Kevin Walsh

Great job! Love me some Bowie.

Really nice sounds, much too soothing for the end.

13 minutes ago, aidan o driscoll said:

No MIDI ports in Audient ID-22 unfortunately ..

True enough but USB Midi inputs are becoming commodity devices, they're cheap and they're everywhere. I have a lovely little wireless USB device that I use for my Behringer FCB1010 foot controller that works great.

Yes, it's good to know what you need first. That said  

I love my Audient ID-22. Probably not the fastest in terms of latency but quite good enough for me and it sounds really very nice. The improvement in quality was completely obvious to even my poor ears after my old Firewire MOTU 8pre and the USB Focusrite 2i2 solo (2nd gen.) I briefly tried out.

I know I posted this before, but this is a bit of a different take.

A few folks and I talked about recording and posting some original songs that we've never really performed before and I picked this one.  Truth is, I've never recorded an actual performance of any song I've written. I always recorded one track at a time in pieces and parts and once they're done, it's damned rare that they ever see the light of day again.

So I took a deep breath and after a couple of run-throughs as rehearsal, I fired up my Logitech HD Pro WebCam C910 and let her rip.  As you can see in the video (sort of) I used a  Microphone-Parts T12 mic into an Audient ID22 interface and right on in to Cakewalk. I did two tracks, one with me on vocals and guitar (a Martin D-16GT) and one with me doing a harmony part. I did have an audio output from the web cam but I did not use it. It was a bit of a pain getting the audio and video lined up, but mixing is much easier with only one or two tracks.

A compressor, a little reverb, some EQ and Izotope's Ozone 9 Maximizer and this is what came out.

It's a pretty rough but it was a lot of fun doing it. I'd appreciate any feedback on mic placement, eq and any other recording technique that comes to mind.

I have a Ryzen 7 3950x system with an Audient ID-22 usb interface. I'm also running the early adopter release of Cakewalk (05 I think). Did the 2004 upgrade on Friday  and everything runs real nice so far.

Grr. This is happening to me now with both Rapture Session and Rapture Pro. Offline activation doesn't work either.  Dimension Pro and other SPLAT-associated synths work fine. (So far.)

Is there a fix available for this yet?

15 hours ago, Jon White said:

Hi Kevin, I meant that Starship's comments taught me a bit.  

In terms of what I learned from the vendors: very little.  Lynx turned out to even be unaware that Cake has the checkbox.  I was disappointed all the way around.  I now have it checked in both Cakewalk and the Lynx driver.  I wish I knew the actual details.  And when I put a heavy song into Cake, I really can't tell which setting makes the audio troubles better, because the results change on restart of Cakewalk.  Very odd stuff.

Thanks, Jon, I appreciate you sharing the information you managed to get. In the immortal words of Danny Kaye, "DAW latency concerns us all."

It would be useful if you were to share with us what you've learned.

I wasn't worried.

I tried a gen 2 Scarlett Solo and I kind of feel the same way, that the drivers were less than stellar, had lots of instabilities. I didn't spend a lot of time troubleshooting so perhaps I'm judging unfairly but there ya go.

I replaced it with an Audient ID22, which I adore.  It operates flawlessly on Windows 10, sounds wonderful, and it has the ability to take use my MOTU 8pre's inputs as well. Some illuminating threads on gearslutz about using the ID22 with the Behringer ADA 8200. Maybe not what you were thinking of, but it's an idea.

Try uninstalling and then reinstalling your audio interface drivers. Gets me after every major windows upgrade.

Something to look at, certainly. On the other hand I was using a PCIE Firewire card for my MOTU 8 pre along with a GPU and two PCIE4 m2 drives with no problem on my 3950x. The firewire card might well be less hungry for lanes than the OP's UAD card though,

Yeah man, it's a plugin on the bus that doesn't do stereo  I'll bet. I run into this all the time. Be nice if the DAW could indicate the offender somehow.

49 minutes ago, MediaGary said:

I just updated my signature, having substantially migrated from my 12-core 2010 Mac Pro to my newly-built AMD 16-core 3950X.  I'll try my first serious CbB mixing today.  The machine has:

• AMD 3950X / 128GB RAM (Corsair Vengeance LPX 3200-C16) ASRock x570 Creator
• Sabrent Gen4 1TB NVMe, Sabrent Gen3 2TB NVMe, 2TB Crucial MX500
• 10GbE link to external servers : Media server with 4TB SSD RAID-0 and 16TB RAID-0 HDD.  Redundant Server with two 12TB RAID HDD's.
• Cooler Master HAF XB EVO case

All the Universal Audio software installs fine, and the UAD-2 Duo PCIe is recognized in the Device Manager, but it fails with a Code-10 (failed to start). So for now, the UAD-2 stays back in the Mac.  I have no Thunderbolt devices to test.  My M32 mixer/interface is connected via an RME MADI ExpressCard. 

