Thursday I got the email I’ve been waiting for. The SoundStreak Preview Release for Windows is out.
I’ve blogged about SoundStreak several times in the last few months. The definitive article, featuring an interview with CEO Dan Caligor is here: SoundStreak – From the Top.
Dan sent the email…and I was excited to hear about it (1) because I’m a diehard Windows user, and (2) I have a great deal of respect for the potential of this product.
Galigor and his developer — Matthew Hensrud — have been letting me in on the beta testing. I’ve been doing some sessions with them over the past weeks, and I’d like to think some of those instances helped a little bit.
SoundStreak’s native development was for the Mac OS, but after reaching a Beta product in that realm, SoundStreak wasted no time working on a version compatible with Win7. It should more than double their possible user base.
In addition, Dan Caligor offered me a few other tidbits of information in his email:
“This preview is fully functional and largely feature-complete, and is fully interoperable with the Mac version (i.e., you can assume either the Production or Talent role on either platform and mix-and-match within sessions).
All sessions on SoundStreak — as well as the software and account — will remain free of charge while we continue to finalize all the elements of our system. This preview is the tip of the wedge for a number of exciting changes we will be making over the next eight weeks or so. These include new features and capabilities, a new and highly scalable back-end, multi-user and eterprise-grade account capabilities, and user and account admin portals.”
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Just briefly, for those unfamiliar: SoundStreak maximizes an internet connection between talent and producer to provide a real-time link for studio quality remote recording. Like ISDN, the session is usually initiated from the producer end, and both parties need to have the SoundStreak software up and running. The producer feeds the script and even lo-res video (if needed) which appears on the talent’s screen. Talent delivers as many takes as the producer wants…the producer listens…chooses the one he/she likes, and the “good” take is immediately downloaded in a hi-res version to the producer’s side of the equation. All recordings also remain on the talent side of the recording.
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That’s a quick paraphrase, and there are many other handy and feature-rich nuances to the process, but the system is robust and intuitive.
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Hensrud told me that by the end of business Thursday, the new Windows Preview Release had gotten a couple of hundred hits. ‘Not bad for the first day on the market!
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Below is a quick screen capture I did of my test session yesterday to show you the screen interface. My promo read is horrid, but you can see the sequencing of the countdown into the delivery of the video. In my headphones, I was hearing all the background crowd noise of the video, plus Traci Ulman’s soundtrack, as well as the beep-beep-beep of the 3-second countdown.
Thursday I got the email I’ve been waiting for. The SoundStreak Preview Release for Windows is out.