Ludwig Bouwer

If I may contribute my two South African cents (which is about 0,0010 USD at current depressing exchange rates):
From a music production (music producer/sound engineer) point of view, a GM player is actually very valuable as I (and I'm sure many others) often get presented with midi files extracted from all kinds of keyboard workstations, backtrack websites as well as horrors like Sibelius. To get an instant playback is pretty important actually. 

Is Zoom working correctly in Track View? It seems the highlighted track does not always stay in view when one zooms in using the magnifier at bottom right.  

On 3/20/2021 at 3:32 PM, msmcleod said:

I finished building my location recording rig a couple of weeks ago, just using gear I already had but don't get much use of:

Dell Vostro 1500 laptop (2GHz core duo, 4GB RAM) with 256GB SSD
Windows 7 Pro 32 bit
SONAR Platinum 32 bit (last released version)
Yamaha 01X mLAN mixer/DAW controller (with 8 analog inputs)
2 x Yamaha i88x  8 channel interfaces with ADAT I/O
Behringer ADA8000 ADAT converter

This gives me 26 simultaneous tracks of 48Khz/24 bit recording (it should be 32 tracks, but the PCMCIA Firewire 400 card bandwidth can only manage 26).  I've set the ASIO buffer size to 256 just to make it lighter on CPU, but it also works fine at 128.

This is enough for a 6 piece drum kit, 2 x guitars, 2 x vocals, 2 x stereo keyboards & a bass guitar.  The guitars & bass are set up for recording both DI & 1 mic on the amps.

The Yamaha 01X is set up as a Mackie Control, so I can control SONAR as well as having dynamics & 4 band EQ on up to 24 of the input tracks.

Initial tests show that it copes fine with 26 tracks at once, without any dropouts... waiting for lockdown to finish before I try it in the field!

Look, I would not try to mix that sort of track count on anything but my i7 studio machine, but it is cool to know what an old lappy can do. My Lenovo dual core can track a fair amount of source as well. Plugin-processing however does change things a bit.. As we all know!

I do a lot of location recordings. Music, mostly. I've often nervously wondered what it would take to make my system fall over as my mobile rig is pretty humble.
Specs are:
HP ProBook6565b (i5 1.6Ghz) laptop
8GB Ram
1 x SSD Kingston 400 for OS
1 x internal Seagate HHD 1TB for Audio
Win 10 Pro. 
RME Fireface800 Asio driver @256Samples Buffer
Recording done at 48k, 24bit.

I just finished tracking three choirs for a project and it was all recorded in layers on location, totaling 238 audio tracks (pic attached).
Recording was done 2 tracks at a time with no plugins on any tracks.
Each of the 10 subgroups of voices was routed through an Aux with Breverb running for on the fly playback mixes, so that's 10 x Auxes and 10 x Breverb.

Well, the bottom line is the system had a few dropouts towards the last session when I was jumping around a bit too quickly between takes, but it never had an audio dropout or even a pop or crackle during tracking. It felt solid and would probably be solid for another 20 or 30 tracks, if not more. I may well clone the tracks to see how far I can still push it.
Disk performance hovered between 15% and 50% depending on the amount of tracks in that section of the production.

I thought the info might come in handy to someone, somewhere  It's good to know CbB is up there (and in my opinion ABOVE) some of the "pro" DAWs..
 

I have never tried to freeze an Aux, but on quite a few occasions I have real-time recorded  what happens on that track and then drag that audio to a new track, archiving the entire Aux and it's source tracks.  I do this mainly to alleviate CPU on huge mixes with lots of side-chain etc, but also, sometimes a synth or some FX just won't  render properly in a bounce , so recording  a submix is my workaround.
One does what one needs to do to get the job done  
PS, I keep asking, but can we please have a waveform preview on Auxes?  Please?

Great video. I wish more producers, engineers and musicians took backups seriously.  

Cakewalk, then Sonar, and now again Cakewalk, has been the heartbeat of my studio and my livelyhood  since the days when it shipped on one 1/4" stiffy. Nothing to be skeptical about, just  install and enjoy.

I've been abusing 08 all day and it is definitely  feeling good. 
I know we touched on this before but what was the verdict about setting the now time using ANY    tool as long as you click on a blank area of the track(s)? It's a tad time-consuming to be using for instance the    eraser to clean tracks but you have to keep going up to the ruler to set a new now time.

I was searching for an answer to why FL Studio (12) just won't rewire with CbB (latest build) and came across this thread. Has anyone had any luck lately?

When I opened a project just now, I got the message below (attached)..  Any ideas what that means?

I'm totally with Tim on this. DON'T EVER underestimate how easy it is to do something stupid in such a big project. I actually save versions all the time, even for singles, let alone massive mixes like a 60 to 100 track 3 hour concert. It's a nightmare if you can't quickly go and grab a lost piece of audio from a previous version... sooner or later, you will need to backtrack. Sometimes clips are grouped that shouldn't be and you delete something, ect .  with high track counts come high plugin counts, which makes the chance of a crash or even a corrupted file much higher too. It costs nothing to use a bit of disc space and delete the old versions once the project is signed off. 

