Normal Studio Rates are $40 per hour with a 3 hour minimum.
If less than 3 hours is booked, the rate is $50 per hour.
Special projects will be negotiated. Special Day or Week rates can be negotiated. We have special rates for Engineers or Producers who can work on their own without our Engineer.
We also offer special rates as promotions from time to time. Please ask us if there are currently promotions that apply to your booking.
New clients must pay 1/2 of the booked time up front to reserve their booking.
All clients are expected to arrive on time. See Cancellation/Late/No Show Policy below.
For new clients with their own engineer, the first session will be charged at the full rate and will include our engineer to make sure all technical issues are covered, unless we feel confident that you can work unassisted in our studio.
No software can be installed on our system without express advance permission from our Staff.
Studio time includes our engineer, and all mics, software and instruments which we have in our studio. Any additional equipment needed will be charged the full rental rate charged to us and includes a service charge if we are responsible for ordering pick up and delivery. If the client picks up and returns the equipment themselves we will waive the service fee. The service fee is based on the time and cost it takes to secure the rental including drive time if we need to pick up equipment ourselves.
To book blocks of time, ½ of total block time must be paid in advance with the remainder paid upon completion.
Some promotions require full payment of the block time up front.
Unless otherwise agreed upon, all payments for booked time must be paid upon completion of the project and before the client takes their masters out of the studio.
A maximum of 8 hours a day is available in 4 hour chunks. There is a 1 hour break between each 4 hour sessions. We normally start at no earlier than 9am and stop by 11pm.
If you are working on your own, you can choose to work starting at 9 am and continue until 11pm for tracking and all night for mxing or editing.
When we have booked you we will send a link to our location
Customer is responsible for paying for the scheduled session even if they are late or do not show. Cancellations are accepted up to 24 hours before the scheduled date. For jobs that have blocked out large amounts of time, the cancellation date must come one week before the first scheduled date.
Catasonic is a Pro Tools based studio. We have a Digidesign Pro Tools HD Accel system (HD3) running on a Mac G5 using OSX 10.38 (current) We can record at sample rates up to 192KHz and use 24 bit. We are compatible with all AIFF, WAV, SDII, mp3 files and can import and export OMF files from Avid, Digital Performer, Logic Pro etc.
We can transfer from DAT (non timecode), Phonograph (33 1/3, 45 or 78), ¼ inch 2 track, Minidisc, CD, Cassette, DVD, VHS, DA88 or miniDV. We can transfer from non-protected audio CDs, CD-Rs and DVD-R Disks.
We typically mix “in the box” and do not mix to tape or DAT.
All clients must provide their own storage media. (7200 rpm or better firewire external hard drives with a oxford 911 or better controller bridge chip.
(The best method of formatting the drive is to use the Mac Disk Utility in OS X to format the drive. Do not use third party formatting utilities such as La Cie etc. since most drives come pre formatted, you are wise to immediately erase the disk with the Mac Disk Utility to insure maximum compatibility with our Pro Tools system.)
Clients are responsible for storing their own projects and must take them with them at the end of a project. We do not provide storage services for any clients.
We can provide digital tape backup services at the rate of $75 per 50 gigabytes of data. The backup is done to a AIT2 backup drive using Retrospect software. Upon completion of your project we will provide you with the backup tapes and the catalog file. Restoring from a backup is charged at the full $40 studio rate for the time it takes to restore to a hard drive. Backup of any kind is not currently 100% reliable but can be counted on as a safety measure if your only copy is on hard drives.
We can also backup to DVD but will charge for the studio time it takes to backup up your data.