Boomrecorder questions

TVSound

TVSound

Active member
i am interested in boomrecorder setups. i will be doing a show soon and am thinking of this for main recorder. If you use a macbook(not the pro) what is the setup if there is only the 1 firewire port. i know that firewire external drive takes the load off the computer, but how are you plugging in the mixer?

Also, whats the benefit of a mixer to something like a motu traveler as opposed to a mixer with firewire like the mackie onyx series, if there is a benefit.

How reliable is the system if you use the computer as dedicated recorder? any crashes? is a backup needed?

between a yamaha like 01v or 03d and mackie onyx, what would be a better way to go? or phil, do you use alesis, and why?

I will also need to go into the back of a van for some parts. how do you power the mixer? is there a conversion cable for a BDS system using np1?

thx in advance. i read boomrecorder website, wexler forum, and ramps, but couldnt find all the answers
 
The motu traveler is how you interface with the computer you can run direct outs from your mixer into motu. It's all personal preference if you allready have a mixer you can add the traveler, but if you are starting from scrach I would say go with onyx. Most people I've heard using this set up records a back up either on a PD-4 DAT or one of the digital recorders like the 744T
good luck
 
I'll try to answer most of your questions:

First, most mixers have a "pass-through" setup for firewire (the Alesis and the Mackies do). This means you have two FW ports one to the computer and one to the hard disk. Many of the hard drives also have dual ports for this very purpose.

As far as going with a USB drive, you can, but you will get better performance with FW - A very technical friend of mine once told me that USB goes through the system bus, while FW does not.

As for why Alesis vs. Mackie - price/performance. People I respect had said good things about the Alesis, so that's the way I went.

As far as reliability, there are two answers to that question. For Boom Recorder, it is amazingly solid. Take Vos (the author of BR) has done a great job of fixing problems when found, and adding new features on a regular basis. As far as the hardware goes, a MacBook is going to be as reliable as any other recorder that uses a hard disk - there are parts that can fail on any recorder, but Apple's QC is generally pretty good. There is a caveat to my statement here - this presumes you are not using this same computer for web browsing, and adding lots of other software. Treat it as a dedicated system and I think you will be fine.

There are probably ways to power the mixer via battery, but I'm not completely familiar with them. For smaller setups like in a van, I did buy Mackie Onyx Satellite, which is fully powered by the FW port and has two balanced ins and works very well with Boom Recorder. I'm actually recording a Webinar as I type this using the Satellite and BR.

Hope this helps.

Phil
 
Phil and I have similar set ups (partially because I used a lot of advice from him). I do a lot less production recording than he does but have done more this year than ever before and about half with BR.

I've been using a USB2 drive rather than FW. It was originally as a quick cheap backup drive then I tested it with BR and it worked really well. I had a few exchanges with the developer about various drives, I was planning on using a ESATA drive with BR, and the jist was that if your under 30 tracks or so there should be no big difference between USB2, FW and ESATA. Something about the way the system writes to disk may make the ESATA LESS stable than the others. As I understand it FW will wright smoother to the drive and USB2 will be a bit more "bursty" so you will see the buffer fill a bit then flush where FW will tend to pass through is a smoother fashion. I have seen this but with 72 tracks (48/24) writing to disk I never saw the buffer get more than a third full. In practice I have never written more than 24 tracks (12 channels writing to two different folders - same drive (one a -6 safety)). With 24 files I get a periodic 1/60 - 1/30 wedge of the buffer before it flushes. In the five or six jobs I've used BR for I have never had an error. I did have one when setting up and testing (if BR has an error it aborts the record and increments the retry number) but that was fixed by changing the buffer setting. RTFM is a good thing.
I use the Alesis because it fit my budget, got good reports and Phil recommended it. What it doesn't have that I would miss if I were doing regular feature work is
1) input limiters
2) pre-fader direct out to the FW (computer). The faders effect the level sent to the computer so there is no way to get a "mix" and discrete outs that don't have level changes.

The Traveler and other such boxes don't have sliders, don't usually have a lot of mic in's. So depending on what your feeding the box that may or may not work for you with out an external mixer.

Onyx from what I gather solves problem (2) with the Alesis but not (1).

Onyx with FW card ~~$1500
Traveler ~~$1000
Alesis (16 channel) ~~$400

Traveler doesn't need AC, Onyx needs AC, Alesis looks like it could be batt powered with out too much trouble, but comes needing AC.

The Yamaha's seem over kill to me and would definitely need AC.

Crashes back up etc. Now this isn't a recommendation but I use my Mac Book Pro (first gen, so closer to Mac Book of today) for a lot of things and 99% of my work is not production recording so it's not practical for me to use it as a dedicated recorder. It also has FCS and Protools installed along with a lot of office software etc. Anyway as I said I'm not recommending it but with all the other junk loaded on this box BR has been a rock of stability. I'm not running other apps while using BR, though when testing I did have mail and Safari going at one time. So I think the BR MacBook combo is very stable even when it's not a dedicated recorder.
 
You can use your mac for anything and everything.

They key is to have all of the services and applications shut down you are not using when recording.

Unlike Windows, OS X is a fully POSIX compliant implementation of Unix (a BSD namely Darwin).

It will not leak memory and use resources when programs are not running.

Windows, on the other hand, get's it's kernel jacked up pretty easy with additional installs and just over time.

Finally, for the Record, I am all about using Windows XP and Windows XP Embedded and am actually not a fanboi nor hater of XP or OS X.

I actually prefer FreeBSD and PCBSD. :D
 
ptalsky said:
I'll try to answer most of your questions:

First, most mixers have a "pass-through" setup for firewire (the Alesis and the Mackies do). This means you have two FW ports one to the computer and one to the hard disk. Many of the hard drives also have dual ports for this very purpose.

As far as going with a USB drive, you can, but you will get better performance with FW - A very technical friend of mine once told me that USB goes through the system bus, while FW does not.

As for why Alesis vs. Mackie - price/performance. People I respect had said good things about the Alesis, so that's the way I went.

As far as reliability, there are two answers to that question. For Boom Recorder, it is amazingly solid. Take Vos (the author of BR) has done a great job of fixing problems when found, and adding new features on a regular basis. As far as the hardware goes, a MacBook is going to be as reliable as any other recorder that uses a hard disk - there are parts that can fail on any recorder, but Apple's QC is generally pretty good. There is a caveat to my statement here - this presumes you are not using this same computer for web browsing, and adding lots of other software. Treat it as a dedicated system and I think you will be fine.

There are probably ways to power the mixer via battery, but I'm not completely familiar with them. For smaller setups like in a van, I did buy Mackie Onyx Satellite, which is fully powered by the FW port and has two balanced ins and works very well with Boom Recorder. I'm actually recording a Webinar as I type this using the Satellite and BR.

Hope this helps.

Phil
Click to expand...

So you are just going Mackie Onyx Satellite and using BR to set your levels?

How are you set up?
 
No, my primary mixer is the Alesis Firewire 16. I use the Satellite when I need something small and portable (for recording VO's for example when I have to go to the customer site, or recording Webinars and Podcasts that are telephone-based). The Satellite has basic level management.

Phil
 
ptalsky said:
No, my primary mixer is the Alesis Firewire 16. I use the Satellite when I need something small and portable (for recording VO's for example when I have to go to the customer site, or recording Webinars and Podcasts that are telephone-based). The Satellite has basic level management.

Phil
Click to expand...



Cool.. that's what I was trying to ask.

How is the sound from the Satellite?

Do you have any samples?

Is it clean and warm or?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top