One of the cool things about CbB which many other DAWs don't allow is to keep more than one project open at a time. If you ever need to grab audio from another version, just launch the old file while the new one is open, highlight, copy, switch to the new version and paste.  

As for backups, you guys north of the equator with your super fast internet, enjoy your cloud backups. Talk to me again when it all goes down for whatever reason! My backups are in a fireproof/ lion-proof/ elephant-proof safe

I can only speak for myself, but I have mixed a huge amount of live albums. My suggestion is you keep it in one long timeline all the way to the point where you have to export for mastering. It's the easiest way to keep things consistent. Choose the best takes and delete the rest non-destructively.

Needless to say, NEVER edit and mix on your original file, that's the only backup you have. Save As... all the way :O)

Choose the song that represents the band's style the best and mix the entire project starting with that song.  Once you have a mix that the artist really really likes, start using automation to mix the rest of the set, keeping your kick drum and lead vocal as constant as possible, within the parameters of taste and style of each song.

I even master an album like that as one big performance, inserting my mastering plugs of choice into the master bus. Again, it makes getting a consistent sound much easier.

Others may have different approaches, so feel free to experiment.

I'd love to see a special track where I can type notes regarding a section in a song... "lift kick here.." , "Client wants a shaker here..". I use Track Markers for that but it gets cramped. Similar to the already-available Take Lane notes, but horizontal along the timeline.

Pretoria, South Africa. (And no, Africa is not just one country, and I don't have a pet lion  :O)

Thanks for the insights guys, much appreciated.

Hi guys, so here's one for the hardware gurus: 

I run an Intel I7-7700 3.6Gz chip
Asus Prime Z270-K board,
2 x 8GB Corsair 2133 DDR4 Gaming RAM,
Kingston 1TB SSD 400 MB/s for OS
Seagate 7200 RPM 2TB SSHD drive for audio and project.
External usb3 for samples
OS is Win 10 Pro x 64
Soundcard is RME HDSP9652 PCi running Asio

So my question is this: Which components do I need to take a look at to improve each of the following scenarios?
1: Faster Bouncing and Freezing of tracks
2: Faster Loading of projects with large plugin and track counts.
3: Ability to run more tracks and plugins before buffer has to be enlarged

Looking at the Windows performance monitor,  Freezing tracks only hits around 20% of the CPU and Disk usage is negligible.
Mixing down hits around 59% of CPU with Disks doing very little as well.

I look forward to hearing from you guys, thanks in advance!

I stand corrected Glad to hear SOS hasn't taken the route so many others have. 

Paying customers always come first, IMO.. Don't think money doesn't change hands to get reviews.

Win 10 Pro x64,  Build 1809,  OS 17763.615

Sorry to hear about your problems, but I just opened a 125 track mix with a zillion plugins on it and it runs fine. 

On 6/27/2019 at 9:47 PM, fogle622 said:

I'm not trying to find out how far the choir advances as much as I'm trying to gain some insight into how much preparation and planning the acts need to plan for.   By the time these shows air I'm sure several tapings have occurred.  It wouldn't surprise me to learn the theater auditions (where the show is presently at in the process) are taped over several weeks or months to accommodate schedules.

Did you prepare  enough backing tracks for the choir to have enough material for multiple performances if they need them?

If you don't mind my asking, are you based in the US, South Africa or someplace else entirely?

If you are a music business professional even one performance of this magnitude is a feather in your cap.  Kudos once again!

Hi Fogle, it is indeed a tremendous honour, thanks so much - I have never worked on a track that gained 4 million youtube views in under a week (never mind the initial broadcast!). Truly bizarre!
I am based in South Africa, in the capital city Pretoria. My humble studio is www.onebigroom.co.za and I do this for a living.
At that time, only the initial audition track (The song African Dream) was recorded with me along with some musical bits and pieces which I did not hear on the show, and that happened a good few months ago. That episode was filmed  early May I think. I have no idea what the arrangement was beyond that but it certainly seemed to me that Ralf Schmitt, the producer/conductor,  felt they only had that one very small moment to prove themselves. I did speak to him a week or so after that filming and all he said was, "Standing ovation -  we've been called back to LA! Gotta run!".. You can imagine what his inbox looks like now! That's all the info I actually have for now - I hope they do well, it's a very deserving project.

6 hours ago, fogle622 said:

Excellent job.  The soundtrack sounded as good as the visual performance.  Well done!

Since they received four "yes" votes the choir advances to the next level of the competition.  Are you providing the music for the next performance too?

I'm not sure to be honest! I have no idea what was used and what wasn't. This show's auditions are filmed quite a bit before the time, but the non-disclosure agreements are as watertight as they can be.. The choir conductor won't tell anyone anything !

Drums, bass, perc and guitar recorded in Cakewalk by your's truly. As seen on AGT last night: 

I'm seeing a considerable uptake in CbB chatter on Facebook. Quite a few recording and sound engineering groups have mentioned it in the last while. Many former users are however still not aware of CbB's rebirth, and I think the quickest way to educate the masses is for us users to spread the word on these FB groups. 

CbB is just MILES above Platinum. But yes, install SPlat so you get the plugs.