Drobo. Worth the hype?

The Drobo made Macworld’s “Year’s Best” hardware list, and was also mentioned on ProLost:

You can cram any configuration of drives into it and it will keep your data redundantly safe. Don’t worry about mixing and matching drives, just throw in what’s cheap and plentiful. As drives get cheaper, toss bigger ones in there.

So what makes this so amazing?

$299 HUI touchscreen for ProTools? Check it out!

There’s a wondrous little YouTube video that demonstrates some custom code enabling an iPod Touch or iPhone to wirelessly control ProTools with very little lag time.

It’s been a long time since I read about high-end studios using large screens outfitted with touch overlays to enable hands on screen editing, but this is a whole other trick.

It takes “control surface” to something that was never intended to do it and actually does a very good job of it…

New Compression Tool: Stomp

I’ve added a new link to my tower of links over to the right there. This one is for version 1.0 of Stomp, a compression utility by Shinywhitebox. It includes support for all QuickTime codecs, presets for all sorts of outputs (check out the video demo on their web site), manual control of all audio and video options, compression of multiple videos at once, video effects, and other features. Stomp is a Universal Binary priced at $29.95, is Universal, as well as Tiger and Leopard compatible.

Specs lie. (Actually they just mislead us.)

In a wonderful commentary article (rant) at High Def Digest, Joshua Zarber takes a moment to put down the hardware and the manuals and speak directly to the “number purists” among us and basically tells us to grow up.

HD Home Audio Formats Explained.

High Def Digest has an amazing rundown of each audio format available on each high-def home video standard- i.e. Blu-ray and HD DVD. Moreover, Joshua Zyber gets into the nitty gritty about the various audio interconnects between the players and other equipment, and how the myriad of audio formats are handled by each interconnect, on each optical standard. Yes, that’s a matrix of 56 different possibilities that Mr. Zyber has organized into a nice, neat article.