329. Veteran Audio Professional Michael Curtis

Veteran audio professional Michael Curtis joins the show in Episode 329 to catch up on what he’s been up to lately as well as when his YouTube educational channel will return and his new journey into audio plugin development. This episode is sponsored by Allen & Heath and RCF.

Michael talks about the process of building his soon-to-be-released Live Stream Leveler plugin/stand-alone app designed for front of house mixers in applications such as corporate events, houses of worship and more who are tasked with managing a feed to a live stream of an event while simultaneously mixing the in-room audio at front of house.

Episode Links:
Michael Curtis (MKC) Website
Michael Curtis YouTube Channel
Episode 329 Transcript

NOTE: Mike Green, the artist who performs “Break Free” that opens every episode, has released a new album — Hang The Moon: Part One — available on all streaming platforms as well as DSPs that support spatial audio. Mikegreenmusic.com will direct folks to the vinyl release or allow them to purchase digitally. And, Mike is hitting the road with Whitney Tai for “The Record Store Tour” starting May 23 in New Orleans. Find out more here.

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Also please check out and support The Roadie Clinic, Their mission is simple. “We exist to empower & heal roadies and their families by providing resources & services tailored to the struggles of the touring lifestyle.”

The Signal To Noise Podcast on ProSoundWeb is co-hosted by pro audio veterans Andy Leviss and Sean Walker.

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Transcript

Episode 329 - Michael Curtis, Live Stream Leveler

Note: This is an automatically generated transcript, so there might be mistakes--if you have any notes or feedback on it, please send them to us at signal2noise@prosoundweb.com so we can improve the transcripts for those who use them!

Voiceover: You’re listening to Signal to Noise, part of the ProSoundWeb podcast network, proudly brought to you this week by the following sponsors:

Allen & Heath, whose new dLive RackUltra FX upgrade levels up your console with 8 next-generation FX racks – putting powerful tools like vocal tuning, harmonizing, and amp simulation right at your fingertips. Learn more at allen-heath.com 

RCF and TT+ AUDIO.... Delivering premium audio solutions designed for tour sound and music professionals for over 75 years.  Visit RCF at RCF-USA.com for the latest news and product information.

Music: “Break Free” by Mike Green

[00:00:58] Andy Leviss: Hey, welcome to another episode of Signal to Noise. I'm your host, Andy Leviss. With me as always the big box to my retailer, Mr. Sean Walker. What's up, Sean?

[00:01:08] Sean Walker: What's up buddy? How are you?

[00:01:09] Andy Leviss: I'm doing all right. It's, I gotta remember how to do this. We haven't recorded in a little bit,

[00:01:12] Sean Walker: Right. Totally. It's like muscle memory. The, the reps are going Totally.

[00:01:20] Andy Leviss: It,

[00:01:21] Sean Walker: totally.

[00:01:22] Andy Leviss: 'cause, uh, well, like I had a, I had a crazy week then it was InfoComm when, like neither you nor I were there, but everybody else in the damn world was there, so nobody was around to, to hang. And then, uh, you and I were both just on vacation.

[00:01:33] Sean Walker: Yeah, dude. Totally. We had the, we had the busiest week in our company's history, and then I peaced out for vacation along with the rest of the, most of the rest of the fellas, and we, uh, had some overhire labor at the shop to sort it all out. We left them a disaster. I'll send you a picture. It literally had.

gaff tape crosses across the front door that said, good luck shop. And we closed that door and we left and we overhired some guys to come sort it out. And uh, we got back to a like 85% clean shop and everybody went, fuck, thank God,

[00:02:00] Andy Leviss: All right. So, so, so those overhire folks will be ca be called back again

[00:02:04] Sean Walker: 100%, dude.

100%.

[00:02:06] Andy Leviss: a, that's A bold test.

[00:02:08] Sean Walker: Yeah, dude. Yeah. That was all, that was all Garrett's doing, man. He was like, you know what we should do? Since we're all burnt to the ground, we should, we should go on vacation and we should let some freelancers do all this. And I was like, that's a great idea. We should do that.

So we did.

[00:02:22] Andy Leviss: Well, I'm, I'm glad it worked out that, that feels like a gamble, but, uh, but I'm

[00:02:26] Sean Walker: it was

[00:02:26] Andy Leviss: off.

[00:02:27] Sean Walker: I mean, they were, you know, they were doing the like base level stuff, checking in the mic cables and that, you know, that all the stuff that you can just scan in and go, this is in this trunk, and this many in that trunk and "Okay, great. And then, you know, all the like wiping consoles and getting them back to factory reset.

We did that when we got back, but. you know, They got through 85% of the minutia that has to get done when a pile of shows come back and you just got bays full of shit everywhere, you know?

[00:02:49] Andy Leviss: Uh-huh.

[00:02:51] Sean Walker: So it was great. It was great. How about you? How was your vacay?

[00:02:54] Andy Leviss: Good. You know, little, little, uh, beachside week and the, the forecast going out there was like one and a half nice days, and like really gray and rainy the rest. And then it turned out it only rained about one and a half days, so it worked out well. Uh, yeah, there was some, you know, some fresh lobster boiled in, like the water right from the ocean.

Um, not that it was hot enough that we could boil them in the ocean, There, there was a pot and a bucket involved. And I.

should

[00:03:18] Sean Walker: Yeah, we, we've, we've followed along bud. We, we

know

him.

[00:03:20] Andy Leviss: I don't know, man, with how, with how much I'm sweating today. it, You probably could boil in the ocean today. It's,

it's, uh, it's been slowly chipping away. It's a, we're on window air conditioners.

It's been slowly chipping away. I'm like, okay. It goes in the, it goes in the little man's room first, then it goes in my office, then it goes in the bedroom and, and uh, and then we put the big one in downstairs and I think we're, we're gonna cave today, 'cause I think tomorrow it's supposed to get up to like 102

[00:03:45] Sean Walker: Brutal, bro. Brutal.

[00:03:47] Andy Leviss: And it's, and it's a humid heat too. It's not, it's not like that Vegas, heat's a dry heat,

[00:03:52] Sean Walker: No. It's like that hot Atlanta heat where you walk out the, you get in the shower, you get all freshed up, ready to go. You walk out the door, you're like, I need another shower.

[00:03:58] Andy Leviss: yep. Yep. It's like I, if we don't have the AC in the window, in the bedroom, do I bother showering before bed? No. It's not really gonna matter.

[00:04:07] Sean Walker: Oh God, gross. Don't, let's not go there. Let's figure the, skip

squirrel.

[00:04:11] Andy Leviss: Yep. Uh, so, so, so now, now saddled with helping us uh, bring this train back onto the rails. We've, we've got an old friend of, uh, the podcast and friend of ours joining us today.

The one, the only Michael Curtis. What's up Mr. Curtis?

[00:04:27] Michael Curtis: Hello. it is good to be here. Good to be back.

[00:04:30] Andy Leviss: And he brought his voice for radio.

[00:04:32] Sean Walker: That's right, dude.

[00:04:33] Michael Curtis: I, I just kick it on, you know, it's, I, uh, it's the prerequisite for having a great YouTube thumbnail where I look like I'm about to hit by a train. That's, that's, that's the,

[00:04:42] Sean Walker: I was just gonna say, you don't have a face for radio, so you, you got the voice though. I'm impressed, dude.

[00:04:46] Michael Curtis: I, uh, this-- I, I just got finished using my dad voice on my three-year-old who was a terror to my wife all morning, So that's

[00:04:53] Sean Walker: Oh,

yeah. yeah. We know how that goes, dude. We both, we both got littles. We know what's up with that dude.

