MOTU Digital Performer 5 Digital Audio Software Competitive Upgrade (Mac Only)
For song writing, studio production, film scoring, live performance, remixing, post production and surround mixing, Digital Performer delivers advanced features in an intuitive, streamlined design. Whether you’re completing a surround DVD, or you just want to write a song and burn a CD or MP3 file, Digital Performer gets you there quickly with elegance and ease. And Version 5 adds six new virtual instruments, plus dozens of innovative new features to keep you on the cutting edge of desktop music production.
From classic FM to vintage analog, six intriguing virtual instruments will spark your creativity and get you making music in minutes. Browse the hundreds of supplied presets, choose a sound or drum kit, and then hit the record button. The rest is up to you.
Load your own samples or program custom sounds. You get two one-oscillator subtractive synths, one two-oscillator subtractive synth, a sample player, a drum module and an FM synth. Get ready to crank out some serious sound from your Mac. All six instruments are designed for easy, streamlined operation and CPU-efficient performance. If you've never used instrument plug-ins before, get ready for some heavy-duty fun. If you're a seasoned virtual instrument user, dive in and don't forget to come up for air.
BassLine™ is an analog-style monophonic bass synth. Don't let the size and straightforward design fool you: BassLine puts out monstrous low end. BassLine's controls are dedicated to the bass, the whole bass, and nothing but the bass. The result? Instant killer bass lines have never been easier to produce. BassLine has one oscillator that blends two waveforms that are perfect for bass sounds (saw and square). It also includes one low-pass filter with cutoff and resonance, simple decay envelopes for the filter and amplifier and several additional analog synth features. BassLine's classic design will feel instantly familiar to retro analog synth enthusiasts, and for those not so familiar with its legacy, BassLine offers an easy-to-understand introduction to early synth design of a bygone (and now reborn) era.
PolySynth™ is a retro analog-style polyphonic pad synth inspired by the Roland Juno 106 and other one-oscillator analog synths from the '80s. Like BassLine, PolySynth has one oscillator, but it is capable of a much wider variety of sounds, thanks to its digital controlled oscillator (DCO), which can be adjusted with varying amounts of de-tune, triangle wave, sawtooth, rectangle (square) wave, sub-oscillator 1 & 2 and noise. Lush pads, rude squawks, twisting sweeps - just choose a preset and go. The single LFO can modulate pitch (for vibrato), pulse width (for the square wave and sub-oscillators) or filter depth (for the classic "wah" effect, among others). The resonant low-pass filter is equipped with frequency and resonance controls, key tracking, velocity control and an ADSR envelope, which can also be applied as an overall envelope for each note. Chorus and distortion provide plenty of punch for the thickest of pads and searing lead lines. Classic filter and envelope design make for quick, intuitive programming.
Modulo™ is a highly programmable 2-oscillator subtractive synth. It's like BassLine and PolySynth combined, on steroids (and other performance-enhancing drugs). At its heart, Modulo is built on two independent oscillators each capable of producing 58 digital waveforms (including the basics such as sine, square, saw, rectangle, etc.). The oscillator waveforms can be further adjusted with symmetry, tuning and a unique phase shift that allows you to split the oscillator, offset the resulting waveforms by up to 180 degrees, and then either subtract or multiply the two split waveforms to produce interesting timbral shifts. This effect can even be modulated with several possible modulation sources, such as one of the two LFOs. In fact, Modulo provides five different modulation sources and up to seven destinations. Sources include the two LFOs, modulation envelope, external mod wheel and note-on velocity, all of which can be flexibly assigned to filter frequency, oscillator pitch, oscillator phase shift, oscillator symmetry, and many other controls. The results produce living, breathing, dynamic, responsive sounds that you can mold in real time as you write and mix your music. The resonant multi-mode filter, three envelopes (for the amplifier, filter and general purpose modulation), detune, noise and modulation matrix provide plenty of additional sound shaping control.
