This just in from Natacha Atlas, a new remix and video inspired by the recent democratic uprising in Egypt. In her own words:
“This is a remix of material from “Mounqaliba”. We were inspired to do this by the news from Tahrir
Square.
Here’s a translation :
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Natacha :
Let us stand together and awaken ,
Let us question, learn and study;
Listen, understand and think.
Let us understand,
Permit us to know-
Permit us to know freedom.
Let us know there is a land
where words are the purveyors of truth,
heads are held high,
And human will is regarded above all.
Where the world is not split into a thousand fragments,
Under siege, forgotten, or lost -
Let us perceive of it,
Let us know that place.
Let us know our land,
where words are the purveyors of truth.
Harrison is a company with a rich legacy in high-end consoles. Mixbus, their software product, is something of an anomaly. Its analog tape saturation, EQ, filter, compression, and mixing should be sold a la carte for a few hundred bucks each, given the usual business model in this industry. The product should run on some proprietary DAW, and should definitely come with a hardware dongle. And it absolutely, positively shouldn’t run on Linux, because everyone knows you can’t sell a product for Linux.
Instead, Mixbus sells for an intro price for US$79.99. You get the whole package: an entire DAW, plus a software version of Harrison’s 32-series and MR-series consoles, with powerful DSP and mixing features baked in. There’s no dongle. The DAW is the open source Ardour. On the Mac, you get support for Audio Unit plug-ins and any Core Audio interface, plus the superb Mac port of JACK.
And now, in addition to Mac support, you can run the package on Linux, benefiting from native Linux technologies like JACK and LADSPA and (now) LV2 plug-ins. Harrison recommends an audio-based distribution, but two of them – Ubuntu Studio and (Fedora-based) CCRMA – make their packages available in standard Ubuntu and custom Fedora repositories, respectively, which means just about any recent, major distribution will work.
Working with an open source DAW, Ardour, has some practical benefits for users. Aside from benefiting from a mature, open source codebase, the fact that Ardour is free software means you can exchange multitrack projects with friends, even if they don’t own Mixbus or do their work in a different DAW. Ardour takes some time to learn – the interface is spartan, to be sure – but because it’s a free project, it refreshingly focuses on the basics rather than the feature creep that has tended to make the major commercial, proprietary DAWs a bit complex.
Mixbus is simply a joy to use, because it consolidates the user interface into an efficient, productive console, and has some terrific effects to boost. Features:
“Knob per function” mixing.
EQ, filter, compression, analog tape saturation, and Harrison’s summing model
4 mix bus sends on every channel, and channel strips that each feature filter, EQ, and compression.
Tone controls, compression, sidechaining, and tape saturation on the mix buses (hence the name), and on the stereo master bus, too – meaning this works nicely for mastering.
Plugin delay compensation for features like parallel compression.
Metering with peak, peak hold, compressor gain reduction on each track and bus – again, bringing mastering and mixing into a nice interface.
All of this operates in an extremely lightweight system that runs comfortably on a fairly low-end laptop, without having to sacrifice audio fidelity. (As with any multitrack system, just make sure you have a capable hard disk; that’s what I find to be the most significant bottleneck.)
In short, it’s a brilliant tool for plug-in hosting, thanks to all the routing options, and for finally finishing tracks, thanks to mix- and master-friendly features. On the Mac, support for AU means your plug-ins come with you from another DAW when you want to finish your music. On Linux (and on the Mac), you can use JACK to route in everything from a Pure Data patch to a recording for conventional mixing.
On the Mac, it’s a no-brainer purchase that makes a fantastic tool in your arsenal for finishing music. On Linux, it could be the release that finally makes a Linux-based studio practical.
Harrison took what they knew about making big consoles like this, and applied it to software. Photo courtesy Harrison.
Version 1.5 also introduces some new features alongside the Linux release, including a key-mappable “play with pre-roll” Transport command and playhead edit range Transport snapping (huge time-savers), thinning for dynamic automation, and a Gain tool you can use to adjust curves in a region.
I spoke to Harrison about some of the details of what’s on offer here.
CDM: Can you describe what’s built into Mixbus’ console from a processing standpoint? What makes this console special? A lot is made of “summing,” but that’s – unless I’m missing something you’re doing – typically the least interesting part of DSP design in a mixer. So tell us what does make working with Mixbus different sonically?
There’s the obvious stuff…. the built-in EQs, compressors, tape saturation, and final limiter…. done by our in-house DSP guys. But I assume that’s not what you mean.
One fundamental difference in Mixbus is the fact that everything is always “in” … for example, when you turn on an EQ, that processing is already allocated so you won’t push your CPU over the edge while undertaking the art of “mixing”. This sounds trivial, but it has significant implications in the workflow, sound, and “immediacy” of the mixer. A second big difference is the fixed number of pre-allocated buses (both graphically and DSP-wise) which is quite different from the normal DAW mixer. This will become more apparent as we develop Mixbus further, in a way that is parallel with – but different than – Ardour and more traditional DAWs.
Summing is a hot-button topic, for sure. On some level, there will be a simple addition, just like there is an addition of voltages/current on the summing bus of an analog console. But nobody would say that 2 analog consoles sound the same. Similarly, there are design decisions to be made on digital mixers. For example, our EQs are implemented in 64-bit, and there is a dither stage in each channel. When multiple channels are summed together, you can handle this dither in different ways. The difference isn’t in the actual summing, but qualitative differences come from these signals when they are summed.
Ed.: That makes some sense – the summing stage itself, which is what people will often describe when comparing DAWs, shouldn’t theoretically be any different, but the way you handle changes in bit depth in various mixing stages prior to summing could make a big difference. I pushed Harrison on this partly because I’ve been having some heated discussions with developers and engineers about this topic, so we can go further into it if interested – but it’s good to know how Mixbus works, and I can confirm that mixing in the software is really a joy. -PK
Finally, there’s the rule that in digital it’s hard to “improve” the quality of sound, but there are a hell of a lot of ways to screw it up. Avoiding these landmines, or designing to accomodate them on a given platform, is something that comes from a lot of experience.
What’s the relationship of Mixbus to other Harrison products? How did they inform this design?
We designed the Mixbus mixer using the same people & process that we would apply to a hardware mixer. Every design has “tradeoffs” associated with it: features, bit depth, gain stages, dithering, oversampling, parameter ramping methods, etc etc. There’s also a lot of thought that gets put into the parameter ranges …. where should the EQ center frequencies be? How wide a range should they cover? These are things that we (a) think about much more frequently than the typical DAW developer and (b) have a very wide experience to draw from.
Aside from the fact that it’s already there, can you talk about some specific advantages of working with Ardour? Any tips you’ve personally found while working with it, from a workflow / usability standpoint?
Coming from the rarified world of high-end audio systems, we recognized a lot of the same qualities in Ardour. Some examples: “The things you do 1000 times a day are very easy to apply, while the things you do once per day don’t matter where they appear” …. “Anything that you do automatically, while really helpful in some cases, will be terribly wrong in other cases” ….. “first-time-user intuitiveness isn’t as important as long-term usability to a pro” ….. “customization on a truly deep level is important for enterprise-class facilities” …. stuff like that.
These are subtleties. How do you make a soundbyte out of the overall “gestalt” that Ardour/Mixbus has? It is the result of many iterations driven by real-world users. Sometimes it’s about going back-and-forth until finally settling on the “least evil” of evil compromises. It doesn’t make good ad copy
One huge point: Ardour (in many cases) is a superset of the features of workstations. For example, the AudioFile (a high end hardware DAW by AMS/Neve) had the feature of “transparent regions”… so you could stack multiple sounds on a single track. Ardour has a “transparent” flag for regions, so you can do this. An interesting point here is that the Ardour session file format could conceivably become the shared standard of nearly other DAW. Presumably we’ll be able to support nearly any workflow that a user wants, once we get the UI’s developed.
Mixbus users – or potential Mixbus users – we’d love to hear from you. If you’re using the tool now, let us know how it’s working for you. And if you’re considering using it, let us know what’d be helpful to you. I suspect a tutorial on setting everything up on Linux would be a good place to start; it’s powerful, but not immediately intuitive out of the box.
Fines for noncommercial broadcasters who air acknowledgments of their donors and contributors that sound too much like commercials have been a problem area for many noncommercial educational radio and television stations, and have resulted in significant fines from the FCC. The FCC allows "enhanced underwriting announcements" that identify a sponsor, what their business is, and where they are located, but such information must be provided in an objective, non-promotional manner. Earlier this week, I conducted a seminar for noncommercial broadcast stations who are members of the Maine Association of Broadcasters and the Connecticut Broadcasters Association. During the seminar, we discussed the FCC rules that govern fundraising done on such stations. The PowerPoint slides from that presentation are available here, and provide an outline of the FCC rules on underwriting, promotions, fundraising and related issues, with samples of announcements that have led to FCC fines for noncommercial stations.
We have written many times about FCC issues related to fundraising and other matters relevant to noncommercial stations. We have written articles about cases where the FCC fined stations for enhanced underwriting announcements that were too enhanced, and violated FCC standards by containing prohibited calls to action, inducements to buy, price information or qualitative claims (see, for instance, articles here and here). Another article discussed fines issued by the FCC for improper underwriting announcements where the announcements were of excessive length, and where the announcement ran in programming that was not originated by the station and from which the station received no consideration. Another article discussed the FCC prohibition on noncommercial stations interrupting their regular programming to raise funds for charitable groups other than the licensee. You can scroll though other articles we have written on other legal issues for noncommercial broadcasters by clicking here. Watch our blog for other issues that relate to noncommercial broadcasters to stay up-to-date on the latest developments about which you should be aware.
Remix albums are ubiquitous, and sampling has become one of the fundamental techniques of electronic music. But how much do raw materials impact the end result? And given that a sample might simply be a prompt or starting point, why not take on someone else’s samples instead of your own?
Film aficionados routinely trade film – sometimes even double-exposing someone else’s roll, for unexpected results. Here, a group of musicians take on another artist’s samples, starting with 40 minutes of material by Forrest Reiff (Off Balance Atlas), shared on SoundCloud. The results are eclectic, sometimes exotic, sometimes chaotic, but well worth a sampling yourself. And if you decide to give them money, you can get a handmade cassette copy in the deal.
Forrest explains the project:
This album was initiated from an idea in my head to have other people hear the sounds that I sample and create their own interpretation of the source material. It’s not really a remix album because there is no linear path that any of the sounds were presented in..it is more a reanimation of raw crystal sound waves into a new gem fortress. The artists were not asked to use the material exclusively, but merely to implement it into the creative process. Thank you to all the producers who participated out of their sheer creative drive in the first round. May the future bring bright things for us all.
The album is being offered free of charge but if you donate $8-$10 you will be guaranteed a physical copy of the release in cassette format. Feel free to donate less if you just wish to support the idea and enjoy the digital album. I will be hand making the tapes initially but if the interest becomes great and I receive enough donations a full on pressing will commence and you will receive a “professionally” dubbed and printed tape…which will mark the first official skylight gymnasium records release. We live in an extraordinary world filled with vast stimuli and beauty…I humbly thank you for your interest in this project and possible endeavors of the infinite beyond.
-Forrest Reiff (Off Balance Atlas)
One of the participating artists, Judson / Sumsun, sent us a heads-up on the project and shares his impressions:
I really enjoy listening to all the artists interpretations of the material, you can hear a little bit of Off Balance Atlas or hear a bit that I almost sampled, but then the songs really sound like the artists using the sample.
He fills us in on some of the process and background, too:
It’s a lot of Roland SP sampling ([BOSS] SP-505 and [Roland] SP-404), cassette and mini cassette field recordings, random vinyl rips, hydrophones, analog and digital synths, you know, meat and potatoes type stuff. Then he sent the soundcloud page out to a bunch of friends and they sent it to their friends and it grew and grew. He started this months ago but just put the finished product up online. The label my project is on, Leaving Records, debuted it in a simple blog post:
Leaving is a small LA label owned by sonic wizard Matthewdavid and is a subsidiary of Alpha Pup Records (Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder label is also a subsidiary of Alpha Pup).
The images here come from Forrest’s sampling setup, and I’m sure aren’t dissimilar from many readers’ noise-making closets.
SoundCloud was the means of sharing the files, for samples like this one:
SoundCloud and services like it, in turn, will be the subject of a lot of the hacking happening this weekend at the first-ever New York installment of Music Hack Day. I’ll be interested to see if that helps spawn more ideas like this.
On the other hand, you don’t need fancy technology; you could even mail a cassette tape.
Another amazing spring collaboration is coming your way, with two high profile Berlin-based labels MYKITA and Uslu Airlines both teaming up for an extra special gift pack.
The designer eyewear label and the luxury cosmetics brand have just released this wicked limited edition Bob Box Set that includes aviator sunglasses and nail polish to match.
Talking about matching: The three exclusive colors include a muddy grey-brown (MYK), powdery lilac (ITA) and neon yellow (SXF), which also mimicked the colors of their corresponding sunglasses. The gift set comes with a proud price of €359, but the nail polish as well as the glasses can also be bought separately.
Legendary Vogue editor Anna Wintour said it best when she said, "We all get dressed for Bill." But just who exactly is Bill. Well, Bill Cunningham was an iconic New York Times fashion photographer who is now the subject of a new award-winning documentary aptly titled Bill Cunningham New York.
The 80+ fashion veteran chronicled pretty much every clothing trend within the last four decades and attended probably every high profile event that New York ever witnessed. The feature flick details the life of this unique character, even called a cultural anthropologist to some. Everyone from David Rockefeller to Tom Wolfe appears in this film.
Bill Cunningham New York has won awards from Nantucket all the way to Melbourne, Australia and will be officially released in April in selected cinemas throughout America, expect some kind of release in Europe some time this year.
If there was one album in 2011 that holds the dance community on the edge of their seats, it's the debut LP from Art Department. They have announced the title of their debut LP, The Drawing Board and it is to be released in April by way of Damian Lazarus's label Crosstown Rebels.
Their enthralling and mysterious tune, 'Without You' got most people's first attention in 2010, taking clubs by storm, it was even named record of the year by Resident Advisor amongst the many other accolades it took.
Capturing the imagination of a new generation of house music fans, the Ontarian duo is made up of one techno legendKenny Glasgow and one new comer Jonny White, the owner of label No.19, they both possess decades of experience on the job. The up and coming LP features the crafty input from well-known producers like Seth Troxler, Soul Clap and Osunlade.
The album is set to follow up on the insightful and gothic style of dance music they have come to be known for.
Tracklisting:
01. Much Too Much
02. Tell Me Why (Part I)
03. Living The Life feat. Seth Troxler
04. What Does It Sound Like?
05. Without You
06. We Call Love feat. Soul Clap & Osunlade
07. Vampire Nightclub (Album Version) feat. Seth Troxler
08. In The Mood
09. Roberts Cry
10.Tell Me Why (Part II) 11. I C U
The Drawing Board will be released on April 25th on Crosstown Rebels
Give 'em an inch, and they'll take a mile, goes the old saying. In Alex Metric's case, you'll need to convert the units, but the principle remains the same: he can spin a couple of centimeters of tape into a hit that stretches as far as the eye can see. Alex Metric has largely made his name with his high-octane remixes for acts like Sharam Jey, Autokratz, Evil Nine, Phoenix, and La Roux. But his new track "Open Your Eyes," a collaboration with Swedish House Mafioso Steve Angello, is a reminder that his original productions are just as massive, roping together dirty breaks and nasty electro riffage into huge tunes that are equally at home in the clubs and over the airwaves.
We asked Metric to give us a rundown as to his formative listening experiences.
If you didn't get enough on the US producer's music 2.0 theory in our recent feature with him, then Haze is offering more thoughts via his own blog, juxtaposed by a sexy picture.
Let's take a page from Marco Carola's book this week, and play it loud! This week sees the release of eagerly anticipated records for the main room and the back room alike, as Tiesto, Kim Fai, Cirez D, Nick Curly, Mark Henning, Deniz Kurtel, and more push our pleasure meters well into the red.
We've been a bit remiss with our albums of the week lately, as we've waited for the year to kick into gear. And now, suddenly, there's an onslaught of amazing longplayers. There are so many good albums out this week, we couldn't pick just one. Read on to get the skinny on new LPs from Isolee, Steffi, Marco Carola, and Joel Mull, plus a crucial reissue from Aril Brikha.
Earlier this week, HousePlanetMusic uploaded this video to YouTube with the note, "An anonymous user sent us this video that appears to show Eric Prydz DJing inside a massive visual structure. It could be a promo for his new Eric Prydz In Concert (EPIC) show. We tried to contact his management but got no reply."
Sounds like a bit of viral promo to us—but with production values like this, who's complaining? Daft Punk, watch out: looks like someone has his eye on the commission for the next Tron sequel soundtrack.
Panica use the example of Hotflush artist Sepalcure's music appearing in the Oscar-nominated Black Swan to look at other examples of dance music meeting Hollywood.
