The Marschall Acoustics
Instruments Digital Audio Workstation Mk III (continued)
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The Marschall Acoustics Instruments
Digital Audio Workstations are serious audio content creation tools for
use by full-time professionals: recording engineers, musicians,
composers, and other audio media artists and researchers. The
majority of systems are used for the creation of audio soundtracks for
video or in the teaching of music and recording arts.
The systems are fairly self-contained although they require hookup to an external (VESA standard) video monitor. Common media network interfaces are included for fast connection to a back-end rendering farm (as in video rendering used for effects and digital colour grading) and external professional audio equipment. As far as possible, the hardware employs industry standard high reliability parts and the software is open source. This ensures customers will be able to support and maintain their investment in the equipment, the skills developed operating the equipment, and most importantly the content created on that equipment. Unlike hobbyist equipment and software, there are no secret proprietary formats, keys, dongles, and other impediments to user creativity with our 'bit of kit' - just plug it in and start creating. Overall speed and performance are also considerably smoother and faster than retail store 'boxed set solutions'. Competent and 'skilled in the art' electronics engineers can modify the hardware. Similarly, skilled programmers can modify and add to the software. The MAI DAW Mk III includes several professional recording packages. The most powerful of these is Ardour, which is arguably the most powerful piece of recording software ever written (as of the year 2008) when mated to appropriate hardware. Below is a screenshot of Ardour being used on a rather trivial (stereo) recording.
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Below
is an example of the Sweep audio editor
being used to edit a percussion sample. Other audio editing tools
on the MAI DAW Mk III include the well known and popular Audacity and Rezound
packages. Each has its advantages with somewhat of a
tradeoff between power and ease of use. A wide range of analysis
tools are also supplied including the most excellent Sonic Visualizer.
Tools to restore old audio recordings include Gnome Wave Cleaner.
The
actual hardware of the Marschall Acoustics Instruments Digital Audio
Workstation Mk III is quite small. A customer's (Macquarie
University) workstation is shown below (it is the small black box
with
the gold label to the left of the photo):
As
can be seen, the workstation is sufficiently small that it (together
with a mini-keyboard and mouse) fit under an airline seat when carried
in its optional carrying case. Much more powerful and robust than
a laptop, yet almost as portable for mobile recording. The
hardware specification (as of early 2008) can be downloaded from here. Hardware and software are
subject to continuous improvement. Custom configurations
are our speciality! Free
downloads
of musical selections produced with the Marschall Acoustics
Instruments
digital audio workstation are available
here . |
