I have to commend Mackie Designs, Inc. for doing something very right. What happens when commercial software becomes obsolete? What if the software is vital to the operation of hardware that has a much longer shelf-life? This is an example of how a company can, with a small amount of effort, help their customers avoid unnecessary dead-end roadblocks even after commercial software product's lifecycle comes to an end. If Mackie hadn't done the right thing, I'd be a much less satisified customer and wouldn't be writing this, despite being happy with their products.

I have a Mackie Ultramix system in my home recording studio. It provides for mix automation on systems up to moderately big analog consoles like my Mackie 32•8. The Ultramix system consists of two pieces of hardware and one piece of software.

The first piece of hardware is a 2U rackmount VCA module: the Ultra-34 automation interface. It has 34 channels (32 plus stereo master) of VCA-controlled gain cells. It looks like a patchbay in front but on the back it's patched into the mixing console via channel inserts. (You should see the snake cable mess back there!) Under real-time software control, this box adjusts the channel levels.

The second piece of hardware is the UltraPilot control interface. It provides 16 faders and a bunch of channel/mute/control buttons. It connects to the Ultra-34 via an Ethernet-like ribbon cable. You use the UltraPilot to make the fader moves of the mix, and they're recorded by the software.

Finally, there is the software: UltraMix. It's used to record and edit mixes, which consist of fader moves and mutes, stored as MIDI data to be replayed in real-time during final mixdown. Most of the moves are made with the UltraPilot control hardware (the physical faders and mutes), and you can also do them via the software on screen. So you carefully create your mix channel by channel, tweaking it until it's just how you want it, and then you can do the final mix without having to worry about jumping around the mixing console and moving all the various faders perfectly at the right time, which is hard to do in many cases. You just set the mixer's faders at unity gain and let the Ultra-34's VCA's do the work under software control. Each mix session is saved as a document on the computer.

I am returning to some long-neglected work on an album's worth of Bombay Heat material that I need to mix. The Ultramix will be a great help in mixing these songs. On the 32-channel board, I generally dedicate the upper 16 channels to MIDI tracks (drums, synthesizers, etc.) and the lower 16 channels to digital audio on ADAT (bass, guitars, vocals). The MIDI tracks are easy enough to automate via MIDI volume commands, but it's even nicer if you can defer those decisions until the final mix (even if it just means setting a fader level on the board). The audio tracks are more work to mix, because there tend to be more fading and panning as the track runs. It can quickly get to be too much real-time stuff going on with a single pair of hands trying to get everything just right. One missed mute and the mix has to be tried again. Multiply 32 channels by 12 songs and you have a big job ahead.

So I cranked up my ancient computer that runs the music hardware. It's a old Power Computing PowerTower Mac clone (a PowerPC 604e @ 200MHz if I recall) running Mac OS 9. This is 1995 vintage gear, and it still works fine. I just have too much hardware-software interface involved at the moment to even think about replacing that machine with one of my newer Macs, along with the peripherals and software, until I'm done mixing this set of music. The UltraMix software is Mac OS 9 only anway. I seemed to recall that the UltraMix software was copy protected. That seems kind of silly considering that it is inextricably linked to the rather expensive hardware that it talks to and comes with. I wasn't sure where my key floppy disk was after all this time, and I thought that I'd check Mackie's web site to at least see if I had the latest version of UltraMix.

Here is where Mackie did a very nice thing. Yes, UltraMix is discontinued. That's a bummer, because it will eventually render the associated hardware obsolete when I run the studio on Mac OS X. Fortunately, part of updating the gear will probably include a cheaper, better form of mix automation. But what Mackie did that is so great is that they took their obsolete software, revised it to remove the copy protection, and posted it for free download on their web site, along with complete PDF versions of the documentation. Now that is a smart company. Their users' old hardware will work longer, and Mackie won't have to deal with lost license keys and tech support calls. They get happy, enthusiastic customers. Mackie not only makes good hardware at a reasonable price, but they seem to treat their customers with respect, too.