[00:04:58] Michael Curtis: I was like, I gotta go record a podcast. Bye.

[00:05:00] Andy Leviss: Yeah. Peace. Be good.

[00:05:04] Sean Walker: Every day oscillates between best thing I've ever done and Homer Simpson the, um, You know what I mean?

Like

[00:05:08] Michael Curtis: Yep, yep, yep. So, yeah, I, I just, in the home event, I just disappeared into the hedge

is

[00:05:12] Sean Walker: Yeah, yeah.

[00:05:13] Michael Curtis: happened. And so I go, what? I got a 1 o'clock,

[00:05:18] Sean Walker: yeah. right. See you. Love you, babe. Bye.

[00:05:20] Michael Curtis: Yep. Yep, yep. So it is, yeah. And so he's actually next door to me and it's rest time. We'll see how that goes. You

know,

[00:05:26] Sean Walker: yeah.

[00:05:26] Michael Curtis: how good the, the noise reduction is, Andy, for you in Post.

[00:05:29] Sean Walker: Yeah, right. Totally.

[00:05:30] Andy Leviss: We'll, we'll, we'll, we'll put, we'll put the new generation of iZotope to the test. 'cause I've, I re recently upgraded. I did not want to, but they had a couple things that I was like, let me see how they, Uh, yep. Nope, nope. Those work better. Here's my money.

[00:05:42] Michael Curtis: Okay.

That's going in the cart.

[00:05:44] Sean Walker: Totally

[00:05:44] Andy Leviss: honestly with all the financial stuff that Native instruments has been going through, I'm sort of like, yeah, here's money.

Keep going, keep going.

[00:05:50] Michael Curtis: Yeah. Yeah. It's

[00:05:51] Sean Walker: Are they in trouble right now? I didn't. I'm not hip

[00:05:53] Andy Leviss: were

they, because Native Instruments bought iZotope and then, and then yeah, they were going through like bankruptcy. restructure. I, I don't remember exactly which format a few months ago. And I, th- somebody I think like bought them or invested in them now, so it's looking promising. But everybody was scared for a little bit,

Um,

[00:06:09] Sean Walker: Interesting

[00:06:10] Andy Leviss: and Then, they dropped the new version and it was like, uh, well that's a good sign. I think. Um, and in fact, I've actually got one or two of our past episodes that I'm gonna try rerunning through a couple things. 'cause I know, um, uh, shoot, why am I blanking on, on the name of our, our, our friend who j- who we chatted w- with, about AI like a month and a half ago.

I'm having a total brain fart right now.

[00:06:34] Michael Curtis: My.

[00:06:34] Sean Walker: the brain. I don't know. Yeah, you're the brain. I don't know what you're talking about.

[00:06:37] Andy Leviss: uh, Sh- uh, I, is it sad that like, I can't re-remember our own, uh, our own episodes? That's,

[00:06:43] Sean Walker: Bro, there's darn near 300 of them between everybody. Like how you gonna

[00:06:46] Andy Leviss: that is, that, that

[00:06:47] Sean Walker: Get out of here. I can barely remember what I had for fricking breakfast, let alone what's, how many episodes, bro. Come on.

[00:06:53] Andy Leviss: yeah. Uh, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba. Uh, uh, oh. Uh, with Jo- Joe Muharsky, Um, when we were talking about AI a little, a little while

[00:07:02] Sean Walker: Oh yeah. Word.

[00:07:03] Andy Leviss: and that like we had, there was like some bleed on stuff and, and I know folks were like, oh, it was kind of a rough listen 'cause of like the, bleed mitigating I had to do to try and clean that up.

And they actually, iZotope has dramatically, uh, rebuilt their, uh, bleed reduction, bleed removal track, uh, tool. So I'm gonna try using that again and see, uh, see how that does.

[00:07:22] Sean Walker: All right. Everybody's getting their AID feedback on under the hood. I see. Okay. cool, Cool.

[00:07:26] Andy Leviss: and, you know, well on the, on the subject of, of, uh, AI and cool plugins and streaming. I know that's one thing we wanna talk to Mr.

Curtis about, but I guess before we get there, like, what, what you been up to, man? It's been a, it's been a bit.

[00:07:38] Michael Curtis: It has been a bit, no, I, um, again, living here in northwest Arkansas, got the fam doing audio things. So I've I've been had the YouTube channel and people were like, where'd you go? And where I went was a, uh, local large company, built a new home office and they had to. Put in a radio studio, TV studio, shooting space, a conference center and a, um, full auditorium and get integrated.

And there was of course, you know, a design team and integration team, but they enlisted some of us who are used to working with their team, or their gear to kind of do the last miles of how it's all set up. So they said, okay, here's five PM5s. commission them please. And so I was like, okay. And just, and then the list kept growing and so.

[00:08:22] Sean Walker: You were like, here, hold my beer. I got you. Yeah.

[00:08:24] Michael Curtis: you. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so, uh, spent a lot of time in the, the venue is actually one of the largest 2110 venues in the United States right now, uh, with everything. So that was,

[00:08:36] Sean Walker: You gotta, you gotta fill me in what's, what's the 2110 menu?

[00:08:39] Michael Curtis: So 2110. Is basically the, uh, if uh, uh, starting with most of us being audio nerds, if what Dante did to analog is networkify audio, so there have, you know, NDI's been a standard out for, for network video, but that's mostly been compressed.

Uh, it, Not as much redundancy, like several other things. Not trying to hate on NDI, by, by any stretch it's, but something that's more of an open standard and available with uncompressed video, very low latency, all these different things you want in live production. That is 2110, excuse me.

[00:09:11] Sean Walker: Oh heck yeah, dude. So what, what, what Dante is to audio 2110 is to video kind of a vibe.

[00:09:18] Michael Curtis: Yes, but since video is so much higher bandwidth, you have to have a lot more robust network infrastructure to make that happen. And you know, there there's timing and there's more vendors. It's audio and video sync, there's essences. So it's all this different, like entire new language of how things are moved around on a network.

So the network infrastructure and then that has to tie to audio world.

[00:09:38] Sean Walker: So you went full nerd on this giant venue.

[00:09:41] Michael Curtis: Many, much nerd and so, uh,

[00:09:44] Sean Walker: Many, much nerd.

[00:09:46] Michael Curtis: many, much nerds.

[00:09:47] Andy Leviss: Yeah, and it's, it-- and I, if I'm not, if I'm not misremembering my, c- or my conversation with Chris Lapp recently, like 2110, the audio layer of it is basically AES67,

[00:09:57] Michael Curtis: it really is, it's, it's, yeah. And that, so there's 2110-20-30-40. so dash 30. Is the audio essence or subset of that standard. And it really is just AES67. So for us audio folks, it's, it's, you can still put a Dante device in AES67 mode and have it talk and do all this stuff, but how, you know how discovery works?

Do you have a, there's something called NMOS. So you have an NMOS registry, which is basically the orchestrator. So the craziest thing that broke my brain, again, me already being a videot, and like I really don't understand the whole super high-level video stuff. Is that an orchestrator? Basically says, I guess we're used to thinking like a laptop is, you know, HDMI output into a converter, SDI into a Blackmagic switcher.

which is like, you know, pretty run-and-gun production company's got something like that or any, or a Ross or a Grass Valley, whatever. And then that goes or it might hit a router first, and then the router then goes out into the switcher and the switcher then outputs a feed to like a web presenter or something like that.

What's crazy in 2110 World is, it's not like there's these discrete stops. Where things happen, you just it. It just subscribes to a multicast group and then moves the signal around. So there is no quote unquote router. There is a piece of software acting like a router, but it does not s- go into the router and go out of the router.

