Opode's new Track Chart, described in the manual as a 'studio management program for the Macintosh', offers a range of useful features aimed particularly at recording engineers. Its main function is to provide a mix engineer with printed track sheets and real-time on-screen displays of track activity (time lines), to help organise and keep a record of recording sessions. It allows extensive control over layout, fonts, font styles and colour, and has full printing facilities. You can print out these track sheets and time lines with information about your project, the song, the studio, the track names, and so on.

You can also use the information from the track sheets and time lines to create console fader labels, tape box labels, and cassette labels. These can then be printed on a variety of adhesive-backed sheets, including mailing labels and pre-cut cassette labels. Sounds like a lot of useful stuff.

LABELS

For a home studio, the ability to print out labels can add a professional touch to the way you present your tapes to others. In a professional studio, it is expected that standards of presentation will be high. Either way, to have the facility to create and print labels for cassettes and tapes directly on the session is a useful thing. It took me about 15 minutes to knock up a couple of labels for cassette copies of my new track; once you've learnt how to use the software you could probably do it in five (you can get hold of blank labels suitable for printing on from ProntaPrint).

THE TRACK CHART

The information from which Track Chart will generate its track sheets can be imported from MIDI files, or directly from Studio Vision or Vision files — or you can type it directly into the program. I was able to set up a track chart for the music I was working on in Studio Vision in a matter of about an hour or so, once everything else was working OK. This included the time I needed to learn how to use the software — I reckon it would be 15 minutes or less once you are practised at using the program.

The program comes with sensible default setups, but will allow you to customise your printouts and onscreen playback settings. For instance, I chose different colours for different text items to distinguish them better on screen. The default number of tracks is 24, but at this stage, I was only using 10 tracks — all MIDI. You can choose for each track an icon to indicate whether it is a MIDI track, coming off tape, off hard disk, or live into your mixing console. The idea here is that you print out copies of this for the engineer and producer to refer to during the session.

THE TIME LINE

The time line can scroll while locked to either SMPTE or MIDI clocks, to show track activity and to display additional useful messages on screen at critical points within a song. The time line lets you see at a glance where there is music recorded onto a track. If you insert text markers (to indicate the start of your verse, chorus, or whatever), you can also refer to these as visual cues as they go by onscreen. This information is probably most useful to the engineer who needs to move faders or set up desk automation at the right point. Using the Opcode MIDI System and/or MIDI Manager, you can sync Track Chart using MIDI clocks and song pointers to a sequencer, either an external device or a Mac sequencer program running under Multifinder.

OTHER FEATURES

The time line can also trigger MIDI messages, such as Note Ons, Controller messages, or System Exclusive data. You can pre-define up to 17 of these messages and keep them ready for use via a popup menu. One such message is already predefined to work with the Tesla Video Streamer, which can be used to superimpose coloured streamers and punches over standard video, just as Track Chart can on your Macintosh screen — very useful when working to picture, of course, though I don't think anyone in the UK actually uses this piece of equipment. The Video Time Piece from Mark of the Unicorn is, however, in rather wider use, so I would have liked to have seen pre-defined messages to control the VTP in Track Chart!

You can also create streamers and punches which will show up on your time line screen on the Mac. When the time line reaches a streamer/punch event which you have previously defined, a special window opens, which is initially grey with the event name printed in red.

After this has been on the screen for two beats, it begins filling up with light blue from left to right. It takes exactly eight beats to fill up, at which time it flashes red, then disappears. This can be useful if you need to make a mixing move, or maybe execute a punch-in at a precise moment. The streamer will warn you when that moment is approaching, then the red flash (a punch) will let you know it has arrived — and the box going away lets you know that you missed it.

"No professional recording studio should be without this piece of software, unless they already have convenient ways of printing track charts and labels, and of presenting overviews of complex recording sessions."

You can just have the punch alone, if you prefer, or you can have flashing text messages. The manual quotes as its example "Mute the bagpipes here, please!", and I can't think of a better one! You can also enter rehearsal marks, lyrics, or static text messages wherever you like. These features allow you to present a very useful overview of important information for the engineer/producer/musicians on a session.

There are pre-defined MIDI events with which you can trigger a relay in a J.L. Cooper MIDI Mute to help automate your mix session, or you can just send out a MIDI Note On, to trigger a sampled sound perhaps. You can also use Track Chart's MIDI events to trigger Vision sequences and, using SysEx messages which you define yourself, you can control many operations of your MIDI equipment directly from Track Chart. Finally, you can record Track Chart's MIDI events into a sequencer in real time if you like, once you have planned out where they will occur and auditioned them using Track Chart.

NON-MIDI TRACKS

Five songs of up to 98 tracks each can be open at any one time, allowing record-keeping of many sequencer-driven virtual tracks as well as tape tracks. So what happens if you are not using MIDI sequences? Well, if you run an audio track into the Audio In of an Opcode Studio series Mac-MIDI interface, it will convert the audio into MIDI data which Track Chart can record and use to build a time line showing where activity occurs in the track. Magic! And what about working to video? You might want to build a time line which shows events on video; well, you can feed VITC into a Video Time Piece, for instance, and then feed MTC from the VTP into your MIDI interface. Track Chart can then grab the SMPTE locations and create visual representations of events which happen at or between these locations. This feature can also be used to help you log activity for acoustic tracks coming off tape or hard disk.

SUMMARY

OK, so you might not want to use all these features on every project you work on. But if you are anything more than a hobbyist, you will appreciate the potential benefits of most of the features Track Chart has to offer. I reckon that no professional recording studio should be without this piece of software, unless they already have convenient ways of printing track charts and labels, and of presenting overviews of complex recording sessions.

If you intend to run a sequencer and Track Chart on your Mac at the same time you will want a large screen, plenty of RAM, and a nice fast processor! Otherwise, it will run fine on the smallest, cheapest Mac you can find.

Further information

£159.95 inc VAT.

MCMXCIX, (Contact Details).