By Ken Berger Publisher ProSoundWeb

Those of us who have been in the pro audio business long enough can remember when Tascam created the “semi-pro” segment of the industry.

First, for you not-so-old-timers… Tascam introduced a range of products, from compact four-track sync tape recorders to the cool looking slide-fader consoles, all priced considerably lower than the big stuff (Neve, Ampex, MCI, etc). This gear used hi-fi RCA style connectors and had output of –10dBM instead of the usual professional “standard” output of balanced +4dB.

And, all of this gear eventually merged together as the big boys made increasingly more cost-effective units while the little guys made bigger and bigger units. The end result was much greater availability of “real” recording gear that in turn brought a significant magnitude increase in the number of people in the audio production field.

Computer-based audio recording, in effect, has already had the same impact by enabling anyone possessing a computer outfitted with a sound card and A/D and D/A, along with some software, to build an effective (if limited) project recording studio.

However, these tools have been hobbled from the outset - many of them were designed before computers were really ready to do the job properly and/or they were designed by great programmers who were not so great (or not at all) recording engineers.

Yet if you invest enough time and money in these tools, you can still produce very good recordings and do things with automation and processing that were almost (if not completely) impossible just a few years ago outside of a world-class studio. While the existing main players in the desktop recording/production market all have good products and strong organizations, they also have a lot of legacy baggage in their hardware, their software - and especially - their user interfaces.

Enter Apple. Its purchase of Emagic, combined with other technologies acquired over the past few years, hold the potential to totally remake and expand the industry once again. That is, if Apple - in a reasonable amount of time - can bring to market a family of software products with open hardware, file and plug-in architectures.

Apple has not always managed to profit and succeed with its attempts to expand technology and markets in the past - remember the logic board-based DSP of the “Quadra AV systems,” hypercard multimedia software, and Geo-Port, not to mention the Newton and the Cube. But the company has been on a roll lately in terms of adding specialty technology and products with their world-leading user interface design, industrial design and quality control. It’s resulted in a series of software that has re-created segment after segment of application products.

Apple bought the rights/code from Soundjam and it was the basis of iTunes, with the new iPhoto doing it again for digital photography. iMovie / Final Cut Pro (based on Apple's purchase of Macromedia Inc.'s video-editing operation) and iDVD / DVD Studio Pro (based on technology purchased from Astarte GmbH) are even more interesting and applicable to the current discussion because they have truly recreated the big market for desktop video production. In fact, this has been done at two levels.

At the consumer level, iMovie - included free with all new Macs and of course supplied with all necessary hardware as standard or an option - has brought thousands and maybe even millions of new users into the market for home or “pro light” video production. Their bigger siblings - Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro- have taken over the middle ground and are even putting pressure on the higher end as computer power continues to increase while software continues to be refined.

The Emagic deal makes Apple’s direction clear: The company intends to make the Mac and OS X the dominate platform for the creative market, and they see that market as all media, including audio. We can expect that Apple will roll out a marketing campaign over the next few years (or sooner), saying “if you do audio, you need a Mac.” This will expand the market and make desktop audio perhaps as pervasive as desktop publishing is today.



For more information on the PSW exclusive coverage Apple & Emagic commentary, click here.