NEXUS 2 – The Professional way to record Web Based Sessions

Source-Nexus I/O is a plugin and virtual driver system that upgrades your workstation with a versatile audio input-output routing solution, tailored and customizable for streaming audio seamlessly from both DAWs and Desktop applications.  It Automatically connects to Source-Nexus Review for effortless streaming. 

This week’s episode is the soundtrack to a walk-through of the new interface we recorded with Robert. It’s an in-depth look at a game-changing software you can’t afford to miss if remote sessions are a part of your day-to-day business…

You can see the video on our YouTube channel..

https://youtu.be/uxzEsSiJyQA

A big shout out to our sponsors, Austrian Audio and Tri Booth. Both these companies are providers of QUALITY Audio Gear (we wouldn’t partner with them unless they were), so please, if you’re in the market for some new kit, do us a solid and check out their products, and be sure to tell em “Robbo, George, Robert, and AP sent you”… As a part of their generous support of our show, Tri Booth is offering $200 off a brand-new booth when you use the code TRIPAP200. So get onto their website now and secure your new booth…

Tri-Booth

https://tribooth.com/

And if you’re in the market for a new Mic or killer pair of headphones, check out Austrian Audio. They’ve got a great range of top-shelf gear..

https://austrian.audio/

We have launched a Patreon page in the hopes of being able to pay someone to help us get the show to more people and in turn help them with the same info we’re sharing with you. If you aren’t familiar with Patreon, it’s an easy way for those interested in our show to get exclusive content and updates before anyone else, along with a whole bunch of other “perks” just by contributing as little as $1 per month. Find out more here..
 
 
 
George has created a page strictly for Pro Audio Suite listeners, so check it out for the latest discounts and offers for TPAS listeners.

https://georgethe.tech/tpas

If you haven’t filled out our survey on what you’d like to hear on the show, you can do it here:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/ZWT5BTD

Join our Facebook page here:

https://www.facebook.com/proaudiopodcast

And the FB Group here:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/357898255543203

For everything else (including joining our mailing list for exclusive previews and other goodies), check out our website

https://www.theproaudiosuite.com/

“When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional.”

Hunter S Thompson

In this episode of Pro Audio Suite, the team introduces Robert Marshall from Source Elements and discusses the company’s new communications platform for media professionals, Nexus. This platform enhances remote work by enabling content creators and voiceover artists to bring audio directly into a standalone app, and set up online review sessions with clients. Nexus also simplifies audio routing, making it easy to use, even for non-technical users. The platform, priced at $11.95 per month, promises a lot of value and utility for users. In future iterations, Nexus plans to provide more improvements and functionalities, making it an affordable, powerful tool for media professionals.

#ProAudioSuite #SourceNexus #HomeStudioSolution

 

Timestamps

  • (00:00:00) Welcome & Sponsor Shoutout
  • (00:00:53) Intro to Source Connect
  • (00:07:56) Discussing Buffer Setting
  • (00:14:41) Nexus Tech Support History
  • (00:20:23) Source Connect for Video Editing
  • (00:26:16) Pro Tools I o Routing Issues
  • (00:28:41) Source Connect Pricing
  • (00:30:59) Broadcast vs Communication Users

 

Transcript

Speaker A: Y’all ready to be history?

Speaker B: Get started.

Speaker C: Welcome.

Speaker B: Hi, hi. Hello, everyone, to the Pro Audio Suite. These guys are professional, they’re motivated.

Speaker C: Thanks to Tributh, the best vocal booth for home or on the road voice recording and Austrian audio making passion heard. Introducing Robert Marshall from source elements. And someone audio post chicago Darren, robert Robertson from Voodoo Radio Imaging, sydney to the Vo stars, george, the tech Wittam from La. And me, Andrew Peters, voiceover talent and home studio guy.

Speaker A: Line up.

Speaker B: Here we go.

Speaker C: And welcome to another Pro Audio Suite. Don’t forget the code trip a P 200 to get $200 off your tribooth.

: And don’t forget Georgeth tech TPAs for your deals.

