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Like my fancy title? What I’m really going to write about is how to manage the balance between computational power and portability. This is only relevant to people who do “heavy lifting” with their computers. Most people probably don’t even need to worry about this stuff outside of just needing more storage available on-the-go. Since lots of us have experience with manual transmission cars the concept of an optimal shift point might be useful as an analogy.

Powerful computational devices (Lower Gear)

Powerful computational devices are, at the time I write this post, desktop machines, clusters and servers. Damn physics is holding us to CPUs that generate heat (and thus require vents/fans/cooling blocks that take up physical space) and consume power (which decrease battery life). Moreover many of these computationally intensive tasks still take time. I’m talking about video cross-encoding and so forth. Serious heavy lifting and shmushing digital assets against one another (yes, shmushing is a technical term and defining it is outside the scope of this post).

Portable Computational Devices (Higher Gear)

Then there’s the stuff we need to do everyday. Multiple times a day even. Like check our email. Fire up OpenOffice. Surf a little web. These tasks don’t require much shmushing or heavy lifting. As a result, no need for cooling blocks and the power consumption is lower. This is pretty frickin’ handy because we send email a lot more often than we render video or composite HDR panoramas (at least I do).

The Problem, in a nutshell

When to shift between low and high gear? What if you’re in high gear and need to shift back? What if shifting back means travelling a few hundred miles? In a car it’s easy enough to shift gears. For computers maybe not. You need to shift into the lower gear as your need for computational power increases. And you need to shift into a higher gear as your desire to be mobile increases. But sometimes you gotta move fast and haul a heavy load.

21st Century Split Shift

What if we had a place where we stored the assets (the gigandor video files or whatever) and the instructions for what to do with those assets were light-weight (like a video edit-decision list or settings for node-based compositing or whatever–something text based that a machine can use as instructions). What if we had something portable that could control, remotely, the heavy lifting (iPod Touch, MacBook Air, Kindl, Nintendo, whatever is capable of messing with an XML file I suppose). Probably, we’re going to need some sort of low-bandwidth prep-work preview VNC voodoo to get at least a glimpse of what we’re doing on our NinKindle Air, but if the heavy lifting is done by the low-gear machine maybe it’s all going to be fine. Oh yeah, we’re going to need bandwidth too.

Here’s the shopping list:

• Heavy lifting machine
• Portable machine
• Software that can do EDL-style communication between the portable machine and the heavy lifter
• Hardware that can make previews quickly
• Bandwidth to transfer the EDL from the portable machine and previews from the heavy lifter.

I’m guessing we’re damn close on this sort of thing. Aside from the software part anyway (when is Pshop going to ship with a client/server version where the client is a NinKindle and the server is an Xserve in your basement?). It’s already easy enough to use VNC on an iPod Touch to get back to a main rig. And audio server-on-the go has done a lot for pushing data back and forth.

Anyway… what do you think?

This post assumes you are on a Mac. Otherwise you may be wondering what the hell I mean when I talk about “the Dock” because I’m not talking about where my cousin parks his Mumba.

Purpose of post:

Get the most out of your Macintosh by eliminating distractions.

Assumptions (and yes, Frau Berg told me already: ASS-U-ME aka assumptions make an ass out of u and me):

You have too much crap in your doc. It shines and wiggles and you’ve never made a conscious choice about what is there. If this is not you, read no further.
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I love music. I love toys. I love design. I love well designed music toys even more.

For the past few years, Rax has filled that void for me; the perfect computer-brain to mash-up with my whatever-input-I-have-handy funtimes. You know, load up some funkay bass, put it through that wackjob AU effect thinger and then go to town with your Nostromo right? Right? Bueller? Anyway.

For the past year or so or maybe longer even… Rax fell on hard times. You see, the folks who made Rax also made another app. This other app was wildly successful and truly required their attention (the app in question is the very very kick-ass and broad-market-appealable ComicLife, but for now, gnash your teeth with me, even if just to humor me). And so, our dear friend Rax… was homeless.

But, being much beloved, Rax found a new home. A home which you can read about in the latest installment of N0D3 Outbound: Rax Finds a Home.

I just got both the Behringer BCF2000 and Logic Express 7.2. This is, after a fair bit of consideration and contemplation, what I consider to be the first step up from GarageBand and: a Powerwave (for people who don’t have bands with drums) or a Firepod (for people who do have bands with drums).

Behringer makes decent gear at a great price. They save their money on documentation. You might as well put their manuals in the WC for better use. Which brings us to the How-To.
How to set up the BCF2000 to work well with Logic Express 7.2
Goal:

Make the BCF2000 do it’s best to emulate the Logic Control MIDI controller to the best of the BCF2000’s ability and as quickly as possible.

Before you proceed: This article is not for you if you have rotary knob BCR2000, but here’s a link

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