SoundCode for DTS Plug-in Suite For Pro Tools available

SoundCode for DTS Plug-in Suite provides mastering-quality workflow tools that enable encoding and decoding of DTS Digital Surround, 96/24, and ES audio directly within Pro Tools HD, Pro Tools LE, and Pro Tools M-Powered systems.

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US$1k. I wish DTS encode/decode were more accessible (read affordable). AC3 comes with DVD Studio Pro for example and although Apple’s app will deal with DTS encoded files you need to buy other (expensive) software to do the encoding.

Shure – E Series

E500PTH Sound Isolating Earphones
Triple Hi-Definition Drivers

Ergonomic and lightweight sound isolating earphones offer the most accurate audio reproduction from both portable and home stereo audio sources—for the ultimate in precision highs and rich low end.

Shure has some new high-end headphones with some pretty cool technology. Along with the tech specs there are flash demos at the site.

Call For Producer/Engineer Submissions for NPR’s “All Things Considered”

The folks at NPR are working on a series called “The Best Music You’ve Never Heard,” and are calling on producer/engineers who may have some of that music in their collection.

NPR’s Alison MacAdam describes what they’re after:

“Memorable songs you recorded that were never released…tape that was too good to throw out. The amazing guitar or trumpet solo, the brilliant cover song that got cut from the album, the track that the record company deemed too edgy to publish. Classical, jazz, rock, country, folk, etc. Fully-produced or not.

Cool idea

Clear Channel, the Dot Com

Under the noses of a lot of broadcasters Clear Channel is becoming an Internet company.

[snip]

Says CCU’s Evan Harrison:

We no longer just compete with AOL and Yahoo or Entercom and CBS — we’re now an audio and a visual business competing with most media companies for audience as it pertains to entertainment, music and news, etc.

Smart.

In the future, you’ll increasingly see our radio stations used as the promotional arms for our websites rather than vice versa.

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HD Radio dumps the “HD”

While it is not wrong that all these channels should be available on conventional radios, it does yet again raise the spectre of a central marketing and communication issue: “HD Radio” is a bad and confusing label that promises something the audience does not want and does not even understand.

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Hear 2.0 dumps on HD.

Putting Vorbis and FLAC back in iTunes

Two of the best and most popular audio formats—FLAC and ogg vorbis—have returned to iTunes thanks to an open source plug-in.

[snip]
FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec. Unlike formats such as ogg vorbis or MP3, FLAC is (as the name states) lossless, meaning that no data is lost in the recording or conversion process, making FLAC suitable for archival purposes.

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Sony’s David Smith Dies

David Smith, vice president of audio engineering and R&D at Sony Music Studios in New York City, died suddenly on Saturday, June 17, while at his mother’s Long Island home. Smith was 55, and is survived by his mother, two sisters, and a brother.

This is old news by now but it was news to me tonight. How horrible. I met David a couple of times through friends at Sony in New York. I saw him many times at AES conventions and always thought that we in the audio community were so fortunate to have someone so dedicated to sound quality in such an important position. It seemed to me that he’d been given license to pursue things which simply wouldn’t have been supported elsewhere. Sad news.

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Iomega doubles REV drive to 70GB

The Rev is a younger, better version of Zip (there was Jaz in between). A lot more space than DVD’s or even Hi-Def DVD’s with 70GB storage space. And unlike DVD’s, you can rewrite and treat the media just like a drive. Iomega seems to have a learned a lesson from its past as the new drives utilize “the same ruggedized, removable, 2.5-inch 70GB REV disks as well as backward read/write compatibility with first-generation REV 35GB disks.” The new drives cost $599 with each disk costing $69. This is a very useful product, an ideal back-up solution. I hope Iomega’s policies continue to get better because its policies saddle their great products.

(via MacNN)

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I’m getting tired of waiting for huge archives to back up to tape. This looks interesting. But hard drive prices keep dropping and capacity keeps going up.

Graffletopia: Film & Television stencils

Omni Graffle comes pre-installed in many new Macs, it is a great app to yourself organized. I have previously written on some of its uses in video production. Graffletopia is a site that collects stencils that can be used within Graffle. They have a category for Film and Television which already contains some useful stencils (5 as of this writing) for filmmakers and cinematographers. I am hoping more will show up. If you are one of those people who have ambitions to create these stencils, could you get the storyboard thing right.

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Going Universal: Audio Developers Catch the Wave

To help understand what you stand to gain and what problems you might encounter, ADC recently interviewed several key developers in the music and sound industry about their experience going universal. The responses make some valuable points for any Mac developer, whether you can code a tune or not.

B.J. Buchalter of Metric Halo is one of those interviewed in this ADC article. Sonic Studio has partnered with MH in developing their new line of software. Sonic is working on porting their software to Universal.