Pro Tools Books

As a relative newcomer to the world of Pro Tools I was more than a little under-whelmed by the documentation that comes with the product. Like so many manuals have become, the included Pro Tools documentation is more about telling you in painstaking detail what every menu item does, but not how to actually use the product effectively. Even the demonstration DVDs that came with our Pro Tools HD2 system do not do much more than scratch the surface.

So, I started searching around for some good books on the subject and hit pay dirt. The first is Pro Tools for Musician’s and Songwriters. At first blush the title makes it sound like this would only be applicable if you are indeed a musician or songwriter, but that is not the case. Simply put, this is one of the best technical manuals on a piece of software I’ve ever read. The author takes you from the very beginning on how to set up and use Pro Tools correctly and effectively all the way through the recording and basic editing processes. She not only explains the what of the software but the why. It doesn’t get terribly advanced, but gives you a fantastic foundation from which to build. The author also has a web site where she personally answers questions from those whom have purchased the book. Highly recommended for anyone new to Pro Tools and trying to find your way around.

The second book I found is called Multi-Platinum Pro Tools and is the complete opposite of the first book. In this one it is assumed you know your way around Pro Tools reasonably well, and the primary focus is on editing, not recording. It does a good job of detailing specific software settings that you should use to make editing easier and more efficient, but the real gem in this book is getting the “inside scoop” from a real Nashville producer/engineer as to how he actually works. The root of his method is called “pocketing”, where you take the recorded tracks and hyper-edit them so that everything – bass, drums, vocals, etc — are time-aligned corrected and “in the pocket” rhythmically. Some purists would find such micro-editing of tracks abhorrent, but such is the way much modern music is produced, so if you’re looking for “that sound” this book will tell you how to get it. The authors also have a web site where you can purchase instructional DVDs to further enhance what the book has started.

On the "MAP"

While searching for information about the proper procedure for installing my first Windows Server 2008 box, I stumbled across “MAP”, aka Microsoft Assessment and Planning Solution Accelerator (what is it with Microsoft and their crazy-long names for things, anyway?). This nice free utility will scan your entire network/domain (or just the hosts you want it to scan) and report on the hardware’s readiness for handling Windows Server 2008, Office 2007, and a score of other “stuff.” It then generates some nice reports with lots of useful information about what you told it to scan for and offers proposals on how to proceed.

Regarding Windows Server 2008 deployment, it tells you where all of your critical roles are currently running, and consequently in what order upgrades to 2008 should occur.

I haven’t used it for any of the other functions beyond the Windows Server 2008 assessment, but I imagine it is just as useful for determining which PCs on your network can run Office 2007 well, etc.

Extreme Makeover: Datacenter Edition

Ok, so my recent datacenter upgrade is more akin to “putting lipstick on a pig” than it is “extreme makeover”, but I thought I should blog about it anyway… after all, blogging about server room renovations is all the rage these days, right? Calling it a “datacenter” in the first place is a little misleading, as it is more like “datacloset”, but it’s the best we have right now and is serving our needs just fine. Anyway, when I came on as IT Manager last summer this is what the datacenter looked like…

The open frame rack had been donated by a generous person, but was not suited for the job of holding rack servers. You can’t tell from the picture, but the servers are sticking out past the back rails by about 8 inches, and they are not on rails, but sitting on top of each other.

On the wiring side, like many patch panels it had started out neat but quickly grew into a rat’s nest as adds, moves and changes have occurred over the past four years. Those doors on the vertical Panduit cable management are not just standing open for the heck of it… they were so over-stuffed with cables they couln’t be closed. And check out the portable AC unit we had to stick in there, which was barely able to keep the room under 90f at the peak of summer. As you can see, the room was in dire need of some serious TLC.

Enter the new APC NetShelter rack:

Ahhhh, ain’t she pretty? I picked the APC rack because it had the features I needed like lockable front and back doors, and plenty of power options. The sides are also removable, and it is universally compatible with all major makes of servers.

Over the course of one evening myself and a buddy did the physical server changeover, while another buddy reconfigured the switches into a new network architecture. You see, buried beneath all of those cables were four Cisco switches and a router… and because of the way the network had grown over the years, they were not configured anywhere near optimally, so we redid it all from scratch.

We moved layer 3 chores from the 2800 router to the 3560G “core” switch, and instead of leaving each switch daisy-chaining from one to the other we starred them all off of the core switch. In addition to that, we pulled firewall/VPN chores off of the 2800 and moved those to an Astaro 220 appliance, and relegated the 2800 to handling only our Cisco Unity Express voice mail system.

Along with the upgrades we also had a dedicated 5 ton AC unit installed into the room. There was just enough space between ceiling tiles and deck to shoehorn in the air handler. The servers should be a lot happier with the ambient temp this summer
Here is the finished product. It might not look like much of an improvement, but believe me, it is! The network is far more stable, far better performing, and you can actually see the gear.

Finally, take a piece of wood and paint it black, add a spare piece of cable management and voila, instant cable bridge! In the prior setup most of the cables between server rack and patch panels were on the floor or simply strung between the two units.

Whole lotta shakin’ goin on…

At about 4:30 am I was abruptly awoken to my bed doing a great recreation of a scene from The Exorcist. My first thought was that the guy in the neighboring condo was doing laundry really early (he has a new front loading washer and is apparently ignorant of how to level and balance it but that idea quickly vanished as it got louder and LOUDER over the next 20 seconds or so.

There are only a handful of quakes I’ve felt here in St. Louis, and all of them were of the variety that felt like a small wave just passed under your floor, but this is the first one I’ve experienced that had real side-side motion. It was ‘interesting’ from a science geek perspective, but not something I care to repeat any time soon!

Celemony Direct Note Access… WOW.

As a bona fide audio geek that gets to play with really expensive toys on a weekly basis, it’s not often that I’m stunned by a new piece of software or plugin. But a couple of weeks ago fellow CITRT-er Chris Green posted this link in IRC chat to a really cool piece of software coming later this year.

The short version of what it does is best said by Celemony themselves: “Direct Note Access is a technology that makes the impossible possible: for the first time in audio recording history you can identify and edit individual notes within polyphonic audio material. The unique access that Melodyne affords to pitch, timing, note lengths and other parameters of melodic notes will now also be afforded to individual notes within chords.”

Translation: Uber-Cool. Watch the video and see if you’re as amazed as I am. If this is not a hoax and actually works as well as advertised, the implications for editing audio are enormous.

MinistryTech / CITRT Re-entry

I got home from the trip Sunday afternoon, sat down in my La-Z-Boy about 5pm, and didn’t wake up until this morning… guess I needed to catch up on a little sleep (and please don’t write me with that blather about it being ‘impossible’ to recoup missing sleep. Yeah, right!)

I had a good time at the conference/RT and met a lot of people, and as expected I got far more out of sitting around lunch/dinner tables and the roundtable than sitting in sessions, but special props go to Chris Green for hauling me around to various events and patiently putting up with my inane noob Windows administration questions! I think I learned more from him in two days than I’ve learned on my own the last 6 months. Thanks Chris!

MinistryTech / CITRT Here I Come…

Well, I’ve arrived safe and sound in Oklahoma City after an uneventful plane ride (had the entire row to myself… ahhhh!) for my first Ministry Tech, followed by my first Church IT Roundtable on Saturday (if you don’t count the SharePoint training we did in January as a CITRT
Looking forward to learning a lot, but looking more forward to networking with the great group of guys I’m just starting to get to know. More later!