It just kind of passes around, which is just a weird way to think about stuff. And so, um.

[00:11:22] Andy Leviss: So like in the same way the controller does, or it's still more involved in passing in the signal flow than controller.

is?

[00:11:28] Michael Curtis: It's More of-- so that's the thing. There isn't a contr- Dante controller equivalent yet for how you patch. It's still all like the most manual ways. You get what's called an SDP file, a session description protocol file that has a bunch of metadata about the audio stream sample rate, bit depth packet timing, all that kind of stuff that's super nerdy.

And then you have to basically say, Hey, here is my SDP file for this stream. And so here is the stream, and then yes, it's a multicast address and I choose to subscribe to it and I pass audio. But NMOS basically says you all can enlist and share your information in one place. And then I, as the orchestrator then can choose who's subscribing to what multicast group without you having to actually see all the multicast addressing and stuff under it.

So it makes it simpler. So a lot like a Grass Valley patch panel, I could choose destination. Let's just call it the projector and the auditorium source. I could choose, you know, a news input, the output of a switch or whatever, and patch it over. But all it's doing is just moving around those sources and destinations and subscribing and resubscribing to multicast groups is, again, someone who really, really knows this stuff is gonna be like, shut up, Michael.

But that's as as as far as I understand it. That's, that's what's going on.

[00:12:41] Andy Leviss: Next week, the return of Chris Lapp.

[00:12:43] Michael Curtis: Yes. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Let's, let's, uh.

[00:12:46] Sean Walker: And all of that without something like Dante controller to visually look at it, you're literally just uploading files and hoping for the best.

[00:12:53] Michael Curtis: It's And, and a lot of GUIs, I mean, 'cause like the facility, there's For-A stuff, there's Grass Valley, there's Ross, and so they all have their own softwares that

[00:13:02] Sean Walker: Oh my God, shoot me in the face.

[00:13:04] Michael Curtis: Yeah, yeah. And so it's, you know, what's great is, you know, it's it's an open standard, so everyone has access to it, but how they implement it and show you it and route it, um, is all different.

And So

[00:13:15] Sean Walker: That took a lot of time.

[00:13:16] Michael Curtis: has the most robust implementation, uh, in audio world. Like they make their, I guess Ravenna is built on top of it, so it, it's, so it's on top of a open standard, but it's their implementation and GUI and chipset on top of the open standard is what's available to us. Audio folks.

[00:13:31] Andy Leviss: Got it.

[00:13:32] Michael Curtis: Yep. And so when we see Ravenna, it's 2110 and they're very intimately familiar with that standard and everything it implies to talk to all those streams. And it's just their flavor of presenting that standard is how. And So there we have several studio technologies, bridges that have Ravenna chips in the facility.

Um, so for instance. Gosh, here we go. So the RIVAGE desks, we wanna get what, what we call in the facility, four router spots. So the facility has thousands of sources, so we can't possibly just eat up half the desk saying if we want to take in, you know, terrestrial TV input number two that is coming into the stadium.

We don't wanna keep or into the facility. We don't wanna like eat that channel up on the RIVAGE. So we know every day we're gonna have two zoom machines. This playback s- playback input, this graphics input that's, s- that's set, that's hard-routed, Um, what's happening, um, uh, uh, hard-patched. So with the router spots, basically on the output, I can say, Hey, these are four open lanes for any audio source I can route to it to come in.

So, but to make that happen. Um, NMOS, which is the orchestrator who has control over the registry and tells things to move around to whatever place you have to have a NMOS, um, registrable device. And none of the Yamaha HY cards, as of when we were implementing them, have that native capability.

[00:15:01] Sean Walker: Damn it, Andy

[00:15:02] Michael Curtis: A- And so not to say they couldn't come or be developed, but since they're, But, but you can put Dante cards even in Yamaha world in what?

in AES67 or SMPTE mode. And it's, There's even been several kind of software updates kind of changing how that's done. And they, you know, they can accept the packet timing. So it's not that they don't play, but they do not show up as a routable destination in the NMOS registry. So you have to put a bridge in front of it that shows up "Hi, you can route to me, and then it then passes through to that device.

So it, it's like the bridging of how the video system wants to work with all the endpoint devices. And then in the, s- in the radio studio, it's all telos gear. There's a Telos Quasar console, which is Livewire, which is another subset of AES67. So

[00:15:48] Andy Leviss: It's the best thing About standards. There's so many to pick from.

[00:15:52] Michael Curtis: exactly. So I just spent, you know, almost a year just getting baptized in 2110 and standards and moving and networking, all that stuff. And it was a blast. But, um, that since now they're open, and they have more engineering staff now that has now come. to where like, I'm there one or two days a month just helping with ad hoc pro projects.

Um, there's Riedel intercom there, there's, um, a new Flex AI server for their loudness processing. And so just kind of ancillary tool sets that help support audio. So, um, so it was t- I, I learned a lot. It's been a blast.

[00:16:24] Sean Walker: Cool. So you, are you back in the saddle again with the YouTube channel and stuff going now?

[00:16:29] Michael Curtis: I'm writing scripts and planning and hope to release stuff very soon. So

[00:16:33] Sean Walker: Nice. Yeah, we, we've been waiting on

pins

[00:16:35] Andy Leviss: writes scripts.

[00:16:36] Sean Walker: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like a, like a,

r-

[00:16:39] Michael Curtis: a pretty generous. Word script. I'll call it a outline.

[00:16:41] Sean Walker: like a professional or something.

[00:16:43] Michael Curtis: Wow. Wowzers So, um,

[00:16:49] Sean Walker: We, just wing it every single time. We're just like, who are we talking to? What are we talking about? Wing it. You know what I mean? We should, we should get better at this. We sh- You know what, Andy, we should do gooder at this.

[00:16:58] Andy Leviss: yeah, we probably should

[00:17:00] Michael Curtis: Many,

[00:17:00] Sean Walker: Yeah. totally. Andy Much

better

[00:17:02] Andy Leviss: feedback we get. Like, yeah, you guys are right. You really should.

[00:17:04] Sean Walker: Yeah. You know what, Check. you guys do suck at this.

Could you please stop sucking so bad

Out- Outlines would be cool though, that tell us about that. You just kinda like, here's what we're gonna talk about. Here's the thing. So if we're gonna go about whatever, one of the things you do is like open sound meter, right? You're like, cool, here's the highlights I need to touch on Open sound meter so people get the point so you're not just rambling on like we do.

[00:17:27] Michael Curtis: yeah, It just helps have a logical flow to it. 'cause I, I. As a person, I, I enjoy making things up on the spot. I wouldn't say ma- as in inventing things, but like, I don't mind being, having to like MacGyver, like, okay, you know, the show chopped, You're like you got a cuttlefish, some like spoiled chocolate and a bottle of olive oil go.

Like, it's like that's, that's, f- some people are like ho- wow. They would just like, they freeze. I like it. And so it's my natural bent. but if I try to lean on that skill set too much. Then the lack of planning. So that's why I married my wife who's like planner of planners, uh, to balance me out. Um, and so, you know, when our... we vacationed a few weeks ago as well, we literally land in Asheville, North Carolina and get a text like, great, your rental car was canceled.

And so like, and we're like, okay. And, sh- and she kinda freezes up 'cause like that wasn't in the plan, you know, to get that. I'm like, it's fine. We'll, we'll find something. It's gonna be okay.

[00:18:23] Sean Walker: It's a rental car. Well, there's more rental cars. Yeah, we'll get one. It isn't a big deal.

[00:18:26] Michael Curtis: It's fine. And so just I'm, I, I'm good at that. But um, I know I do my best when I bring in some planning and forethought as well,

[00:18:35] Sean Walker: All right. Sweet. Sweet.