Speaker C: Man indeed, indeed, indeed. And don’t forget demosthework.com. Anyway, that’s enough plugs now we’re talking.

Speaker A: About Source elements.com today.

Speaker C: This is a first for us, the first time we’ve been seen on camera, which sorry about that. It’s the way it goes.

Speaker A: No, scary.

: Oh, crap, I forgot I should need to stop picking my nose now.

Speaker C: As long as that’s all you’re picking.

Speaker A: Yes, that’s got your balls. Whatever you do.

Speaker C: So this is the new source nexus.

Speaker B: Robert yeah, we just released this and really something that I guess if a lot of our crowd are voice talent, at least initially here, this is kind of showing more of the client side or our new version of a client side application kind of shooting down the middle. We had originally made Source Live, which has a really high powered server assisted video streaming system and it can have a lot of, I think up to 20. We tested up to 26, 25 or 30 people. We just ran out of people to test with. But it shouldn’t have any limits on the number of connections. So the idea here was to take Nexus, which has started to become sort of a slightly more commoditized concept. Nexus going way back how many years ago? I’m not sure, but it feels like probably at least ten, maybe a little bit more, maybe 13 years ago or so. Nexus comes out and really sets this genre for how to construct post sessions so that you can have your talent coming in on Source Connect. You can have your clients in on various meeting platforms, you can have a remote connection. Nexus was also used for bringing in sound effects, feeds and other monitorings of other types of things, things that you would normally patch into a patch bay in the hardware world. This is now all starting to happen application and Nexus is this patching center, as the name implies. But that capability has been slightly commoditized. You have all kinds of things like even UA and Apollo has our virtual drivers built into the interfaces and interfaces are coming out with loopback connections and blah, blah, blah. So here we are innovating and saying, what was Nexus originally used for? And a lot of it was used for integrating these communications platforms and we thought let’s make a communications platform that’s a little bit more built for media professionals. And on this side, the initial sort of intent is for review and approval. So you can imagine either you’ve got clients on the gateway here and they are meeting and then there’s a talent connected and the engineer can patch all this together using Nexus actually. And they would have a session where talent’s connected in on source connect and the clients are all here on a meeting platform. And so here’s sort of a meeting platform that’s more designed for media professionals and specifically like a review and approval workflow. Here’s kind of what it looks like a little bit. One of the first things with Nexus is it has now a plugin dedicated for it that does a lot of this template setup. People used to have these crazy templates for Pro Tools and now if you oops, what I should do is share my screen. So here’s Robert’s Screen. So the first thing that Nexus has besides this meeting room looks pretty similar to a lot of things but here’s one big difference. There’s a plugin that’s included with it. And the plugin has, as you can see, my talkback coming in here has the input from the mix. So I can hear the mix actually right here. The mix is also sent to the broadcast input, which we’ll talk about in a split second. And then here’s the chat return. So if someone says hello, we will see this meter bounce.

Speaker A: Hello.

Speaker B: There you go. So that’s how I hear. And this takes care of all the mix minus and all the routing that people would have to do in one drop of a plugin on the master fader. Yeah, you don’t have to change your session structure. You don’t have to mix to a bus. So you can separate the people from what you’re listening to and make them mix minus. Essentially, this does it for you. And so here’s this broadcast input. But over here in the gateway, I’ve got this broadcast section. So now I can send my mix separate from my communications input, which is not something you get to do with zoom, et cetera, et cetera, all the other ones. So here’s a high quality stereo communications feed without having to have problems with my talkback conflated within it and those kinds of things. So now you guys might notice that if I just literally go over here and this might be loud. Here’s a rock tune in this session and then as easy as that is it’s a good level right I put it down to -20 because we have to blend it with this stuff and.

: Coming back to me in full stereo. Like high fidelity.

