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MillimeterThe Sampler
Jun 8, 2005 11:21 AM
JRT: Production Music With a French Connection
Although JRT Music has established itself as a formidable competitor in the U.S. production music library market, it is actually a French company. The initials belong to the father-son team of Jerome and Roger Tokarz, who got their start in 1967 when they formed the Parisian publishing company Editions Musicales Sforzato, which later morphed into the hugely successful European production music enterprise Tele Music. They started their American subsidiary, JRT, in 1997 with about 70 Tele Music titles, but now that operation has developed a personality of its own as it has begun to generate new discs recorded in the United States.
"We've had a couple of productions done here," says general manager Catherine Bogin from the company's New York office. "Our first foray was one called Sports News Drama, and we've recently finished another one called Street Beats, which is a hip-hop thing, and that's being released as we speak. It's interesting: The guy who did that one is French, but he lives in the U.S. and he had a real sensibility about the international sound of hip-hop, but I think it's still distinctly American. It's very strong. We used a studio called Back Pocket for Sports News Drama, and Street Beats was made in the small studio of the guy who produced it."
JRT prides itself on releasing production music that's up-to-the-minute and right in step with the latest trends. Besides Street Beats, recent releases have included Adrenaline Addict, Funk Connection, Roots Dancehall Ragga, and, one of the company's top sellers, Indie Pop—all emanated from European producers and studios. Bogin notes, "The next one we're hoping to do from the U.S. and that we'll be working on over the summer is an acoustic guitar CD which will cover everything from roots of American guitar music—[Woody] Guthrie to folky modern things in the vein of Iron & Wine [Samuel Beam], Cat Power, Kings of Convenience—people like that."
Bogin says that one new trend at JRF, and perhaps at other companies as well, is to write production music that also includes lyrics. "Our Indie Pop disc has some songs with lyrics on it, and that's been incredibly successful for us. People seem to want songs with lyrics, so music libraries are adjusting, because it's the trend on the WB [network] and other programming aimed at young people to have songs with lyrics. Popular music has become so big on TV, so it's only natural that libraries would reflect that."
Other big sellers for the company include electronic music titles. "We also have a couple of children's CDs and some orchestral things that are exceptional and get used a lot," Bogin says. "We do a lot of American television: America's Funniest [Home] Videos and Animal's Funniest Videos [sic] and all those types of programming. We work with various production companies, like the Alan Ett Music Group in California—he does a lot of television.
"Sometimes my husband and I will sit on the couch flipping the channels and we'll see something and I'll say, 'Oh, we're making money from that,' flip the channel and, 'Oh, we're making money from that, too.' I can almost always find a show with some music of ours. But that's the nature of music licensing. Once you license a piece of music to a TV show, that program is often shown over and over again. It amazes me when I get the BMI [publishing] reports to see how many shows repeat. Like for Fresh Prince of Bel Air, we did something when it was originally on TV [in the '90s] and now every time those episodes are shown, we get paid again. Television is timeless.
"We also work with a company called Post Haste Sound [in Santa Monica, Calif.] doing re-scoring for the international release of television shows, so there's even more life—and money—in those old shows. Because [of] the way the original contracts from these shows in the '80s and '90s were written, nobody got worldwide rights to the songs they used. Now they have to come back and either buy the rights, which can be very expensive if they used a popular song at that time, or, as more and more people are doing, they decide to re-score using music libraries because it's too painful financially to do it the other way. When I go through the cues they've replaced, I'm always surprised at the music that originally played in these shows—a lot of popular stuff. Northern Exposure is a show where they used a lot of our music to replace songs from that time, and it seems as though more are turning up with those needs every day. That's good for our business."
For more info go to jrtmusic.com.
Soundminer Helps Businesses and Editors Organize and Track Their SFX
Over the course of putting together this newsletter every couple of weeks for the past half-year, I keep encountering people who are using the Soundminer asset management software system to organize and track their SFX. Last fall, for example, when I interviewed sound designer Eugene Gearty about his work recording vintage planes for The Aviator, he raved about how Soundminer had made his job easier. "My assistant, Larry Weinland, and I set up this database [in Digidesign Pro Tools] so every entry in Soundminer has at least three components representing the three [different] mic setups [for each recorded event]," he says. "We'd get these multiple pass-bys of liftoffs, and when you'd line them up later to a sync point, it was pretty cool. I could rifle through my library and get different perspectives of the same action." And just a couple of weeks ago, a radio station engineer in Atlanta told me that Soundminer had infinitely simplified the process of calling up, cataloging, and accessing effects, giving him a searchable database for the first time and saving hours of labor in the process.
Well, you know me—I'm kind of the curious type, so I called up Soundminer's president, Steve Pecile, to find out a bit about the company's origins, its approach to software design, and also a bit about what's coming next from this dynamic and important company. We chatted by phone from his Toronto office.
BJ: So Steve, when and where did the idea for Soundminer come about?
