When Apple introduced the AV Macs last year, multimedia producers and musicians thrilled at the notion of recording and playing back CDquality audio without paying a four-figure price for a board such as Digidesign’s Audiomedia II.
OSC’s Deck II lets an AV Mac strut its stuff. The original Deck was marketed by Digidesign and worked with that firm’s sound hardware. Deck II is sold by OSC and works with the AV Macs as well as with several Digidesign cards; with RasterOps’ MediaTime card; and with Spectral Innovations’ NuMedia card, which uses the same AT&T 3210 digital signal processor (DSP) chip as the Quadra 660AV and 840AV.
Deck II turns a Macintosh into a multitrack digital-audio workstation that enables you to record, mix, modify, and play back CD-quality sound. Many of Deck II's windows mimic common recording tools: there’s a Mixer window with shders and volume meters for adjusting sound levels, and a Transport window with play, pause, record, rewind, and fastforward buttons.
After you’ve recorded one track, you can add material to other tracks. For example, you can add background music to narration or turn yourself into a one-person barbershop quartet. When you’ve filled seven tracks on an 840AV, for instance, you can combine (or bounce) them onto the eighth track, thereby freeing the original seven for still more overdubs. You can do all this with a multitrack tape deck, of course, but sound quality suffers when you bounce tracks on analog tape decks. Not so in the digital world, where you can bounce until you run out of disk space without compromising sound quality.
Deck II can record at either of two sampling rates — 44.1kHz (the standard compact disc rate) or 48kHz (used by some digital audiotape decks) — with 16 bits of resolution. You can convert a track or combination of tracks to 11kHz or 22kHz with 8 bits of resolution; you might do this when exporting a finished recording you’ll use in a program such as HyperCard, Adobe Premiere, or Macromedia Director.
Deck II provides all the goodies you would find in a high-end digital-audio recorder. A punch-in-punch-out feature lets you rerecord portions of a track by switching into and out of record mode at specified times. You can create audio bookmarks to quickly jump to specific sections of a recording. And you can scrub a recording — slowly play it forward or backward to locate an exact point, such as the start of a sentence.
With Deck II's Mixer window, you can pan recorded sounds to make them come from the left channel, the right channel, or anywhere in between. You can even pan during playback to make a sound whoosh across the stereo field. You can adjust the playback levels of each track — to boost the background music during a pause in the narration, for example. And you can record your panning and volume adjustments so that they repeat each time you play the recording. None of these adjustments alter the original recording — this technique is called nondestructive editing — so you can punch in multiple takes and create as many mixes as you like.
Deck II also provides several destructive editing features that adjust volume levels and fade tracks. But the program can’t edit sound at the waveform level; you can’t, for instance, remove a sneeze in a narration. For jobs like this, you’ll need a waveform editor such as Digidesign’s Sound Designer II (which at this writing works only with Digidesign’s hardware).
Deck II provides no equalization (EQ) features, which would let you boost or attenuate certain frequencies to improve a recording’s tonal qualities. A forthcoming multitrack digital-audio program, Alaska Software’s DigiTrax..., offers EQ and supports up to six simultaneous tracks, but the prelease version I examined lacked Deck II's extensive automation capabilities.
Deck II offers excellent support for MIDI sequences and devices. You can import MIDI files so that Deck II plays them back while you record audio tracks — great for combining vocals with a MIDI sequence.
Deck II is also a superb tool for working with QuickTime movie sound tracks. You can import sound tracks from QuickTime movies and export Deck II recordings as QuickTime sound tracks. You can use these features, say, to import a QuickTime movie of an interview, add a musical background, and then replace the movie’s original sound track with the combination of the music and narration. Deck II can also display live video from a camcorder or VCR connected to an AV Mac’s video-input jack.
I found Deck II to be more robust than most digital-audio programs, many of which require you to disable all but the essential extensions and can be unreliable if you don’t. Deck II coexists happily with other programs — indeed, as I'm writing this in Microsoft Word, Deck II is playing eight tracks of audio in the background.
Deck II uses a relatively unobtrusive form of copy protection. You can install the program on up to two hard drives by “authorizing” the drives with the installation program. (If you simply copy Deck II's icon to your hard drive, the program will ask you to insert the master floppy each time you start it.) Unlike some early authorizing schemes, Deck II’s system is not affected by disk-defragmenting programs.
OSC’s Deck II is a dream come true for AV Macintosh users. It is able to handle nearly any audio task you can throw at it (the exceptions being waveform editing and equalization), and it’s the best tool available for doing QuickTime audio postproduction work. Seeing this program running alongside the likes of Word and Excel illustrates just how wonderfully versatile the AV machines are.
Heid, Jim. (June 1994). Deck II 2.1. Macworld. (pg. 63).
OSC Media Products
Applications
out of 10 (0 vote)
9 / 
2020-09-13 / 
0c632946079d61bb38f8549553a4ea21b4c04872 / 
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Deck_II_2.1.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