Speaker B: Yeah, high fidelity, full stereo.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker B: That’s the whole point. But really it’s like I don’t want you looking at my screen because there’s too much stuff there. And whatnot what you really want to see is this. So if I jump back out and I share my window, you can’t see what I’m doing because I’m not sharing it, but I’m basically sharing again. But this time, instead of doing entire screen, I’m picking window. I’m picking that Pro Tools video window. So now we can play this spot that we using as a little ADR demo. And right now that’s more stuff to talk about later, the remote ADR workflows, but here’s just a review and approval thing. And so a lot of voice sessions are not synced to picture. You’re just, hey, read it three times. All right, I’ll cut that in and you see it happening. And essentially, here’s the core of that session. I can have a talent connected. I can bring the talent in through here, actually through a new plugin, but I can’t really talk about that. But the classic connection where you have Source Connect and a plugin on an Aux track. So here you can see I’m receiving from source connect. This is the original Nexus plugin. And so there’s from Source Connect, and that’s popping over to my record track over here. And then an Aux send from receive of Nexus. And I can send the chat over to the talent.

Speaker A: So you don’t have your talent on Nexus then? Is that what you’re saying?

Speaker B: You don’t want to? Because then you have all right, everyone mute their mics or you don’t have separation, essentially. So what you have is you can have the talent join Nexus. And one of the first we plan on kind of rolling out updates rapidly. And one of the ones that’s up on the dock is a no audio button, meaning not just mute your microphone, but mute the whole output. So then the talent can be here. The talent can look at the picture, see the clients and record. And within the realms of that latency, you can even record sort of with pictures as long as the engineer slides it back. And it happens a lot over these remote systems. You just kind of deal with the latency a little.

: Can I ask you about the buffer setting? I now see in my window? It says off no buffer right now.

Speaker B: Yeah, right. Another thing. So stuff you can’t do in zoom oh, the broadcast, which is really high quality, is giving me a little bit of trouble. You can add some buffering on your side. So maybe that connection is going to be a little bit more latent, but it’s going to have a stronger connection because as you know how it goes with all of these Chrome type things, it’s all up to the way Chrome really decides to treat the audio. And Chrome loves to drive latencies as low as possible and just say, screw it, I’m going to stretch audio and mask all kinds of stuff and quite frankly, make up more audio than I’m actually broadcasting just to kind of make communications work. And if it is high quality, that’s nice, but it’s not my goal. My goal is just communications. Just by adding to that buffer, at least we can protect that audio stream a little bit and make sure that clients aren’t hearing. So, for instance, the way I do it, when I send my talent to the clients, I’m sending them through the broadcast input so they hear that voice record from the talent in really high quality. Whereas we’re over here the chat. Even though there is a broadcast option on the chat, you don’t really need it. And that way you also have echo cancellation built into here and you’re optimizing the way things are. You’re not all eggs and all echo canceled. Good enough for a lawyer’s meeting or the other side, something like Source Connect now was where it’s just like wide open, pure audio, but then you have feedback issues. This is kind of trying to blend. You got clients who are used to the business meeting. You’ve got Vo talent and playback that needs to be high quality. Put all that together in the right.

: Way, that’s always challenging a lot of things. It’s an all or nothing proposition. It’s either Zoom equality or everybody’s in a high quality and it’s just you introduce new problems, especially the client is not prepared for that.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of stuff that’s like for people that aren’t initiated in this stuff, it’s easy for us to say stuff, but we do this day in and day out. At least I do.

: Obviously, we always have headphones at the ready.

Speaker B: Yeah, we’re actually getting it pretty good on the iPhone and iOS devices, and those have their own challenges. We have a warning right away that says, like, if you’re going to use this for communications, we can’t really give you as high quality broadcast audio. So there’s another thing that’s unique to this is there’s a mode to it where you can just join it for the broadcast audio, which is a case where maybe you do want to have a sidecar zoom meeting. Some of the issues with a sidecar zoom meeting with a high quality broadcast on the site is now Zoom is unaware of its echo cancellation. So the high quality audio broadcast echoes through everyone’s connections because it doesn’t think that that’s part of its initial input output. It doesn’t catch it in its algorithm as well as when it’s all integrated into one platform. But yeah, you can join this and just use it for the broadcast, or you can use it for the meeting, but when you use it on the iPhone, if you just want to use it for the broadcast, you’ll get high quality. But if you use it for communications and the broadcast, the broadcast unfortunately gets stepped on. And I’m sure you’ve seen some of that happen even when you just get a phone call. As soon as the iPhone thinks it’s in a communications mode. It’s like it’s doing that good enough for communications, make it intelligible kind of thing. But still there’s people that might be driving. You might have a producer who’s just really they just want to make sure the session is flowing well. They’re not listening to it in the same way that the writer and the art directors are, for example, worrying about what time is it and are we going to have to pay somebody overtime if this goes any longer? Yeah, but that’s pretty much it. The idea is it’s trying to be really simple about it as well.

