UPDATE: In the interests of disclosure, and in accordance with this blog’s editorial policy, please note that on July 18, 2007, the CBC asked me to update this post with some corrections, clarification, and additional information. The CBC’s comments are italicized.

I finally got my hands on the elusive iPhone… er, DaletPlus today. Did a full day of training in Vancouver and here’s what I think.

In Short

Wow. This is miles ahead of the prehistoric Dalet still in use in most of the country. I mean, you can import and export MP3 files. That in itself nearly made me weep. It’s still Dalet, so it still has a few quirky Daletesque weird things, but in short you are going to love the difference.

What I Like

In general, this is a huge improvement. I no longer feel like showering after touching Dalet. You’re going to work faster, be happier, and that nagging urge to kick small children in malls after work will decrease somewhat. Specifically, here’s what I liked:

1. It’s in stereo!
   This isn’t a big deal for CBC Radio One folk like me, but Radio 2 people haven’t been able to use Dalet for stereo music, until now.
2. Workspaces follow you from desk to desk.
   Create a workspace (a saved snapshot of how you like your screen laid out) and it saves it on the server, not on the workstation you’re at. So if you jump over to a new workstation, you can still load it up with your own preferred layout. Beautiful. (Works only within your plant, not country-wide.)
3. Site-wide licence.
   We now have a site-wide licence, meaning anyone who needs it can finally get DaletPlus on their computer. And it doesn’t need some obscure special sound card either any more. In the past, we had to pay Dalet for each install and buy that special card — the cost was hundreds and hundreds of dollars (over a thousand, I think, actually) per install. So many show units would have special Dalet computers that everyone had to share. It was as if only one chair at a hair salon had any sort of cutting utensils and the hairdressers all had to wait for them.
   
4. “Quick listen” audio preview function added.
   Ever wished you could listen to a bit of a clip without actually dragging it up into a surfer or navigator? Now you can. Click once on the clip, then click the quick-listen button. There’s even a button that will play you the first and last three seconds of the clip. A nice touch. (You have to select clip and click button each time. There’s no way to turn on Quick Listen mode and have it preview by just clicking on each clip. Maybe the next version.)
5. WAV format standard.
   Holy hannah, we’re saving in an actual semi-normal file format! No more SND files (which were actually weird-ass 48,000 mono MP2 files). When you save a title, it saves it as a 48k WAV format (compressed 4-to-1). It also secretly saves a low-res MP3 version so you can quickly preview clips from other regions before transferring them. Beautiful. No… sexy!
   CBC responds: “Incorrect – it is WMA format for low-res auditioning.”
   Tod responds: “Picky, picky. {grin} But really? WMA?! (sigh) Well, better than no preview I guess.”
6. Volume curves are smooth like buttah.
   Making nodes on a volume curve are so easy, it’s actually fun! (Okay, I’m a geek.) First of all, you can add curves right in the waveform view — no more obscure editing box. (Yes, this feature has been in most audio editing programs for years; it’s a huge step for Dalet.) And all it takes is a right-drag to drag a node out. It even will try to reduce over-noding by auto-deleting nodes that are within 1dB of a previous node. In a related note, you can finally raise the levels of a track! Again, this seems like “Duh!” to most outsiders, but in the current incarnation of Dalet, there is no way to do that. You have to actually duplicate a clip on another track directly below it, all McGyver style.
7. I’m in MP3 heaven.
   You can drag MP3 files right on top of Dalet and it’ll import it. You can drag AVI files. WAV files. MOV files. SND files. Pretty much anything (they’re still having trouble with, of all things, AIFF files for now, but a fix is on its way). Welcome to the late-1990s, Dalet! (Sorry.) And converting to MP3 is so easy — just drag it into the “Convert to MP3″ folder. Boom. Done. Now just drag it out of Dalet and onto your desktop or into an email or whatever.
8. BrazilWeb built into DaletPlus
   Well kinda. Actually, there’s a “Web” tab within easy reach, preloaded with BrazilWeb and access to other web-audio resources. Smooth.
9. Pull a clip while it’s still being recorded.
   This one made me so excited, I shrieked like a 12-year-old girl. Say your colleague in the newsroom is currently recording an interview live that’s coming in from the Legislature. You can actually pull up that clip — while it is being recorded — and can edit it, extract clips, re-save it, etc. You can even watch the waveform fill in as it’s being recorded. I have no idea how this is done, but I assume voodoo is involved.
10. The new clipboard follows you.
    The new clipboard is called ClipBin and it’s much smarter than the previous clipboard. The best part: You can keep your clips with you, no matter where you travel. Move to a new workstation, your ClipBin is there. It’s easy to put something in there — just select a region (the usual right-drag and all those things still work as per usual) and click the “Send to ClipBin” button. Within the ClipBin, you can give new names to the clips, drag them into a different order, and drop them back in at your pleasure.
11. St. John’s has bloopers in their system.
    Speaks for itself. Go have a listen. It’s easy as hell to poke around in other regions’ systems.