If anything unexpected happens with Cakewalk or Reaper or Studio One in the new machine that might be relevant to this CbB community, I'll update here.

I've not run into any problems with interfaces with the Ryzen system at all, sorry to hear about your UAD device. I assume you have updated your BIOS, chipset drivers and obtained the latest UAD device drivers? 

I've tested a rather long-in-the-tooth MOTU 8pre connected to a PCIE Firewire card with great results. I recently moved an Audient ID22 to the primary interface role, also with very good results. 

21 hours ago, CosmicDolphin said:

I have a Ryzen 3900x PC but I haven't set it up yet.  Need to finish the current project then I can get into it. 

You won't regret having purchased it.

5 hours ago, lmu2002 said:

As far as I know the motherboards for higher than 3700x cpu requires  stronger power output and cooling  regarding the vrm. Maybe you can tell about your motherboard and experiences with it?

E.g. the MSI 450 series motherboards were great but MSI 570 series have a problematic reputation so far. Gigabyte X570 AORUS ELITE, Asus TUF GAMING X570-PLUS and Gigabyte X570 AORUS MASTER all look like solid choices for 3900x.

And what ever the motherboard, efficient cooling is essential for a reliable daw. I recently replaced the stock fans of my case (Fractal R5) and both the noise and temperature improved significantly. Three fans 7€ each so well worth the trouble. The stock cpu coolers are also noisy and offer the bare minimum for cooling, so better change it for something bigger/cooler.

The build experience was smooth as silk. I've had absolutely no problems with any of the components I used. I've always built my own PC's. (My first build was as part of a computer club project in the 70's, an Altair S100 bus 8080 computer, lol)

My most recent build prior to this was centered around an Intel i7/970 CPU and an X58 motherboard from EVGA. By comparison, that build was complex and fraught with challenges and while it ran well for over ten years, it had it's quirks. The DIY world for high-end PC's has come a long way and the parts I used were all well-thought out, well documented and extremely easy to assemble. I felt like I was cheating.

Event the liquid cooler was easy as pie and the temperatures are nice and stable. The build is very quiet. You can hear the fans ramp up a bit when I'm stressing things and I wouldn't call this an absolutely silent build, but I'm pretty sure if I monkeyed with the fan heat profiles I could get it pretty darned close.

I'm using the Ryzen Balanced Power Profile in the Windows power options control panel settings. That comes with the chipset drivers and sets up the memory speed profiles and CPU configurations. I haven't felt the need to use any more extreme settings.

Here's the parts list:

Motherboard: Gigabyte X570 AORUS Master

Memory: 2 G.Skill Trident Z Neo Series 32GB sticks

SSD's: 2 Sabrent 1TB Rocket NVMe 4.0 Gen4 PCIe M.2 Internal SSD's (I mistyped earlier, these are 1TB drives, not 2.)

Power Supply: Corsair AX1000

Cooling: Corsair Hydro H150i 360mm liquid cooler

Graphics Adapter: Sapphire Radeon Pulse RX580

Case: Phanteks Eclipse P600S 

Firewire card: Ableconn PEX-FW107 1394b & 1394a (TI XIO2213 Chipset)

I'm running a Ryzen 9 3950X with 64GB of ram and 2 2TB PCIE 4.0 drives. I built this powerhouse machine for my daily work as a software developer but it's a fantastic audio workstation as well. I use an Audient ID22 USB 2 interface with it and it just kills. I highly recommend the Ryzen family as a great platform for DAW boxes.

1. Disable integrated audio devices on your motherboard in BIOS (this assumes that  you will use your audio interface for DAW and system sounds.)

2. Disable power management for your USB device. 

3. Turn off power management for your CPU(s) (speed step, etc.)

4. Turn off the Windows search indexer. This process scans all files on your system and creates a content index to allow fast searching. 

I'd put step-by-step how-to's here, but in a few weeks time they'd be out of date anyway, so with my apologies, please google it.

I feel the OP's pain. I love Cakewalk but I've always had occasional problems with dropouts and crashes and the latency at which I operate has always been higher than I wanted it to be. I have an old MOTU Firewire 8pre that I bought somewhere around 2005. The performance was such that I was forced to change how I record because input monitoring was a non-starter for me.  Since other people didn't seem to have these issues I always assumed it was my machine, an aging but oh-so-reliable  X58-based i7/970 system I built in 2011, and I just pressed on. I loved the sounds I got out of that thing though! The MOTU ran okay in Reaper, but I hate using Reaper. 