Speaker A: It’s very cool. I mean, as you say, it takes zoom out of the equation, which is the best bit. Plus, as you say, we’re listening to the talent in broadcast quality as well, which for me as an engineer is a big thing. I don’t want to have to listen.

Speaker B: And in any session you do, you can remote heise it in just like one drop of a plugin. You don’t even have to think about it. So one of the unique things about the review plugin here is that you can bring your talk back in from any input in the whole computers. Right now I’m using same as system, which is picking up this road NTUSB actually. So same as the system setting or picking it up directly. And that can be my Talkback input, which is on a trigger with a slash key. Or if you’re on a Pro Tools HDX or HD native system, when Pro Tools launches, your audio interface is exclusively owned by Pro Tools. And if your Talkback mic is going to that audio interface, how do you get it in there? Here you go. You pick it up on the side chain.

Speaker A: Nice. That’s clever.

Speaker B: I like that you tell this thing. So say my input is I don’t know, it wouldn’t be one of these buses, but I don’t even have a hardware input. Yeah, so in this case but then you just pick your input there and then here you’d say use key input. That covers all the HD native and anybody else with an exclusively run hardware audio system. There’s a few others out there. I’m trying to think of what they are, but maybe like a Fairlight, for example, and that CC one card that they have and things like that can make use of that input. Actually, come to think of it, I’m not too sure Fairlight has gotten around to putting side chain inputs on their plugins yet. That’s a different issue. They could sure use it. Because I remember I did a tech support thing the other day for a Fairlight person and what I ended up doing is making an Aux channel, dropping a Nexus plugin and picking up making the Aux channel the input for his talkback mic and then just sending it off to a virtual device like Nexus 23 24. So then over here on the review plugin. I just went over and picked up Nexus A 24 or whatever and got his talk back into the system, even.

Speaker A: Though, yeah, that’s clever.

Speaker B: It took an extra channel. It’d be nice if fairly put in a side chain on their plugins. And I forget what other exclusive systems there are, but there are some plenty, I believe.

Speaker A: Well, it’s very cool, mate. You must be pleased with it.

Speaker B: Oh, yeah. I mean, it’s funny how it’s exactly a year. We went to AES last year and showed a prototype of this and we put the prototype together in like the month or two before AES, I think. And it was like that kind of thing where you make 80% of the progress. We had a review plugin that looked a lot like this stuff was functional. And then the whole last year has been spent like the details.

Speaker A: So was the idea, I mean, Nexus One, shall we call it the original Nexus? For me, it’s no secret I’ve talked about it on this show a million times. I love it. Looking at this and watching you use it now was the idea to take something that was really useful, but probably you needed to have a bit of a tech understanding and make it a bit more user friendly. Is that what you were trying to do?

Speaker B: So we would find things like this. You’d get someone and they’d buy Nexus at that time. It’s like 295 at the time. But they’d be on the phone with one of our tech support people for another 45 minutes an hour. We’re building a template for them. It’s kind of expensive, honestly. And this isn’t everybody, but there’s like a certain level of users I just need to do this thing and well, what you need to do is kind of complicated. That’s fine. Can you show me? And then you show them and then next thing you know, when they get stuck or something, they’re back at it. And originally Nexus didn’t even include live tech support. Try to simplify because some of these people, george, I know you know this syndrome where people get set up with something that is barely at their capacity to remember, especially if you’re setting it up for them. Because it’s a different thing when you brew something up in your head. But if someone’s just like, Here you go, whiz, bang, boom. And then you’re like, oh, fuck, I got to get off the phone. See you later. Have a good day, sir. And it worked. I don’t even want to close my computer. So the idea was this first one is just to take that whole kind of set up and distill it into here. I mean, here’s your classic mix minus is what this is.

