bitflipper

I used an outboard compressor/limiter for years but eventually sold it.

The reason is that such devices really only work well when you have somebody watching it, which isn't possible when you are both performer and engineer. I wouldn't know how badly the track had been compressed until after the fact, and if it did turn out overly squashed I'd have to turn down the gain and do it again - the same process I'd have followed had the compressor not been employed.

The downside, of course, is that you run the risk of going too far the other way: having the gain too low and ending up with excessive noise/room in the recording.  I battle that using Greg's "caveman" solution, recording quiet and loud parts separately. Most of the time, that works fine. In the rare situations where it doesn't, I try to address it with mic technique, singing like I'm live on stage, usually with a handheld microphone.

And that's another solution that took me a long time to figure out: putting away that pristine condenser mic and using a handheld dynamic instead. Dynamics are inherently more forgiving, and unless you're recording a delicate ballad, the advantages of condensers is minimal-to-none. Lots of successful pop and rock singers record exclusively with SM-58s or SM-7s. These days I've abandoned the 58 in favor the better but still-affordable Sennheiser e945. 

Oh, and one other thought. If you don't have any acoustical absorption around your singing space, get some. That greatly extends the practical dynamic range of your microphone by reducing the room sound, allowing cleaner recordings at lower gain settings. My "vocal booth" consists of freestanding gobos stuffed with 3 inches of rigid fiberglass. The result is a very, very dry recording that I can subsequently turn up as needed, limited only by the microphone's own (quite low) internal noise floor.

Hmm...if each device injects just 1 dB of noise...

That would be a great name for a music software product, perhaps a multi-fx plugin, a do-everything sample library or an all-inclusive plugin collection.

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I've been begging for years for Start-of-Song and End-of-Song markers. It could be implemented fairly easily using the existing marker features. But in the meantime I've developed my own ritual...

First, insert Start and End markers. 

When you're ready to export, click anywhere in the Track View to make sure it has focus (rather than the console, PRV or some other window). Then press the following key sequence:

CTL-A

W

CTL-Shift-PgDn

F9

CTL-End

CTL-Shift-PgUp

F10

Then export.

Yeh, I know, that's a mouthful, and seemingly impossible to memorize. But after a while it becomes completely automatic. So automatic that I had to think a bit before writing the steps down here. 

If you had a programmable keyboard, you could put those keystrokes into a macro and invoke them with one keypress. There are also software-only methods for doing the same kind of thing.

I've had that happen to me before...in each case it was because I had the wrong track selected when I invoked the step sequencer.

Try closing the SS, create a new MIDI track and then open the SS again. A clip should automatically be created. It's a special type of clip, a variant of a MIDI Groove Clip that can be stretched out to any length you like (your pattern will be automatically replicated as needed). Later, after you're done with the step sequencer, you can bounce the groove clip to create a standard MIDI clip that can be edited in the PRV.

Now start saving up for better speakers...and thus the GAS begins.

They make rack-mounted preamps. 

But I ended up selling mine and bought another synth with the proceeds. No, that doesn't make me a hypocrite - it was rack-mounted.

When Elon Musk finally perfects the direct brain-to-computer interface, I'll be getting rid of my big keyboard as well.

In the old forum, somebody would have created a similarly-titled thread full of off-topic nonsense observations.

Good thing those people didn't come over to the new forum, eh?

2 hours ago, Chuck E Baby said:

You have no idea what your missing. Before I had a control surface (mid 2000's) I didn't know what I was missing either. Now I don't know how I would survive without one.

Before I got rid of any hardware that didn't bolt into a rack (mid 2000's), I also didn't know how I'd survive without that stuff.

I do now. 

Depends on what you mean by "improved results". If you mean better-sounding audio, then prepare for a big letdown after spending big bucks on an outboard interface. It's going to be only marginally better, if you can hear a difference at all.

But if you mean more inputs and outputs, more and quieter amplification, real knobs, convenient jacks, better driver support, an effects loop, then an outboard interface is the way to go. Being in the UK, I'd suggest starting your search with Focusrite. Their stuff is relatively inexpensive, well-supported and reliable.

"I sold today...I mean, who really wants Monday? The new day I ordered is supposed to arrive tomorrow."

- drewfx1, c. 2014

Where did you go, Drew?

Well done! I would never have gone to that much effort to justify a gear purchase. ? Most of my own semi-rational rationalizations come down to "because I need that".

However, as good as your justifications are, I have to say I remain unconvinced.

I've been 15 years now without a console or control surface. I like having the extra space. A place to set my coffee cup. Room for multiple headphones, shakers, tambourine and a little fan for hot days. 

Backward compatibility has always been one of Cakewalk's great strengths. I have imported projects from as far back as Cakewalk 1.0  for DOS into SPlat with no problems. CbB would have no problem doing the same, I'm sure.

(I figured I'd best grab those c. 1986 files while I could still find a floppy drive to read them. Ironically, after securing them on my hard drives those files disappeared after just one year, when my computer was stolen. Still have the floppies and they are presumably still readable, but I now have no idea where that USB floppy drive has gone.)

