As multimedia shops have matured our needs increasingly expand into the areas of music production. Not long ago adding music to client projects meant hiring outside composers, musicians and recording studios. This is still the option of choice for high-end projects, but is beyond most modest production budgets. While modest projects can be satisfied with stock music and lower end music tools, creative control is stymied.

After much discussion and thought, here is the list of hardware we ended up with, and why. Keep in mind that our choices were made based on the idea of keeping it real. While it’s fun to play with all the top-of-the-line toys, we wanted to keep this studio set-up to a cost most shops [...]

Once the hardware was all chosen and installed we turned our attention to Cubase. Installing the program was reasonably smooth until we came to their hardware keys and found out the drivers were problematic. Doing some research online we found we were not the only ones having issues so we contacted support line for the [...]

The basic Cubase 4.0 package came with a rather large number of free virtual instruments and five synthesizers. The virtual instruments are part of a package that Steinberg calls their HALion One Collection which includes instruments from 18 different categories like Drum & Perc(ussion), Guitar Plucked, Keyboard, Piano, Strings, Woodwinds, Sound FX, etc. Each category [...]

We will start this section by saying everything in this review worked well. But since nothing is without some issues—especially complex hardware/software—we wanted to share with you some of the minor hurdles we encountered, and a few pet peeves.
CUBASE: On Windows only a few select pallets are allowed outside the program window. That [...]

Costs & Budget
So how did we do on our budget? We came right in on the mark! Granted, this was accomplished by going for a few used items, the keyboard and playback system. But you could get excellent new hardware for the same prices and stay on budget. For example, the $700 we spend on [...]

Has it really been forty years since we—the cultural “we”—hit our height of love and creativity? What was it that made 1967 so special, special enough to look back upon one particular summer over a generation later with equal parts wonder and regret for its distance?

You can tell from our reviews that we liked this new release very much. However there were a few things we had issue with. On the whole it’s a great release and its price point would almost make our complaining sound like petty nit-picking. Except for the fact we are not talking about a mid-level [...]

The new Production Bundle has changed since the old CS2 release. Adobe has acquired a number of companies, including Macromedia and Serious Magic, so there are more toys for each bundle. The Production Premium package now has an incredible amount of software, including: After Effects Professional, Premiere Pro, Photoshop Extended, Illustrator and Flash Professional.

Along with Flash, Encore is the one other application in the suite that takes care of the packaging and delivery of your content. This time around however Encore will not only deliver to disk, it will also steal some of Flash’s thunder and deliver to the web. More on that soon. Encore is [...]