[00:18:37] Andy Leviss: Yeah, I am, I am in the next couple weeks, like deep down the road of basically having to do that. 'cause in, uh, at, uh, the, the weekend of the, I guess 24th, 25th of, uh, July, I'm going to Chicago. For the, uh, T-S-D-C-A, the Theater Sound Designers, composers Association that, um, we had, you know, we've had Lindsay Jones on talking about it, and Ian, Denaya and all them. and, um, their annual meeting is, uh, coming up and I'm gonna be there doing a DM7 workshop one of the days about using DM7 in

[00:19:05] Sean Walker: Cool.

dude

[00:19:06] Andy Leviss: And Yeah. It's like I'm so used to like, yeah, let's just sign on and wing it. We kinda know what we're gonna talk about, see where it goes. And I'm like, yeah, I need to actually be able to give a constructive 90 minutes that, you know, my employer is paying for me to do. And

[00:19:18] Michael Curtis: Yeah.

[00:19:18] Andy Leviss: so, uh, so yeah, I, I might actually, I might actually hit you up and pick your brain on a, on a, some, uh, some approach stuff.

We'll see.

[00:19:26] Michael Curtis: sure. I, um, no, I would love to help there. There's several tools, methodology, stuff like it, it's all there in your brain. It's just the linearization and, and helping put it in the most approachable way someone can absorb it. And that,

I would say on the YouTube channel, my favorite comment to get, um.

Is the one of thank you for teaching me something new that was complicated. You made it accessible without watering it down that sentence, making it accessible without watering it down. So simplicity too early will derail you 'cause you don't get nuance Sim simplicity is best late after you can then distill it down into the core.

And so getting to present that's a lot of fun and I enjoy that journey.

[00:20:11] Sean Walker: Yeah, dude. 100%. It's interesting that you say that. I actually look for that in people I hire.

[00:20:17] Michael Curtis: Ah, yeah

[00:20:18] Sean Walker: so there are complicators and Simplifiers, right? And As soon as I said that, everybody went, oh, I understand what you're saying. Right? Like, you know those people that you say, Hey, we need to do XYZ," and they give you like a two-hour tirade about how complicated it is and all the stuff they're gonna have to do and everything.

Behind the scenes, and you're like, Hey man, don't care. This is gonna get done. You know what I mean? And then there's the people that are like, oh yeah, yeah, no problem. We'll just do it this, that, and the other. And we move on with life. You know what I mean? Like we intentionally try to hire simplifiers so that it just makes your life easy, right?

Same kind of thing where you're like, you're not losing all the details. There's just a whole bunch of stuff that doesn't have to get said in order to get this done. You

know?

[00:20:58] Michael Curtis: Correct, correct. There, there's a, there's a great book the Paradox of Choice. His name is Barry. I forget his last name. It's A good book on that. And then I just finished one by Dave, uh, David Epstein called uh, inside the Box How

[00:21:12] Sean Walker: The other Epstein. The other Epstein, yeah. Yeah,

Yeah,

[00:21:16] Michael Curtis: unrelated, has upstanding moral

character.

[00:21:18] Sean Walker: yeah, to-

[00:21:19] Michael Curtis: yeah. Um,

[00:21:21] Sean Walker: Not that Epstein.

[00:21:22] Michael Curtis: yeah, yeah. And, uh, and he, it's how yeah, inside the box how constraints make us better. And he has, he ends the book with a chapter about maximizing versus satisficing, And, and there is a time for maximizing at some point, but again and again, satisficing and contentment and. Getting c- you yeah, you're ultimately more creative with constraints is basically the point of the book.

And so, um, yeah, it was, it was a fun read,

[00:21:50] Andy Leviss: Yeah, I'm putting both of those on my, like I'm, I'm. reading The, the quick like blurb on paradox of choice, which is Barry Schwartz is the, is the Barry you were looking for? Um,

[00:21:59] Michael Curtis: fastest Googler in the

West.

[00:22:00] Sean Walker: hundred percent, dude.

[00:22:02] Michael Curtis: guy. What am I?

[00:22:03] Andy Leviss: I'm, I'm actually at, at Coggy these days.

[00:22:05] Michael Curtis: Ooh,

[00:22:06] Andy Leviss: Yeah. I'm, I'm,

It's,

[00:22:09] Sean Walker: duck. Go, guys.

[00:22:09] Andy Leviss: it's Coggy's the one, it's, they're like, we, we charge a little bit for it, but because we charge you you're not the product anymore.

[00:22:16] Michael Curtis: That's

[00:22:17] Sean Walker: Ooh, I love that. Wait, tell me about that.

[00:22:19] Andy Leviss: uh, Yeah, I mean, literally

[00:22:20] Sean Walker: I'm gonna put my tin hat on real quick. Tell me all about that. Eddie

[00:22:22] Andy Leviss: well, I mean that's the whole thing, like with like, you know, like any, any of the social media, any of the search engines, if you're not paying for it, somebody is, which means if you're not the customer, you're probably the product

[00:22:34] Sean Walker: 100%. Yeah. They're just a wiretap tracking every s- keystroke you make in the whole joint.

[00:22:38] Andy Leviss: Yeah, and I've heard, m- I gotta dig deeper 'cause I've, at one point I heard on, on one of the podcasts I listen to that they might be like using backend APIs that like their search data at least partially comes from Google. I'm not sure if that's true or not, but their results have been like pretty good.

And depending on some browsers, like you can just use them as the default browser choice. Like on like Safari on my iPhone, they've got a plugin, so it's a little hacky 'cause like it basically intercepts a Google search and then redirects it to, so there's a weird little like. bloop, bloop As it, like, you start to see the Google results pop up and then it pops up in Coggy instead.

Um, but it's, yeah, it's, uh, I've been digging that, like, I was like, I don't, it's, you know, it's not, I forget what it costs. It's not horrendously expensive, but it was like the Yeah, let me give this a try for a little bit. Um, and like, yeah, the first few days trying, I maxed out like the number of searches on the free trial and I was like, okay, yeah, I haven't been upset with it.

Let me, uh, let me, uh, give it a go. So, uh. but Yeah. No, that's, I mean, that's one of my, s- that's one of my superpowers in like, support too, is like, is just being able to search quickly and know where to look to find something.

[00:23:40] Michael Curtis: yeah

[00:23:42] Andy Leviss: and that's, I I was gonna say when we were talking about like, like the, like there's education and support are definitely like a large overlap on that end of it's, you know, it's, it's much more, when you're doing support, what you're keeping is much more.

Constrained to a smaller topic usually, you know, depending on what the question is, but it's still, there's a lot of, sometimes it's just answering a, where, where, where is that stupid button? But oftentimes it's actually trying to teach it. Like, you know, like I'm, I'm getting noise outta, you know, outta the speakers when I'm using your mixer.

Like, what am I doing wrong? And it's like, okay, let's

[00:24:16] Sean Walker: Everything. You're doing everything wrong.

[00:24:19] Andy Leviss: Yeah.

I'm gonna introduce you to my friend, the signal-to-noise ratio, and it's gonna take us a minute, but by the time we're done with this, you're gonna totally understand it.

[00:24:25] Michael Curtis: Yeah. And seeing that light bulb go off, there's nothing, there's no feeling like it when you're like, ah, ah, I did that light bulb.

[00:24:32] Sean Walker: Yeah, dude. everybody's, everybody does that. I do that several times a day, bud. Totally.

[00:24:35] Michael Curtis: yeah,

[00:24:36] Sean Walker: Okay, so you made something though. Speaking of tech support and stuff, you have made something recently to solve a problem that you had, and the rest of the world now is pretty close to being able to solve the same problem.

