They agreed to share the code needed if the program went to market. Steve Pecile and I went to an AES show and showing the Digidesign/ProTools folks the app as it stood and why we wanted to spot to timeline. But the sonic science app had a way to spot a sound direct to the timeline at the current cursor.
ProTools had no drag and drop or workspace at the time, so the only way to import audio was to Command Shift I, navigate to the folder manually (or using OS9 extension apps to allow dragging it into the open file box). One of the missing parts was getting the sound into ProTools still. Using lots of other little applications and utilities, most that I wrote to do its work. Anyway, over the course of a couple of years (starting in earnest in 2000) the first internal version of Soundminer was born. It was originally called Soundmine and just used by a few of us at Crunch. People like Dave Farmer, and Gallery had cobbled together solutions using Filemaker Pro, and co-incidentally I had done the same thing with Filemaker and SoundApp. It was very exciting, but the technology just wasn’t there. We used to use disks we used a lot at the front so the arm wouldn’t have to travel that far! Around this time, hard drives and Jazz/Zip drives were coming out, so you could digitize your own recordings and store them feasibly. So, you’d want an ambience, you’d find the listing in the app, go and audition (although you’d just record in case it was good), wait for the arm in the jukebox to grab the CD, and cue it. What Soundminer looked like back in the dayĬrunch at the time had a CD Jukebox and a program from Sonic Science to real time load in sound effects into ProTools. and I really wanted to get into proper audio post production, so I moved to Crunch Recording Group run by Steve Pecile and Joe Serafini, who later became my partners in Soundminer. At the time it was just making a program to spit out MESA patches which I could use in my Akai sampler, but it was enough to see how much time I could save. How naive! I ended up saving up money to buy Codewarrior (a C/C++ compiler) and that’s what got me into audio programming. It was there I opened the about box in ProTools, read that it was made using MacApp and a “object oriented programmed language”, which to me sounded like building blocks to make applications.
My colleagues at the time (Nick & Alex) all shared the same passion for technology, and we all just fed off each other. Rob went on to open a studio called The Other Studio where I worked on a lot of commercial post and dabbled a bit in music production. Commuting by train, reading manuals, and just absorbing everything I could.
Looking back, it all seems so primitive! From there I met the composer of the show, Rob Rettberg, who became my mentor, and I went to work with him out of his basement. That really got me into audio and computer’s, on the cusp of the transition happening. My teacher Garrick Filewod knew how computer crazed I was (I had learned 6502 machine language on the Commodore 64 growing up!) and recommended me. They had just moved to Sound Designer II and one of the first versions of ProTools. In second year, a fella named Greg Mason called the school looking for someone to help out producing a syndicated radio show called The Parent Report. I just really gravitated towards audio, and seemed to be pretty good at it, so I choose that as my major. In the first year you took classes in all disciplines and then chose a major. This encompassed Video, Film, Multimedia, Television and Audio. I went to Sheridan College here in Ontario, Canada, for Media Production.