bitflipper

BFD sounds better? That's a reasonable personal opinion, and you're not alone in that. I love the BFD sound. But more realistic? Nope. That's SD's main problem, really - too realistic. Anyone who has recorded real drums knows it's a lot of work getting a specific type of sound from them. BFD does much of that work for you, and I'm not knocking that. However, there is a necessary compromise, namely that BFD and similar products can't offer the flexibility of Superior's bare-metal approach. If a person can only afford one premium drum synth, SD is a good candidate because it can do it all. That includes SD2, which I used for its lifetime and loved it. Never bought any extra kits, either. Just the default kit that came with it. That's how flexible it is. Honestly, I only bought SD3 for the brushes and mallets.

Great review, Simeon. I remember vividly the first time I heard Ivory and being blown away by it. The demonstrator must have gotten a sore face from grinning all day, handing headphones to one convention-goer after another and watching them react. I stood there for awhile just watching peoples' faces light up. It was a universal reaction. Nowadays, we have a LOT of sampled pianos in that league to choose from but Ivory is still at or near the top of that category. It's so good that I can't imagine what version 3 might add - play itself, maybe? Gotta add, though, that despite having maybe 40 piano libraries in my collection, I have finally come around to believe that the future of piano VIs is not conventional sample libraries, but rather physical modeling. I was a skeptic for a long time, and for good reason. But today we are this close to modeled pianos that are indistinguishable from a high-end sample library - but only take up a few hundred megabytes, load in an eye blink and have 5-10x the velocity layers.

Unfortunately, that would require re-inventing the fundamental design of packet-based networks.

The interleave option will be overridden internally when necessary, as when mixing mono and stereo plugins in one track. Most of the time, it works fine. Other times, you get unexpected results. It's totally legit to mix 'n match mono and stereo effects; you just have to think it through while you're doing it. For example, you have a great guitar solo going on with a mono amp sim and mono interleave, and decide to throw in some ping-pong echo at the end - only to discover that it neither pings nor pongs until you change the track interleave to stereo. Even though Cakewalk does a heroic job of trying to make your Frankenstein FX chain work, sometimes it just can't. Whenever a vendor offers separate mono and stereo versions of their plugins, there's a good reason.

I think that's a good idea, Noel. This past year we've seen an enormous influx of new users, many of whom could be easily stumped by such problems. As long as it's not a silent workaround and the offer comes up in a yes/no messagebox. That way, users will have the option of either accepting the suggested fix or addressing it themselves. Some users are married to ASIO for one reason or another, and would prefer to troubleshoot the issue first. I'm normally not a fan of such potentially annoying verbosity, but it's not like this scenario is going to be an everyday occurrence.

I can barely afford two speakers, much less five of them. I did, however, do an experiment once with an ancient pair of Pioneer quadraphonic headphones. That was fun, but then I realized just how awful headphones sounded in the 60's.

You might try switching to WASAPI if you're currently using ASIO. Lately I've been doing a lot of fiddling with my audio interface trying to get Jamkazam to work. In the process, I'll often end up with the "no device" issue. For example, CW will work OK but WMP says there's no device, or YouTube videos and/or Netflix come up silent with no messages. That could be because I use WASAPI for CW, while Jamkazam insists on ASIO and won't run if it can't find an ASIO device. However, my experiences may be irrelevant to your situation. I have the onboard audio permanently disabled.

My preferred method is the one suggested by Alan above. Freeze the track, select it and CTL-SHIFT-drag it into another audio track. This has the added advantage of being able to copy just specific parts of the track. For example, you could drag a single cymbal crash or snare hit over, reverse it and nudge it to the left for a whoosh effect. I'll sometimes use that to implement a reverse-reverb effect at the start of a vocal phrase.

Well, I finally got Jamkazam working properly and tested it last night with a bass player and a guitarist. And a drum machine. Thank goodness for the drum machine. I was getting 2.9ms, but the guitarist was contending with such long latencies (~80ms) that the only way I could stay in time was to not listen to him. The bass player was off, too, but he had no technical excuse because he was the one hosting the drum machine. What has turned me off the whole thing, though, was the horrid audio quality. I was expecting something akin to streaming audio at 128 kb/s, but it was far worse than that. It was tinny and had a lot of chirpy aliasing going on. The experience was not pleasant, didn't feel natural, and I breathed a sigh of relief when the guitarist announced that he had to leave the session. Better than nothing? Um, I have a drum machine of my own. And a capable multi-track DAW. So no, for me it was not better than nothing. Oh, and apologies to Starise for the mis-attribution. In the future I will err on the side of statistical probability and just blame Craig by default.

Starise was joking, that ain't me. One reason I can be sure it isn't me is that I have yet to get Jamkazam functioning properly. It's 1.0 software. Pretty rough around the edges. Surprising, given that it's been around since 2014. Yesterday I decided to play around with routing in my interface, wanting to switch which outputs were being sent to Jamkazam. But when I attempted to change the output channels, instead of modifying the setting it added two more channels. And then complained that I could only have 2 - and gave no way to remove them. To add further insult, when I clicked CANCEL it complained again and refused to close the dialog. Then I tried re-running the setup wizard in hopes of getting everything back to defaults, but it told me I couldn't do that with an open session. But I couldn't close the session because the port-selection dialog that wouldn't close was covering up the main window. I was caught in a Mobius strip of bad programming.

In terms of S/PDIF, no. It's a digital transfer, so assuming no issues with cables or cable lengths, you simply get what you get. Same as a USB or an HDMI port. Assuming it's working correctly, neither clocking accuracy nor jitter should be an issue. Preamps are another thing. But if you don't use the analog inputs, the benefits of higher gain with lower noise won't interest you. I am a Focusrite user today but used a more-expensive MOTU for many years, and an entry-level Roland unit before that. The only complaint I have with the Focusrite is I sometimes have trouble getting enough gain on the mic inputs, and there's noticeable noise when I crank them up. Otherwise, I think the unit (Saffire Pro 40) was a good value.

Their advice wasn't helpful to you because they're talking about dynamics and you're talking about envelopes. While related, they are not equivalent. Their advice was still good, though. Serious orchestrators use the modwheel and hand-drawn CC envelopes A LOT. It's a practice you'll definitely want to adopt. And in your specific situation, perhaps your only option. Full-featured libraries typically offer several features for adjusting attack times. There may be a global AR envelope, plus an automatic attack adjustment based on velocity. They'll also have multiple articulations that affect attack. Strings aren't synthesizers. How a violinist positions the bow, how they initiate contact with the bow, whether they strike the strings with the bow - all affect attack but aren't just about amplitude modulation. This is the difference between an expensive string library and a free one. That said, there are ways to modify the envelope of any instrument. Fast-attack lookahead compressors, gates with envelope controls, transient designers - these are all effects that can modify the attack time. Just don't expect it to sound like a real orchestra. For that, you'll need CC modulation, which even a freebie should support, especially one from Spitfire (my all-time favorite library vendor). Without a modwheel, you'll have to draw in the modulation in the PRV. Sounds like a bother, but it's actually my preferred method 50% of the time. It's more precise, I don't have to think about it while performing the part, and I can tweak it later in the context of a full mix. The good news is it's not difficult, just time-consuming. With practice, you can get natural-sounding strings very quickly. I'd encourage you to watch Christian Henson's tutorials. Christian is one of Spitfire's founders, and a good explainer.

When the quarantine went into effect, it didn't impact me all that much. Sure, it killed my business, but to be honest it's been a nice vacation. Yeh, gigs and band rehearsals went away, but that just meant I could focus on recording again. More time for reading and getting my blood pressure up watching political YouTube videos. But some of my bandmates were going stir crazy. Our singer, well, being a singer is what she lives for. She begged me to find a way for us to practice/jam online. We held a Zoom meeting during which I gave a lecture on how networks work and why real-time anything is impossible over the internet. To appease her, we did a singalong. And yup, it went exactly as you'd expect. Especially when the drummer joined in on cajone. Cacophony ensued, of course. But then this past weekend I got a call from a buddy of mine who'd been experimenting with Jamkazam. He swore it really worked, so I installed it and agreed to give it a go. To my amazement, it really did work. Well, after considerable hair-pulling (metaphorically speaking, as I currently have none to pull) we got it more or less working. The developer is struggling to keep up with the sudden popularity. Their server has crashed or become unresponsive many times. The software is 1.0 and looks it. But the core design is good. You can start a jam session as a private experiment, as an anyone-can-join open invitation, or as an invitation-only session. It's reminiscent of online gaming in that you get a list of open sessions, can see their network latencies (what gamers would see on their lists as "ping times"), pick one that's got reasonable response times and jump in. Choose wisely, because the session's overall latency is constrained by the slowest participant. Yes, there's video, so put on your pants first. I'm still experimenting, but am optimistic. Setup can be a bear. I won't go into the details, except to say that once everything's configured for Jamkazam my computer is essentially useless for anything else. At least I was able to do some housekeeping, vacuuming away years of cobwebs from behind my rack. Please don't try Jamkazam. You're only going to slow me down. But if you're already using it, I'd like to hear about your experiences. Here's a YouTube livestream from last Saturday that shows how cool it is when it works:

^^^ +1 for Craig's observation about NOT putting the compressor on until you're ready for, or at least close to, the mastering stage. Having it there from the get-go doesn't really do you any favors. In fact, I normally place NO plugins at all on the master while mixing. To be fair, not everybody agrees with that approach, with some preferring to mix into a compressor all the way. IMO, that's like making a cocktail underwater because you plan to add ice cubes later.