Is that right?

[00:24:47] Michael Curtis: Yes it is.

[00:24:48] Sean Walker: Tell us, tell us about that

[00:24:49] Michael Curtis: it's called Live Stream leveler. I tried thought about something cool and awesome and like I know the next like VC fund looks for basically a word with all the vowels removed is how you choose to invest, you know, in the right company.

[00:25:02] Sean Walker: We'll just call it Boom Shaka.

Laka.

[00:25:05] Michael Curtis: yeah. Some, you know, whatever. But it's live stream-- so it does what it, you know, it, as our British folks say, it does what it says on the tin, it levels out live streams. So basically the problem, the root thing is, is if you're in a corporate, A1 world or even some the, I guess Andy, you could probably speak to this on theater world, I don't know how often the A1's tasked with it being live streamed or recorded in that environment. But I'll say from my experience in corporate, A1 world.

Um, doing this for a while, uh, 90% of my shows are like, it is also at least being recorded or being streamed out somewhere. And then you

[00:25:36] Sean Walker: 100%.

[00:25:36] Michael Curtis: have to, and you, and most of the gigs, at least I'm on, there's not a separate broadcast mixer, um, or a mix engineer handling that. So you're doing both. And there's also, you know, mix minuses back to Zoom and like, okay, there's a separate prompter feed with just dialogue and no nats.

And like I would say, if. Mixing in a music sense is like having a lot of inputs. that you make sound good into one output. Corporate is having a fewer buckets of inputs. You could still could have 36 microphones, but it's microphones, playback, ambient mics, to a bunch of different outputs

[00:26:07] Sean Walker: Tons of outputs. All the outputs, bro. All the outputs.

[00:26:10] Michael Curtis: So, um, and to me, so I was like, okay, I want to be able to focus on the room, hit my QLab cues, be able to make the mic sound good, make sure everyone's happy. You know, there's not. Shoot, like my A2 did a good job, but the lav fell. There's always some type of just fire or just thing you're having to solve, but make it, um, uh, presentable to the, the, an audience in corporate context and like, and then I also have to worry about what it sounds like online in the recording. so that that's a lot to juggle.

Um, and it's doable and there's been tools out there. Um, I've used others in the past that have, have done a good job. Um, but the, the the main things I want to solve is I want it to be low CPU. Low latency cross-platform, easy to use. Uh, not a bunch of plugins, just one contained plugin can run standalone, um, and is stable.

And so I, I, I want, I, I wanted all those things and no one tool that I already had in my toolbox after trying or, a- and is, uh, i-inexpensive 'cause there's so-- And so, and I want it to run on, um, Mac or pc. Um, not no Linux yet. If there's any Linux A1s out there, let me know. We'll see if we can develop it. But right now, I,

uh, no one's

asked

[00:27:21] Andy Leviss: the three of them will very loudly let you

know

[00:27:24] Michael Curtis: Yes. Oh, yes, they will. Yes, they will, uh, want it to be stable.

[00:27:28] Sean Walker: Okay, so first question, I'm gonna just right right in the middle of it.

What does this do for me as an A1 That the tools I have now don't like an ML 4,000 or an L3 or L1 or whatever. Like what does leveler do that just a brick wall limiter won't do for me

[00:27:45] Michael Curtis: Yep. So a brick wall limler-- Wow. Brick wall limiter is the black knight at the end. that says, "None shall pass. So no clippy. Um, and no clippy clippy So it usually has a, what they confusingly call the threshold control, which is basically give me more gain

control.

[00:28:00] Sean Walker: 100%,

[00:28:00] Michael Curtis: don't know why they called it that, but here it is.

But, uh, threshold would be, you know, this what they call ceiling, so that there are no more clips above this with an L3, uh, or any other limiter, the L3 is great. It's low latency it does a good job. None shall pass, but it, you can adjust your levels into it, but that doesn't have loudness metering on it. So you think, okay, let me put the WLM after it from Waves." that shows you metering LUFS, and which is great.

Like I know how loud I am and I can maybe adjust the threshold, but once I have a presenter on stage. and I have, you know, MC, who's eating the microphone, super excited guy and I have to get over the, the crowd or the DJ that's really loud in the house. I might set my gain coming in to where it's nice there on the stream and then I get, you know, the CTO of the company.

Very mousy person, very soft-spoken, snow coning you

[00:28:52] Sean Walker: Mi- Microphone at their belly button. Terrified of their own voice. Yeah. Yeah,

[00:28:56] Michael Curtis: and you're like doing your best to keep it stable in the house. And like if you push it any more, you're on the verge. because you haven't bought de-feedback yet. And then, uh, you're, you're like, "Ugh."

[00:29:05] Sean Walker: Does he have a PodD feedback?

[00:29:07] Michael Curtis: yeah,

[00:29:07] Sean Walker: which just had a huge upgrade, by the way. Go, go update. Holy crap. Anyway, sorry. Go back to what you.

were doing

[00:29:12] Michael Curtis: you're, you're like, okay. So it is appropriate for that person in the house of like, they kind of get, you know, that there's a much bigger dynamic range, but that end person on their iPhone, whatever listening. you, It needs to be much tighter. And so the L2 is not gonna ride that level for you. And You think?

okay, let me put playlist writer in front of that. That kind of does it. And so, but playlist writer, again not, not trying to dog on the plugin, but it's not aware of content type. It it basically says, I have input, it needs to be this loud, get whatever input to this loud.

[00:29:45] Sean Walker: So it does the band and the vocals and the everything together, and so it's not helping you keep the vocal clear and on top.

[00:29:51] Michael Curtis: Yeah. And so everything is just being put to one loudness number, which is great. If you have Spotify playback where it's already fairly normalized or whatever, it's just like, keep this even. Um, and so, and then you might also want like, okay, throw whatever, you know, an SSL or whatever your favorite bus compressor, just to kind of help squeeze stuff together.

So that's four plugins in a row, trying to do level riding, compression, true peak limiting and loudness metering.

[00:30:15] Sean Walker: Yeah. Uh-huh.

[00:30:16] Michael Curtis: do that one specific job well, but how do they work together for the end result of, I want a clear, consistent program that's low latency, stable and is going to work.

And that's what the plugin does.

[00:30:28] Sean Walker: Heck yeah, dude. That's awesome.

[00:30:29] Michael Curtis: Yeah. And it's three controls, just input, trim, your loudness target, and what's called dialogue bias. So again and again, when I would kind of analyze loudness of different meetings or my the with the shows I would mix. Let's say I'm shooting for, um, an gosh. And so there's, there's, L- LUFS integrated, which is like the long-term value, uh, the loudness in the entire program.

And then, but for like in, in a lot of, uh, Radio broadcasts, they call, they say what's called don dial norm. So basically I want dialogue to be normalized to a certain amount. Minus 24 is pretty common for radio. So basically that is the anchor in the program. And so I think in corporate you can choose like, okay, what is my anchor?

The dialogue? I'm assuming it's that. But if you're, if you're mixing a music festival, music is gonna be the di, the anchor.

And

[00:31:18] Sean Walker: Sure. Totally.

[00:31:19] Michael Curtis: on tour wants to record their set and then immediately post it on social. On the bus. And so they want that recorded and, and nice. Well, but you have an mc in the middle of the show.

You have some, the, the, the vocalist just talking like that could be level two. So all that being said, I want you to, you pick your target. I want dialogue at, let's call it minus 18. Okay, let's, let's, That's a good, you know, healthy-ish streaming level. But then you have the, the walk-in band, uh, like or you have a walk-on stinger.

or There is like a real entertainment act during the show, um, that on the LUF, the loudness meter to the human ear. If I put that also at minus 18, that's actually gonna sound a lot weaker than dialogue. Dialogue in and of itself is gonna register, but full much more spectral density and thing and h- things happening in the music.

