So far in this erudite series, we have concentrated solely – and pretty doggedly – on the hardware selections available to users of digital audio workstations. In this installment, while keeping the adrenalin running fast for all you gear hounds, we’ll take a step back for some perspective on two of the myriad reasons for purchasing all this gleaming hardware with crisply applied brand names.

While fame and fortune might appear at the top of our wish list, in more prosaic terms the reasons for any purchase is to satisfy a customer’s needs. Of course, that “customer” may be you, as the composer of a theme and score for a new TV series, for example, who needs to ensure that the various elements can be recorded and edited to picture before being turned over to the re-recording crew for integration within next week’s show.

What we need to appreciate of course, is that we don’t operate in a vacuum. Material for a project can arrive in a variety of media formats – some of which we recognize; some of which we don't – and may need to leave a workstation in a different format to accommodate the requirements of individuals or facilities involved in subsequent stages of the project. And this situation need not to be as daunting as one might first consider. (I know that the mind recoils in abject horror at the thought of a removable hard drive arriving with an odd connector format, or the reality of a project that mounts on a remotely-connected drive yet steadfastly refuses to be recognized by our current choice of DAW.)

As with everything, clear communications among all involved will minimize difficulties. For example, if you are being asked to prepare a original-music track for an industrial video, be certain to ask what the video format will be, and also insist that it contain standard, SMPTE-format timecode (resolved to a high-precision clock reference). QuickTime or AVI-format movies are all very cute, but a real pain in the posterior to synchronize if you are new to the random-access post production game. And if a client expects you or your facility to assemble and clean up a number of dialog tracks, for example, and add some looped voice lines plus some Foley elements (either recorded live or added from an effects CD), then it is not unreasonable to ask that the elements arrive in a format you can access, and which can be assembled into a viable project. (Assuming, which of course we cannot, that the client is unable to send us a “Work-in-Progress” ProTools, Digital Performer or Nuendo session, if that is our workstation of choice.) And it might not be unreasonable to ask what data formats the client can handle on the re-recording or dubbing stage, if elements need to be incorporated into a large project.

Will it plug ‘n’ play? (click on image for full size)

So if it’s a matter of inloading tracks into an existing session, we need to make sure that the media on which they arrive can be read by our Mac/Windows or proprietary-based workstation, and that the data is in a format that can be accessed directly or imported via a speedy translation utility.

While a full explanation of the various recording media and file-formats we might encounter will be the subject of the next installment from your intrepid Technical Guru, rest assured that most Macintosh and Windows systems can read the popular flavors of removable disk drives and cartridges, and that with a little forethought we can ensure that the files in question can be imported easily into the project. (And if we encounter, for example, a .WAVE file, there are several translation utilities from a number of vendors that can turn these into AIFF or even SDII formats for direct access by Macintosh platforms.)