Can you expand on "it doesn't work"? Were there errors displayed during the installation, or did it seem to install OK but did not show up in your fx lists?

We piano snobs are quick to dismiss it, but don't write off the piano in the good ol' TTS-1. If you know what you're doing with EQ and compression, you can make it sound pretty darn good.

I often use it as a placeholder, with the intention of replacing it later on with Keyscape or a Kontakt library. Sometimes, though, if in the final mix the piano isn't particularly prominent I may just elect to leave the TTS-1 in place.

You never know what you'll learn reading through a thread...thanks, Promidi, I wasn't even aware of any recent driver updates for my GTX960. I just assumed they'd pulled the plug on driver development when they stopped manufacturing the card. 

We only believe in the two-Ed theory because no one has ever seen Ed and bapu together in the same place at the same time. Consider the possibility that they are actually identical twins who've been playing an elaborate prank since 2003.

Keni, I apologize for my flippant reply. I'm sure this issue is important to you and I didn't mean to trivialize your concerns.

I've just never felt the need to copyright anything. The best outcome for anything I create would be that it's appreciated by someone, even if that appreciation takes the form of unaccredited theft. Music wants to be free.

10 songs would certainly cover all the times a composition of mine was stolen and then made into a gold record or used in a car commercial.

I would not.

At least not until I'd done some research. The manufacturer isn't going to waste time and money twiddling with a piece of software that isn't broken.

There exists, somewhere, a change log that'll tell you what they've fixed. Find that, and then see if any of those changes affect you. If it says "makes a funny noise at noon on Tuesdays under Fruity Loops", I'd pass.

11 hours ago, 57Gregy said:

One hundred percent of people who are living will die, so stop living.
Oh, wait...

But that's an example of actual causation, not a spurious correlation.

The leading precursor to death is birth.

One of my favorite extrapolations used to be a comedian's observation that "50% of all marriages end in divorce. Those are the lucky ones; the successful marriages end in death." 

6 hours ago, Stxx said:

For tracking and playback This would not effect audio performance.  For overdubbing maybe 

I think it could. Whenever users are having dropouts due to DPC latency, 9 times out of 10 it's because of the network adapter preempting interrupts from the audio interface.

19 hours ago, Craig Anderton said:

TeamViewer does the job, and it's free. It's a little crowded on a smart phone ( a stylus helps), but tablets are good.

Great idea! I use TeamViewer every day in my day job but never considered it as a remote control for a DAW. It is indeed very responsive; I'm usually controlling computers that are physically thousands of miles away and the response times are almost like being there. Latency is going to be less than a millisecond on a local network, but even if it was 100 ms that's good enough for a control surface.

My only reservation is the network overhead and its possible impact on audio performance. Sending individual clicks, keypresses and mouse moves is a necessarily inefficient use of bandwidth because every event may require its own packet, and your network card's interrupts take priority over your audio interface's. I could see it occasionally causing a dropout. I doubt it would be a concern for me, as my ASIO buffer size stays at 2048 at all times, but it might be an issue for someone wanting very low latency, e.g. a drummer playing Superior Drummer in real time.

I'd be reluctant to use any remote device that relied on wi-fi, just because it would require enabling the one piece of hardware most likely to have a detrimental effect on audio performance. Try to find a solution that doesn't need wi-fi.

Depending on how far away you are from your computer, a hard-wired (USB) control surface might be a better way. That's only practical for runs less than 15', but for many people that's plenty. Wireless keyboards are great, don't slow anything down, and work right out of the box. However, they also have distance limitations and many require line-of-sight to the receiver.

(Sigh. I miss my Frontier Designs Tranzport. That was a brilliant solution, but Windows 10 killed it. I know some folks here are still using one under W10, but I've never been able to get mine to work.)

First, the good news: Windows 10 is just as good at audio as Windows 7. You'll be able to get back to your accustomed performance with a little tweaking.

On initial installation, Windows is going to set generic defaults that will work for most people with the fewest problems. Unfortunately, they aren't always best for a DAW. Sometimes, even Windows updates will reset things without asking. (One update killed my audio completely by changing my default audio device back to the motherboard's integrated audio that wasn't hooked up to anything.)

There are many Windows 10 optimization guides around that can help, although some give outdated or even dangerous advice. Don't make a whole bunch of changes all at once, and test each change before moving on to the next one. Some of the most reliable guides are from interface manufacturers, such as the ones from Presonus and Focusrite. IIRC, RME and Avid have similar guides.

If your computer has a Wi-fi adapter, make sure it's disabled. Windows likes to enable it by default, and it kills DPC latency. Grab LatencyMon as recommended above and see how your computer's doing in terms of DPC latency. There is good documentation on the Resplendence site for interpreting what LatencyMon tells you, and what to do if it reports bad numbers. If DPC latency is low, then your issue isn't with interrupts but rather some background process(es) that need to be disabled.