It to my ear needs to be about six or seven loudness units above dialogue to feel the same.

[00:32:18] Sean Walker: Totally.

[00:32:19] Michael Curtis: To me, uh,

[00:32:20] Sean Walker: Otherwise it doesn't feel like it's banging, it feels like.

merrow

[00:32:23] Michael Curtis: yeah. Yeah. And so the, the voice sounds like, hi, you know, big announcement. And then do, do, do, do. This sounds-- this feels like elevator music to me

[00:32:30] Sean Walker: Sure. Totally.

[00:32:31] Michael Curtis: not going higher. So you're thinking like, wait a minute.

I thought loudness meters were supposed to take care of that and get everything to the same target. Well, like, well, it's, it's apples and oranges. It's, it's the spectral density and tonal character and s-spacing of dialogue is much different than music. So I want to account for that. I want it to feel the same on the other side, but have a way to ch- tell the AGC or the automatic gain control that hey, I can sense when dialogue is happening, park it here.

When a walk-on stinger or music or video roll happens, park it here. And

that's the dialogue.

[00:33:05] Sean Walker: Yeah,

my man.

[00:33:07] Michael Curtis: So that was definitely the hardest part is getting that right and so to make sure it can sense the right thing, not trigger falsely. Move fast enough. And so for instance, like even at my church, I took a live stream in a, in a, what I mixed and, uh, the, un- often way to kinda solve like, hey, my pastor's really quiet and the band is really loud, is, you know, on the mix bus you would send the dialogue microphones hotter than the band and help offset it.

And this could be true for a corporate gig of like, you know, your, your

DJ

[00:33:34] Sean Walker: Any gig.

yeah

[00:33:35] Michael Curtis: yeah, whatever. And so, but it turns out there was a part where the pastor walked on stage and started talking to the worship pastor. They're in separate groups at different levels. th- They're both dialogue microphones, but pastor's sent 10 DB hotter and now what I tried to solve for segment by segment, they're actually in the same thing.

And so you have to s-solve for that too. So it's like, okay, I wanna do less of having to create these predetermined decisions about how things should go and something adapt to it on the fly. Um, so anyway, so it-- I used that as like test material. Um, And then, but it on average, like if you're running like a, a church service or any show, like, just call it 90 dBA. dialogue to my ear feels most comfortable at 67 or 68 DBA, like in a room.

And so if you're, you know, assuming critical distance isn't nuts or whatever, just like, you know, you're just sitting listening to the pa, it's about 67 or 6-68 is to me. So that is, uh, quite a delta. You know, and there doesn't need to be that delta online, it needs to be reduced. And

[00:34:36] Sean Walker: Yeah, you got like maybe, maybe four-ish DB online that it can like f- swing within so that they can still hear everything, right? Like.

[00:34:42] Michael Curtis: Yeah. And so it, it, it, you know, some people can be more tolerant and the, and the way that folks have done it in the past with a lot of radio processors is multi-band and a ton of compression. So just everything is squashed and you know, into the same thing. Um, and so this tool with the AGC, it is like think of like a really, really smart vocal rider that's really just riding gain, but then there's a compressor after it as like the punching bag and the Black knight limiter at the very end to make sure none shall pass. So it's those three things things working together to make sure like, hey, you just hit your target. s- See how much dialogue bias you want. How much do you want the dialogue to sit under? Um. LUFS-wise from the target and have a great show. So that's, uh, that's the plugin.

[00:35:28] Andy Leviss: Nice. So, and, and you said this is, this is close to being available for folks, to folks to make use of.

[00:35:36] Michael Curtis: Yes. Hope by the end of July is my hope. I mean, the, the, and so h- you think like, well you're not a programmer, Michael, you, you don't know how to spell c And so, um,

[00:35:45] Sean Walker: But Vibes do.

[00:35:47] Michael Curtis: vibes do. so, yeah. So th- a part of this was really just an, it came out of. like An exercise of like, okay, I wanna learn how to use AI better, and uh, what is it capable of and what's it good at?

And of course, like, you know, when Claude code came out, it was like, I wonder what Claude code is good at code. And so, and so I was like, you know, uh, let's, let's see if we can point it in the right direction. Any, any LLM can, you know, that's on the frontier could probably do this pretty well. But I was like, you know, I don't, I've wanted this tool for a long time.

I don't have it. And let me just kinda, let me tell it what good is, what success is. And it was like, okay, you should probably build on top of juice, which is a framework. You should get a GitHub account and track your changes. And so all these like software developer adjacent tools I had to learn and get comfortable with and know what's happening.

um, that I have actually had a, a professional software developer look at things as well. So it's not just been all vibes, but, um, thankfully he had a pretty good report of like, Hey, you know, it didn't screw this up. Um, so right now I'm in, in, what's what's called the hardening phase It's like make sure it doesn't crash on your show.

And so that, 'cause that's the thing that is a, a one-way ticket to a one-star review. Um, is, is, is is where that is. So how, 'cause, uh. it's-- I, I'm glad that people are able to use the tools they want, and that's been democratized, but it introduces some amount of risk to the A-1 now to say like, "Hey, I'm gonna bring my own fancy toy, um, and use it.

And this isn't from the production company, so they're exposing themselves a little bit more from a liability standpoint and don't wanna get burned. So that's, that's really what I'm working very hard on right now.

[00:37:17] Sean Walker: Yeah, you bring some vibe stuff to my show and it crashes my show, bro. You're fired. I don't know what to tell you. Like there. there's, Yeah. There's no way around it. Uh, You're fired. Right?

[00:37:25] Michael Curtis: Yep. Yep. And so, and for instance, like and it, it's, it was cool to see, you know, a precedent in De feedback come on the scene. 'cause the only way you can run it is via software.

[00:37:37] Andy Leviss: Mm-hmm.

[00:37:37] Michael Curtis: have their own hardware box as well. And so I think that can still be, like, that feels a little bit better to most people to have a piece of hardware.

But

[00:37:45] Andy Leviss: Yeah, Like it'll, Yeah, it'll run on like the waves box or Now, as of a week or so ago on a furrier.

[00:37:50] Michael Curtis: Exactly. And so yeah, they're starting to creep in what people are more, um, comfortable with as far as being able to, you know, explain to a client, Hey, this is tested, piece of industry standard hardware had a failure, versus some guy's, you know, M1 Mac Mini that he hasn't booted up in six months and just installed this software on,

[00:38:10] Sean Walker: Hey, hey, I feel so seen. Stop that right now.

[00:38:13] Michael Curtis: it's a M2.

[00:38:15] Sean Walker: Yeah, yeah, right. Totally.

[00:38:19] Michael Curtis: Yeah.

[00:38:20] Sean Walker: Okay, so can I, can I use your plugin on my waves box? My. Waves, And, and they'll do VST3?

[00:38:27] Michael Curtis: anything, yeah. VST audio unit or standalone. standalone

[00:38:30] Sean Walker: Heck yeah, dude. So I can throw it on my Dante waves rack. thinger-dinger along with AID feedback, and we can be just smashing the streams and corporate stuff.

Love that for me.

[00:38:42] Michael Curtis: Smashing them. So, yeah, it, uh, it. yeah, It's been a lot of fun to build and make, and it's had me ideas for like, other things. I wanna build some free stuff I wanna put out, just like I, I wanna use audio software as educational tools as well. Um, like I'm building one right now. that's in beta. It's called Pivot eq, and it's after the, the nine EQ pivot points.