: Just because someone’s a talented engineer, mixer, whatever, it doesn’t mean they necessarily are trained and know how to build some of the really routing and stuff.

Speaker B: Those are different I know exactly how that is. I mean, that’s kind of how I got my start. Like, I was a sound designer and mixer at Cutters, and there’s sort of operators I was always involved with even. What equipment are we going to buy? How are we going to set up? How can we be more efficient, are we going to do our storage? I mean, there’s so many aspects.

: You were like engineer, technician, really.

Speaker B: I was a little bit of like the I didn’t do all the soldering because there was also like a whole department of full text. But I was like the liaison and I would define and get my hands very dirty doing the stuff for the audio department because you’re also an audio department in a company that was originally a video company. So the video texts are videotechs and they can do what you want, but they don’t know the same stuff. They know exactly how to run an Avid and premiere and all those things. And then audio is kind of a weird thing. So, yeah, it came out from you’re setting stuff up and then here we are making the stuff that we trying to simplify these things.

Speaker A: So I guess the important point to make here too, especially for content creators or for voiceover artists, is all this techie stuff in the background. Especially if you’re a voiceover artist, that’s not your responsibility, that’s the engineer’s responsibility. All you need to do if you’re a voiceover artist is dial into the Engineer on your usual source connect connection. Yeah, but dial into the audio engineer on your usual source connect connection and bang, you’re in. But if you need to run sessions or if you want that connectivity, then you’ve got all this in Nexus as well. Right?

Speaker B: So first thing I was going to say is there’s engineers that they just want to walk into work, go, where’s my talkback mountain? Where’s the mic pre for the talent? Where do I search my sound effects? And I just want to run that way. Yeah, they’re not worried about like, am I on the latest version of this and that and what do I have? They’re more of the artist type of engineer and not so much of the tech kind of engineer. And they’re doing a lot of great work, but they’re just not into it as much. And so a lot of those people, as you said, sometimes especially is what’s happening these days is people are going freelance a lot. And a lot of those people had the support of a big team in a post house like that. And now they’re freelance and they’re leaning on either companies and people like George or some of our tech support. And so the idea is to simplify this, but here’s something that a voice talent could do with this. Imagine you have clients that think, and I’m going to say think that they can save money and time by having the Voice Talent record themselves and then just throwing a bunch of audio takes and poorly, poorly noted stuff at Audio Engineer to say just put it together. And somehow that’s going to save 1 hour of an Audio Engineer’s time by making them edit stuff after the fact. And Robbo, you and I both know that they will get more of what they want quicker for less money if they just do a supervised session with an engineer on the line. Nonetheless, it happens to a lot of Voice talent. Andrew knows this and they are like, can you play that back for me?

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: Now, as a Voice Talent, all you got to probably I think this is stereo only. We should modify this for mono, but you could just make a master fader in your daw and chuck this on it. And now you can do playback without thinking about it. You just play it back. You’re broadcasting your mic. You want to do a playback, especially if you use the push to talk. You can mute your microphone. So the playback is nice and clean for them, but they’re probably not recording you anyway, so they just want to hear it and decide if. So this could be useful for a talent who just needs to have a very simple playback system. And one of the things also that’s going to come out pretty soon is a standalone version of this plugin because it’s also useful for video editors. They want to share their video edit screen and what they’re working on with clients in exactly the same way we are in Pro Tools. But the video editing systems don’t have quite the same idea of always a live ongoing mixer. So in this case, you would just use Nexus to bring the audio directly into the standalone app. The audio from your system essentially like a copy of your audio from the system. And then you can have your Talkback mic selected directly. And now someone running Final Cut or Premiere can easily set up a review session with their clients so they can work remotely as well.

Speaker A: Cool.

Speaker B: So it does have a couple of applications. There some other fun stuff. You hit the Talkback button and it dims things. So for example, if you can talk over it, when you’re like right over here, this happens and that happens and it dims the mix. And you can just decide what you want to dim just by selecting here what gets dimmed when you dim.

Speaker A: Nice.

Speaker B: If you do need to run with Zoom or something like that, there’s some preferences here. You can send your Talk back to your broadcast input. Like I said, Zoom can’t differentiate these things. So that way you could use this with a Zoom type setup or whatever. Just a traditional meeting.

: Google meet, right? Microsoft.

Speaker B: This is a funny setting. Normally this is off and we take away the master fader for the engineers. So that they don’t end up turning their whole mix down and printing it. But if they do want to have their control of their mix of their own level, then they can turn that preference on and have is that just.

Speaker A: For if what you’re sending. So that’s effectively what I’m sending out my mix bus, is that right?

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. So if you were to somehow move this fader and then mix everything down yeah, it’s down. You might bounce down at like negative something bad.

Speaker A: But if you’re recording and things are a bit hot, at least you can trim it a touch, right?

Speaker B: Right. If you want, you can turn this on and you can control your monitor mix a little bit easier without having to change your master fader. But when you mix down, you want to either make sure you put this puppy at zero you can type the numbers in here, by the way, too, or you can do the preference and just turn it off. So there is no way, there’s no fader. It’s gone.

Speaker A: See, the thing for me is in Pro Tools, and you might correct me if I’m wrong here, but when I have a session and I save memory locations, right? So I’ll create a new session. I’ll create a record section as a location memory, and I’ll tell it to remember the tracks that I’m viewing and the zoom and all that sort of stuff, and the mute and the mute and all that sort of stuff. And then I’ll create another section which might be Mix, and then I’ll have other tracks. So when I slip through and when I go to each memory location, it’s muting and unmuting master faders. So on my record section, my record master fader, I would have this Source Connect plugin on it. But then when I went to my next one, if I was doing the mix and I opened up that memory, it would be a different master bus, which wouldn’t have that on there. So that would negate that forgetting to turn it off. Right.

Speaker B: It’s like the old SSL boards that would have, like I forget what the modes are called, but like mix down mode and tracking mode, and it would do a whole bunch of switch arounds to deal with queuing and things like that. Yeah, you’re kind of like switching your mixer into different modes depending on what you’re doing it’s one of the favorite.

: Things with Twistawave is being able to hide the little volume slider on the bar at the top because people will slide that thing down. Don’t even realize why it’s so quiet. Start recording at a higher level or doing all kinds of weird stuff. No, that’s just your playback, dude. So I love that. I can hide it, make it disappear. Yeah, you can’t touch it anymore.

Speaker A: Opening a hole.

Speaker B: That’s why we put this here, because it’s just like we were trying to make this thing the idea a lot with this was to reduce tech support and try to which ironically is the.

: Idea of the Passport Vo is to also reduce support, which is I’m actually frankly a little concerned about.

Speaker B: It was kind of funny when Andrew and I talked about doing this episode, he’s like, and then all you need, you need this and Passport Vo. And I was like, with this, you just kind of need a basic two out interface. Like you could just do a road AI one.

Speaker A: See, if you buy the Passport Vo, you don’t have to pay $15 a month either. See, there you go.

Speaker B: That’s true. How many months is that at like $600? The Passport Vo is a piece of hardware and it’s beautiful in its own right. And even though it does cover a playback workflow, there’s many differences. I’m personally not worried about it.

Speaker C: The thing we sort of don’t touch on, which is something that’s kind of more common than it was pre COVID, is once because I lived remotely for seven years before a mate of mine who’s an audio engineer moved here as well. And when he decided to move here, it was like, thank God for that. At least I’ve got some kind of support. So things go wrong in here, at least I can give him a call. He’ll just pop around and fix it for me. So all these things that make life a lot easier and technically support you in a kind of roundabout fashion are perfect for people like myself or Pip the audio engineer, just so we don’t have to sort of go, shit, I’ve got no one around here to fix anything.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, honestly, I like it too, even though I know what to set up. It’s like couple tunnel or however you say that. Having to set up sessions and do things and do all your routing when it is nice. Oh, I started this little thing. I wasn’t planning on doing a review, but now someone wants to hear it. Hold on, put the plugin on there and you’re not changing things. And so it’s just convenient even if you know what you’re doing, it’s like, why work harder?

