I’ve just been given a sneak preview of a new Presence sound bank that a third-party developer has been making and it sounds really nice… Not sure when it will be on the market, it’s a work in progress, but I personally can’t wait to have it. People keep asking me about new sounds for Presence – I guess a lot of people don’t realise that Presence is basically a sophisticated SoundFont player, so any sounds in that format should work great with it. So there are already a huge amount of sounds available if you know where to look.

My personal favorite place is Digital Sound Factory. These guys are ex-Emu developers, and they have pretty much the entire Emu sampler and Proteus module library available as SoundFonts, which can be dragged and dropped directly from the Studio One browser into Presence. I have a ton of these sounds and they are killer, highly recommended. The Proteus Pack especially is ridiculous value for money: 3,500 Proteus instruments for $99! That’s a no-brainer if you want to increase your library fast.

Or if you are really on a budget, a quick Google search will turn up some nice freebies, such as:

• soundfonts.homemusician.net/
• Hammersound

Anyone know of any other good resources like this?

Astonishingly I actually have a (more or less) free weekend, so am currently on a train from Munich to Stuttgart with my PreSonus headphones plugged into my iPad, writing new songs on the rather wonderful Korg iMS20 and iElectribe apps. I am sure I have mentioned these before, but just to reiterate: I freakin’ love these programs. They are bringing me back to my youth when all I had was a couple of analog synths and basic sequencers to write on. And as much as I have criticised the iPad in the past for various reasons, I have to confess that with the installation of these apps it really does become a magnificent mobile compositional tool.

The really cool part that as soon as I get to an Internet connection I can upload to Soundcloud the .wav files of the rhythm tracks I just made and when I turn my computer on they will be waiting for me inside Studio One’s Browser, ready to have vocals and guitars added to them, thanks to the Soundcloud integration added in Studio One 2.0.

Technology. It’s a wonderful thing when it’s done right.

Spent most of yesterday at the new premises of Music Store Professional in Cologne, Germany. To say this place is HUGE would be barely scratching the surface of the gigantic immensity of the place. Even their elevator was bigger than some music stores I’ve been in. It took me three photographs from the far end of the car park to be able to capture all of it. As much as I love small local music stores – and I do, they are the backbone of our industry, and you should support them – I can’t help but be impressed by the sheer amount of music gear under one roof that this place has.

They also have their own Internet TV channel, so I spent the afternoon being interviewed by their presenter Alex, who is a great guy that I really enjoy working with. We shot a couple of things about Studio One 2.0 and the new Audiobox VSL interfaces, one in German, one in English, that should hopefully appear on their site soon. A nice visit, and a really impressive store.

Am at the Music Production Show in London today, which is being held in the rather bizarre environment of Arsenal Football Stadium. It’s kind of weird to look out the windows beside our booth and see an enormous soccer stadium standing empty. Was also pretty weird using the VIP parking area under the ground itself that is normally kept for visiting teams and managers, and have a guide to walk me around the staff areas of the place.

The show itself has been buzzing, met up with lots of PreSonus users and converted many more who weren’t beforehand. Good to see how many really happy users we have – and a big thank you to those that stopped by to say hello and hang out.

Also just got the latest issue of Music Tech magazine – which features a two page review of Studio One 2.0 and a one and a half page review of the new Audiobox 1818 VSL interface. Both products earned a solid 9 out of 10 stars, so I’m pretty happy about that. They described Studio One as “evolving into one of the best DAWs around” with “…brilliantly simple workflow” which works for me; though I’d say “evolving into the best DAW around” and forget this “one of…” nonsense 🙂   Still, a more than acceptable review, thank you Music Tech!

Crossgrade offers are weird things. From the perspective of someone who makes and sells software for a living I can’t really make up my mind whether they are just giving people a big discount or whether they are a good way of genuinely rewarding people who have gone out and invested in our industry. Either way, from your point of view as a user, they are often a hell of a good deal. So if you are reading this and are still using a DAW other than Studio One, or (more likely) know someone else who is, check out the Crossgrade offer at the bottom of the online store page. It’s pretty sweet.

And yeah, I know this might sound like me using my blog as a some kind of marketing tool, which I really hate doing, but I didn’t even know about this deal until this morning – and I work here; so I guess a lot of other people might have missed seeing it too 🙂

Haven’t been updating much in the past couple of weeks, because I’ve been on the road practically the entire time. Everyone wants to know more about Studio One 2.0 so I’ve been visiting some of our dealers in the North of England and Scotland training them in the new features of the software – big shoutout to the guys at Rubadub and GG Digital in Glasgow, and Soundware and Sounds Live in Newcastle. If you live up that way and need PreSonus gear, they are definitely the people to go to. Also been showing the new Audiobox VSL interfaces, which people seem to love (basically the guts of a StudioLive 1602 mixer in a rack at a great price, what’s not to like?).