Little PDF I put out like

[00:39:03] Sean Walker: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally. Where it's like, here's the things that like make things significantly change.

[00:39:09] Michael Curtis: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:39:09] Sean Walker: right? Like here's the nine points in the music. That significantly change the way it sounds, right? Is that what that thing was?

[00:39:15] Michael Curtis: And I was like, okay, here's it's all, this is five, one, two. 50, 100, 200, 500, 1K, 2K, 5K, 10K, 20K. and let's assign adjectives to each of those. So all you gotta remember is five, one, two and add zeros. And all this EQ does is has static bells at each of those five points with adjectives below it to be like, oh, I want more depth.

That's 50 hertz. It punches you in the chest. I want depth and weight is 50 hertz and warmth and punch is 100. Uh, mud, and I forget the other one for 200, but if it it's helping someone who, when, you know, they download a FabFilter and like, oh, I can boost 1000 hertz or 1001 hertz. You know, what I mean? so that's too much granularity.

So start coarse and then get more comfortable with the tool. So

just, yeah,

just

[00:39:59] Sean Walker: And, that will be like an EQ plugin for your DAW or whatever, so that people can, like when it's their first rodeo, they can just load that rather than, like you said, FabFilter, Which is amazing, but amazing,

[00:40:11] Andy Leviss: dare we say. fab.

[00:40:13] Sean Walker: Oh, It's fab, it's fabulous. Uh, but just for like, when it's your first rodeo and you're staring at the stock, Pro Tools EQ going, what do I do?

You know what I mean? They can just go, oh, this needs a little more whatever. And you can look at the adjective and do it. So it just really s- way to be a simplifier bud really simplifies the thing.

[00:40:29] Michael Curtis: my best.

[00:40:30] Sean Walker: And then once you're like an old pro, you can be like, oh, I'm gonna get that FabFilter and get, get on with my 1.1257395K that me- this needs.

[00:40:40] Michael Curtis: Yes. And, and absolutely. So it's, it's, it's again, meeting, making the concepts and repetition, approachable to someone to, to learn on it. And so, and the host will be, because when you're in a live console, like that's, that's where, again, you're, you, Sean, are a studio rat who learned to be a simplifier Because it's you, you can be.

a, a, What, what's it, Simplifier or, a complex- Complicator, yes. And so a complicator, because you, you have the ti- all the time and resources of CPU to throw on 17 plugins on the hi-hat. But in live, like, you know, we loaded it an hour ago, we need the pa in air, in the air in 30 minutes, like let's go. And so, um, so part of me was kind of like, oh gosh, introducing like third-party stuff.

And vsts is, is that just kind of playing in the weeds and not focusing on fundamentals, but I was like, this is a tool I really have wanted for a very long time. I'm gonna go build it and then move on and then, you know, make sure I'm s- that, that, that it's nice to have the industry Sounds good. But if you missed the CEO walking on stage, uh, that's a problem.

So

[00:41:38] Sean Walker: e- for everybody. That's a problem for everybody.

[00:41:41] Michael Curtis: fast. And so, yeah, so this, yeah,

[00:41:43] Sean Walker: when does MKC software launch and when can we start buying these products? And how many thousands does this leveler plugin cost me?

[00:41:51] Michael Curtis: I, I think it's gonna be $97 Under 100 bucks.

[00:41:55] Sean Walker: Dang, bro. How you gonna pay for anything with that? Never mind. Uh, that's for you to worry about. Not for me. We won't. Well, I'm not gonna air your dirty laundry. If you wanna give that thing away, that's fine. $97 MKC software taking over the world.

[00:42:08] Michael Curtis: I, yeah. I'm gonna keep it there for now. Um, and it's not because I think like software is gonna be so commoditized. It's gonna drive all the cost to zero and AI's gonna take our jobs. It's, it's, I purposely wanna make it to where it is accessible and starts, starts doing the thing.

I don't wanna undercut. Um, but I start to feel like people start kinda, kinda, uh, second o- once, once things are three, three figures instead of two. It's kinda like, okay, this is uh, it can-- I want people to like, obviously take it seriously and know it was worth it and I made it. But, um, start there and then, you know, if it just sells like hotcakes, fantastic.

If no one buys it, fine, but I

[00:42:45] Sean Walker: Den er s

[00:42:45] Michael Curtis: gonna be 97 bucks and it's not gonna be $27 the next day. and It's not gonna be back to $97 the next day

[00:42:51] Sean Walker: I see you waves.

[00:42:52] Michael Curtis: the next day. And so,

[00:42:53] Sean Walker: Okay. Waves.

[00:42:54] Michael Curtis: yeah. Yeah. So,

[00:42:55] Sean Walker: Dude, you know what you're, you're so

[00:42:57] Andy Leviss: name comes from. It's their pricing model.

[00:42:59] Michael Curtis: yes,

[00:42:59] Sean Walker: my God. Totally

[00:43:01] Andy Leviss: It goes in waves.

[00:43:03] Michael Curtis: you win, you get the game ball.

[00:43:04] Sean Walker: 100%, dude. Game ball goes to Danny Leviss.

[00:43:07] Michael Curtis: Leviss. Yeah.

[00:43:09] Sean Walker: Dude, that you're so right though, 'cause I was just thinking, I was thinking about my own. Buying habits. When you said that I was like, 97 bucks, I'll buy that. Then you were talking about like, well, but if it's more than that, I'm like, God, if it was 197, I would think about it and it's not really the $100. It's like at 97 bucks, you're like, sure, I'll try that for $200. You're like, I don't know. I could take the wife out to dinner. I could bu- I could buy a cup of coffee. I could, I mean, I, I don't know what things cost in Arkansas, but here that, that'll buy you McDonald's bud. You know what I mean? Like 197 almost fills up the truck.

You know what I mean?

Like

[00:43:41] Michael Curtis: Yep. Yes. Exactly. Exactly. No, I'd, uh,

[00:43:44] Sean Walker: Oh, bro. Anyway, but you're, you're totally right. Good thinking.

[00:43:48] Michael Curtis: my, my hope is by, by the end of the month it's out in the wild. because, you know, making tutorials and user guide and all that kind of stuff, but it's in the final stages of like, please don't crash my show. Um, and just so some edge cases I'm figuring out.

But again, I, again, the, the most, the, the coolest part was I just learned so much about these tools and software development and like, oh, wow. It, g- it gave me so much more appreciation for the stuff we use and take for granted. That

[00:44:10] Sean Walker: Oh, dude, 100%.

[00:44:10] Michael Curtis: like, like I love good Hertz plugins, some of my favorite out there.

It's just the user interface, the, their manuals, like how they. Put things together, it, it, the way they sound, they're fun. Like, I like that when I put the up and down arrow key on the gain, it goes in, half dB increments instead of like 0.1, 0.2 or whatever. It's just like little, little things like that.

It's like, oh, someone had to make that decision about it and it, it was really intentional. So that was fun. So. um, But yeah, but it's already been used in beta on a bunch of different shows and has done well. And so I've gotten good reports. And so again, it, will, there, there will be a fut- the, the, the trial will be basically it'll run for 30 minutes uninterrupted and then just stop in the session.

But if you basically launch a new pro tools or whatever, I guess it's actually not available in pro tools 'cause it's not aax 'cause they want $800. Um,

[00:44:58] Sean Walker: Ooh, ouch.

[00:44:59] Michael Curtis: and the pace licensing system, so I'm like, nope, no AAX for now. But you can run the standalone app or the VST in any DAW that hosts Audio units or VST.

