Great freebie from Bluelab Audio. (Noise reduction VST)

[PavlovsCat]

1 hour ago, Keni said:

I’m finding patience is a learned skill. I must first decide to be willing to be patient and that was/is the hardest part.

I work very hard in a continuing effort to think before I act. At the most minute level. Far from always able, but more so, the more I make the conscious decision.

It's funny but this always brings to mind a "game" I often play and suggest to others.

 

Exactly what position was I in when I woke. Down to the minute again. Not just, on my back, side, or such, but where was each hand and which way was my head facing etc.. No matter how close I come, I find yet another smaller level of uncertainty and the challenge continues. This is an approach I use to help train myself to be more aware and more quickly. Translating that into actions makes me a much more calm person than before.

 

Not that I’m good at it as I also suffer the impatience of the elders being tired of the repeated beatings we each must weather to survive...

 

...but I/we digress here. No matter what we each feel or say regarding Sonar, only time will tell the story. 

I am anxious to begin working with the new Sonar having no idea how I will find the cash, I intend to purchase it immediately.

It's funny, but I'll feel better working with a paid DAW than I do with the free version of same. There is no real security, but reality has a way of manipulating dreams.

I am releasing my 14th solo album this November. The last 11 have all been created entirely in Cakewalk/Pro Audio/Sonar/CbB and I am well underway on my 15th as we chat. Just remembered... back 12 albums. It was made using Cakewalk as a sequencer in sync with a Soundscape Hard Disk Recording System (defunct but I worked for the British company back then in the early 90’s)

 

I really enjoyed that bit of wisdom. I do need to work on patience -- it is a virtue. Thanks for the encouragement and I wish you the best with your music and in life. You're a very interesting person and I enjoy your posts and those little tidbits of wisdom you share.  Maybe I can pick up some tips from someone much better than me at patience -- I'm game to try.  All the best, Keni!

Edited October 16, 2023 by PavlovsCat

[Keni]

8 hours ago, PavlovsCat said:

I really enjoyed that bit of wisdom. I do need to work on patience -- it is a virtue. Thanks for the encouragement and I wish you the best with your music and in life. You're a very interesting person and I enjoy your posts and those little tidbits of wisdom you share.  Maybe I can pick up some tips from someone much better than me at patience -- I'm game to try.  All the best, Keni!

Thanks PavlovsCat, but I don’t know how much wisdom it contained. More simply the observations of an old man!

It's easy to grow less patient and more intolerant with age as we are all continually cowered with the repeated actions that never cease. There is always anger and disagreement of same/similar issues and it gets tiring.

Sorry, I digress again. Lots of alone time! 👀

 

 

Edited October 16, 2023 by Keni

[Clint Martin]

As far as games of patience, I play chess daily.

Can't wait for the new Sonar...instant buy for me!

I'm hoping they restart development of the Pro-channel.

I always thought the Pro-channel was unique and set Sonar apart in many ways.

Update the tape sims and console emulations, I'm sure they have many plans. 

[Keni]

4 minutes ago, Clint Martin said:

As far as games of patience, I play chess daily.

Can't wait for the new Sonar...instant buy for me!

I'm hoping they restart development of the Pro-channel.

I always thought the Pro-channel was unique and set Sonar apart in many ways.

Update the tape sims and console emulations, I'm sure they have many plans. 

I'm with you here too Clint!

My apology for derailing the topic. It was unintentional. I have used the denoiser for quite some time...

I think the team did a great job maintaining and updating Cake since Gibson dumped us and Meng made that all possible... Now with the addition of the return of enterprise to the product, I hope we have even more good stuff coming down the line soon!

 

[Clint Martin]

Yeah, Meng has earned my support for sure!!!

 

[Keni]

5 minutes ago, Clint Martin said:

Yeah, Meng has earned my support for sure!!!

 

He seems to exude a confidence too! I admire him as well. Between this and Bandlab itself, he set out to help the world have access to good music making abilities!

