New Music Gear Monday: Free Audiofile Calc Conversion Tool

A few years ago I designed an iPhone app called the Delay Genie that determined the delay time for any tempo along with full note, dotted and triplet note subdivisions. Unfortunately, the publisher decided to no longer support the app on later versions of iOS, so it's no longer available.

I've searched for a substitute for a while with no luck, but finely found one that's even better called Audiofile Calc, and the best news is that it's free!

Audiofile Calc figures out delay times with ease but goes way beyond that to allow you to find things like Note Length, Bar Length, Song Length, Beats to Tempo, Time to Samples, and Samples to Time. You can also compare tempos, and add and subtract timings, which is great for determining the running time of an album.

Audiofile Calc doesn't stop there though. It also figures out pitch calculations like Note Name to pitch, MIDI Note to pitch, Frequency to pitch and Wavelength to pitch as well as Timecode calculations like Frames to Timecode, Convert Timecode, and Change Timecode.

There's also electronic calculations like Compare Power and Compare Voltage, acoustics calc like Distance to Time, Time to Distance, Sound Pressure Level (SPL) and Panning, as well as a handy file size calculator too.

I'm not a big one for apps, since we all seem to have so many of them that we don't use, but this is one well worth having on your phone. You'll constantly find it useful for something in your audio life.

Audiofile Calc was developed by Audiofile Engineering, the same people that created the very cool Triumph mastering workstation software. The app requires iOS 7.0 or later. It's compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. And again, it's FREE!

A big thank you to Russ Hughes at Pro Tools Expert as well as everyone at Studio One Expert for this find.

Download Audiofile Calc here.

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New Music Gear Monday: Here Active Listening System

We live in a noisy world and sometimes everyday life just makes it difficult to concentrate. Noise-canceling headphones have been around for a long time, but the good ones are big and bulky and just not suitable for everyday use. Now comes the Here Active Listening System that's designed to be worn anywhere and everywhere to keep your environment as audibly controlled as possible.

The Doppler Labs Here System is comprised of two wireless in-earbuds and a smartphone app. The ear buds aren't designed to reproduce music but to control environmental noise since they act as extremely small noise-canceling earphones.

What's different is that the earbuds are connected via Bluetooth to an app on your phone that controls the digital signal processing. The app features some useful DSP presets for different noisy environments like walking in the city, the subway, the office or on a plane, but it also has a few that audio folk might not feel are needed, like providing EQ, bass boost and reverb when listening to music.

The Doppler Labs Here System will be available later in the year and will retail at $249, but you can find several discount packages if you visit the Kickstarter campaign. The campaign has already surpassed it's goal of $250,000 (its at $569K as I write this), but you can still get involved until July 1st.

Check out the video below that explains more.

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New Music Gear Monday: Hue Studio Lighting

When we talk about the networked studio, we usually don't think about lighting, but that's exactly what happens with Philips's Hue LED light bulbs. Not only can they be controlled via an iPhone app, but the color can be changed to just about anything you can think of as well, including one that's been scientifically designed to help you concentrate (perfect for mixing).

Now these things aren't cheap at $199 for 3 bulbs and a wireless base station starter pack, but when you consider all that they do, they can be a worthy investment for any home studio.

One of the cool things is that the days of the big expensive studio rheostats to dim the lights will soon be over as the world turns to these new programmable LEDs.

A shout out to my bud Rich Tozzoli for turning me on to these via his column in Pro Sound News!

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

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12 iPhone Apps For Recording And Editing Audio

It's amazing what you can do with iOS devices these days. It's really true that the applications we take for granted every day would have been declared miracles a mere 20 years ago. Take audio recording and editing for example. Who would have ever thought that you could not only record high-quality audio on your phone, let alone edit it as well?

Kenny Myers recently had a pretty good overview of 10 iPhone apps for recording and editing. While you can read exactly what he had to say about each, here's his list, which I think is a good one (I've added a couple of additional ones that Kenny is looking over as well):

1. VC Audio Pro

2. Recorder & Editor ~ ISAIDWHAT?! (this one I didn't know about)

3. Voxie Pro Recorder

4. Multitrack DAW

5. Garageband

6. Hindenburg Field Recorder

7. Pocket Wavepad

8. Hokusai Audio Editor

9. Twisted Wave Audio Editor

10. Studio.HD

11. FiRe 2 Field Recorder

12. Four Track

Clearly, we've come a long way in a very short time when it comes to iOS audio apps. I can't wait to see what the future brings!

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Don't forget to check out my Music 3.0 blog for tips and tricks on navigating social media and the new music business.

A Couple Of Cool Mixing Tools

Here are a couple of tools that I've brought up before in other posts, but thought it was worth bringing them up again. The first is a learning tool and the second is a mixing tool.

The Audio Mixing Bootcamp Video Course
If your mixes aren't what you think they should be, or you're confused about how to get started, here's a video mixing course that I recently did for Lynda.com that will teach you the fundamentals of getting a strong, punchy mix regardless of the type of music.

The course covers every aspect of mixing, from setting up your listening environment, to setting up your mix, to how and when to use EQ, compression and effects, to the best way to balance a mix. There are over a hundred movies that describe every step of process of creating a mix, and you can see the full list here.

Lynda.com is one of the oldest online training portals and their production values are incredibly high. They have over 1500 courses in every type of software you can think of. The cost is $25 a month for as much as you can view, but click on this link for a free 7 day trial.

Here's a sample of a movie from the Audio Mixing Bootcamp course about setting up a compressor.




Delay Genie
About a year ago one of my publishers, Hal Leonard, asked me if I'd be interested in doing a phone app. If I was going to do one, I wanted it to be something that I would use myself, all the time, so I came up with the Delay Genie.

The Delay Genie basically replaces those time delay charts that most studios used to have so you could easily set the reverb predelay and delay times when you're mixing. While most delay plugins allow you to do some form of automatic timing, the Delay Genie is different because it will allow you to easily calculate dotted notes and triplets, which are time denominations that are essential to a good mix and one of the tricks of most top mixers (see this recent post).

You can calculate the time delay either by first entering the BPM of the song, or tapping it in where the app will calculate it for you. After the BPM is directly entered or tapped in, the Delay Genie will instantly display:

• delays in 1/4, 1/8, 1/6, 1/32, 1/64 note time increments
• delays in triplet time increments for 1/4, 1/8, 1/6, 1/32, 1/64 notes
• delays in dotted note time increments for 1/4, 1/8, 1/6, 1/32, 1/64 notes

As a bonus, in the Live mode, the app also calculates the delay time from the stage to a delay speaker stack in a live sound reinforcement situation.

The Delay Genie app can be used for:

• setting the delay time to make a track larger than life
• setting the delay time so it fits better in the track
• setting the delay time so it sticks out of the track
• setting reverb pre-delay time
• setting reverb decay time

What's more, the price is right. It's FREE, although it will cost $.99 if you want to remove the advert.

Give it a shot and let me know what you think. It's now available in the Apple iTunes App Store.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Don't forget to check out my Music 3.0 blog for tips and tricks on navigating social media and the new music business.