 We're live back at NAB day three, this side the Cube, the Intel Studio Experience in front of a live audience here at the Intel NAB kicking off day three. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com and I'm joined with my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org and John we're here with Brandon Ryan who's the director of product marketing at Cakewalk. And we've been talking about earlier that the spot we talked about, the democratization of the media business and in particular, we're going to talk about how we're bringing all this capability and particularly as it relates to audio and editing and sound to the masses. I mean, obviously we're in the Intel booth here and obviously Moore's Law, you go back in the history of the PC generation and it's always been software and yesterday we talked about a lot about the software innovations and software really highlights the capabilities of the performance in the hardware. And Brandon, you guys have a cool product, obviously audio, music, sound, really becoming now part of the discussion which was once watered down to the point where MP3s and iTunes, I mean, it was sucky audio basically. So now we saw from DTS Sound Matters in production, good sound, you can hear it and it creates a great experience. So what are you guys seeing out there about this democratization? Obviously big studios, motion picture down to broadcasters have always invested in high-end audio but now as you come down with Moore's Law and more gear, more equipment out in the street in the hands of consumers, what's happening, you guys have been a big part of that change. Well, a few things have happened. I mean, with the advent now of surround systems and higher home theater, that's obviously been, sound becomes more and more important so I'm glad to see that. I think it is more important to the consumer. We've seen over the years, big studios move to small studios and a lot of what you hear out there is being done in people's personal studios. It's not being done in large studios so that democratization has happened in pure audio recording. It's happening obviously more and more in video and people are able to broadcast themselves and being able to handle the audio and the video themselves is a really important aspect. So many things had to sort of be farmed out to other people, the mastering process, the editing process, the engineering process. A lot of our users, they have to do all of that themselves now. There aren't budgets necessarily for that kind of audio production. And talent too. I mean, the talent availability has always been a problem. You have to have a crew. Absolutely, yeah. So putting more power into the hands of a single person and letting them do more in less time is huge. So it's a combination of the sort of new emerging studio and the prosumer, is that who your market is? Yeah, I mean it's really a little bit of both. And there's more and more blurring line between the two because sort of prosumers are able to kind of do professional work using the tools that are offered. And in smaller and smaller formats, I mean what used to take a giant room in a reinforced floor now takes a desktop. And even more so now, even things like ultra books. I mean what used to take a dual Xeon system with extra cooling and all kinds of optimizations, that same amount of work can now be done on a couple of pound ultra book, which is pretty amazing. So talk about the technologies that have enabled that democratization a little bit. Well SSD is one. So solid state drives have been huge, just allowing recording of lots of tracks, playback of lots of tracks, virtual instruments or another thing, just large orchestral soundscapes that would have taken huge amounts of RAM, lots of disk streaming. So SSD has been kind of a godsend. The other is low latency fast memory access. So things like AVX extensions have been giant because really what our users need is they need real time capability. When they hit a key or they play something or they sing something or they do a voiceover through effects, everything needs to happen immediately. And so real time, tons and tons of small chunks of data, small buffers, so AVX extensions have been huge, larger cache memory on the processors, along with SSD, 64 bit, we were the first ones to create a 64 bit native digital audio workstation. And so going from two giga RAM to eight, 16, 24, these kind of environments have really allowed people to just kind of work without constantly thinking about and tweaking the hardware. Talk about the, give an example of some of the revelations that have happened with you guys and examples in terms of features, because one of the things that you can do when you have this kind of power is make it easier. Yeah. Right, so obviously, and having more robust features, but ease of use is really the key thing, right? Making things dead simple is obviously the end game, but what have you guys been able to do with this new horsepower that in just a few years ago was like, wow. Yeah, one of the things is we created a new user interface, partly due to have the ability to have the UI be GPU accelerated, those kinds of things. We've created a thing called Skylight, which is our interface that basically allows you to create the workspace in any way you want. Everything is drag and drop, and you can do everything while it's running. So you can have lots of tracks playing, dragon effects, they can instantiate themselves immediately. So just not having to kind of baby the system all the time and just be able to when a person thinks about it, they can do whatever it is they kind of hear in their head. But with the UIs, high definition has been another thing, high definition monitors. We've optimized our displays for 1080p, and so being able to do that, you can see a lot more in a single workspace and design just at a touch of a button to kind of have the workspace adapt to what you're trying to do at the time. And we made it very simple for people to just be able to hit a key. It changes the entire workspace. They can drag and drop anything they want. There's not as many menus to go through anymore. So it really is about ease of use is huge now. I mean, a lot of the features are there, but now it's really about those features being able to be accessed at any time immediately and sort of right in front of you. Talk about the Ultrabook. I mean, we've been hearing a lot about the Ultrabook, but what is, I mean, I was looking at, yes, it's just like another laptop. What's in the Ultrabook that makes it so compelling in your opinion? SSD is a big part of it, so the thing boots right away. I think what happens is that, and also the fact that it's truly a Core i5 or Core i7. I mean, that's amazing. So you get that super low latency performance, which is so important to be able to be at one or two