A couple of weeks back, while being almost certain that my next “Gear of The Month” item would be an AD/DA converter, I run across this month’s item – a wonderfully small, useful, easy-to-use DAW remote control unit. Being the adventurous and curious guy I am (a great qualification for an Equipment Moderator and recording engineer) I looked more closely into this matter and keeping in mind that the majority of our forum members use DAWs for recording/editing (this is why your contribution on posting your equipment list is so useful!) I decided that it was too good to let it go.
Imagine the following situation: You’re in the tracking room (or the all-in-one recording room many guys use) and want to track yourself playing guitar/drums and you have to hit ‘Record’ or arm the track – what do you do? Say, you want to put some marker for later editing or change the record-ready track – do you run back and forth to your computer and start clicking away? That’s not easy and can destroy whatever traces of creativity you’ve got left after a tiresome day at your day job. Not to mention the intuitive operation of the old fashioned transport layout that modern computer systems have never managed to surpass (click this, move mouse there, click that – you get the picture).
The Frontier Design Tranzport (
http://frontierdesign.com/Products/TranzPort) uses high freq radio signals to communicate with a small reeceiver card plugged in the USB port of your computer and allows a range of around 30 feet. Because of careful design, regular walls or other obstacles pose no threat to this little beast so its operation is as uninterrupted as it gets (under normal conditions of course). It is powered from four AA bateries and can be mounted on a mic stand using a special adapter supplied by the manufacturer if needed. The two-way data flow allows for things like displaying track names and numbers, timecode etc. Of course you can do punch ins/outs, change panning and levels too! Another great application for all you live musicians is that you can play and control pre-recorded parts without being next to your computer all the time.
Its installation is straight forward and is compatible with most major DAW software (both PC and Mac). Your computer should run Windows 2000/XP or Mac OS X (10.2.8 and above). The manufacturer website has all the compatibility info available and even a user forum.
For what it does the price is a really modest under $200 figure and I’m sure looking around some e-shops can knock this even lower. This is a great piece of gear that will make your sessions more fun and allow the creativity to come through without unnecessary obstacles – take it from someone who doesn’t get excited that easy!
note: Starting this month, the new item topic will remain sticky for the duration of one month - then it will be changed into a regular topic and the new month topic will take its place as sticky. Older 'Gear of the Month' threads can be found by doing a simple forum search! 
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