Speaker A: Look, I can’t tell you the amount of times Nexus has saved my ass since I’ve had know just that fact of being able to get stuff out of the box, out of the software, out of the software, where you kind of think, holy shit, how am I going to get this out of here and into there? Nexus is usually the answer.

Speaker B: I’ll give you the craziest thing I solved with Nexus. One time this guy was desperate and he had some problem with his audio interface. I forget he had like an input and an output device and he couldn’t use the same device for input and output, but one device was only running at one sample rate and basically end result is you couldn’t get these. Two things to aggregate together and work as a single device for Pro Tools. So he ended up with Pro Tools kind of like me right here, where he’s got no input. I think right now with my Pro Tools interface, if we go to my I O setups, you get in these weird situations, no inputs.

Speaker A: Wow. Yeah, look at that. That’s crazy.

Speaker B: Got nothing, right?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: But you’re like, I need some inputs. So you just drop a Nexus plugin on a bunch of aux channels and like, hey, inputs.

Speaker A: Yeah, that’s clever.

Speaker B: And I just sidewired his whole Pro Tools system.

Speaker A: There you go.

: Sometimes the Pro Tools I o routing is confoundingly frustrating. I mean, I’ve tried to set it up for people. I feel like every time I try to customize the I get, I confuse myself.

Speaker B: Half the problem with the Pro Tools I O is that you’re all good, and then you get a session from somebody else, and then your I O set up is cluttered with a bunch of other shit from somebody else. You’re like, yeah, what are these things? I never created them. Can I delete them? And then if you really get into it, sometimes Pro Tools picks the wrong output. You can have many differently named things going out, the same physical output, so you’re hearing everything where you want. Then you’re like, I don’t need this output. And proto’s like that’s being used in the session. Make sure that you don’t screw yourself, because if you delete that output, then who knows? Yeah, it is interesting. Nexus kind of puts all that routing just on the top level, and for some people, it’s a little bit easier.

: To see, I think, so it makes more sense to me, that’s for sure.

Speaker A: So give us the sell, Robert. What’s the sell, mate? How much a month?

Speaker B: We are trying to make this very affordable. So the idea is that what other people would spend in, say, a streaming service and a high quality streaming service I won’t name any names, and they’re cobbling together different services to make things. Our Nexus is right now, and we hope to keep, at this point, 1195 a month. And we’re just going to add to it.

: That’s cheaper than my Netflix subscription, man.

Speaker A: Yeah, it is pretty cheap, I’ll be honest.

Speaker B: It’s cheaper than, like, middle. I don’t know the Zoom pricing exactly, but I believe at least one of the lower tiers of Zoom is like, $20 a month, I think. Does that sound right?

: Cheaper than Zoom pro.

Speaker B: Yeah. And then with Zoom, you got to add other services. So really, with Zoom, you’re looking at at least $30.

Speaker A: Well, with Zoom, you still got to have Source Connect, right? And all that sort of stuff. And at least with this, with the broadcast setting, you can get away without that for a while.

Speaker B: You yeah. I mean, with this, you might still have Source Connect, but you might not need a separate broadcaster. Some of these users are often trying to put things together in more affordable ways or I don’t know. This is designed to be a lot of bang for the buck and we’re going to add a lot to it and a lot of very specific industry type workflows built within so that you can get your job done easier.

Speaker A: What about podcasters and video creators and all that sort of stuff?

Speaker B: Right now there’s the record button, right, that we’re actually using, but I’m not sure exactly how it’s going to be presented, like, which overall tiers. But yeah, the ability just to hit record and then collect all those files easily. It’s not going to be the direct to Daw workflow that maybe a higher end podcast might use, but for a simple, I just want to collect files and send them to the engineer who’s going to edit them together. And never give that engineer bad files, by the way, people. It’s very rude.

Speaker A: Jesus. Take your own advice for once.