milliseconds, basically completely real-time performance. It's not kind of watered down. It's always been that laptops were kind of like they were okay for doing audio, but they were never as good as having a full-blown workstation. But these things, I mean, we're over here basically running 32 channels into a system, real-time effects and everything, didn't really tweak the OS, didn't do anything to the system at all, and it just works, you know? And so having that solid-state drive performance, the fast boot, fast restart, able to record and play back lots of tracks, lots of instruments. So did you not have to go through a big rewrite to take advantage of all this new tech? No. Okay, so you just dropped it in? Yeah, I mean, basically we work really closely with Intel over the years, everything they've thrown at us. So we multi-threaded the application years ago. We created 64-bit in 2005. We optimized our Sonar workstation. SSD just happened, AVX extensions. We co-wrote a white paper with Intel. They've been really great with working with us to show off the technology. So over time, we do some implementation, but as far as Ultrabook, we were already there. But O5 was obviously a big issue. Yeah, we had a lot to do with 64-bit, and we created a bit bridge thing which allowed you to still run 32-bit plugins, and so we kind of did that work previously. And Intel's been great about kind of giving us the technology. We implement it so that we're there, and then when new things come along like Ultrabooks, and we don't really have to do anything, it just goes. Talk about your perspective here at NAB. Obviously, you'd look at the show that obviously, obvious things pop out, editing, obviously software. We didn't see a lot of mobile, we were just kind of commenting on mobile. No big mobile presence here in terms of showing off some killer mobile. We see some little bit here and there, but obviously the cameras. What are you seeing as you walk around that no one might not be obvious to the people just doing a booth crawl? I don't know, I think really, when you see a lot of like storage systems and things like that, it really just seems like everything's getting sort of smaller and smaller, and it really is kind of this democratization I know that we keep talking about, and this kind of disruption again, is that it's really, if you sort of read between the lines, it becomes obvious that people are able to do high production, high quality broadcast of audio and video basically on their own with less equipment, less wires, less cables, you have things like Thunderbolt and all these things. I mean, it really is coming down to smaller devices, more self-contained, and really people being able to do it on smaller budgets with higher value. I mean, the theme here is survive and thrive. That's kind of like been like the theme within the show, broadcasters and motion pictures. And the ones who can survive will thrive. You guys have done a good job. You talked about your rewrite. What would you say to folks out there in terms of breaking through this year, going forward, what they need to do about their business models and their business approach? I will listen to the users. That's the biggest thing, is you have to go to the users and figure out what it is they actually need and what they want, and they'll tell you what you should do. I think that's a big part of it. Also, it is really about ease of use. It's about workflow. I mean, that is key. And you can get into a feature war with other companies. You can get into a feature war with other broadcasters but really it's about giving, streamlining everything and giving the users or the customers what it is they want. And you have to talk to them and be willing to listen and utilize the current technologies to provide that. I think that's what's kind of broad but I think that's really the philosophy. So talk about a little bit about your market segment. So you guys have clearly gone after the high end if you will versus you could get run of the mill software that maybe reaches a larger audience but you chose to go for a somewhat smaller audience and sell value and purpose build your solution. Talk about that a little bit and talk about what the difference is there. Well, in a way we cover both. I mean, we do, it is sort of a smaller audience in that, you know, our higher end software and the higher end like ethernet based audio systems that Roland puts together. But even then it's still about providing, you know, more value in that way. But we do have, we do take our technology and trickle it down into much smaller products that allow people to get a large portion of the capabilities that a professional would need. And it's really about figuring out what it is those users want. They don't need certain things and other things are very key to them. So it's about sort of fencing off certain features and giving a wider range of users, you know, the right capabilities. But we do try to cover both kind of user bases but I think the theme with our products and the Roland products is really about not, it's not the ultra high end. It's giving people really the core of what they need but for a lot better value. So what's happening at that ultra high end? Are they just, you know, like we watch the print media and we see what's happening there. Is there a similar phenomenon going on? Yeah, I mean, when you talk about audio, I mean, the big studios, I mean, there's not a whole lot from left, you know, and they are keeping the very big work but that sort of middle of the road, large studio is, you know, kind of going the way of the dodo. It's really bifurcated. We're going down to the clock here. So one quick last final question for you guys. What's next as you go forward, we're actually in a good position, software's in a good spot optimized for the hardware that's growing. What's next for you guys? What can people expect? You don't have to divulge any secrets about the products, but just philosophy and how are you going to move forward in the next couple of years? Well, the biggest thing is, you know, we're going to keep working closely with Intel, keep working closely with Microsoft to kind of keep taking advantage of the new technologies. Obviously we want, you know, touch screens are a big part of this, smaller and smaller formats, you know, other OSs, but, you know, we're going to keep listening to our users and taking advantage of, you know, new trends in music and audio production and, you know, the kind of things people need for high-definition audio and we're going to just keep forging ahead with that. Brandon Ryan, high-definition audio and that's the key, sound matters. We're hearing all that theme here. It's one of those things that really makes users just great. Thanks for joining us in theCUBE. My pleasure. We'll be right back with our next interview.