CAS Quarterly

C A S Q U A R T E R L Y I FA L L 2 0 2 1 31 Recently, a number of manufacturers have made comments about being a little more selective of which trade shows they'll attend, along with spaced timelines for doing so. That could be felt at this summer's NAMM as some larger displaying vendors of the past were absent. Our area of professional audio, while having a good representation from the music recording side (mic pre's and other outboard gear, for example), was noticeably light on manufacturers presenting sound for picture-focused gear. Deity Microphones traveled across country after attending the Hollywood Sound Expo (see the recap in this issue provided by Doc Justice CAS) and was answering inquiries. But other than Deity, things were sparse in our area. Now, being a guitar player, I had no lack of six strings to pick up and report on, but instead of writing about cool guitars, I decided to look into something else I thought may be of interest. One of the hallmarks of the sound for picture mixer is the ability to be inventive when it comes to problem solving. Many of our members create custom hardware or software to make their lives easier since off-the-shelf options are unavailable or don't meet every need. Some even have side businesses filling this need for colleagues. In that spirit, I spoke with a couple smaller vendors who created some interesting items. I'll share a few here. First up is something our scoring mixer members may find interesting, and that's the JackTrip interface. JackTrip has a really interesting history, starting in 2000 as research work at Stanford University by a faculty member wanting to use high-speed data connections (available on campus) to connect musicians across the world remotely with extremely low latency. Further improvements to this open-source software were incremental until the pandemic hit. Once lockdowns took place and musicians were isolated, JackTrip further developed to allow a direct connection from microphone or interface to a server that combined signals of all musicians playing so the musicians could practice in sync with uncompressed audio, allowing nuances of an instrument's sound envelope to be heard. I asked about the potential to provide isolated streams of each instrument for someone (like a scoring Above: Deity Microphones represented the sound for picture field. Below: JackTrip offers two interfaces based on the type of connections you need to make.

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