bitflipper

When all my gear was stolen, including maybe a hundred cables that had conveniently (for the thief) all been gathered into two gym bags for easy looting, I had to replace a LOT of cables in one go. $60-100 per item was going to be cost-prohibitive. So I crossed my fingers and took a chance on Sweetwater's own Pro Co line solely because they were relatively inexpensive. (Not because I blindly trust Sweetwater; they also sell Hosa cables.)

Three years later and haven't had one fail yet, despite frequent abuse from coiling/uncoiling, being stepped on, having helpful bandmates quickly yank them out so we can pack out faster from a venue. No RFI or EMI, either, even in venues with questionable wiring and neon beer signs. And if they ever do fail, they all have metal plugs that can be easily repaired.

I'd also second Geoff's observation about keeping cables short. That's just a best-practice prophylactic measure in any situation. I, too, keep an assortment of lengths on hand - which is why I had so many in those gym bags. 

It is essential to apply compression before the signal hits the ADC.

Audio only gets converted to floating-point data after the interface, which works exclusively with signed integers. That means that instead of clipping you get inversion, e.g. an overflow that turns a positive number into a negative number. This doesn't sound like analog clipping at all. It is particularly nasty-sounding and noticeable even at low levels.

There are only two options for preventing this: analog limiting prior to the interface, or recording at a low-enough level that clipping can't happen. The latter is indeed practicable -- if you have a quiet microphone, a quiet room, and acoustical treatments to mitigate boundary reflections and room resonances. 

Just one of many unanswered questions surrounding that tale. 

We once had an amazing saxophonist sit in at a gig. As he was stepping off the stage, an audience member asked him if what he did was hard. His reply: "I guess it would be if I was a guitarist."

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.

Agonizing over which reverb to buy? Try VallhallaGasX for instant relief!

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."