The South is home to several sizable audio-post/commercial production markets. Atlanta is probably the largest in terms of gross revenues, though Miami, with its plethora of Spanish language radio and TV stations, probably boasts more actual facilities and small spot work.

Our last stop on our mini-tour of Atlanta took us to TUBE, a four-person boutique operation which bills itself as a “creative media design firm”—it provides both traditional audio/video post for a wide range of projects, but also, increasingly, DVD, CD-ROM and web-oriented projects. The company was founded in 1999 by editor, Chris Downs, and is situated in a large, modernly outfitted pre-Civil War loft space downtown. The audio suite is centered around a Digidesign Pro Tools HD system (with surround capability) and a Mackie HUI digital console.

According to production manager Greg Partridge, two large PMLs—Killer Tracks and Extreme Music—give him the sort of coverage he needs for the projects that come to TUBE. “But even with just those two, I must have 1,000 discs here,” he says. “But frankly, I’ve been using the discs less and doing online searches more. It’s faster to find things and you don’t have to wait for tracks to load in the CD player. So I’ll go online and make notes right there.”

Like many of his counterparts at other post houses, Partridge makes a point of listening to new discs as they arrive and making mental notes about what tracks might be useful in certain applications. Since TUBE does work with both mainstream companies and clients who want a more edgy approach to sound design, Partridge says he is constantly on the lookout for new music. He says it “[keeps] the projects that we work on sounding fresh. I like to think that’s one thing we do well here.”