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BRING THEM UP TO SPEED with the tutorial, dazzle them with the product, then wow them with a demo of what the product will do for them. If the script for a great product presentation goes like this, then the script for the April DACS General Meeting came pretty close to being great. Our presenter was Frank Powers from Voyetra Technologies, assisted by Mike Kelly, also from Voyetra. The product was Voyetra's software and hardware for creating the audio portion of a multimedia application. Adding audio to a computer display makes it better. Adding custom audio, combining recorded voice, sound effects, and synthesizer music, all selected for and synched to the display, makes it spectacular. With Mike handling the computer and Frank doing the commentary, the two demonstrated Voyetra's Digital Orchestrator Pro as an impressive software package that easily edits multitrack recordings from various external audio sources. The edited audio was played through a Turtle Beach Pinnacle soundboard on an impressive rig of sound equipment provided by Eastcoast Music Mall of Danbury. Voyetra has been producing professional-level audio software for computers since 1979. In 1996 the company combined with Turtle Beach, the pioneer of great sound on PCs, which has taken all the Oscars for high-end soundboards since 1990. This synergistic mating gave rise to Voyetra's Pinnacle Project Studio, a coordinated package of editing software and soundboard. While there are more expensive systems on the market, Frank and Mike made a pretty convincing case that Project Studio can handle most anything this side of Hollywood. Street prices for Digital Orchestrator Pro are about $135, the Turtle Beach Pinnacle Pro soundboard is about $380, and the bundling of the two plus various extras in Pinnacle Project Studio runs about $500. Frank and Mike opened their presentation with the usual adjustments and testing of equipment and then belted out a showtime musical theme they labeled "Voyetra Beach Party." It was great sound to a solid Calypso beat that elicited a spontaneous round of applause from the audience, probably a first for an opening to a DACS presentation. Frank then went into his tutorial on the basics and buzzwords. In the audience, Margaret Arnold, a schoolteacher and keyboard artist but not a computer maven, found it helpful. Dave King, a local musician who creates music in his home studio using the Pinnacle soundboard, was way ahead of the curve on this part of the program but felt it was well presented and effective. Next came the in-depth tour of just what Voyetra's Orchestrator Pro can do with component sound elements. Frank emphasized the similarity to a word processor as he sliced, diced, and blended audio components in much the way we process text and graphics. He cut out segments of an audio waveform and recombined them with modifications and enhancements. Working with MIDI tracks, Frank substituted other voices for the originals and showed the manipulations built in to the editor including SMPTE support for locking and synchronization and transposing keys. For overall effect, he combined audio recordings with MIDI signals. Frank used his mandolin for input to the Orchestrator Pro editor to demonstrate its digital audio capabilities. Technically the demo was a clever and effective way of illustrating the versatility of the editor. From the audience's viewpoint, however, both Margaret and Dave would also liked to have seen a demonstration of input from a MIDI keyboard. The razzle-dazzle looked difficult to Margaret, but she could follow the time/event lines, and the waveform representations made sense. Dave said, "The capabilities are there for just about any requirement of a professional production." The final segment of the presentation was a demo of just how effective a multimedia production can be. Frank combined videoclips of his recent house-hunting venture with audio recordings of his wife's comments, his own comments, and his ubiquitous mandolin. The result conveyed the kind of multimedia impact that people in the audience could use in their own situations —meetings, sales promotionals, Web pages, or wherever powerful impact is needed to leverage a message. It sounded great to Margaret, but Dave felt that it could have been presented much more effectively had the audio equipment been better adjusted and the audio recordings been of a higher quality. To Dave, the 97 dB signal-to-noise ratio and the digital I/O capabilities on the Pinnacle soundboard provided a level of audio excellence that was not fully achieved during the presentation due to the source material utilized. The presentation by the Voyetra people was very well planned and presented. It was at the level of professional excellence that characterizes the top tier of DACS General Meetings. We learned a bit, watched a system that can do just about everything we would need, and saw the jolt that multimedia editing can give to our apps. And it was delightfully entertaining. |
| Jack Corcoran is a retired computer programmer who has abandoned his Fortran and Assembly background for the fun stuff. |