For the past couple of days I’ve been attending the Computer Audio Expo at the rather fabulous Digital Village megastore in Romford, London. Did a one hour seminar on Studio One 2.0 in their lecture room yesterday. The large THUD sound emanating from the room was the sound of people’s jaws collectively hitting the floor when they saw what this thing can do. One guy came back to the show today to ask if he could use it with his Pro Tools hardware. When he found out that he couldn’t, he immediately priced up a StudioLive desk, Central Station, Studio Channel, FaderPort, and Studio One Professional and figured out it would be cheaper for him to buy all of those together than upgrade his current Pro Tools system – and he’d still have money left over if he sold his current rig second-hand. He’s currently trying to decide whether to spend the leftover cash on going on a very nice holiday or getting an ADL 600 preamp. So if you’re looking for a cheap Pro Tools HD system, I suggest you try ebay.co.uk later this evening, I suspect one may be appearing there very shortly…

One of the annoying things about being based in Europe instead of our Baton Rouge office (apart from missing that incredible Cajun food…) is I also miss out on cool stuff like being there for our Hallowe’en Zombie Video shoot that is going on today! As someone who has personally bagged many thousands of zombies as Special Agent G in House of the Dead (and many, many other videogames) this pains me greatly. I even have zombie wallpaper on the desktop of my studio computer (because that’s what I usually look like after an all-night session in the studio).

If you missed last year’s Studio Channel of the Living Dead video, here it is again. I love working for a company that makes promo videos like this. Can’t wait to see the new one.

You know you’ve just done a major release when you spend the entire day doing nothing but answer emails and you still have more in your Inbox than you had when you started. That was my entire day yesterday – I think I got to what I laughingly call “home” at about 11pm, and then I was so pumped up I ended up catching up on old episodes of Dexter until the wee hours of the morning just to relax.

Today I’m having a look through the forums to see how we’re doing as well as passing on some bug reports. Although this thing has been in beta for months (we really did a long beta test), it’s inevitable that in software this complex there are going to be bugs that everyone misses. You might think that’s ridiculous, but you’d be surprised.

Let’s take the most simple thing I can imagine – say we are in the business of releasing a new, improved coin flipper. It’s a coin that you toss up and it comes down heads or tails. That’s about as simple a product as I can imagine – there are only two variable states that you can have: heads or tails. What could possibly go wrong? But let’s assume that thousands of people buy Coin Flipper and start tossing it up. Sooner or later, if enough people toss it enough times, by some bizarre turn of events, it’s going to end up on its edge instead of landing heads or tails. That’s a bug. OK let’s solve that! Easy solution: we mill the edge so it is really thin to make it harder for the coin to land on its edge and stay upright. Everyone is happy with the new, improved Coin Flipper 2.0. But then some newbie with no experience tries catching it and the new improved thin (and now very sharp) edge cuts them. Ouch! So by fixing the little tiny bug for pro users we have created a really major bug for new people entering the fine sport of coin flipping. The forums go crazy with users screaming at the Coin Flipper developers for missing such a huge bug. And so it goes…

Now that’s the simplest example I can think of. Multiply that by the (literally) millions of permutations of things that people want to do with a modern Digital Audio Workstation and you’ll get some idea of what bug fixing is like. And we’re pretty lucky compared to some companies out there, since the internal Studio One code is really modern, modular and efficient. It’s a lot easier and faster for us to fix bugs than it is for some of the other guys. That’s why if you look in your PreSonus User Account you’ll find that the installer for Studio One 2 in there is already 2.0.1 build 16909 even though we only officially released version 2.0 on Tuesday morning. And I’m writing this one Thursday afternoon…

Actually the biggest problem I find with bug fixing is people frequently don’t report them. When I’m out doing shows I get people coming up to me all the time saying things like “Well I guess you know about this bug already, so why didn’t you fix it yet?” and then mention something that I’ve never heard of. When I ask if they reported it, the answer is usually “I just assumed you guys would know already.” No, we don’t – unless you tell us. Pretty much everyone at PreSonus is a musician and a Studio One user in our “spare time” so we do actually find stuff all the time – that’s how we come up with our ideas, we scratch our own itch as they say. But we can’t possibly cover all the millions of things our thousands of users come up with, so please please please do tell us when we screw something up. That’s how we make this stuff better.

We’re not going to be happy until we’ve created the greatest piece of music software the world has ever seen. So beta testers and bug hunters: thanks for helping us with that. We really do appreciate it.  🙂

It’s 18.30 in Germany and the news on 2.0 has pretty much hit round the world now. We just finished the first of three live webcasts, I’ve been fielding excited questions from stores and magazines all day, and I finally feel like I can breathe again. There’s another webcast at 21.00 German time, and I’ve (stupidly) agreed to hang out in the office until then and join in on that one too – I really don’t want to miss anything (well, I’ll miss dinner, but whatever…).

Responses by mail and on the forum has been extremely positive so far, which doesn’t really surprise me to be honest, I’ve been using this thing since June already, and I know just how awesome it is, but it’s still very gratifying to see that other people love it too. Unfortunately our servers are getting hammered with people wanting to upgrade or download the demo. No matter how much we increase our server capacity, we still get taken by surprise 🙂

So now to relax a little and sit back before the next show…

After more than two years of work, we finally show everyone Studio One version 2. It didn’t really hit me fully until I looked on Twitter and saw that Celemony already put up a video showing the integration of Melodyne and S1. Although I’ve been secretly showing lots of journalists myself how it works over the past weeks, it’s the first time I’ve seen someone else actually using it – and wow… it’s amazing to see it from another perspective. It really is unbelievably that good!

Am so excited to see what people think now…