It'll run for 30 minutes and then just bypass. Um, but you can render through it. So I would say if you wanna test it out, the best way to do it is take your last live stream that you wanted to be something good and just use the input trim to get the level there on dialogue or whatever to where you're happy with and just hit render and then compare the two.

and do, do, do a better job of keeping it there. S- 'cause if, if you're just like skipping around the timeline, the, the, the detector circuit has to like adjust really quickly to something brand new. So it's not good j- just to hop around with the algorithm, but if you render through and then listen to it is the best way to judge it.

So,

and,

[00:45:41] Sean Walker: Okay, sweet.

[00:45:42] Michael Curtis: me, yeah, give me feedback. Like, you know, I'll, I'll probably be a YouTube video I'll release it and like, if it's terrible and crash your show, like post it in the comments, I wanna know. So, or email me or

whatever.

[00:45:51] Sean Walker: I'll just, I'll just text you some expletives and some emojis if that happens. Yeah.

[00:45:55] Michael Curtis: like, if it goes well, give me three eggplant emojis. So

[00:45:59] Sean Walker: Yeah. Right. Totally

[00:46:03] Michael Curtis: That's what I want

[00:46:04] Sean Walker: sold.

[00:46:04] Andy Leviss: can do is two

[00:46:05] Sean Walker: Yeah.

[00:46:06] Michael Curtis: Yeah,

[00:46:07] Sean Walker: Sh- She's been complaining about that for years.

Andy.

[00:46:09] Andy Leviss: I Wow.

[00:46:12] Sean Walker: It's 'cause he's the second-best engineer in his house. You know what I mean?

[00:46:14] Andy Leviss: you know,

[00:46:16] Michael Curtis: it's amazing. It's

amazing.

[00:46:18] Sean Walker: dude. I'm excited to try it. That's gonna be super freaking fun, dude. That's a, that makes a lot of sense. 'cause when you, like you say stream leveler, like, I understand what that means, right? I, I get it. But then you're like, okay, well why don't I just, you know, L3 or whatever with the, the input and output linked and drag that down and then boom, it's the same level, It, you know, like being simple.

Like, oh, okay, now it's level. But you're totally right. It doesn't account for the voice versus the music versus the, you know what I mean? Like that's a, that's a really great, I,

[00:46:45] Andy Leviss: And

[00:46:45] Michael Curtis: the, yeah

[00:46:46] Andy Leviss: And

[00:46:46] Sean Walker: that's a great

[00:46:47] Andy Leviss: like I know Michael and I have like a longstanding like periodic text thread over like new tools to do this kind of stuff for both, for like event streams and then for the very podcast you're listening to, it's something I have to be concerned with. And there's, you know, there'll be, well this one does a really great job, but it doesn't have a, a true peak limiter built in, so you have to put one after it and then it works great.

But it's, you know, it's got like 50 milliseconds of latency. So. Offline for a podcast, it's fine. For a stream it might be okay, but for like anything else, it's not at all. And then this one has like almost no latency and has limiter built in, but holy crap does it need a lot of CPU and.

[00:47:23] Sean Walker: And So you've solved all those like it. It's low latency. It doesn't take a ton of CPU and is stable

[00:47:30] Michael Curtis: Yes.

[00:47:31] Sean Walker: you're a superstar, bud. You're a superstar.

[00:47:34] Michael Curtis: I know how to burn a lot of tokens and give good direction.

[00:47:36] Sean Walker: Yeah,

right?

[00:47:37] Michael Curtis: uh, uh, that, that's it.

[00:47:40] Sean Walker: Totally.

[00:47:41] Michael Curtis: no, it, uh, it, yeah, again, it's been a lot of fun to build. I'm excited to see it out in the wild when it come and, yeah, it'll just be at my, uh, website producebamkc.com, and I'll have a link to it and it'll probably be /livestreamleveler if I had to guess the, URL in advance.

And so,

[00:47:53] Sean Walker: It's a good guess, dude. It's a good guess.

[00:47:56] Michael Curtis: I am try- trying to keep the

[00:47:57] Sean Walker: l-

[00:47:58] Michael Curtis: shelf, man.

[00:48:00] Sean Walker: I love, I love the creativity. Way to get weird dude. Way to get weird.

[00:48:03] Michael Curtis: Yeah, yeah. We'll figure it out. We'll see what's next.

[00:48:06] Sean Walker: Well, that's fricking awesome. I can't wait to try it. I'm gonna, uh, dive into that here. I've got plenty of things to test that on, although now I gotta figure out how to use logic 'cause I'm a pro Tools guy and so I, you know, go fuss. But that's fine. that's fine. I get it. I could, I could, but

[00:48:23] Andy Leviss: I

was gonna say you can even, there, there's, there's skins and templates for Reaper that will make it look and feel like pro tools.

[00:48:30] Sean Walker: it does not l- use the same key commands as pro tools.

[00:48:33] Andy Leviss: Oh no, that's like part part of those packages is, is like swap out all the, like literally it's the, I'm used to pro tools, make it look as close to pro tools as you can and make it respond as close with like keyboard shortcuts and stuff,

[00:48:44] Michael Curtis: yeah.

[00:48:44] Sean Walker: Oh, thank God.

[00:48:45] Michael Curtis: crash. What pro tools is best at, so.

[00:48:47] Sean Walker: Right. Totally, dude. Totally. No, dude, I've just, I've lived there so long, I don't know how to do anything else at this point, you know what I mean? Like, I, I just fricking, I just can't, dude, you know what I mean? But, oh, all right. I'll check it out. That's gonna be, that's gonna be super cool, and I'll make sure that the.

that We buy one or 12 and all the boys get a copy of it so that everybody can like get their livestreams ripping. We'll just, we'll save MKC software right from the ground up. Get our IPO going pretty soon, and boom, there it is.

[00:49:13] Michael Curtis: great. That sounds like a fun bubble.

[00:49:15] Sean Walker: Yeah, right. Totally. Dude, what a cool thing you made. We're stoked. Thank you for putting all that effort and time and tokens into that, dude.

That's rad.

[00:49:22] Michael Curtis: Absolutely

[00:49:24] Sean Walker: That's awesome. Anything else that we haven't covered that we needed to cover?

[00:49:27] Michael Curtis: Uh, no, just, just, yeah. Keep an eye on the YouTube channel. Um, I'm excited to see where that goes. And, uh, I got some other ideas for more system pivoting back into, like, system engineering and training and stuff like that, and design specifically. So it's just little, little teasers there.

But no grateful for you guys, your work for, um, shepherding our audio community of sorts and, and doing that well, and it's, it's a, it's an honor to be a part.

[00:49:50] Sean Walker: Thanks for being a part of, it here. We appreciate you

[00:49:54] Andy Leviss: It's good to hang with you. Like, I feel like we've, we like text all the time and like we occasionally chat on the phone. It's good to actually, you know, nobody listening can see our faces, but it's good to see your face for a little bit and

[00:50:03] Michael Curtis: Yes.

[00:50:04] Andy Leviss: ca catch up on the record, as it were.

Yeah.

[00:50:06] Michael Curtis: not personal, you know.

[00:50:08] Sean Walker: We all have faces for radio. It works out fine. You know what I mean? Like

[00:50:11] Michael Curtis: It's great.

[00:50:12] Sean Walker: that's why we, that's why it's not a video

[00:50:14] Michael Curtis: Uhhuh,

[00:50:15] Sean Walker: podcast. Well, thanks for coming on, Michael. We appreciate you, buddy. It's good chatting and we're stoked on the new thing. Thanks to Allen and Heath and RCF for letting us yap about audio for another week.

That's the pod y'all. See you next week.

Music: “Break Free” by Mike Green