled the niche of the soon to be extinct gigastudio! I'll have to check this out for sure... Right up my alley.

EDIT: Just checked their website, this is definitely something I'm interested in. Did they mention anything about price? It looks really cool. Looks like they have an ethernet-based audio transfer, like the muse receptor audiowire - no audio interfaces to buy, cool. I'm assuming this isn't available yet, as their website has a few dead links on it.

[Scott Goldberg]

You know, we didn't talk about prices as we were just kind of hanging out throughout the afternoon, but I am calling him tomorrow and I will know more. Lots of irons in the fire with this one and Chris is absolutely brilliant. I will try to let you know. I will tell you this., it was amazing, and one of the most amazing demos I've ever seen. He designed EVERYTHING from the GUI to miking the orchestras, to making it real user friendly. I was blown away. Stay tuned and feel free to contact me at my own address goldrecordings.com

[John_Toolbox]

He designed EVERYTHING from the GUI to miking the orchestras, to making it real user friendly.

This is exactly what composers like me have wanted for a long time. Right now I have several machines synched up, it gets the job done but it's something that just slows down my productivity because it's so complex.

Part of the problem with what's available right now is that orchestral VI's are designed just as a plugin... and even the plugins like philharmonik that are supposed to be orchestral plugins, are still based on VI plugins - which are meant to trigger samples of anything, not specifically orchestral instruments. (Hows that for a run-on). What is left out of their development is the idea that a composer is going to tweak midi to get a realistic sound, but then have to tweak it again so the score makes sense. This hasn't been an issue for me(yet), but I know it is for a lot of composers.

I know samplecell really well, so I obviously have quite a few samplecell cards, but it just can't load enough to compete with what a newer computers can handle these days.

Keep me posted Scott, thanks for letting all of us know about this.

[Media Man]

Originally Posted by tal herzberg

This was the 17th AES show I've attended since my first one in 1992, and by all means the most depressing one.

<snip>

Aside from catching up with a handful of colleagues and old friends, it was 100% waste of my time and $.

Well, I sort of agree. Besides PT 8, there wasn't much new at all.....at least I didn't see it.

The seminars, tutorials, workshops, etc., were poorly organized. For example, I thought I'd learn a little bit about game audio, but the workshops were on Friday and Sunday, with nothing on Saturday. In the past, these sort of things have been grouped together. Nothing personal against the panelists, but the special events weren't very special, nor did they follow the outlines in the directory.

I came up with the intention of staying the weekend, but was bored to tears and bailed late Saturday after noon on BART to the airport. At least BART is cool. Had a nice meal Friday night with a vendor group.

Mark

[Premo]

YA AES is more like a 1/2 day, maybe 1 day max type of event for me at least. Unless your a vendor I wouldn't want to be there all weekend.

Grab the free magazines, talk to a few people, eat some free candy and make have some drinks and catch a speech or two and I'm outta there. It's been getting smaller feeling each year. At least it feels that way to me.

[ronwasserman]

I mean no disrespect here, but wasn't the audio impressions thing initially demonstrated at NAMM early last year (or the year before that?) If so, I know every major composer sent their underlings there to check it out. Everyone was impressed with the software but very unhappy about the samples.

I think the full system price would be around 35-50k if I remember correctly. It requires several computers.

Perhaps the library was tweaked and is now much better?