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SoundFonts... menu option, Version Control & Latency


Caldur

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Is it possible to:

  1. Bring back the SoundFonts... menu option from Sonar 8.5?
  2. Implement seamless integration of Version Control with TFS?
  3. Add general setting for each midi output device to compensate* the playback (non real time) latency?

* It means to send all midi messages to that midi output device earlier with NN.N ms or even go further & automate the process by measuring the latency just like it is done for audio.

Edited by Caldur
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19 hours ago, Mark Morgon-Shaw said:

Lol...I think I tried 'em once in like the 90s...seriously I thought they were a dead format

 

That's OK, a lot of people get caught up in their own little lives and don't realize there's a whole world out there!

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3 hours ago, Mark Morgon-Shaw said:

Yeah but if they still wanna use soundfonts ..I say let them, I can't imagine they've aged well

 

You will let them?

You may not be aware of this, but you come off as intolerably arrogant and condescending.  And trust me, there is no reason for you to be either!

Perhaps you should google Soundfonts.  You might learn things you don't know.

Edited by RobertWS
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18 hours ago, RobertWS said:

 

You will let them?

You may not be aware of this, but you come off as intolerably arrogant and condescending.  And trust me, there is no reason for you to be either!

Perhaps you should google Soundfonts.  You might learn things you don't know.

Dude. Chillax. You're taking this way too seriously. No one is being condescending and arrogant, except for kind of, you in your response. We're well aware of soundfonts and their uses. I used them heavily way back when and still use them today with software like MuseScore. 

My original comment was in jest, because for the most part, soundfonts are not a powerful sound design tool compared by modern tools, but are still useful for certain things. 

Take care. I wish you the best. 

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FWIW I still use SoundFonts regularly.

I sampled all the patches I use from my old hardware synths, and I chose SF2 as my preferred format for 2 reasons:

1. My soundfont player (SampleLord) is way more CPU friendly than Kontakt / Dimensions / Rapture Pro... PLUS I can use SampleLord on my V-Machine.
2. SF2 files are easier to manage, as they're one file vs 10's or 100's (in the case of sfz).

At the end of the day, SoundFont is just a file format - it's no worse or better than any other format.  Sure, there are advantages to some formats over others (e.g. release samples), but for me that's not an issue.

If I export my samples as .nki, they sound exactly the same in Kontakt as they do as a sf2 in SampleLord.

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@scook, yes, you are correct, TFS means Team Foundation Server.

@Glenn Stanton, thank you for your suggestions. With the existing versioning there are just hundreds of files and after awhile it is hard to say what exactly you did in each one and how much it differs from the others.

There's an interesting discussion here: https://discourse.ardour.org/t/how-is-version-control-not-a-thing-in-daws/89124

Lets hope that there will be a motivation to write .wrk/.cwp comparer that works with TFS or some other VCS.

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yeah, there are a lot of challenges to versioning...  (ignore the DAW specific bits)

http://www2.grammy.com/PDFs/Recording_Academy/Producers_And_Engineers/PTGuidelines.pdf

https://www.grammy.com/sites/com/files/delivery_recommendations_for_recorded_music_projects_final_09_27_18.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Naming_conventions_(music)

https://musicbiz.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/MusicMetadataStyleGuide-MusicBiz-FINAL2.0.pdf

https://www.grammy.com/sites/com/files/folder_definitions.pdf

couple more:

https://www2.grammy.com/PDFs/Recording_Academy/Producers_And_Engineers/DAWGuidelineShort.pdf

http://aesnashville.org/PDFs/NARAS/DAWGuidelines-OneSheets_v1.pdf

https://www.waves.com/ways-to-better-organize-your-daw-mixing-sessions

tracking worksheet:

http://aesnashville.org/PDFs/NARAS/Session-Doc.pdf

you practically need someone acting as a librarian and archivist to manage this 🙂 just in case all the engineering and creative duties aren't enough 😉 

that said, i think in these links are some really decent ideas which if condensed for the "small guy", could be useful and made consistent enough for a broad base of people to collaborate without going nuts (or too late for that? lol)

Edited by Glenn Stanton
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Very interesting documents, lots of good practices in there.

They're very much oriented toward the traditional division of studio/engineer vs. client, which makes perfect sense given the professional organizations that sponsored their creation.

Where I have trouble creating and adhering to good versioning practice is when I am both the engineer and the talent, and I am using the DAW as a composition/creative tool. Specifically, I may wish to "see what happens" if I apply certain creative effects, and that may turn out to be a dead end. When I do this, I usually do a Save As, and name the new project something that indicates that at this point I decided to add a string arrangement. The one with the string arrangement may be the version that becomes the Master project, but it also may not.

I call it "forking," after the software industry term.

Then I come back a week later and often have to look at the file dates to figure out which one was the last one I worked on. I haven't figured out a good system yet.

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At one point I moved all my projects into MS Sourcesafe, and later SubVersion to give me version control. But to be honest, the extra hassle of checking out projects / checking them back in far outweighed the benefit of the very few times I needed to go back to an earlier version of my projects.

My current solution is just to use cloud storage. I have a couple of batch files which copy my CbB project directory to and from a directory that is synced to the cloud. 

It's important that the sync directory is different from your actual projects directory to avoid the cloud client app accessing project files at the same time as Cakewalk (although an alternative might be to just manually run the cloud client app).

I run the download script when I start up (once the cloud sync has finished), and the upload script when I finish a session and wait for it to upload everything.

This has a few advantages:

  • I have a backup of my projects in the cloud
  • The cloud storage gives me access to previous versions of files
  • I decide when a project gets synced
  • All my Cakewalk projects are in sync across all my PC's.
  • I've always got access to my previous version in the sync directory.

The disadvantages:

  • The initial upload to the cloud took ages... but it was just a one off.  Delta updates only take a couple of minutes at most.
  • I've got two copies of my projects on each machine, which takes up disk space
  • When working on another machine, I might forget to run the batch files to copy the latest to my project directory.
  • The annual cost of cloud storage... not a biggie though for the piece of mind.
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along those lines of cloud storage - i have the OneDrive and Google Drive clouds set up on my disks, but i only synchronize the project content into those directories so the cloud services don't mess with active files. then once i finish my project work, running the FreeSync app mirrors the new/updated content into the folders and i let the background cloud sync processes go to work... since it's mainly deltas once the new content is uploaded, the sync to cloud only take a few minutes. i think 1TB of OD and 1TB of GD are about $18/month total. really old stuff (>10 years) i just keep on removable drives stored away...

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