As I wrap up my revised edition of my book The Desktop Studio (Hal Leonard), it occurs to me that any book about using computers—especially one where the computers and software will be used in aid of creating art—is by its very nature obsolete to some degree.
That's not to say it's not valuable. As I worked on the revision, so many of the things I wrote about in 2002 remain valid. Macs were already on OS X; FireWire and USB were becoming common for mass storage, MIDI, and audio interfaces; Ableton's Live had been released, while Sony's ACID had changed the way we worked with audio files. We still record AIFF and Wav files, use MP3s to share audio on the Internet, use MIDI to trigger sounds, and still feel the pinch when our computers have too little RAM or too slow a processor.
But much has also changed. As I went through the book, I did a lot of deleting—and usually, the word I was striking was "can't." Music software has become so powerful that many things that were once very difficult to do are now easy, given the right set of tools. Want to quantize an audio file? You can do that with a number of programs, but perhaps Ableton's Live 8 takes it to an unprecedented level by letting you get inside a groove. Want to edit audio as you would MIDI? You can do that with Celemony's Melodyne. Pretty soon, that software will allow us to edit individual notes in a polyphonic performance. I've seen it in action and it's impressive.
My goal for this blog is to talk about these new developments as they happen, and continue the discussion started in The Desktop Studio. I'll call your attention to new products and draw on almost 20 years as a reviewer to make recommendations. I'll offer tips and tricks, and, hopefully, include your experiences in the discussion.
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