Studios doing double duty as control room and recording space?

Just use Reaper and add the required video codec packs to the USB drive installations for video import. All those formats are drag and drop with Reaper. I'd admit that Reaper isn't completely intuitive if you are new to computers but in this situation it can be set up with sensible defaults and templates so that it could be as simple as drag and drop to get started.

I get your point, but you'll be amazed the format you get given! I recently did a show where all the participants were asked to bring in an mp3 file so we could play it in the show. We had 10 in Act 1 and 9 in act 2.

I think we had something like 8 or 9 that played on our rack mount mp3 player. Old Apple protected formats being the worst problem, but others had all kinds of weirdnesses - some were AIFF, or WAV, and we were able to convert them, while others were things we had never experienced before, created on odd software.AAC and AMR? No idea what produces those! Quite a few were CDA format - all these, we were informed were MP3 files from MP3 players, so it was a real pain. Some seemed to actually be split video files, but the audio file refused to play without being run as a video file and the audio file was picked up by the software.

I guess the other problem is choosing software - reaper is great, but this puts you in the position of making a choice - what happens to an adobe, cubase, logic, PT or one of the others? If you limit the installation to one platform, you create another issue? Equally having a 'Reaper' DAW and a 'pro Tools' DAW is expensive.
 
I guess the other problem is choosing software - reaper is great, but this puts you in the position of making a choice - what happens to an adobe, cubase, logic, PT or one of the others? If you limit the installation to one platform, you create another issue? Equally having a 'Reaper' DAW and a 'pro Tools' DAW is expensive.

The problem that Reaper addresses is the situation where people go changing settings without knowing what they are doing and causing the system to stop working. To prevent this the system has to be locked down in some way and giving every user their own portable Reaper installation on a USB stick means that if they mess something up then it is only their installation that suffers.

The other alternative is to use software that understands the multi-user environment so that every user gets their own login and configuration files for the software they are using. I guess educational establishments should be used to this issue as I've seen this done for certain data processing software but I've no idea which DAW's can be configured to support multiple users.

Oh and AAC files are the format that iTunes uses although they normally have the .m4a extension while AMR files are usually produced by mobile phones. If I get a strange file delivered I'll always try opening it in Reaper before moving on to something like VLC. I don't envy you having to make something work with a show looming up.
 
The trouble is people no longer need to understand audio. One of the people gave the sound guy her phone, and wouldn't give him the pin, and said he needed to tap it every few seconds to keep it awake. He tried it and it didnt play. Turned out the music was on her work server, and cloud services don't work when there's no signal!
 
The Scarlett 2i2 is a real basic starter-level audio interface. Maybe good for your 'beginner set up' in one room. For your semi-pro room, you are going to want something with more preamps and the ability to send more mics' signals separately to the computer (the mixers will do the opposite - take all the mics and send them to a stereo signal unless you go for one of the more expensive digital mixers like the QSC Touch. Same for your Podcast room - the 2i2 will only allow 2 separate tracks.

Thanks!
 
Thanks!

We've removed Dante as an option. We just don't have the staff capacity to contentiously support the this solution. They are cool though! It looks like we're leaning towards the tie in solution.

This control room/recording room is a functional requirement of the project, and we're also waiting to hear back from our contractor to see what solution they propose.
 
The success of your project should be fine with either Dante, or simple tielines as long as your technical support is top notch. With no budget for a person full time available when you are open, you will sink rapidly because people will wreck the computers accidentally, and somebody good needs to be on hand to restore them to 100% every day. You will be amazed how many times things require rebuilding. People really do stupid things accidentally. Never we found maliciously, just things like "this will remove cubase, continue yes/no?" And for some reason they'd type Y!!!! Sounds like a great project, but a brave one.

Thanks! We know that that our new suites will be more complicated that what we are currently running. Fortunately, we already have a service model that works for us, and have staff that are able to keep the rooms running. But we need to build them so that our staff aren't spending the majority of their time rebuilding drives and repatching suites. So 'simple' is our first option when buying equipment, and it looks like we'll be investigating the tie line approach.
 
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