The music technology blogosophere continues to expand, now with an excellent new site dedicated to film scoring. The site also has a bonus: its name begins with the word “Create”, which means it can join CDM’s unofficial “Create [Stuff]” network!
Jerome Leroy, an L.A.-based music systems technician, is editing the new site. Jerome tells CDM he works as a studio technician and technical assistant and had a specific “thirst for film music tech news” that led him to start his own specialized resource. We’re of course always happy to see the community of practical sites for digital musicians growing, so this is great news — welcome, Jerome!
Among the early articles is a great piece on assembling farms of Mac minis to help process samples for Vienna Instruments and their massive Symphonic Cube package. The minis are a little underpowered in the hard drive department, but thanks to a cheap price and fast processor, they can be an economical way of adding necessary sample-processing power. The article also details composer John Frizzell’s setup, which originally, like a lot of film composers, used a Mac as the main machine and PC slaves for GigaStudio; Frizzell has sinced switched to an all-Mac rig of three G5s. Jerome says this is the first of a series; we’ll be watching:
Mac minis as VSL Farms: An Overview
Related: CDM’s resident game composer talked to Tomb Raider’s Troels Brun Folmann, who uses a similarly massive computer farm for his music. His setup: one master computer, eight sample slaves, all PC. (His sample library of choice is East West’s Symphonic Library XP rather than Vienna’s.)
Got a sampler farm of your own? Let us know about it. (Don’t worry, we won’t get into pissing contests over who has the most computers — for those of us who don’t need to use enormous orchestral libraries, one machine often does just fine!)