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July 30, 2007
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Music on the Mac: On location recording = easy! Greetings from the macsales.com Music Department! Introducing the new Digidesign 003 Rack audio interface! Everything you need to compose, perform, record, edit, mix, and master audio for music and desktop post production projects - with truly professional results. Following on the heels of their highly successful 002 family of interfaces, Digidesign has now upped the ante with a solid upgrade to their audio hardware. The new 003 Rack is designed to work with the Pro Tools LE software which is a very mature and full featured offering. It is certainly no light weight version of Pro Tools and it is widely used by professionals and semi pros in every corner of the world. The mere fact that Pro Tools is so widely used is a great reason to get into the Pro Tools camp. Let's look at this new interface and see what it offers! This standard 19 inch rack mount unit features 18 simultaneous channels of input and output. High speed FireWire connection and high resolution 24bit/96 kHz specifications which equals high quality professional audio. You get 8 analog inputs/outputs, 4 high quality mic preamps and 8 channels of ADAT optical input/output. With ADAT optical you can, for instance, add additional mic preamps so you can record with many mics at one time. .......perfect if you need to record a drum kit, some horns and vocals all at once. You also have midi in and out and BNC Word Clock to sync to other digital devices in your studio which is necessary if you have more than one digital device in your setup (such as a digital mixer or keyboard with digital output). All of this connectivity makes the 003 Rack the perfect "hub" of your studio setup. You can connect virtually all of your studio gear at once including mics, monitors, keyboards, guitars and effects and have it all waiting for your moment of creative inspiration. Using Pro Tools LE software, you can also create a template of your typical session, with audio, instrument, midi and master fader tracks ready to go when you start a new session. I suppose one could make a comparison to Apple's multi featured GarageBand application, but Pro Tools operates on a much deeper level. This package also includes over 60 plug-ins that are essential tools in modern music production. The plug-ins range from Reverbs to Chorus to Delay to Virtual Instruments . You also get Pitch Shift, Compression, several types of EQ, Gate, Ping Pong delay and many more. There is also a very long list of 3rd party developers who are constantly creating new, exciting and useful plug-ins for Pro Tools users. The long list of features and capabilities would correctly suggest that this is a setup for the power user, the semi-pro and pro. It would certainly make the perfect "step up" for someone who has been working with GarageBand. With GarageBand, one can see the value of a system that has everything for music production in place. Pro Tools and the 003 Rack is just the next logical step up in music production. With a system with this much creative power, there certainly is a learning curve to consider. There are some helpful and free tutorial videos at digidesign.com that show Pro Tools in action. If you want to get in on that action with professional results, Pro Tools and the 003 Rack are a guaranteed winning combination. -- Ozonic-what is it? We are constantly featuring individual products here that add productivity to your musical life. Sometimes, there is an "all-in-one" solution that does several things well. The M-Audio Ozonic fits that description perfectly. It's not just a 37 key midi/USB keyboard, it's also a FireWire audio interface and midi controller in one slick package. Add this to your laptop or desktop and you can easily record vocals via the built in mic input, guitar or bass with the instrument input and play virtual keyboard sounds with the 37 key midi keyboard. You can also use a whole host of sliders, knobs, buttons and a joystick controller to adjust and tweak the on screen parameters of your software instruments. In the "heat of the creative moment", its so nice to be able to grab a control and adjust the sound you are working with instead of having to "mouse around" to find it and then adjust it ! Heck, it even has a transport control surface so you can control the start/stop and record status of your software such as Pro Tools M-Powered. You can check out this great visual overview right on our site. The details are important so let's take a look at the Ozonic up close. It has a synth action keyboard with 37 full size keys. M-Audio is noted for their quality keyboards that players seem to like. One thing to look for are keys that feel solid and do not rock back and forth from side to side. Any rocking back and forth should be done by the player anyway! With its plethora of buttons, sliders, rotary knobs and joystick, you can freely assign all of these to get hands on control of your software instruments. This is standard stuff for keyboard players these days and Ozonic is fully equipped. As an audio interface, it happens to feature a mic input WITH phantom power for your high quality studio mics. Plugging in a guitar, bass or using the line inputs for plugging in external devices is also provided for. Those external devices could be midi keyboards that have sounds in them you want to record or tape machines, DAT players, CD players, etc. You may be doing something as simple as trying to play the virtual guitar amp/effect sounds in GarageBand. Ozonic covers all the bases!. Just plug your guitar into Ozonic, create a track for it in GarageBand and rock out! Of course, the Ozonic works flawlessly with industry leading Pro Tools M-Powered software too. This is a FireWire audio interface capable of high resolution audio...24 bit, 96 kHz audio quality. In lay-person's terms, this is double the sample rate of so-called CD quality audio. That translates into crystal clear, full frequency audio. A friend of mine has an Ozonic with her as a music major at Columbia College in Chicago. She uses it in her room, in a classroom "jam" setting and brings it to sessions at outside studios to record her music on a regular basis. This hardware has worked flawlessly in all situations and has proven to be convenient, portable and dependable. This type of music technology is supposed to make our lives more productive and streamline the creative process. The well designed Ozonic by M-Audio certainly does! Add-ons: The M-Audio Nova Condenser mic is a fabulous companion to the Ozonic. This very popular mic sounds great on everything from vocals to sax to piano and at $99, it performs like a mic costing many times it's price. Our music dept. also has top quality Mogami mic cables at great prices. The mic cable has a definite impact on sound quality, never settle for low quality cable! Don't forget about our Audio/Music Forum. We want to be your resource for answers to your questions...and let you share your experience with others too. Please find the "right stuff" at great prices here. Get our entertaining Widget called Daily Guitar Jam. Browse and read other 'Music on the Mac' articles by Roger posted online. See how Roger created The Garage Album CD at The Garage Album website. Interact with Roger and other Apple Music/Audio users in our online music and audio forums. About our Music Guru: |
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