MOTU Digital Performer 5

Digital Performer 5 - Even More Powerful!

For songwriting, studio production, film scoring, live performance, remixing, post production, and surround mixing, MOTU 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. Digital Performer Version 5 adds six new virtual instruments, plus dozens of innovative new features to keep you on the cutting edge of desktop music production. With version 5.1 (a free download) Digital Performer offers Universal Binary support for Intel-powered Macs!

• Six new virtual instruments
• Track folders make organizing lengthy track lists easy
• Meter Bridge monitors all signal paths
• New Trim, Slip, Slide, and Roll editing tools
• Click enhancements provide incredibly flexible click options
• Enhanced input monitoring

Six new virtual instruments
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!

• BassLine - An analog-style monophonic bass synth that puts out monstrous low end.
• PolySynth - A retro analog-style polyphonic pad synth inspired by the Roland Juno 106 and other one-oscillator analog synths from the '80s.
• Modulo - A highly programmable 2-oscillator subtractive synth. It's like BassLine and PolySynth combined, on steroids.
• Nanosampler - is, The easiest way to play samples ever devised. Just load a sample and play it.
• Model 12 - A 12-part programmable drum module (sample player). Instant drums, with hundreds of drum samples and dozens of kits.
• Proton - An imaginative and provocative two-operator frequency modulation (FM) synthesizer that delivers classic, bright, shimmering and expressive FM synth sounds.

Track folders make organizing lengthy track lists easy
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 Digital Performer 5 in all windows that show multiple tracks, including all track show/hide selectors.

Meter Bridge monitors all signal paths
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.

New Trim, Slip, Slide, and Roll editing tools
The Digital Performer 5 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.
• Slip - Allows you to move the waveform inside an audio clip earlier or later without affecting the left or right edge of the audio region.
• Slide - Does the opposite of Slip: it allows you 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.
• Roll - Allows you to drag the border between two adjacent audio regions in one operation, "covering up" a portion of one region while "uncovering" the other.

Streamers, punches and flutters for film/video scoring
Building on an already strong feature set designed for film and TV composers, MOTU Digital Performer 5 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.
Digital Performer 5 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, Digital Performer 5 also paves the way for anyone to conduct small- to medium-scale scoring sessions in their personal and project studios.

Once visual cues have been programmed as desired, they can be exported as part of the QuickTime movie, which can then be shared with colleagues for review or approvals before costly sound stage recording sessions with a full orchestra. And when time is ticking during costly sessions, changes can be made directly in your Digital Performer project quickly and effortlessly:

Click enhancements provide incredibly flexible click options
A click is such a simple thing, and yet it can be crucial to the recording process. That's why MOTU Digital Performer 5 introduces another round of ground-breaking click and countoff enhancements. To complement Digital Performer 5's new visual cueing features (streamers, flutters & punches), a visual click has been added.

• Customized click - In past versions, Digital Performer's click feature was tied to meter changes. In Digital Performer 5, you can also insert click change events wherever you like in the Conductor track, independent of meter changes. This allows you to quickly and easily program customized audio, MIDI, and visual click tracks for a wide range of situations. Three types of click change events are provided: beat click, tacit click, and pattern click. Together, these click change events give you complete flexibility in programming even the most elaborate click tracks. For example, film composers and conductors can customize the click for each cue in preparation for sound stage recording sessions. Because click events are regular Conductor track events, creating the perfect customized click track has never been easier.
• Beat click - The beat click makes clicks on regular beats or beat sub-divisions, just like the beat click that is part of a meter change event, except that a beat click event is independent of any meter change events. For example, you could insert a meter change event that clicks every quarter note, but then insert a beat click event a few bars later that clicks every eighth note.
• Tacit click - The tacit click silences clicking until the next click change event (or meter). For example, you might create a countoff in which the last two clicks before the downbeat are silent. Or you may want to create a period of click silence in which you then program visual elements in the Conductor track (punches, flutters or streamers) during the silence in order to provide a visual timing reference.
• Pattern click - The pattern click allows you to program any imaginable click pattern you wish using a convenient shorthand method of entering the click pattern.
• Click defaults - The new click defaults feature lets you choose a preferred click pattern for any meter and tempo range that you specify. For example, at a slow 6/8 time, you might prefer to click on eighth note sub-divisions, while for a fast 6/8 you might prefer to only click every dotted-quarter note. You can create as many default click patterns as you wish for any variety of meters and tempo ranges. These default preferences can go far beyond the convention of clicking once per beat, thanks to Digital Performer 5's new click programming features. Once you customize your default click patterns as desired, Digital Performer will automatically use them whenever the click is enabled and your sequence Conductor Track matches the meter and tempo of each default click.
• Enhanced countoff - Digital Performer now lets you specify the countoff in any number of beats and bars (instead of just bars). This allows you to include pick-up beats, countoff for only a portion of a measure and many other applications. In addition, you can specify any click pattern you wish for the countoff, and even program a visual countoff, just like the visual click, with its own customized settings.

Enhanced input monitoring
Each audio track in MOTU Digital Performer 5 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. To further enhance input monitoring, four Audio Patch Thru modes give you several options for input monitoring behavior in various situations. For example, just like large-format consoles, Blend mode lets you hear both the live input and the disk audio during playback, before you punch in for recording.

• MIDI Keys window provides convenient, basic MIDI note entry - right at your fingertips.
• Waveform Editor provides new tabs for direct access to - and hands-on editing of - the embedded tempo, pitch and volume meta-data in your audio files.
• Lock button in the Waveform Editor title bar lets you use all of the familiar controls in Digital Performer 5's main transport panel to control playback and selection in the Waveform Editor.
• Add virtual instruments to your project even more quickly and conveniently. In one simple operation, you can add as many instances of the instrument plug-in as you need, with MIDI tracks already assigned.
• 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 Digital Performer 5.
• Soundbite Volume & Gain - Draw a volume curve on an audio clip and it stays with all instances of the clip. Apply an overall, non-destructive amount of gain or attenuation to a soundbite. All instances of the soundbite are affected.
• Support for Pro Tools 7 - Digital Performer 5 is fully qualified for use with Pro Tools 7 systems running under DAE Version 7.1cs4 or higher.
• Conveniently configure external MIDI gear directly in DP. Now your MIDI device setup can transfer with the project, with all settings and track assignments still intact.