As its name implies, Nanosampler™ is, quite simply, the easiest way to play samples ever devised. Load a sample and play it. Easy. Yet consider the power and convenience of being able to drag an audio file from any other DP window, or even your Mac desktop, and then drop it into the Nanosampler LCD display to instantly play it from your MIDI controller. All of the basic sampler features you need are right at your fingertips: set a sample start/end time, set a crossfade loop, apply the multimode filter and automate cutoff frequency or other parameters, apply an envelope to the amplitude or filter and add some LFO effects. Build your own personalized library of samples, organized as you wish in the Mac OS Finder and accessed instantly from Nanosampler sub-menus that reflect your customized folder organization. You can even "collect" the samples being used, regardless of their source location, into your DP project folder for easy archiving and session exchange with your colleagues. This is the way sampling was meant to be. Simple. Powerful. Convenient. And CPU efficient. Open as many Nanosamplers as you have samples to play.
Model 12™ is a twelve-part programmable drum module (sample player). Instant drums. Hundreds of drum samples. Dozens of kits. Load and go. It's as simple as that. Or build your own kits with surprisingly deep programming features, including all of the traditional features you'd expect in a drum module, such as part linking for open and closed hi hats. Each of Model 12's individual parts has two sends, allowing you to independently apply any effects or other external processing you wish to each part. For example, you can apply heavy gated reverb to the snare while adding just a bit of multitap delay to the hand clap. Use the Velocity parameter on a part's tuning knob to map note-on velocity to pitch, allowing you to "bend" up or down into the root pitch of the drum, depending on how hard you strike your drum pad or MIDI controller key. This, and other similar techniques, can be applied to sample start, filter cutoff, and other parameters. Choose either a decay or gated envelope for each part independently. Each part even gets its own multimode filter for a wide range of filter effects, all applied simultaneously.
Proton™ is the sixth and final instrument plug-in included with DP5. Proton is an imaginative and provocative two-operator frequency modulation (FM) synthesizer that delivers classic, bright, shimmering and expressive FM synth sounds that serve as a perfect compliment to the rest of DP5's new instrument lineup. FM synthesis involves modulating one oscillator's frequency (the carrier) with another oscillator (the modulator) at rates in the audible range (i.e. not slow LFO rates). Different frequency ratios of modulator and carrier operators produce a world of interesting timbres. The pioneering Yamaha DX7 delivered a wide range of sounds using only sine waves with six operators. Proton delivers an equally broad palette of sounds with a streamlined 2-op architecture driven by its unique wavetable knob, instead of the added overhead and complexity of additional operators. As such, Proton may be the most easily programmable FM synth ever created. A real-time display in the center of the window display the spectral content or periodic waveform being generated by the current settings. Additional controls include an FM LFO, modulation pitch envelope, FM amount envelope and overall ADSR envelope.
So... What else is new?
Track Folders. Organize your lengthy track lists into folders and sub-folders and show or hide track groups with a single click on the disclosure triangle. You can put folders within folders for as many levels as you need. Assign a unique color to the tracks in each folder to further enhance your project organization. Track folders appear throughout DP5 in all windows that show multiple tracks, including all track show/hide selectors. Option-click and command-click shortcuts help you quickly collapse and expand multiple folders, or even all folders.
The Meter Bridge™ is a new window (and central pane in the Consolidated Window) that is dedicated to monitoring all signal paths in the Digital Performer mixing environment. With a single click, you can independently show or hide available hardware inputs, available hardware outputs, busses, bundles and tracks as desired. The Meter Bridge provides long-throw, scalable meters with extremely fast, smooth and accurate ballistics. You can quickly toggle between two different layouts: the linear layout shows all meters side by side in one row that scrolls left and right. Resize them vertically as high as you want for detailed metering, or shrink them as small as you need. Zoom in on a specific level range for extremely detailed, hi-resolution level monitoring. The wrap-around layout displays all meters in multiple rows that fit in the space available in the window for an instant bird's-eye view of all signal paths currently being viewed. Meters turn red to clearly alert you when clipping occurs. The entire meter changes color to be highly visible, even from across the room.
