This is TranzPort one of the products I work on at Frontier Design Group. TranzPort is primarily geared towards anyone with a DAW. A DAW is a digital audio workstation: basically a Mac, Linux, or Windows computer used to make music or even tv/video sound. TranzPort is wireless and has most of the buttons mapped to items you need to control and lets you do so away from the computer...you know, where there's no hard disk and fan sounds and you can actually play instruments.

These are a few of the photos I've taken for our website. They show up in other places too. If you are ever thumbing through music gear catalogs, like Sweetwater, you might run across the photo of Faith using TranzPort in a vocal studio or my friend Brian jamming on a guitar.

Response to TranzPort has been great. All of the top Mac & Windows audio apps support it, either through plug-ins we've written or built-in support by the app developers. There are even open source projects adding support. The guys writing the DAW app Ardour recently added TranzPort support.

We just released update 1.3 which includes drivers for Intel Macs, new Sonar features, 64 bit Windows drivers, and adds support for iTunes. TranzPort can be used to wirelessly control iTunes: play, stop, rew, fast foward, next/prev song, adjusting shuffle & repeat, creating playlists, and even setting the start and stop points of a song. There's a few features worth noting:

Cue Mode

Some musicians go to a gig and take backing tracks along, something they've recorded previously to accompany their live playing. In TranzPort cue mode you press a button (or use the Footswitch) and TranzPort will play the current track, stop at the end, and cue up to be ready to play the next track. Setup an iTunes playlist to hold all of your set's backing material and away you go!

Practice/Transcribe Mode

Let's say you are trying to learn or transcribe a song. Using TranzPort you can quickly set a Start and Stop point over the section you are working on and jump into repeat mode: iTunes loops over the section while you try to figure out how to play it. Hold down In or Out on TranzPort and use the wheel to tweak the points or move them to the next section. All from the comfort of your couch across the room...

ITMS Preview

Visit the iTunes Music Store, find an album you are thinking of buying, press Shift-Stop on TranzPort and it will step through and play the preview for each song. No need to continuously double-click each song to hear a preview, TranzPort walks through the songs for you.

In addition to the software updates we kicked off another fun TranzPort site: wires-suck.com.

You can get free TranzPort accessories (the mic stand adaptor rules!) if your TranzPort story is posted on our website. There's some interesting ones online already. I especially like Shawn's Theremin story. If you ever watched the old sci-fi movies from the 50's and 60's you no doubt have been exposed to the theremin. And if you've ever watched TV in the last ten years you've no doubt been exposed to Shawn, he's responsible for the music on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and a huge list of others.

Sorry to go all info-mercial on the blog. This is a part of what I do each day so I figured it might be interesting to a few of you as well. If you want to know more about the digital music world be sure to check out Music Thing and Create Digital Music.

Now back to our regularly scheduled program... ":^)