Master bus compression is pretty much standard practice nowadays. Even in naturalistic genres such as jazz, folk and classical. But it's only become standard practice in the digital era. While making the transition from analog tape we realized just how much mixing work the tape had been doing for us. Most engineers today are using gentle compression settings that mimic the effect of tape compression. Talking 1.5:1 to 2:1 ratios with slow attack, and 1-3 dB reduction. Which is good, because overcompression can easily suck the life out of your mix. Unless, of course, you're doing EDM or rap, in which case extreme compression is intrinsic to the genre. But for everything else, including hard rock and metal, do your heavy compression on tracks rather than on the master bus. It's a choice of "making it breathe" versus "letting it breathe".

Cannabis doesn't get you into trouble. That would be that vastly more popular drug, alcohol. "Your honor, I only beat up my girlfriend because I was high on marijuana!" Said no one, ever. I totally respect your decision to leave it alone. I feel the same way about snails. Eat 'em if it makes you happy, just don't bother offering any to me.

Frank, the short answer is yes, it's a good investment. Like many here, I've been a happy Ozone user for many years. Everything iZotope makes is top-quality, in the same league as, say, FabFilter. Maybe too good for their own good; I'm still on Ozone 7 and feel no need to upgrade. If you do make the plunge, you might as well spring for the Advanced edition. With Advanced you get the modules as individual plugins, as well as the Insight metering tool.

If I go for it, this will be my 5th major upgrade since starting with Melodyne at version 1. Each time, I told myself no, the old version already does everything I need and the new features don't justify the upgrade price. And each time, Celemony eventually came around with an offer I couldn't refuse. But that usually happened a year after the release. Not saying that'll happen again, but they've been consistent in the past. It's a sensible strategy: snag all the instant-upgraders in the first round, then come back later to scoop up the stragglers. I'll be one of those. I've done the same with Kontakt and Ozone, both of which have consistently seduced me into belated upgrades with an "ok, what about this price?" email.

I didn't say it was better, just that it has no equal. Truth is, when I want the reverb to be heard, I use one of the Valhalla plugins. Usually the plate. But if I just want natural-sounding spaciousness without an obvious effect (e.g. orchestrations), Pro-R does the job like no other due to its ability to shape decays non-linearly. Nobody else does that, AFAIK.

Here's what happened. I decided to try a trim on my own. The left side turned out pretty OK, but the right side came out shorter, so I had to shorten the left side. After multiple iterations of that process, both sides ended up being quite short. It was only then that it occurred to me that I wouldn't be able to do the back at all. Mullets are coming back, no? So I called my granddaughter (the 27-year-old, not the 4-year-old) and asked her to come over and shave it all off. She wouldn't do it, but said she'd get it really short. Well, turns out that when your hair is as light-colored as mine is, there is little cosmetic distinction between very short and bald. So I decided to leave it as she left it, about 1/8" long all around. I have a photo, but can't figure out how to copy it to my computer without signing up for yet another Google privacy scam. Used to be, all that was needed was a USB-C cable, but that doesn't seem to work anymore. Tried the built-in Windows app that's supposed to be able to import photos, but it doesn't see my phone. I guess that $29 direct-from-Shanghai deal wasn't such a great bargain after all. The hand-crank should have been my first clue.

Starise, you'll be pleased to know that the medicinal benefit is in the CBD component, which can be purchased in soda-drink form. Or as drops for your tea. The latter can be had, at least around here, from Safeway.

When you do, know that sweat pants are unaffected. Yoga pants, however, are quite susceptible.

Got some good news today...according to the government, I am not elderly! Woo hoo! Because of that, my check was for the lowest amount possible. My 19-year-old grandson got more. Me, I fall into the freewheelin' single-guy category. They know I'd just blow it all on beer and pizza. In other good news, apparently cannabis prevents COVID-19. No kidding.

Honest answer - probably not. Yes, they are truly excellent. Top shelf. But is a $200 limiter 4x better than a $50 limiter? The law of diminishing returns says no. OTOH, there's Pro-R, which has no equal IMO. As suggested above, be sure to let an existing user refer you for your first purchase. You get 10% off and the referrer gets a small credit in the store.

Oh sure, bring up science. In the Coffee House. Seriously, Craig? How's this for a newly-discovered scientific observation: living in quarantine makes your pants shrink. Anyone else notice this phenomenon?