Review: Frontier Design TranzPort
Pages: 1, 2, 3

More iTunes Tricks

There's much more you can do with the TranzPort to enhance your experience of iTunes as a music player, and I won't go into all of it here. But there are two other techniques I must mention: using the TranzPort to shop the iTunes Music Store, and using the TranzPort with iTunes in live performance.

With the TranzPort and the Music Store, you can browse, filter, and collect songs, artists, and albums. In some cases, the TranzPort makes existing operations easier and faster, and in others, it enables new operations. One of my favorites is pressing Shift-Play to preview all of my current selections. This is a great way to get a sense of a whole album without having to turn your attention back to iTunes, track by track. In other words, you can do something else while listening. (Of course, it would be even better to stop multitasking and just be in the moment. I'll get to that.)

For live performance, the TranzPort has a Cue mode, as in "cue up the next song." By using either the Rec button or a footswitch (for which the TranzPort has a one-quarter-inch jack), you can tell iTunes to be ready to play the next song in the current playlist, but not to start it until you press Rec or step on the footswitch again. So if you perform live with backing tracks, you can move gracefully from one song to the next just by discreetly tapping your foot. I love this kind of design in musical equipment—a feature that subordinates itself to the flow of the experience, causing the technology to recede into the background.

This illustration from Frontier Design's site (made with Comic Life, perhaps?) shows the optional mic-stand adapter and foot pedal (each $19.95) in use.

The Ramp of Complexity

The potential downside of all this functionality is complexity. But the complexity ramps up well. You can learn the basic functions almost instantly, and then take on more advanced functions as they become useful to you. In all cases, the TranzPort interface imposes little overhead—there's no paging through sub-menus here—so each new function is fairly easy to remember.

Another liability is that the TranzPort's buttons are hard-labeled, and some labels don't reflect what the buttons do in the program you're controlling. It would help to have perforated overlay sheets with labels for various apps.

Reason to Believe

To set up the TranzPort to work with Reason (version 3.0.3 or above is required), you select Native mode in your computer's TranzPort menu, launch Reason, and select Preferences→Control Surfaces and Keyboards→Auto-detect Surface. You will now discover two cool things: the TranzPort's LCD display is showing a bar-graph-style VU meter and a position counter, and the data wheel acts as a fast, accurate shuttle control, like on a video editor. I was sold already, just as with iTunes.

Other basic functions (Play, Stop, Rewind, Fast Forward, Mute, Solo, Record, and Loop) work as you'd expect. Interacting with Reason feels fast and solid, more so than when using a mouse, since there's no hunting around the screen trying to hit a small graphical target in Reason's feature-packed interface. Brisk shuttling with the data wheel doesn't cause any hanging, only smooth scrolling with almost no discernible delay between the wheel movements and the onscreen display. (Holding the Shift button while turning the wheel "gears down" the shuttle for finer work, so that you now move by 16th-notes instead of quarter-notes.) If you shuttle while in play mode, play resumes instantaneously at the new position.

I assume this responsiveness is thanks to the fast wireless protocol that the TranzPort uses. According to Frontier Design:

Although TranzPort uses the same 2.4GHz radio band used by Bluetooth for true worldwide use, it uses a proprietary radio protocol that is different than Bluetooth. As a result, it is a lower cost solution, with lower latency, more immunity to interference, and lower power consumption.

Here are some of my favorite uses of that fast, cheap connection. In all cases, the experience is faster and easier than it would be with Reason alone:

• Press the In or Out button: Reason's "playback head" goes to the Left or Right marker, or in Loop mode, the loop in- or out-point.
• Track Left or Right: Selects the previous or next track.
• Shift-Track Left or Right: Selects the previous or next patch on a device.
• Shift-Prev and Shift-Next: Lowers or raises tempo one bpm at a time—great for dialing in a feel with minimal fuss.
• Shift-Punch: Toggles the metronome click on and off.

There are some button mappings, or absences thereof, that may seem surprising. For example, the Prev and Next Marker buttons don't map to anything in their unshifted mode, and, unlike with iTunes, neither the Rec button nor a footswitch will do anything. But mappings can easily be changed. Let's say you decide to set up one-button access to the Preview button on Reason's Dr. Rex loop player. Mapping Preview to the Prev button is the interface-design version of a pun, I guess, but it makes it easy to remember. Here's how you do it:

1. In Reason, select Options→Remote Override Edit Mode. Reason's window goes grey.
2. Click on the device you want to work with—in this case, the Dr. Rex. A blue arrow appears on controls that can be mapped to the TranzPort.
3. Double-click the Dr. Rex button you want to map—in this case, Preview. A gold, rotating lightning bolt will hover over it.
4. Press the TranzPort button you want to map to this control—in this case, Prev.
5. When you're done mapping buttons, deselect Remote Override Edit Mode in Reason.

As with iTunes, the whole experience was greatly enhanced by using the TranzPort—and I already liked Reason. I found that my operation rate picked up considerably, and yet the operation rhythm was smoother. Faster, but less frantic—that's what I call flow.

Plugging a footswitch in to the TranzPort makes it easy to do tasks like punching in during recordings and advancing to the next backing track in iTunes.

Tranzcendence

In all my testing of the TranzPort with iTunes and Reason, I've had no trouble. Everything has worked well, nothing has crashed, and even the battery life is good. (There's no on/off switch, but the TranzPort is an efficient sleeper.) Basically, I love it. But given that I'm working with a free review unit here, let me pause to put myself in the imaginary position of having paid for it. The TranzPort would have cost me about $200.

Still love it.

Do I need it? No, but when you get down to it, the secret, awful truth is that all I really need is one good instrument and open ears. Now and then, though, extra stuff does find its way into my life. The TranzPort performs the valuable job of reducing the mental clutter generated by some of that other stuff. For that, it is my little blue and black friend.

Spencer Critchley is an award-winning producer, writer and composer with experience in digital media, film, broadcasting and the music business.

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