Audio Collaboration in the Network Age
by Philip De Lancie
With digitally enabled advances in individual productivity now taken for granted, the frontier in recent years has shifted to group productivity. Particularly in sound-for-picture (film and video), it takes a team effort to move a project to the finish line. And, because time is money, there’s a huge incentive to make that effort flow as efficiently as possible. But the number of people and facilities involved in a typical project—plus the incompatibilities between computer platforms, storage media and file formats—make for some pretty significant hurdles.
Everyone agrees that networks are crucial to allowing greater collaboration and more efficient use of resources in multiroom facilities. In the past, questions about reliability and speed have slowed down adoption in the audio industry, but the widespread deployment of networks throughout the economy and the resulting improvements in technology have removed such obstacles. Today, the real question for owners of most multiroom facilities isn’t whether a network is needed but what kind of network best suits their needs.
Considering the Alternatives
Historically, there have been two main alternatives to networks for moving digital audio around a facility. One is digital tie-lines; the other is “sneaker-net,” the physical transport of removable drives from system to system.
“Comparing sneaker-net to a network is like comparing carrier pigeons to a phone system,” says Doug Perkins, VP of sales and marketing at mSoft in Woodland Hills, Calif. “There may be scenarios where the pigeons are better, but it’s hard to think of them.” mSoft makes the ServerSound system, which gives multiple workstations access to centrally stored sound libraries through a browser-based interface.
“With sneaker-net,” Perkins continues, “someone typically asks for audio files to be copied onto some sort of physical media, which is then copied to another media, with who knows how many people touching it throughout the process. Not only is this not a good use of time for many creative and highly skilled people, but the quality of work ultimately suffers from the delivery delays.”
Ed Bacorn, Storage Area Network (SAN) specialist at Glyph Technologies in Ithaca, N.Y., adds that there is an increased risk of damage to a drive—and the data it holds—whenever it is removed for transport to another room or station. “All too many drives are dropped or get bent pins,” he says. “Any number of common disasters can happen when drives are physically moved around to several locations.”
Another problem with sneaker-net, according to Joe Rorke, VP of sales at Rorke Data in Minneapolis, is the issue of interoperability between different systems. “In many cases, the user can’t easily exchange sneaker-net media between OS platforms: Macintosh, Windows NT, etc.,” says Rorke. He also notes that a network can make the bridge between applications in heterogeneous configurations, and it offers better time-to-data speeds than sneaker-net.
mSoft’s CEO, Amnon Sarig, agrees that networks are superior to sneaker-net on almost every level. However, he says that sneaker-net cannot be pronounced dead yet. “With sneaker-net, you can move a 73GB drive from one side of town to the other faster than you can send even a small fraction of that data over a T1 line,” he explains. Within a facility, however, he says that moving files over a network “saves you time, media costs and labor.”
As for digital tie-lines, Bacorn points out that, in most cases, patching must be manually reconfigured in each room for each specific operation. “This requires physically plugging and unplugging cables per task,” he says. “When your facility is on multiple floors or spread out among multiple departments, this becomes a major problem.”
Beyond inconvenience, tie-lines can also be technically unsatisfactory. The Village Recorder, a music and post facility in West Los Angeles, has its four rooms integrated into a single network provided by Glyph. “If we went with digital tie-lines,” says chief engineer Mitch Berger, “we would have to be working in real time. And with the tie-lines, in some cases running long distances, that would have created problems with sync.”
Reprinted with permission from
Magazine, June, 2001© 2000, Intertec Publishing, A Primedia Company All Rights Reserved
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