I never really solved the latency issue on that system, but I did discover through many Windows updates that Microsoft loves to reset all your carefully tuned system parameters to values they want them set to. Window sometimes (but not always!) likes to re-enable power management for USB and CPUs, and all the built in audio devices you don't use magically turned back on.  I also learned that I must uninstall and re-install the MOTU device drivers whenever the Windows runs an update. It was said that MOTU boxes were targeted at Mac's first and foremost and I don't know that for sure but I believe it. I dreaded both Windows and Cakewalk updates. They almost always introduced a new round of crashing and instability.

This last January I picked up a Ryzen 9 3950x and a Gigabty x570 AORUS Master and the parts to go with it and built a new system, but I kept  my old MOTU. Stability was good out of the box, but the latency issues remained. Maybe I could get a bit more juice out of the old girl, but not much. So I picked up a new Audient ID22 this week and got it yesterday. BLAM. All problems solved! I had never seen the heady heights of sub-64 sample settings before, such a pleasure to have everything work so well. Fast, stable, great sounding. No crashes. We'll see what the next update brings but I'm very happy with things right now.

Cakewalk isn't perfect but I've personally discovered that your interface hardware chain (firewire, tb, usb, etc)  and the quality of your drivers are an under-appreciated factor in your audio setup's stability and efficiency. I know the OP has ruled out new hardware, and I get that, it took me a long time to justify my recent hardware refreshes, but keep in mind that current software development is done in parallel with current hardware development and both sides of the equation matter.

No, but I've long been curious about it. Any process that takes the frustration out of gain staging is one I'm interested in. How has it been working out for  you?

I believe you're on to something here. Very much dig the song and especially the instrumental break. Looking forward to seeing where this goes.

On 12/14/2019 at 4:58 PM, David Sprouse said:

You have such an intimate style, it really comes across in the recording.  Liked your lyrics alot.

Thank you, David!

On 12/14/2019 at 8:06 PM, Lynn said:

Kevin, I love this song and style of singing.  This is a song that I will listen to over and over because it has what many songs are missing, and that's heart.  I'll be back for more!

Wow, thanks Lynn!

On 12/16/2019 at 3:10 AM, Bob Oister said:

Hi, Kevin,

This is an absolutely fantastic song!👍😀

Well written and performed, with excellent vocals and harmonies, and the sparse, bare bones mix showcases the deep emotion and story of the song.

I also definitely agree with Steve about the very catchy chorus hook that instantly sticks in your head.

Great stuff, Kevin, dynamite job on this!😀

Have a good one!
Bob

Thanks Bob, that's high praise from the King of Hooks!

On 12/16/2019 at 6:29 AM, Bajan Blue said:

Hi Kevin -  really like this a lot - like the song and the arrangement i think is perfect.

I think   quite a lot of us thin out what we use as we go along - i know i have - i have been going through a lot of our old stuff from 10 or more years ago lately - i opened one project that had 16 (yes sixteen) different synthesizers on it!! 

Cheers

Nigel

 

lol, thanks Nigel, that's a boatload of synths. I know orchestral guys use a lot of instances but that kind of work is beyond me. I'm more of a little ditty kind of a guy.

On 12/17/2019 at 10:56 AM, amiller said:

I thoroughly enjoyed this.  Very intimate indeed.😊👍

Thank you!

On 12/18/2019 at 6:53 PM, congalocke said:

Nice work. It's raw and yet it's fun to see you work with an effect in there. (what is that?). Thanks for sharing...

Thank you for listening! There is a single acoustic guitar track, a single bass track, a lead vocal track and maybe three harmony tracks. There's reverb in there (Re-Matrix solo,  the pro-channel version) and I use Izotope 9 to master. I also slapped in an Izotope imaging plug in to help fill in the holes. I used some pretty agressive settings on the imager.

On 12/19/2019 at 3:54 PM, Jesse Screed said:

very unalloyed

pure feel

we should all take a few steps in this direction

I shall try this approach myself

Thanks, Jesse. It's rather liberating. Can't wait to see what you come up with!

On 12/19/2019 at 4:30 PM, garybrun said:

I liked this a lot.
The simple arrangement works wonders and its so easy to go off on one and trying to be advanced etc.
You  nailed this one.

When my wife heard me singing "Hold Me Down"  thought I was getting a little kinky for a few secs  🙂
Somehow it reminded me a bit of Springsteen
Did you sing the harmonies separate or use Melodyne?.

Anyway... well done on a heartfelt song.

Thank you for listening and providing feedback, Gary! I apologize for taking so long to respond, my Dad's been in the hospital for several weeks and it seems that my time is no longer my own.

Melodyne is incredibly useful for creating harmonies and I often use it in the writing process, but usually once I have them I set them aside and record the harmonies the old fashioned way. It sounds a lot better to my ear that way. 

+1 on the Loggins & Messina comment. Beautifully detailed and well crafted mix with lots of space, not to mention a boatload of great performances. Quite a beautiful song!