SP: Soundminer was really developed internally here before it was a commercial product. We have a post facility here in Toronto, Canada, called Crunch Recording Group, and basically about seven or eight years ago, we wanted to move off CDs [for SFX editing], and hard drives were starting to come down in price and one day I was bemoaning, "Wouldn't it be great to be able to get all this online and have it be searchable no matter what [work]station you were at?" So I started to write an interface, and then one of my supervising sound editors who was looking over my shoulder said, "You know, I have a degree in coding..." I was saying, "Buddy! Here's the stuff I've started. What can you do?" So that's how it started—with a simple interface. Then we started to realize all of the pitfalls that others were doing; for example what Dave Farmer was doing—and this is not to take anything away from Dave, because he's done a great job with Soundlog Pro. But everyone was using apps like [Linux] sound apps or Quicktime to convert audio, and if you put those things under a scope you realize the conversion quality is atrocious, and this is what you're relying on to provide the data that's going to be on your film. You could see the bytes being distorted all down the processes. Quicktime totally decimates 24-bit files; it still does today.
So then we started writing a playback engine for it; effectively writing our own DAE [Digidesign Audio Engine], if you will. Then we started to write our own conversion algorithms and things started snowballing: Wouldn't it be great to build our own thesaurus into it, so if you type in "auto" it knows to search for cars, and if you type in "run" it knows to look for "ran" and other variants? But it's been a slow process from that time.
BJ: How did it become a commercial product?
SP: I think around 2002 a sales rep from Digi was up here because we'd opened a 5.1 room and we were having an open house party, and he noticed that [Soundminer] was on all the screens—as I said, we'd built it entirely for internal purposes. And he said, "This is great, I think a lot of sound editors could use this." So we showed it at NAB in 2002 for the first time, and company slowly took off from there. Now I don't even mix anymore; all my time is spent on Soundminer. But we're still a post facility and when we build a new version, it goes into Crunch first, so we always have immediate feedback. And a lot of the ideas that have gone into Soundminer come from the fact that we use it every day, which is maybe a little different than a traditional software company.
Like, we developed the whole system for cross-categorization. We got involved because we're sound editors and every sound editor has his own take on the way things should be organized. You sit down with ten sound editors and you might get ten different views on how their sound files should be. So we designed Soundminer to be as flexible as possible. That was extremely important.
One of the principles we came up with [early on] is that the database travels with the file, so we started the process of wrapping the file with all the information the editor wants in it, to give the editor as many fields as we could possibly give him but still be easily manageable. We started with a database kernel that we optimized for sound work. The other thing we weren't doing was using MS Access or FileMaker or anything that was off the shelf, because we didn't think any of them were robust enough to deal with hundreds of thousands, let alone millions, of records. So that's why we built our own database structure, and that was one of the first things people loved about us—you could have 150,000 files and [access] any combination of "and," "'or," and "not" multiples and find something in less than half a second.
BJ: I understand you're now developing a Soundminer that will deal with music libraries.
SP: That's right. With sound effects libraries, because all the data was readily available, we spent countless numbers of hours organizing it for Crunch, and it was natural that we would roll all that support into the program and system when we sold it commercially. But we had never designed Soundminer to be specifically for music libraries—our background is mainly cutting effects and mixing. But once users started to get Soundminer in hand and they liked the interface and they liked the conversion, and they liked all these other features we put into it, they said, "Why can't we use this for music?" Well, there is no reason, except that you're dealing with a different set of criteria. You need more fields: You need specific fields, like "publisher," that need to be larger fields because you might have six composers; whereas, with sound effects you never list who the original designer is, or if you do it's probably one name. The music libraries have very specific concerns, so we've been working for the past year and a half to modify the program to get to that next stage. Also right now we're working on interfacing a couple of other technologies into the system that I think are going to be pretty cool once it's done.
BJ: Such as?
SP: Such as allowing music libraries to track and watermark, so when something gets broadcast they can see it. There's going to be systems built into Soundminer so that you can literally drag and drop a Pro Tools [file] off in Soundminer and it will tell you, "These are the music files that made it onto the tracks [that were used] and these are the number of seconds that were used," effectively creating an auto music cue sheet. By going back to the database, it's going to extract out information about the publisher, the composers, what the affiliation is, etc.
BJ: When do you see that coming down the pike?
SP: Well, a lot of the preliminary work has been done, so right now we're working toward AES New York [in October], because that's when the [Windows] XP version of Soundminer is also moving.
BJ: It seems as though Mac doesn't have quite the same dominance as it once did in this arena.
SP: That's true. We're seeing a little shift in the industry away from Mac—not so much in North America, but certainly in Europe and at some television stations in North America, where they have these huge unity servers. ... For better or worse, Apple and Avid don't like each other and Avid has mandated they want to push the PC world, so they're forcing Mac users at TV stations to give up their Pro Tools Macs and move to Pro Tools XT. And that's obviously pushing us because our market is primarily Pro Tools. For every Nuendo, [Apple] Logic, Pyramix, or other system out there, there's probably ten Pro Tools systems. So, whether you like it or not, Pro Tools is ubiquitous and that's the cart we're tied to, to a degree. But we're intent on working with everyone.
For more info, go to soundminer.com.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
