Located on Hollywood Boulevard right across the famous Grauman's Chinese theaters (the site of the original famous Mann's Chinese) in the heart of "trailer-land," Creative Domain (http://www.creativedomain.com) has been a major force in producing motion picture trailers, teasers, and television campaigns since it was founded in 1991. The sale of this mSoft system marks the first large mSoft music system to go into a Los Angeles "trailer house," and will be a major marketing tool for attracting new customers to the already well established company. Their trailer work includes Jerry Maguire, Stuart Little, Godzilla, and Saving Private Ryan. They now offer marketing, branding, and advertising services in audio/visual and print in the home entertainment, home entertainment, DVD, interactive entertainment, internet, and branding worlds as well.

To provide the music for their work, Creative Domain's Director Of Production Dan Korobkin has maintained walls of production music, sound effects, pop / rock, and soundtrack CDs that could fill your local Walmart. Thousands of CDs were organized in rows and rows alphabetically by type, many of which were only accessible by ladder. When Dan saw mSoft's system, a light bulb went off - he realized that the company could reclaim this space to put in another Avid room in place of the CDs. In addition to the production music and SFX that mSoft keeps current from most every library you've ever heard of, a custom database was created for many of their most used pop / rock and soundtrack CDs which were added to the 7TB (that's about 9,000 CD total capacity) server system they ordered.

All of their Avid editors will now be able to search for music, SFX, etc. and import what they need from project lists created in the mSoft system. They will even be able to automatically create accurate to the second reports of the music used by production name from reading in Avid EDLs. The system will help them determine if the music has already been used for a similar campaign recently by its new ability to show prior use. Creative Domain's producers will access the system from their desktops via the same internet browser they are already using to play media by just bookmarking the IP address of the mSoft server installed in the company's machine room.

Korobkin says that the company is also interested in implementing the new VisionClip video management module into their mSoft system for managing all the video that they need to reuse. Eventually, they may add low res MPEG versions of what they currently keep on tape, etc to the system to instantly audition any piece of video with the option of including a full resolution (yes, even HD!) clip for transfer to a workstation.

AES in New York October 7-10 will be the first U.S. showing of the new MusicDirector search abilities, which will actually let the user find music by how it sounds rather than how it is described in words. MusicDirector works by "audio comparison" technology, which takes a piece of music and finds other music that is similar to it and ranks them in percentage of similarity. The MusicDirector project is an ongoing one, with each library within mSoft's more than 20,000 available CDs needing to be encoded for this type of search. mSoft will offer this as it becomes available to all our users under support as a free upgrade, and is part of MusicCue 4.0 to be released at AES05.

We also offer a new "true random" feature for search results to make sure you're getting the most from your libraries. Especially useful for large facilities that want to make sure that their users do not go back to "the same old same old" music that they know, this is a powerful way to ensure freshness in their productions. Of course, mSoft still offers sort by newest music first, or most any other way you'd like to manage your searches - the power is in the search, and we're all about giving you better search tools as we can come up with them.

Also at AES, we will show how our new VisionClip still and motion video file management system can add new power to our audio file management capabilities - so if you missed this at NAB, now's your chance to see it.

So call us at 800-489-9314 to make a demo appointment with us in booth #249 - to get a free pass to AES, go to: http://www.aes.org/events/119/vip.cfm?49

An interesting computer related history story for you: Few people know the origin of the term "computer bug". Many years ago, when the military was developing what at the time were "super computers", they were HUGE and literally filled multiple rooms. In the middle of testing one massive computer it just didn't work, so soldiers were assigned to trace the problem down. They followed all the cabling and relays and eventually found a dead insect lying across one of the connections, shorting it out. The soldiers told their superiors that they "found the bug" that was the problem, and the term has stuck from then on for most any computer problem…... Of course, if we can admit the truth, at least SOME of the time the problem isn't a "bug" but a human - namely, US!

Last month I alluded to an old TV spin off flop of a few decades ago when I threatened to call the bit on our Saatchi & Saatchi dual LA and NYC server orders "mSoft Loves Saatchi," and ran a contest for the first 3 people that could give me the real name of the show. The correct answer was of course, "Joannie Loves Chachi," the "Happy Days" spin off show that is hopefully still spinning its way outside of our galaxy. The three free mSoft "CDs - Old School" ultra soft and ultra hip t-shirts went to our winners:

Honorable Mention: Erin Collins, Marketing Director of APM showed her vast knowledge of American television culture with the correct answer, but just a mite slow on the "send" button to get a t-shirt. She looks way under 40 though, the age cut-off requirement for winners ;-)

September is back to school time, and we all remember (depending on our conscious state when we saw it) the movie Rock 'N Roll High School ( featuring the Ramones!). Few people know that there really was a "rock'n'roll high school" in New York that let students come and go at will and boasted such graduates (and drop-outs) as Steven Tyler from Arrowsmith, several members of the New York Dolls, and even "now all grown up child actress" Patty Duke. An mSoft "CDs - Old School" ultra soft & hip t-shirt goes to the first three people with the correct name of the school.