Know what I like best about this job? That the income I derive from it has allowed me to purchase a cozy vacation chateau in the south of France? Nope. It's that I get to talk to people who use current and developing technologies to advance the state of the industry in creative ways. Occasionally, research helps me to solve a problem of my own or even allows me to be of service to this column's readers.
This is one of those times. My goal this month is to create a piece that deals with digital workstations, hopefully in a way that avoids simply rehashing what has been said about them in the last year or so. The focus must be on you, the end-user of these products. In a competitive market there are always opportunities for the small-business person. The audio post market is ripe with possibilities. Why? DAWs have dropped dramatically in price, as have digital consoles. All of the tools you need to transform a project studio originally designed for music applications into a fully functional audio post room are in place.
Still, before your schedule is fully booked with audio post sessions, you'll most likely need to augment your income with other kinds of work. How many of your clients have a web presence, and how can you serve their audio needs? Do you know how to edit and prepare the tracks a client develops in your studio for the Internet? In very little time I went from knowing nothing about this stuff to being able to make intelligent decisions about these kinds of assignments. You can too.
I used a single software application — Bias Peak — running on a Mac workstation and ported the entire contents of an album of my chamber music, Many Streams, One River, over to a computer. Relying on some key advice from Jeff Lipton, vice president of audio solutions at Pulse, a company that specializes in preparing audio for the Web, and the combination of Jason Davies, vice president of worldwide sales, and Zac Wheatcroft, product specialist at Bias, the company that wrote Peak, I was able to edit and assemble selections from the album and email the results to web designer Paul Aston.
Getting started
First, audio must be captured. I know that sounds pretty basic, but in order to cover all the bases let's explicitly state that different hardware and software combinations handle this task differently. My workstation is a Mac, which runs Paris, the E-MU recording/editing environment, and a bunch of plug-ins, including those that are Paris-specific and some VSTs that are not.
Peak is a dedicated stereo editing program that was very good when it was released in the mid-'90s and continues to improve. Peak supports two audio I/O standards on the Mac, Sound Manager, and ASIO. It also can access all of the VST plug-ins that reside in my computer. In this case, I had the entire contents of my album on a hard drive as Sound Designer II files, so I didn't have to record them a second time. I simply opened them within Peak.
It was easy to edit the 19 cuts into snippets that could be downloaded or streamed. Peak has some sophisticated editing functions, although I didn't need them for this task. Simply finding a point in about 45 seconds that was a musical place to say sayonara, and using the default setting to execute a fade-out over the 10 seconds or so worked fine. About an hour later, I had a Peak playlist that held all 19 trimmed cuts (actually copies, not the originals) in a folder labeled “Web Cuts.”
Finding the right compression
Next came an important decision: How much or how little should the files be compressed? Peak VST 2.62 saves files in several web-acceptable formats, including Real Audio 5.0, Shockwave, and MP3.
“Almost all codecs compress the audio using MP3 technology,” says Pulse's Lipton. “With some variations, the quality of the audio they yield is similar. Obviously, the basic rule is that the less compression you apply, the better the audio sounds.”
Lipton adds: “Your first and most important decision involves accurately targeting your playback market. If you're creating audio for an inhouse network that has very fast access to the Internet, you won't need to apply a lot of compression. But if you're sending the files to a broad user base, you'll have to use a lot more. A safe decision would be, in cases where audio is being prepared for wide distribution, to downsample your files to 22.050kHz and then compress them for delivery over a 28.8kbps Internet connection.”
It's also wise to choose a codec that the greatest number of potential listeners will have on their computer. Shockwave is excellent, and is especially good at handling audio that needs to integrate with video elements. However, Lipton recommends that you save in the Real Audio format because of the deep market penetration it has achieved and the relatively small file size of the RealPlayer.
With experience, one presumably will get better at anticipating how the intense compression that must be applied to turn audio into small files affects their quality, and will be able to process them to retain as much of their original fidelity as possible. That's what companies like Pulse specialize in. I decided to let Real Audio handle the task on its own because my goal was to establish a web presence as soon as possible. Over time I'll play around and possibly replace the selections with higher quality versions.
Peak handles a number of tasks well. Its ability to batch process files is outstanding. I simply created a folder named “Web Cuts RA,” highlighted all of the files in “Web Cuts,” and told Peak to save them using the Real Audio format at the specs listed above.
You can get quite involved in preparing audio files for the Internet, and clients may be prepared to book extra hours to let you do just that. Some sites, for example, offer both high quality (limited compression and possibly no downsampling from the 44.1kHz Red Book standard) and low quality (heavily stomped) versions.
Why? The “stomped” version with more compression downloads quickly and is fine for auditioning purposes. Even those who have fast access might prefer to listen to these files first, and then, if the material is deemed worthy of a download, go for the primo-quality cuts.
At the end of the day, it's all about serving the needs of your client. Unless you specialize in web audio, there will be circumstances where you'll pass your clients' projects along to a house that does this kind of work on a daily basis.
However, with the simple addition of a stereo audio editor like Peak, you can turn your Mac into a DAW that can handle any task related to preparing your clients' sound files for the Internet.
