Recording: Then and Now - Part V

Welcome back to our little trip through digital recording history. I really hope someone is finding this informative, entertaining, amusing, or otherwise distracting. I'm finding myself having to really think about specifics from 20+ years ago, and sometimes one memory triggers another, so it's a fun romp for me--probably less so for you, on the "you had to be there" factor.

Well, anyway, there we were in 1989/90, wanting to record audio for presentation on our Macintosh IIx. It seemed logical, since the Mac had great audio output capability. Recording should be a snap, we figured.

As it turned out, it was easier than it probably should have been, and resulted in an unintentional brush with greatness on my part.

In our search for a method to input audio to the Mac, we discovered a hardware/software combination called Sound Tools. It had a card for the Mac's NuBus, and software to manage recording and editing. Pretty advanced stuff, especially for the time. So we purchased the goods and started recording sound!

That was my first experience with recording outside a professional studio setting, and wow, was it an eye-opener! Suddenly being in the position of having to figure out where all those odd background noises, hums, and so forth came from--not a very pleasant experience. But, as we learn from our mistakes, I started to learn a little bit about the recording end of the process, which until then had been off my scope.

Well, priorities for organizations change, and, as happened with my similar effort in the Air Force, the decision was made that in-person explanation was the better approach for our purposes at the time, and we didn't pursue the project further. We still had Sound Tools, though, so I got to tinker a little here and there as time permitted over the next couple of years.

Little did I know then that "Sound Tools" would later be renamed "Pro Tools", and the company that invented it, Digidesign, would become a division of Avid and the leader in digital audio recording technology. That was my little brush with greatness at the time. My path, however, would take another turn and I'd be pulled away from the mic for several more years. By the time I got back to trying some digital recording, it would be with different hardware, different software, and a different organization...but lots of the same issues.

Next time: Windows, Cool Edit, and The Box.