You should check out the Frontier Tranzport at:

http://www.frontierdesign.com/Products/TranzPort

One of my favorite devices. Very flexible, reliable, and you can program many of the buttons to your liking.

I have a four room studio: 2 iso booths, live room, control room. I do record myself from time to time and for that this device is invaluable.

But I also use it when prepping for a session, checking to make sure the mic signals are making it properly to the intended track in Cubase on my Mac.

Check it out!

Jeff

Hey, well, many folks now have incorporated their control rooms into the studio. In many cases, there is no reason anymore to have a separate control room from the studio. You use your headphones when tracking. When you are ready to mix, no one is recording in the studio and so you use speakers. A bigger space for your control room & mixing is always preferable to a smaller control room.

Tracking down tracks
Mx. Remy Ann David

Thanks

Thanks guys,

Two options there and both helpful. For my situation i'm favouring Jeff's suggestion as it's closer to the vision I have. I'll probably couple it with a second LCD monitor facing the live room so I can see exactly what i'm controlling or just use a hinge on the screen in the control room that I can rotate to face the live room through the window.

Any further suggestions would still be considered so don't hold back people.

Cheers,

Rob

I have a video monitor in my live room and use wireless mouse and keyboards to control the DAW. Space bar on the keyboard starts and stops, Asterisk on the numpad starts recording, etc.

Pretty easy, you just have to watch out that things like mike stands and headphones don't interfere with the wireless signal.

I can even control things from my drum room in the basement.

For a while I wanted to do a similar kind of thing, but I gave up. Controlling a computer in a separate room isn't too difficult, but controlling the hardware was the killer. So either the hardware went in the tracking room to make it easy to adjust during the session if I was a part of the session, or it went in the control room for easy adjustment when I was just recording and not part of the band, but either way it was a pain in the butt if I wanted to switch from one setup to the other.

All whining aside, under XP I control the computer in a separate room using a hard-wired network (wireless can create issues) and Remote Desktop Connection from a laptop. What I see on my laptop in the tracking room is identical to what's on the DAW computer screen, so I get full control over the DAW which is nice. There's a little bit of screen refresh latency, but I got used to it. I didn't get used to having to move hardware from one room to the other and back and reattach all the cables every time I went from session participant to just recording guy, and that's why I gave up and put everything in one room.

Get a rotating desk in the wall between the tracking and control room.

Or have a stationary desk and build rotating tracking and control rooms. Didn't Neil Peart already try this? :wink: