bitflipper

Returning to topic...Bapu is going to have to do this all over again with his new cans. He's been in the game long enough to know that better playback does not instantly mean better mixes, but that it will over time. Any time you change your environment, you have to acclimate your ears all over again. Recently I added a headphone amplifier to my setup, not for mixing but for kicking-back-in -the-dark-with-a-doobie focused listening. Those bedtime sessions have long been my final approval for any new mixes. Away from the computer, listening intently without visual feedback, I hear flaws in my mix that weren't evident while sitting in front of the screen. The headphone amp was more impactful than I'd expected, a significant improvement. But different. So my homework this past week has been listening to past references, pulling up every recording I've valued for quality. Sure, it's a sacrifice, but one I'm willing to make in the interest of better mixes.

Actually, it may not be necessary to create a correction curve that mimics your hearing aids' EQ. Hear me out. (no pun). Everybody hears differently. Every room sounds different. Every speaker is different. Headphones are all over the map. It's a wonder anybody is able to make a mix that others find agreeable. Think about how that's even possible. It's possible through ear training. You spend enough time listening to well-made records through your playback system, whatever it may be, and over time your brain comes to "know" what a good record sounds like. It's been studied; it's a real thing, and it works. All it takes is the admittedly herculean effort of kicking back while listening to good music. Of course, if the playback system can't replicate all frequencies (e.g. laptop speakers or generic earbuds) then you'll still have to use a spectrum analyzer to fill in the missing bits. But the all-important midrange is going to be there, and that's what counts most. It's worth a try, eh? Set aside a half hour every day to just listen to some reference recordings in your favorite genres.

Thoughts, as requested: 1. You absolutely could create a correction curve if the audiologist has given you a detailed analysis. However, I wonder if the hearing aids would even be capable of full-spectrum sound, even after equalization. 2. I wonder if the midrange emphasis might actually help with mixing. Same idea as using Mix Cubes. As long as you supplemented your monitoring with visual aids to check the low end. 3. The problem of not hearing the same things as others is a universal problem, because no two people perceive sound exactly alike. Sure, it's exacerbated by hearing impairment, but consider that everyone over 30 is hearing-impaired. Especially musicians. Nobody can truly trust their ears. You just know that better than most.

Sorry, a picture of where I came from would violate the TOS.

? No Facebook for me, sadly.

True, but that doesn't answer my question. Ozone 5 doesn't do anything that subsequent versions can't duplicate.

Oh, don't be a Luddite! ? I'm a piano player who owns a real grand piano, but that doesn't stop me from having multiple Steinway libraries. Just kidding. I don't own a real Steinway, so a sample library is the only way I'm ever gonna get one into a recording. The OTS Pear is a little dated, not quite as good as Trilian IMO, but it's only $59 and unless your song prominently features the instrument it should do the job just fine. It has the main feature I look for first in a bass library: the ability to slide convincingly between any two notes, which many (most?) bass libs can't do without complicated scroll wheel trickery. They're scripted slides as opposed to sampled slides, but in context that's usually good enough.

Curious as to why you need O5 specifically. I'd think O6/7/8 would be fairly simple to substitute.

I don't have it myself so I can't speak from authority, but it just sounds like that library may have too many limitations. Pear is the only OTS bass I don't have. When I need an acoustic, I turn to Trilian. Spectrasonics is a different world from Kontakt and not as easy to use, but the instruments are truly outstanding. Especially the acoustic basses (yes, basses, plural). Trilian's rather pricey but you get a whole bunch of basses and they're all good.

I name such projects with the date they were started, sometimes appending the key, e.g. 8-14-2019 Am. If the test project is to explore a new soft synth, I'll name it accordingly, such as "Amadeus" or "Synthmaster". That's usually enough of a memory jog to find them later. It's also helpful to separate "real" projects from test projects in the file system. I create a lot of temporary projects for the articles I write, projects that may not even be songs, just tracks that demonstrate the features of a plugin or instrument, or to take screenshots from. Those live in a separate folder called \projects\tests, so that they don't clutter up my actual music projects. Another subfolder is called "Ideas", where I keep song ideas and chord progressions.

Ah, I see the problem. Most users ask this question because they're using a short keyboard and Kontakt maps keyswitches to keys that don't physically exist on the controller. In that case, moving the keyswitches up an octave along with everything else is desirable. It sounds like the library developer didn't take transposition into account, and may have hard-coded MIDI note values into some scripts. It's possible you just won't be able to do what you want to do with this particular instrument. At least not without remapping the samples, as you concluded. Something you'd think would be simple, but my experiences attempting to remap commercial products have had mixed results so I don't do it anymore. One of the reasons I'm fond of Orange Tree and Indiginus is that they support keyswitch reassignment right in the UI. My favorite Kontakt-based bass is OTS' Rickenbacker, in which drop tuning is a built-in feature. All you have to do then is transpose the MIDI track, rather than the instrument.

Plenty of word confusion around here, even if it doesn't usually rise to the level of clinical aphasia. I suspect it's like synaesthesia, insofar as everybody has a touch of it, and musicians are more prone to it than the general population. A little may even be a benefit if you're a lyricist or poet.

This isn't something Noel can fix. If anybody could do anything, it would have to be NI. The issue is that synths often report inconsequential "changes", which could be something as trivial as playing back a patch that has parameters modulated by a random envelope generator. Cakewalk has no way of knowing whether change flags are important or not, so it honors all of them without bias.

I keep forgetting that I have that one. It's good (and free!), although I usually reach for D16 Group's Syntorus when I need a chorus. Very flexible and currently on sale, too, for 25 EUR. Sale ends today, btw. Speaking of freebies, I also use the free BC Gain plugin a lot. Pretty much every vocal track. It's part of the free Gain Suite. But it's the metering and analysis tools that I've been concentrating on lately. The value of multi-channel spectrum analyzers is obvious, but I'm struggling to come up with a compelling reason for the stereoscope tool. It's fun to look at, but I'm not sure it'll actually help me mix better.

...said the patient to the proctologist.

You shouldn't have to remap the samples. That could be a real chore depending on how complex the map is (e.g. multiple groups and velocity layers). Click on the wrench icon, then the Instrument Options button. In the dialog that comes up, click on "Instrument". There is a field there where you can enter a transpose value. Set it to -12, so when you play E1 Kontakt translates that into E0.

I haven't tried it from my interface. It has no problem driving 300 ohm cans, although that's not relevant because the headphones I use for editing are 50 ohms. Might be worth experimenting with, though I doubt there'd be much if any improvement. Most powered (meaning you plug it into the wall) interfaces should have no problem driving high-Z cans, because they'll have at minimum + and - 12V rails if not higher. Where you have issues is with portable devices such as smartphones and dedicated music players whose output voltage range is limited by their batteries. henkejs: yes, I have the first Large Band album on tap here. It was made in what I consider the Golden Age, that too-short period c. 1986 - 2001 before extreme squashing had become the fad. Lots of detail in the recording, especially percussion. I'll have to give it another listen with the new amp. I'd expect some benefit, given its high crest factor. Thanks for the suggestion. Craig: yes, I think a poll of references would be interesting. I've seen such lists in the GS mastering forum. Those have led me to a few discoveries that I wouldn't have thought of, such as Donald Fagan's The Nightfly. I'm not real crazy about the music, but the audio quality is exemplary. May be the same crew that engineeered Aja?

Sorry for the confusion. I've never had any doubts about headphone distribution amps like those pictured above. They are studio essentials. What I'm talking about in this thread is specifically a portable amplifier for a single (sometimes dual) pair of headphones, solely to enhance the personal listening experience. That said, there's definitely a connection to recording, mixing and mastering. After you've worked on a mix for hours, you lose perspective. You concentrate on specific elements, swim in the cornucopia of processing possibilities (sorry for the mixed metaphor), and you are influenced by onscreen graphics way more than you realize. I therefore find it very helpful to listen to my mixes offline, away from the computer screen, the carefully shaped acoustics of my room, and the high end speakers. Most importantly, away from any possibility of altering the mix. Suddenly that snare you'd boosted because you thought it weak is now obviously overbearing...I've had many "what was I thinking?" moments while listening to a mix on headphones in the dark. This week I'm also enjoying the immersive goodness of my favorite reference recordings, some of which I'm now hearing as if they were new. Bouncing around on my player, I happened upon Paul Simon's Graceland. Holy guacamole, that's one well-made record! Not that I'd recommend it as a mix reference - it's too unique - but as a "does my system sound good?" reference it's amazing. Some others that I regularly turn to when I want to hear what an especially well-mixed and mastered record is supposed to sound like: Alison Krauss's New Favorite, Steven Wilson's Hand.Cannot.Erase, Taking the Long Way by the Dixie Chicks, Mark Knopfler's Sailing to Philadelphia, pre-Vapor Trails Rush, the remix of The Beatles' Sgt Pepper. Now I'm out scouring YouTube and Amazon for some new stuff - suggestions welcomed.

I am. Their stuff is often pricier than the competition, but I really like the clean UIs and low CPU burden. But this post isn't a fanboy love letter to Blue Cat, but rather a call for comments from those who use any or all of the following plugins: Oscilloscope Multi FreqAnalyst Multi (not FreqAnalyst Pro) StereoScope Multi I know some of you picked these up when they went on sale back in June. I'd like to hear your opinions: what you like, what you don't like, how you use them, and whether they've proven valuable to you. Did you find them confusing or intuitive? Did you switch from a competitor, or perhaps abandoned them in favor of another competitor? Maybe you find these types of tools useless or more trouble than they're worth, or are content with CbB's built-in analysis tools. This is research in preparation for a review in next month's SoundBytes Magazine. Thanks in advance for your observations.

Start up Kontakt in standalone mode and see if it recognizes MIDI input the LPK25. If it does, then you probably just need to enable the keyboard in Cakewalk. If it doesn't, then verify that the keyboard is set to channel 1, and that the Kontakt instrument is also on channel 1. Both should be by default. If the channel is OK, then Windows isn't seeing the device. Try unplugging the USB cable and plugging it back in.

If your only concern is the display, you can set its power-down time separately. Go to system settings -> display -> power & sleep.

That's pretty vague, Tom. That's what you get for being a CIA assassin back in the 60's. btw, I'm hiding out not far from DeeringAmps.

Best joke you've ever posted, Craig. And you've submitted a great many over the years.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07P86584R/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 A mere $47 on Amazon. You can, of course, spend a whole lot more than that. But I trusted the published specs, which claim to drive up to 500 ohms (most inexpensive amps say 150 max). The 500 mw spec, of course, means nothing - that's for a 32 ohm load. I plan to test the amp under load and see what it delivers into 300 ohms, but I'm guessing it's going to be around 50 mw. Which is actually plenty. I also didn't need a DAC, since I'm feeding it analog from my device. The $129 version includes a DAC, and can therefore take audio from your computer via USB.

I don't notice it at low levels, but surprisingly do hear an improvement at moderate levels. I haven't yet verified this by objective measurement, but to my ear it sounds like when you turn down the ratio on a compressor. I assume that when the output signal approaches the maximum dictated by the voltage rails, transistors are driven into nonlinearity. At moderate levels this could be subtle, not necessarily audible as distortion but rather a loss of clarity caused by the dampening of transients. A headphone amplifier should (if it's designed well) accommodate higher voltages than your phone or media player, and thus a greater swing before the transistors are pushed outside of their linear envelope. This, I suspect, is where anecdotes of increased clarity come from. BTW, I am also using HD650s.