He looks like he might be checking email on his laptop, but what sound mixer Todd Maitland is actually doing on set in New York's Steiner Studios, and in a variety of other settings around the city, is recording the location audio — dialog, ambient sound and in some cases actual singing — for the cinema remake of Mel Brooks' classic The Producers, based on the film's Broadway adaptation. "Believe me, this is a lot more complicated than email," he says.

Maitland is doing more than recording the film’s sound — he’s making history: this is the first major Hollywood production to rely on software to capture its location audio. The fact that it’s a musical makes the accomplishment even greater, and for an added degree of difficulty, director Susan Stroman has opted to allow the stars to sing live on the set, rather than lip-synch to prerecorded tracks, the standard methodology since Busby Berkeley. (Musical tracks will then be built around the vocals recorded on location.)

The futuristic system Maitland is working with was cobbled together by Peter Schneider and Nick Huston at rental house Gotham Sound & Communications. The location kit is based around Gallery Software’s Metacorder, a virtual 16-track digital audio recording system running on a Mac G4 laptop with OS X 10.3.6.

With its live singing and its intent to capture as much location sound as possible (Mel Brooks can be heard doing the sound of pigeons on the set – sort of Foley on the fly), the production needed to double the eight tracks that the most commodious dedicated-hardware location hard disk recorder could provide. "The industry has moved to dedicated hard drive versions of linear recorders," says Schneider. "But really all the dedicated hardware recorders are computers optimized for location work. Why not just go directly to a computer?" Schneider adds that laptops are not the ideal recorders for all location applications. "They’re tough to hang out the window of a moving car with," he concedes. "But what this really does is send sixteen fully-synched tracks directly into post production’s workflow ready to go."

Ganging hardware-based digital recorders was not an option, Schneider adds. "OS X doesn’t natively support combining audio devices without specialized software to synch them," he explains. "Otherwise, the Mac will only recognize one of the two audio streams and you’d have to synch them in post, which defeats the purpose of trying to improve workflow."

Nick Huston, general manager at Gotham Audio, had done a test run of the system on a reality series, Celebrity Charades. "Metacorder was the ideal solution," he says. The Metacorder allowed Huston’s team to record each mic separately as a Broadcast Wave file. Thoe files could be imported quickly into Avid Media Composer systems during the post process. It also allowed for changes to be made after the fact – when the original eight contestants on the show suddenly became 12, Huston’s team was able to accommodate the change through some quick patching. A Denecke GR-1 Master Clock generated timecode that was sent to the line input of the Mac Powerbook, where Metacorder read it and stamped it in the header of each WAV file it recorded. Denecke slates were jammed and videotaped at the head of each take.

Another issue was how to interface between laptop and signal- a tricky problem since, according to Huston, there is no available A/D converter with more than 10 analog inputs that also offers a FireWire connection. Instead, Huston’s team used a Metric Halo Mobile I/O system as an analog-to-digital converter via ADAT. By sending the eight analog inputs of the Mobile I/O into the ADAT port of a Mark of the Unicorn ( MOTU) 896 audio interface, and combining that with the eight analog inputs offered by the MOTU unit, Huston was able to send a total of 16 analog audio tracks to Metacorder.

Other issues included cross-platform compatibility. Since Macs don’t support the universal disc format (UDF) for DVD-RAM, offloading directly to PC-based DAWs was severely constricted. Instead, deliverables are done via a 60-GB LaCie Firewire-enabled drive.

However, adds Huston, the nature of software is also its greatest strength. "On one of the first days on set, Tod wanted to see the meters move on playback, which is not standard to the software," he says. "So I called the code author at Gallery Software [in the UK] The next day he emailed us a fix that I installed in 10 minutes. You can’t do that with dedicated hardware."

Perhaps the biggest advantage, though, is the software/computer combination’s ability to record not only audio data but its metadata, as well – reel numbers, scene, etc. – information crucial for multichannel HD broadcast post.

Having direct contact with the software developer is a luxury that most users won’t have if software-based location recording becomes more common. "Philosophically, you have to assume that this new technology would fail," says Schneider. "Computers crash. So backup is critical." Assuming the worst-case scenario – total system failure across 16 tracks- yet still wanting to assure file compatibility for post, Schneider and Huston added a pair of Symetrix 581E distribution amplifiers and split the signal to both the Metacorder and to a pair of Fostex DV824 hard disk recorders – "literally, the first shipment of them," he says- with the capability to generate eight-track Broadcast Wave files.

The Producers is the first film for director Susan Stroman, who directed the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical version. Her background is in live theater, so it’s understandable that she wants the actors to sing live. This production will be tricky, with a combination of live and studio vocals that will sorted out in post and later in the mix.

Meanwhile, Maitland has the lead performers’ studio-recorded vocals on several tracks of the Metacorder, as well as music prerecords. The actors sing live to both, monitoring themselves on earwig monitors, rather than hearing the music pumped into the set through speakers.

"This way gives the actors a lot of freedom and artistic inspiration," says Maitland. "But it’s hard for them to get any energy just through the earwigs."

The solution: a "thump" track- a low-frequency click track- pounding a 40 Hz note on the down beats. "It gives a lot of enthusiasm to the dancing and the singing, and since we know exactly what the frequency is and when it hits, we can easily filter it out of any of the tracks that it gets into on the set."

Maitland says his high-tech location recording system is a learning experience, one that takes place while capturing sound for one of the season’s most anticipated releases. But it’s worth the additional effort. "This is the way things are going to be," he says. "I’m bringing in a hard drive to editorial and they’re plugging it right into post. It cuts half the time off the process. We’ll figure out a way to hang it off a moving car at some point. There’s been a few issues, but for the most part it’s worked as expected."

Those issues include figuring out how to best allocate tracks for post- the first four of the 16 are on-the-fly submixes of the individual voices on the other 12 tracks (a combination of wireless and booms) configured to go right into a four-channel Avid editor, a music-minus track and a playback time code track- as well as monitoring and how to set levels on a virtual interface. "There’s a huge range of volume on this production- Nathan Lane is the loudest actor I have ever worked with," he says, even as Lane’s hysterical alto can be heard a block away during a rehearsal. "One of the issues I’ve encountered is one particular track that continues to get overloaded for no good reason, so I have to maneuver around it. I’m through the first week and I’m still figuring it out."

The trade-off, says Maitland, is virtually limitless recording time, versus the 20 minutes or so he can get from a dedicated location hardware unit. He got more from the three Tascam DA-98s he ganged together when he worked on The Cradle Will Rock, but that was cumbersome and linear. "At the end of the day I’m handing off a Lacie hard drive for the dailies," he says. "There’s a serious learning curve, but it’s very much worth it."

"This is definitely a big part of the future," says Schneider. "Not for every location application, but for many of them. At the end of the day, you’re getting multichannel files fully synched and ready to flow right into post."