"We gave up on hardware processors."

There are so many award-winning projects in their online gallery that it's tough to choose which ones we'd like Andrew Roth, head of Internet audio at Earwax Productions, to revisit. Oscar-grabbing sound design for Bram Stoker's Dracula, the Peabody-awarded Lost And Found Sound on NPR, and the computerized voice of HDTV's Emmy-winning "Hacker" character weren't discussed, nor was there time to cover the AT&T Sound Tunnel, the Whales in IMAX, the choirs of Kilimanjaro, or the interactive Woody Woodpecker Kiosk at Universal Studios Japan that turns everyone into a sound designer.

Founded in 1984 by Jim McKee and Barney Jones in San Francisco, Earwax Productions has evolved from radio art and early multimedia work to fully embracing sound and music composition for feature films, online audio, museum installations, television, independent radio, and even the Macintosh operating system. Early adopters of digital recording technology, the staff of nine combine to output more audio with every upgrade.

"We're fairly small," says Roth, "but our output has increased as the technology has changed. We were there when Sound Designer, Pro Tools, Director, and Flash were just starting out. We think of sound design as composition, so Pro Tools is the first program launched every morning. You'll see Pro Tools and Flash on every screen in here on any given day."

Earwax In Every Mac

The company's sounds are heard in movie theaters, museums, and on television, radio, the Web, and most every Mac desktop. Commissioned by Apple to create the Platinum operating system sounds, Earwax's McKee designed every click, return, and save sound a typical Mac user generates in a day.

"We see a lot of opportunities to not just marry sound to picture but to also design interfaces that manipulate the user and create an environment," Roth continues. "We found that if there was that little click sound when people scrolled through the Apple menus that they were able to navigate more quickly because there was tactile feedback. It gives users a better sense of timing and tactility with the mouse."

The Earwax studios house four G3-based Pro Tools workstations. Three are running Pro Tools 5.0.1 on Mix Core systems, and another uses a Digi ToolBox XP system that will be upgraded soon to add timecode compatibility to that Mac. Three 888|24 I/O units handle audio input/output, a DSP Farm card handles mixing and all DSP functions, and three SBS Bit 3 Technologies PCI expansion chassis extend the studio's TDM capabilities. A long list of plug-ins, including Renaissance Compressor and L1 limiter from Waves, have long since replaced the Earwax audio rack.

"We gave up on hardware processors," says Roth. "The racks are shrinking but they're still there to look impressive! We have a Mackie 24-channel mixer that replaced a big 48-channel console, but with Pro Tools and all the automation we found that we're using fewer and fewer mixer channels all the time. Most of the studio now lives in our computers and the expansion bay chassis."

Roth has also given up his favorite MIDI tool since Pro Tools 5.0 integrated MIDI sequencing. Earwax used Opcode's Studio Vision the past 10 years but needed to bring it all under one roof in order to free up precious CPU real estate. "We've definitely taken advantage of the MIDI now in Pro Tools, especially for our Internet work. 'Active in Background' is a great feature for us because we like to keep Flash and Pro Tools up at the same time and toggle back and forth when doing Internet mixes on the spot. We use Pro Tools for complete integration in doing Internet sound because nothing else has its ease and stability. That's why we've stuck with Digidesign all these years."

Deep In The Jungle

A project particularly close to his heart took Roth into the rainforests of Costa Rica. Armed with an HHB PortaDAT, a Lunatech V2 pre-amp from Grace Designs and a handful of shotgun and omnidirectional mics, he spent four weeks capturing the local flora and fauna for the Natural Sounds of Costa Rica CD collection (available on Amazon.com). Roth recorded volcanoes, waterfalls, and rare birds, supplementing the latter with a lot of help from the National Museum and Digidesign's DINR plug-in.

"I used DINR extensively for some bird sounds we got from their head ornithologist," Roth concludes. "They were excellent rare bird recordings done over the man's lifetime, but the sounds were all on cassette and very hissy. I used DINR to clean up the noise, and I can't tell you how happy I was when I heard what a wonderful job it did. The whole collection was in this huge duffel bag, about 150 cassettes from the past 16 years of his recordings. I sat there in the museum with all these stuffed animals staring down at me, and I wasn't sure at that time if I could ever clean the tapes up enough. I was sure that there would be some loss of quality but there wasn't! It just dramatically dropped the noise floor. By enabling me to use his vast sound collection, DINR allowed the project to go from being good to my being completely satisfied with it."