Frank Kenney

As many of you know I make music. Considering that I am an industry analyst for the largest and most influential analyst firm in the world, I guess I’m not that good at making music. That being said I love to make music.

Arguably the platinum standard in recording audio music today is Digidesign’s ProTools. You can walk into any professional studio in the world and 9 out of 10, they will be using ProTools. The beauty of this software is that it supports open standards around third-party plug-ins. Plug-ins created by third parties By are useful if I want a specific type of sound effect like a reverb or a delay. Using a drop down menu the plug-in executes and integrates with the client, in this case Pro tools.. Other Digital Audio Workstations (DAW) such as Sonar and Cubase also support open standards, some better than others, that allow me to plug-in third-party sound effects and virtual instruments. Needless to say plug-ins have been extremely valuable in the world of composition and music creation.

So when the creator of one of my favorite composition tools, Reason, decided to develop and sell a new environment for professional and semiprofessional audio recording I was ecstatic at the proposition but perplexed by Propellerhead’s decision not to support open standards around third-party plug-ins and virtual instruments. I felt that they would be doomed from the start because me, like other semiprofessional and professional musicians, like to leverage heterogeneous third-party plug-ins.

I was wrong.

For the last three weeks I’ve been beta testing Propellerhead’s Record, their new digital recording environment, and it works. It works so well and so simply that I don’t see it working and I just create. I don’t fight with conflicts in the operating system or in between clients and plug-ins, I just create. There is a very good reason why it works so darn well for me and that reason is I have been spared most of the common conflicts, error messages, blue screen of death, sad Mac, dead Mac and loss of cursor, one tends to get when using a mixture of technologies based on open standards (remember open don’t mean interoperable- an interoperable don’t mean reliable)

Much like my iPhone things hardly ever go wrong which allows me to make my phone calls and use my applications. (With all do respect to Apple when things do go wrong old boy do they go wrong!!!) This got me thinking about the information technology we use their IT environments every day. If I were to ask you, the reader, if you preferred opened or closed systems, I’d bet most of your money that you would tell me open systems and standards.

Open is good. But in reality do you really want everything open?

I mean, at some point dealing with all of the integration and interoperability issues takes you away from what you have bought the systems to do. Please understand on tap isn’t a disparaging post on ProTools, Sonar or Cubase. Their technologies do what they do very well-when I’m allowed and able to do it. But the reality is I have dealt with systems crashes, client crashes due to unreliable third-party plug-ins and plug-in crashes due to inexplicable conflicts.. Again this doesn’t take away from the strength and the robustness of these fine DAWs but the reality is analogous to any business process, such as order to cash, nothing exist in isolation. I don’t and can’t blame ProTools itself but if some plug-in is causing ProTools to crash, the end result is that I am not making music- which is my goal. If some third-party application on my open Google Android phone is it working and causes the phone to crash ,I am not getting phone calls- and that ain’t good.

So when I ask do you want a closed proprietary system or an open one or I ask, “Do you want to leverage open standards or proprietary ones?” The real answer is, “It depends on what I’m doing. Because on That I want open standards for the Internet and yes I want open standards on electricity. But I’ve want a closed system for recording and I am willing to trust the vendor, Propellerhead in this case, to deliver the innovation that I need to continue to make better music.

Kudos to Propellerhead for bucking the system and giving us what we need even though we don’t know we need it. They didn’t convince me to become a Record user because the product was so good it has so many features, no they convinced me to be a Record user because it just worked. And work consistently and let me concentrate on making music..

For more on Propellerhead Record click here
For more on Digital Audio Workstations click here
For more on my album (if you laugh I will come hunt you down) click here

Till next time
Frank