Speaker B: Will.

: Pot calling the catalog.

Speaker A: I was going to say absolutely. Do as I say, not as I do.

Speaker B: That’s right, exactly.

: Robert, let me ask you this. So from you’re in this case, what would they call you? The host of the session?

Speaker B: Yeah, I’m the host. It’s my room.

: Does the host get to see the settings on the guests? So as a host, do you know that a guest is using broadcast versus communication?

Speaker B: Yeah, which we’re not using right now. You would see the HQ there, I think. Got you. Yeah. There’s going to be some of that stuff. We plan to have like a button where you can see what the bit rates are of the connections and things like that. But right now this is 1.0. That’s right.

Speaker A: This is the beginning. Absolutely.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: But it’s funny because I’ve talked to you about the client of mine in Dubai, the studio there that I do a lot of work with. I’ve been talking about this, and they’re super, super keen. And that’s why they want to get this as part of their workflow because it just tightens everything up, everything’s in one place for them, which is good for them and bloody good for me.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.

: I was confusion about should I mute this or mute that? Should I unmute this? You don’t want to be listening to this, but only be listening to.

Speaker B: Yeah. Andrew, for you, you’re recording in Twisted Wave, and so when they ask you for playback, you have to play back at a twisted Wave, right?

Speaker C: Well, no, because I usually use the bigger machine and not the one I’m using here. So it’s wavelab. Same thing, though. But I just don’t play back.

Speaker B: Right, you just don’t play back. No. In a later iteration, when we get the standalone version of this, you’ll be able to just pipe wavelab right through it as your system output and then you can do playbacks.

Speaker A: That’s opening a whole nother can of worms.

Speaker B: This is feeding the animals at the zoo.

Speaker C: Correct. It’s like, I know I can, but should I? This is the question.

Speaker A: But at least you’ve got the option, though. You can make the moral decision, but at least you’ve got the option there. You might be recording a podcast and you might want to play something back or something. But in a voice session you might go, well, listen, you might take the stance to, well, you’re not paying me to be an audio engineer, so no, I don’t play back. Not that you would tell them that.

Speaker B: It’s creatives. It’s like, imagine you’ve got an art director and a writer and they’re just like, what song do we want on the spot? What about this one? What about that one? And they’re playing stuff over the cell phones before it’s like, here, you could just be like sharing what’s on my desktop. Check out this song. I don’t know. I like this one. They’re just playing each other’s itunes library at each yeah.

Speaker A: Well, there’s the other thing you could do, too. You could almost with Nexus, if you can get an analog line into whatever it is you’re using and you can plug your phone in. You could plug a phone call in through this as well, too, couldn’t you? You could have someone listening on the phone.

Speaker B: I don’t know that one day you don’t actually. Maybe you can order this and order a phone number.

Speaker A: Yeah, well, there you go. I just think the amount of times that I’ve had sessions where the client’s been on holidays or the creative has been stuck in the airport and I’ve had someone on a phone as well and you can still throw them into this mix.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, the way I throw people on a phone call into my session right now is I’ll use even like FaceTime is a really easy one. You can get a phone call on FaceTime and FaceTime shows up on the Mac and Skype if you buy a phone number from them. The nice thing about FaceTime is, like, everyone has a phone in their computer just by the nature of it. So that’s like one way to just.

Speaker A: Make Nexus your input and your output of that. Absolutely right.

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker A: Yeah. Very cool indeed. Well done, sir.

Speaker B: Thank you.

: Bravo.

Speaker B: We are proud. And if anybody has questions, source elements.com, check it out.

Speaker C: Indeed. Check it out.

Speaker B: Well, that was fun. Is it over?

Speaker C: The Pro Audio suite with thanks to Tribut and Austrian audio recorded using Source Connect edited by Andrew Peters and mixed by Voodoo Radio Imaging with tech support from George the Tech Wittam don’t forget to subscribe to the show and join in the conversation on our Facebook group. To leave a comment, suggest a topic or just say G’day. Drop us a note at our website. Theproudiosuite.com.

 




Check out this episode!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *