bitflipper

I'm holding out for a meteorite. Won't see it coming and it'll be over before I know what hit me. BTW, "peacefully in his sleep" usually means the fellow died from a morphine overdose. True fact.

If both tracks start exactly at 00:00, move them to the right by one measure.

Don't dodge the question, CJ - who are you, really? Your initials are the same as another well-known poster, who used to go by the alias "CJ". Coincidence?

My mixes suck and I can't sing. So which do I need: a new DAW, a new interface, or more RAM?

My go-to for quick 'n dirty background vocals is Omnisphere, but that's an expensive route. The Ladies from Realivox is quite good and a lot of fun to experiment with, and although it takes significantly more effort it's the way to go when you want your faux-vocalists to actually say something besides "ooh". A FREE Kontakt library that I use often is actually a demo for a singers-for-hire service called SoundBetter.

Yup, anything he creates goes straight into my toolbox without question. "Ethereal" and "mystical" do not describe my style at all. Still, these fit into even the most conventional genres, as thickeners, transitions, stingers and percussive effects.

I've never transposed a recorded vocal to make it sound deeper, mainly due to the possibility of noticeable quality loss. It's the same reason I only pitch-correct the worst-offending words and leave the rest alone even if it's not "perfect". However, picking the right key for a vocalist is crucial, not just for ease of singing but also for tonal quality. Elvis Presley famously sang out of his natural range on purpose. Initially it was because he learned songs from demo recordings made by a guy with a higher voice, but it became apparent that those strained high notes added emotional content that appealed to consumers. Personally, I like to sing below my natural comfort zone because it doesn't sound like me anymore. But only for recording, where I can get away with it; on stage I'm far more likely to pick keys that test the upper end of my range. Two of the most widely used techniques for vocal thickening, as noted above, are double-tracking and micro-shifting. But both need to be done with care lest they sound obviously artificial. Don't forget less-intrusive effects such as EQ, delays and distortion. These can significantly fatten a vocal without it sounding obviously manipulated.

There is no need to globally exclude audio files because they'll only be re-indexed after being edited or updated. You probably aren't going to be editing the audio that plays when you get an error message or an email, or the sound files from video games. I exclude my entire project drive, plus my sample libraries drive for good measure. Granted, I may be waiting a few milliseconds seconds longer for a Kontakt library to load as a result, but I can live with that.

He doesn't really need a separate interface, as the Mackie is also an audio interface over USB. The lack of pan knobs is troubling, but it appears they've dealt with that in a more compact way, with a single switch that separates channels 1 and 2 into L and R. I'm just guessing, but it looks like that button labeled "Stereo Pan" needs to be depressed.

Wow. 80 vocalists singing "aaaow" in unison. Pretty clever arrangement. Here's another one. Disco version of "Another Brick in the Wall".

That does sound like the kind of generic name Behringer would use. Maybe somebody here who is a Behringer user could tell us what the driver shows up as. IIRC, and that's a big "I", Behringer either initially didn't have ASIO drivers for their products, or did have but dropped them. Entirely possible that's just my old brain mis-remembering, I dunno.

^^^ Yup. Much bigger deal than file indexing. An even bigger boogeyman is your network interface. Might want to consider shutting that service off if you're having any performance issues. When I was struggling with a potato computer, I wrote a batch file to disable the network before starting up SONAR. Windows just assumes that nothing you could possibly be doing on your computer is more important than getting Microsoft notifications in a timely manner.

As long as you're excluding your audio data, indexing should not have any noticeable impact on performance.

Interesting. I use Trilian and always end up freezing it (it can be such a hog), but have never seen this behavior. I am not in the habit of rewinding or doing any other preparation before freezing. Do you guys also use Omnisphere, and if so, does it behave this way as well? My understanding is that both instruments are basically the same under the hood, as evidenced by each being able to play the other's samples. The reason I ask is I'm wondering if the issue is actually within the instrument or if the problem lies elsewhere. It just doesn't make sense that an instrument could cause this behavior on its own.

For drop-D tuning, of course!

I get that the two white keys are A and E. But why are there three?

Black mics do indeed matter. Especially when you show up to a gig and can't find it. The only black mic I ever owned got misplaced for over a year. I thought it was gone for good. Then one day I decided to empty my cord bags and sort them (drink enough coffee and it works like meth). There it was at the bottom of the bag, hiding among the hundred other black items in there. Its replacement was, of course, another black mic. Might add some yellow electrical tape to it. No rush since it's a stage mic and it won't be travelling to any stages for the foreseeable future.

Steve, ol' pal, this is what eventually happens when you've become an obsessive plugin collector. One day, everything just goes to sh*t. There ought to be a support group or something. As a codependent friend, though, I have to ask: have you tried FabFilter's Pro-R? Duh. What am I saying? Of course you have. I just thought of it because Pro-R is what I turn to when I want the reverb to dissolve unobtrusively into the mix.

Same here. I intentionally ignored it for weeks but you know how annoyingly insistent YouTube can be when pushing its recommendations. You watch one video on how to cook scrambled eggs and it thinks your life now revolves around that topic.

Thanks for the reminder, SK. I'd excised mode 3 from my brain, the same way I've purged most memories of my teenage love life. Unlike the latter, mode 3 is still a WiP.

Needs Kontakt 6. Still waiting for that must-have library that'll push me to upgrade from K5.

Is this one of those "my mic is bigger than yours" threads? Mine looks a lot like yours, but it has a "K" in front of it, which I assume means "kbetter".

I'm surprised you don't know that one, Ed. That's the Red Hot Chili Peppers' bass player. The photo was taken at his sister's wedding, right after he mistook some pastry frosting for cocaine.

As noted above, some INI settings affect how Cakewalk deals with latency, but there is nothing in there that's going to be able to reduce latency. Especially when that latency occurs within a plugin, in which case Cakewalk has no choice but to wait it out, even if means doing nothing for N milliseconds. ThreadSchedulingModel tells Cakewalk which of the three variations (0-2) to threading algorithms to employ. The newest of those methods (#2) is intended to be more efficient with modern CPUs (4+ cores) and was designed with WASAPI in mind specifically. However, Cakewalk will utilize all of your CPU's cores regardless of which model you choose. EnableCacheWriteThru is a true/false value that's true by default and is meant to make writing to disk more efficient by bypassing the drive's hardware cache. It is only relevant if write caching has been enabled, which it usually isn't - at least, not for audio applications where speed trumps efficiency and even reliability.