Winter NAMM Wrap Up On My Latest Inner Circle Podcast

This week's podcast is a little different in that I'll give you my Winter NAMM 2015 wrap up overview. 

You'll hear about the new trends from the show (like Pro Tools 12 going to the cloud) as well as a look at some of the cool new gear that I spotted, including some of the odd things that other blogs and magazines probably missed.

No guest on this one, but I'm sure you'll dig it anyway.

Remember that you can find the podcast at BobbyOInnerCircle.com, or either on iTunes or Stitcher. 

The Storage Holy Grail - The RAMcloud

While most of the consumer world is just getting used to the idea of cloud computing, corporations have been using it for years. For those of you who don't know, cloud computing means storing your data and even your apps on an external server that's accessed via the Internet.

A number of behind the scenes companies like RackSpace offer cloud services, but Google and Amazon also have huge server farms around the country that have been renting their storage in their clouds for years. Over the last year, the cloud has been brought to consumer's attention thanks to Amazon and Google's cloud music initiatives, and of course more recently by Apple's iCloud.

The big problem is that cloud storage is often failure-prone, slow, and quirky. Of course the cloud is never supposed to go down, thanks to so-called redundant systems, but that hasn't always been case. Of course, when the cloud goes down, it can be devastating. Don't forget when your data can't be accessed, your dead in the water until it's fixed. Although it's rare that you lose any data, outages are a nagging problem.

The reason why a cloud goes down is because just like your personal computer, server farms still store their data on spinning hard drives, and therein lies the problem. Enterprise-level drives are much less likely to stop working than the run of the mill drives that most of us use, but they still go down. That's why a group at Standford University has a radical suggestion: datacenters should just put everything in RAM.

The proposed system, which the researchers are calling RAMcloud, means that those spinning drives are replaced by the latest solid-state disks (SSDs). Since they don't use mechanical spinning parts like a hard drive, they're not only a lot more reliable, but a lot faster too. Of course SSDs are still a lot more expensive than hard drives, but if only a few server farms switch to SSDs, it's thought that the huge number of drives ordered would be enough to cause SSDs to decrease in price immediately.

Don't forget that almost all websites are stored on a spinning hard drive somewhere. Imagine how much faster they'd be in a RAMcloud. When it comes to the Internet, fast is never fast enough.

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The Real Reason Why Apple Bought LaLa

It's not exactly what you think.

Does "cloud computing" (see the picture on the left) ring a bell?

Check out the Music 3.0 blog for the story.

Recording In The Cloud

The latest hi-tech phrase leaking into our every day language is "cloud computing." Cloud computing means that instead of using applications or storing data on your personal computer, you upload everything to an online server via the Internet. The beauty is that you never have to worry about upgrading applications or worry about backups because someone else is doing that for you "in the cloud."

On a corporate level cloud computing makes sense and has been somewhat common for the past few years, but except for a few online backup services like Mozy and Carbonite, most consumers haven't gotten into it yet. They will soon enough as Microsoft has just announced that it's Office suite is now available for free as long as you use it in the cloud.

Now a company called Indaba has developed a way of recording multitrack audio and collaborating with other users in the cloud using their application. This wouldn't have been possible a few years ago due to the speed of just about all areas involved in the process, but Indaba says it's made breakthroughs in several key areas (improved audio quality, real-time effects, offline mode, and non-destructive editing) by switching from running on Flash, which hampered some audio features, to Sun’s new JavaFX platform.

I'm still not sure that it's fast enough for professional use (although I've not tried it yet), but if there's an idea that's capable of destroying the Pro Tools stranglehold on the music industry, this is it.

Indaba follows the "freemium" model, in that its basic version is free, a $5 per month fee gives you more control over effects, access to additional loop libraries, and more room to store songs and tracks, and a $25 per month fee offers unlimited session storage, unlimited private sessions, and other features required by full-time session musicians and other heavy collaborators.

Here's a video that explains Indaba's features.