 

I hope his many endeavors bring him much joy and rewards for all he does!

 

[mettelus]

Quick follow up on this guy. In practice, running this enabled can cause some latency issues, so I am not sure about the feasibility of running this in a tracking situation. I got it to cause its own phasing issues, so be conscious of the algorithms used and how much tweaking you are doing. It definitely raises issues with plugins that have look ahead embedded in them, so its best use is as first pass for post production, then bake that into a track bounce so it can be removed from the process chain completely.

[Keni]

3 hours ago, mettelus said:

Quick follow up on this guy. In practice, running this enabled can cause some latency issues, so I am not sure about the feasibility of running this in a tracking situation. I got it to cause its own phasing issues, so be conscious of the algorithms used and how much tweaking you are doing. It definitely raises issues with plugins that have look ahead embedded in them, so its best use is as first pass for post production, then bake that into a track bounce so it can be removed from the process chain completely.

Yeah, I noticed the latency as well as flanging or phase shifting that sometimes occurs. I only use it much as you describe. Remove the noise and get rid of it! I do sometimes duplicate the track, archive and hide one copy, then apply the noise reduction and remove it from the active track/copy...

 

[mettelus]

6 hours ago, Keni said:

Remove the noise and get rid of it!

+1, I am firmly entrenched in using an old copy of Adobe Audition in the Utilities menu so I can do that in less than 30 seconds and not require any track bounce afterwards, but I am also always on the lookout for options to new folks that function and don't require massive money investment. Spending CPU power every time the transport runs to remove something that you want to obliterate anyway is a waste of computer resources. I was hoping this might have tracking potential, but the overhead is a bit much to be feasible.

[Keni]

8 minutes ago, mettelus said:

+1, I am firmly entrenched in using an old copy of Adobe Audition in the Utilities menu so I can do that in less than 30 seconds and not require any track bounce afterwards, but I am also always on the lookout for options to new folks that function and don't require massive money investment. Spending CPU power every time the transport runs to remove something that you want to obliterate anyway is a waste of computer resources. I was hoping this might have tracking potential, but the overhead is a bit much to be feasible.

I have always avoided using that kind of stuff while recording outside of Dolby/DBX noise reduction back in the day.

The chances of losing some stuff while recording has always out weighed the noise issue. Safer to remove it later.

Luckily, these days, tech has evolved to a relatively decent level. Far fewer noise problems than in the past.

...but when it perks up it's scratchy little head we have bluenoise to help!

[mettelus]

I understand where you come from and see that sentiment often. I come from a background where signal-to-noise ratio reigns supreme (to the level of being alive or dead). Signal = source level - propagation loss, and Noise = environmental level - directivity index (the ability to discern that signal discretely even when buried). Signal is all that matters with processing, so obliterating noise completely allows for those processes to occur readily and without limitations.

I did, however, run into someone who has a -60dB noise floor requirement recently (for narration). After that "GTFO" moment for me, I thought, "Okay, I'll play," and went about business as usual, then introduced them to iZotope's Vinyl. If you use only the mechanical noise module, the date buttons at the top control a noise band that gets lower in frequency as you go from 1930-2000. End result was to use the 1950 setting at -19dB to insert that "-60dB noise floor" on the master in a region that was easily drowned out by the vocal fundamentals. I still chuckle about that "requirement", but whatever.

[Clint Martin]

1 hour ago, mettelus said:

I am firmly entrenched in using an old copy of Adobe Audition in the Utilities menu

I used to use that, then I switched computers and never bothered to reinstall it. I wonder if Audacity is capable of being used like that? I suppose the old Adobe is still available somewhere? I believe it was Adobe 3? 

Do other DAWs include a feature like this? Seems like an obvious thing to add if not.

Edited October 18, 2023 by Clint Martin

[mettelus]

Audacity can be added to the Utilities menu just like any other program, but if you can find AA 3 (there was a great Adobe server debacle years ago on the old forums where folks could grab Creative Suite 2, which had AA 3 in it). I use AA 4 (from CS 5.5), and IIRC the noise removal algorithm is identical between AA 3 and AA 4. That noise removal is far superior and highly recommended if you can reinstall it.

I do not know of any DAWs offhand with this feature but there may be... it seems to be more a focus to wav editors or post-production suites. The AA 3/4 version remains my preference just due to its speed.

[mettelus]

I suddenly realized I posted a video for using Adobe Audition in SONAR almost 10 years ago now. I have no clue what I used for the video capture (use Camtasia now), but even the cursor latency in "whatever" I used sucked. I actually have "Audacity" in that Utilities menu, but never used it (that I can recall). The only difference between then and now is that I normalize to -3dB by default. I remember someone had asked how to do this, so threw this together to demonstrate it way back when. Where I "cheat" with this (and do it often), is that non-optimal capture environments (with steady state noise) are no big deal as long as I get a clean capture of that environment in the initial recording as well.... always a pre- and post-roll capture on things. I did one once about 10 feet from a fireplace starting to take off (so the post-roll was louder), and Audition removed that without issues... in fact, the one in this video may be it now that I look at it more closely.

 

[mettelus]

Quick FYI, I guess Adobe's reaction to the debacle a few years back was to shut off the activation servers completely for CS2, so AA3 won't activate even if you can get it to install. I "think" that was scripted for XP SP3, but even in compatibility mode it won't go past the choose language screen on Win 10. The activation servers being shut down makes it a waste of effort anyway.

[CSistine]

6 hours ago, mettelus said:

Quick FYI, I guess Adobe's reaction to the debacle a few years back was to shut off the activation servers completely for CS2, so AA3 won't activate even if you can get it to install. I "think" that was scripted for XP SP3, but even in compatibility mode it won't go past the choose language screen on Win 10. The activation servers being shut down makes it a waste of effort anyway.

This is exactly why I hate all those online/login authorization products! In the end you realize that you have bought a cheat package, because you never know how long you can use them even if you have a compatible computer system!

God save Reaper, Mixbus, Klanghelm, Toneboosters, AudioThing, Black Rooster, Acon Digital, Audiority, Boz Digital, ... and all the free plugins! 😄

[mettelus]

Welp, it just took a little more digging.... AA3 DOES work, can be installed, and is so old (2008) that it has a manual registration cycle (I simply said "Do not register" when I got there). The "correct answer" in post was accurate. There is a "components.msi" file in both the 3.0 installer and the 3.0.1 patch that worked for installing the application and patch (the setup.exe files both fail on Win10). Upon launch it failed to load twice because of incompatabilty issues, but the Win10 trouble shooter popped up and fixed that. The layout is different from what I am used to (with AA4), but the noise algorothm seems identical (the only difference in a null test was default differences between the two apps on the default render tweaks (I am not in the mood to run that to ground and no one would know/care anyway)).

I was bothered with the initial pass I tried above because the default installer STILL downloads all of the needed files from Adobe's server (just the setup.exe won't run in Win10). Even though I saved that download folder from years ago just in case, it bothered me that the installer was still able to pull them down without an issue but not run them.

Edited October 21, 2023 by mettelus

[mettelus]

Quick follow up with the OP on the BL Denoiser specifically. I have never been a fan of processing things you really want to bake each time the transport runs, and the BL Denoiser loses its settings in addition to causing latency. Because of losing its settings (which also causes it to phase), this plugin is best suited for a "once and done" workflow. After insertion it does extremely well, it just cannot be left active. The quickest method I found for using it (almost identical to a wav editor actually), is to insert it as a clip FX (not track), loop an area of ambient noise and toggle the Learn on and off with with the transport looping, adjust to taste and then Bounce to Clip(s) (which bakes in the clip FX). BL Denoiser is actually very effective when used in this manner.