What Still Needs Improvement

1. No crossfades.
   This is a shame, for people doing multitrack work. You can load a SURFER8 now (eight-tracks) but you still can’t have two clips crossfade on the same track. You need a second track to put the increasing-level track. Seems like a braindead thing to add but Dalet has never been known for its multitrack prowess.
2. You’re still stuck into the SURFER model.
   Dalet’s multitrack comes in four flavours — SURFER1 (one-track… okay, it’s not multitrack at this point, I know), SURFER2 (two tracks), SURFER4 (four tracks) and now SURFER8. But let’s say you’re working with two tracks in SURFER2 and you want to add a new track. Nope, can’t do it. There’s no “Add Track” function. You have to save your work, close it, start up a SURFER4, reload your work, then put your new material on that new third track with the fourth track going empty. It’s not a huge deal, but seems silly to lock people into that. Hell, even the free Audacity lets you add and delete tracks at will.
3. Multiple title work is difficult.
   It’s hard to knock the advances this version has in its metadata. It finally follows the Windows standard of Right-Click/Properties. That in itself is awesome (again, eight years late to the party, but let’s be glad it’s here). But there’s no way to change multiple titles at the same time. For instance, if you want to change the Kill Date on a number of titles, you have to do it individually to each one. You can’t pull up a combined dialog box (like you can to change the metadata on, say, iTunes tracks).
   CBC responds: “Admin can change dates on multiple files easily.”
   Tod responds: “People ‘on the line’ should be able to do this without bugging a superuser.”
   Plus, adding a clip in a multitrack while having the rest of ALL tracks shift right is still gimpy. It’s a little easier, but you still need to do the stupid CTRL-B trick. Really, we need to be able to lasso clips to highlight them, then drag them wherever we want.
4. The User Interface still has some of the odd Dalet quirks.
   Don’t get me wrong — I’m ecstatic that the menu structure is File/Edit/View like every other Windows app, as opposed to the old Title/Cancel/Make Coffee/or whatever the hell it said up there. But still, the Dalet developers seem to have dropped the ball on a few UI things. ALT-F4, for instance, on every other Windows application on the planet, closes the application. Here, it opens a SURFER4. Weird. There are a few inconsistencies in workflow too. To save a Group, you don’t do what you’d think (something like File/Save Group). You have to right-click on the group title, and pick “Rundown Properties” to save it. Huh?! Would “Save” killed them?
   CBC responds: “This is not how user saves a Group. Group is saved by simply closing the Rundown Editor.”
   Tod responds: “This isn’t how we were taught in Vancouver. Plus, a File/Save Group makes more sense. Anyway. Not a big deal.”
   Also, in one place, a trash-bin icon means “clear” and a “New” icon really means “clear all.” It’s going to screw some people up.
5. There are keywords. They don’t work.
   I was really excited to see that there was a field for keywords. This kind of “tagging” system lets you add a keyword to a title, like, say “fishing” so you can search by the general topic of a piece. Indeed you can add a keyword. But if you search for files with that keyword, it doesn’t find it. Not even under Advanced Search. Seems like an odd bug to miss. Searching otherwise (item code, title name, etc.) work fine and is fast.
   CBC responds: “Keyword search does work. After entering keyword, it may be a minute or so until the database updates.”
6. There are no effects.
   I know, I know, it’s not meant to be a full multi-track editor. But would it have killed the developers to put simple Echo, Normalize, Noise Reduction, and EQ functions into it? Come on, this is 2007.
7. Ripping CDs is done outside of DaletPlus.
   I know I’m splitting hairs, because if you wanted to rip a CD track and put it into Dalet, you were pretty much on your own. (Most of us ended up patching a CD player into our mixing board and recording it via analog — acoustically — in real time.) Now, there is a “Add CD Track to Dalet” program. It even looks up the track names and drops it right into Dalet when it’s done. But, this function is not integrated into DaletPlus. It’s a separate program and it’s U-G-L-Y. DaletPlus developers are good at building stable programs, but they need a UI team like Donald Trump needs a toupee. Also, the levels “app” is now a separate app. If you want to monitor your levels (and why wouldn’t you?!) you have to run a separate application.

A visual tour through the new user-interface coming later today.

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	Email this	Posted at 2:11 pm (29 Jun 2007)