The DP5 tool bar contains four new audio editing tools to speed up your edits: Trim, Slip, Slide and Roll.
Trim lets you drag the edge of an audio region. This feature was available in earlier versions of DP, but now it can be explicitly invoked with the new tool in the tool bar. This allows you to trim audio regions more quickly by clicking somewhere inside the audio region, rather than having to find and drag the edge, which may be offscreen.
The Slip tool allows you to move the waveform inside an audio clip earlier or later without affecting the left or right edge of the audio region.
The Slide tool does the opposite of Slip: it allows users to move the edges of the audio region earlier or later by the same amount in one drag operation while the audio inside the clip remains anchored to its current position in time.
The Roll tool allows users to drag the border between two adjacent audio regions in one operation, "covering up" a portion of one region while "uncovering" the other.
Film/Video Scoring Enhancements
Digital Performer is the established application of choice for those dedicated to the art and craft of writing music for picture. Building on an already strong feature set designed for film and TV composers, DP5 includes several major enhancements for the extended music-for-picture workflow. Now, the director, producer, composer and music editor can work even more closely to quickly realize their creative vision.
Streamers, flutters and punches are visual cues that help composers, conductors and musicians to anticipate visual hits and, more generally, synchronize their music to what is happening on screen. DP5 can now superimpose streamers, punches and flutters directly on a QuickTime movie playing in Digital Performer’s movie window. This allows film and TV composers to collaborate more efficiently with music editors and better prepare for and conduct live orchestra sound stage scoring sessions. By bringing these visual cues to the native desktop, without expensive and cumbersome additional hardware, DP5 also paves the way for anyone to conduct small- to medium-scale scoring sessions in their personal and project studios.
A click is such a simple thing, and yet it can be crucial to the recording process. That's why DP5 introduces another round of ground-breaking click and countoff enhancements.
Click
A click is such a simple thing, and yet it can be crucial to the recording process. That's why DP5 introduces another round of ground-breaking click and countoff enhancements. To complement DP5's new visual cueing features (Streamers, flutters & punches), a visual click has been added.
Enhanced Input Monitoring
Each audio track in DP5 now has its own separate input monitor button, allowing you to listen to a live audio signal from the track's assigned input, independent of the track's record-enable state. This is similar to "Record Safe" mode on a conventional mixer. This simple feature greatly enhances all workflow processes that revolve around live input monitoring and recording. Here's just one example regarding the use of Propellerhead Reason with DP5: instead of having to set up two tracks for each Reason instrument input (an aux track for live input monitoring and a disk track for bouncing the final Reason track), you can instead set up just one stereo disk track. Engage the input monitoring button to hear live Reason input, and then simply record into that same track when you are ready to commit the part to disk for archiving, session exchange or editing. Your Reason track counts can now drop by half.
Soundbite Volume & Gain
Draw a volume curve on an audio clip and it stays with all instances of the clip.
The new MIDI Keys window provides convenient, basic MIDI note entry - right at your fingertips. Trigger synths and enter MIDI notes from your computer keyboard. Step record MIDI notes without a MIDI keyboard.
Support for Pro Tools 7
Maintaining its position as the leading audio sequencer software front end for Pro Tools HD, DP5 is fully qualified for use with Pro Tools 7 systems running under DAE Version 7.1cs4 or higher.
Track enable/disable
Audio tracks can now simply be enabled or disabled to free up their system resources. Cumbersome audio voice management is now handled automatically by DP5.
MIDI Device Setup
Conveniently configure your external MIDI gear directly in DP. Everything you do is reflected in Mac OS X's Audio MIDI Setup utility. Need to transfer your DP project to another computer, or exchange it with a colleague? Now your MIDI device setup can transfer with the project, with all settings and track assignments still intact.
Digital Performer 5.0 requires a Power Macintosh 500MHz with 512MB of RAM and Mac OSX 10.3.7 or higher.
MOTU recommends a dual-processor 1GHz G4 Power Mac with 1GB of RAM or more for optimal performance.
