Thanks to my friend Matt for this video. This clip is of HIS old band but some bonehead father does something terribly stupid in the audience. Watch and enjoy…
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Why ProTools Sucks
I’ve added a new category: “Why ProTools Sucks.”
This section will be where I voice my opinion about Digidesign’s ProTools digital audio recording hardware/software. ProTools has become the industry standard in the recording world. It’s the buzz word everyone always knows.
But in my opinion there are many systems out there which can do what ProTools does, even better. Add that to the fact that you can get these systems for a fraction of what ProTools costs… Customer service? Yeah well i remember calling a 900 number for my ProTools questions, paying $3/minute, being on hold for 47 minutes and then getting asked “did you plug it in?” There goes $150 bucks… But if you have thousands of extra dollars to waste on an overpriced recording system, I guess you can pay $150 bucks to be on hold for 47 minutes.
CAN’T SELECT MULTIPLE MARKERS
I’m editing this book on CD. It’s a 350 page book where the author has read the entire thing. The author has a speech impediment and screws up constantly. So there are over 3000 markers in this ProTools project, each is an edit or fix that needs to be done.
I’ve got the book edited and now I need to get rid of most of the 3000 markers and put new ones in. So about 2800 of the markers need to be deleted. Should be easy, right? Just select a marker, hold down the shift key, then select the end of the group you want to delete….right? WRONG. You can’t select multiple markers in ProTools. You can delete ALL the markers, but you can’t say select 30 of them and delete them, leaving the rest.
I have the choice of deleting all 3000 markers, and losing the 200 I want to keep. Or I can delete 2800 markers, one at a time. Oh you can’t just hit the delete key when you have a marker selected either. You have to select the marker, then use a pull down menu to select “clear marker.” This process would take me close to 10,000 mouse clicks on this project. Is digidesign willing to pay my doctor bill for ligament damage which I’ll incur from clicking my mouse so many times?
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Great gig tonight
I enjoyed playing tonight. Enjoyed bashing the shit out of the skins… Tonight my bass player of 25 years, who’d moved away, was back in town. I haven’t seen him for 10 months, but we locked in like he’d never left and made some rock & roll. I had a great time, didn’t care much about the crowd (though it was decent)…
I miss my old bass player. The new girl doesn’t play like he does. She’s sort of wimpy and doesn’t know the tunes or have a decent tone…
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3 gigs, 3 bands, 4 days
I’ve got a busy weekend coming up. I play three different gigs in three different bands in a four day span…
One of the gigs the big studio I’m at is doing right now is a book on tape or book on CD as the case may be. The guy reading has a lot of “issues” with his pronunciation and English skills.
So he’s read his entire book into three different ProTools sessions. Each session is at least 400 minutes. Each session also has about 1000 out-takes or flubs which need to be edited out.
I volunteered to edit the book, knowing that there was a lot of material and it would be a good gig for a while. They initially had someone else doing it but now they’ve given the edit to me.
So the studio bought a Digidesign MBox Pro, which comes with ProTools LE and I’ve got it set up in my living room. I’ve edited for three hours so far and I’m getting into the flow. It’s taking about an hour to edit 10 pages of the book and the book is 350 pages. I’m sure I’ll get faster and by the time I’m done with this sucker I’ll have my first evaluation and impressions of ProTools LE and the MBox on my Apple MacBook.
Stay tuned.