bitflipper

I'd guess probably not, since you're usually quantizing to a musical interval, not ticks. An eighth note remains an eighth note regardless of how many gradations there are between them.

I don't have a barn. Does a garage count? Although I've seen no evidence that virtual instruments get better with age. I just checked the Audio Modeling website to see if they have demos available. I saw no obvious link, but on my account page it does have a category named "trial/evaluation" that suggests they do. It might be worth contacting them to check. They're running a sale through August, btw. Note that the violin I've been talking up has been discontinued, superseded by Version 3, which I don't have. I can only assume that it's even better now than when I got it. Still trying to decide whether to upgrade - $90 for the solo strings bundle (violin/viola/cello/bass). I have all four, but really only use the violin regularly.

Which instrument are we talking about? Spitfire has 8 or 9 pianos. I ask because they have different conventions for different families of instruments, e.g. Kontakt-based, LABS series, Abbey Road One series. [EDIT] Nevermind, I figured out you're referring to the "Cinematic Soft Piano" for the LABS player. On my machine the main DLL is called "LABS (64 Bit).dll" and is located in \program files\cakewalk\vstplugins. Which should already be in your scan list. The LABS samples (that don't need to be in your scan list) are in \users\{user_name}\Spitfire\Spitfire Audio - LABS. All of the many LABS instruments' samples are in the same place.

Everybody's scan list eventually ends up being a bit messy, if they are compulsive instrument collectors (guilty!). I've got eight directories in mine, even though I go to a lot of trouble to keep my plugins organized. I let the installers decide where to put FX plugins since they're small, and only worry about where sample libraries go due to their size. I have lots of Spitfire stuff here and have never had to alter scan paths to accommodate them. Spitfire does give you the option to override the default destination, although it's common practice to place any files that are user-editable (e.g. presets, Kontakt instrument definitions) in %appdata%. That's a Microsoft requirement, being the only file location where the user is guaranteed unrestricted read/write/delete access. (btw, %appdata% is not in my scan list. The Spitfire Audio folder there contains only settings and installation files, no instrument executables.)

What's that you say? Not all Guitar Center employees are dedicated sales professionals anxious to meet your musical needs? I'm shocked. Next you're gonna tell me some of them don't know what they're talking about.

I'm impressed. How did you ever find the time to become creative and flexible with all those instruments? Heck, I didn't even know what "Bartok Pizzicato" was until it appeared in a string library, and still I had to look it up.

It's not just Musician's Friend, and it's not just UPS. Still waiting on an amp from Sweetwater via FedEx that was supposed to arrive last Friday. Watching the tracking page has been, um, entertaining. In one leg, my package took 3 days to travel 17 miles. It has spent one or more nights in at least 8 different states. Fingers crossed it doesn't finally arrive and is damaged.

My favorite fast compressor for vocals. Place in series with an LA-2A clone such as Cakewalk's own CA-2A and you can tame the most out of control bedroom rocker wailing. Also works fine with good singers.

More like old peoples' problems.

Hmm, so it's not just FedEx. Wildfires, perhaps? Or maybe the $4/gallon gas is making them drive slower. What if they're making all the drivers take COVID tests before crossing into Washington, and they're all demonstrating outside in the parking lot because you have to wear a facemask to get in to the testing site and that's a violation of their HIPPA rights? Or worse, they all did get vaccinated and now they're magnetic and can't cross that big steel bridge over the Columbia River?

Oh, hell, here we go again. Most of my projects contain at least one Spectrasonics instrument. Makes sense Trilian would be affected as well, since it uses the same engine as Omnisphere, which is why you can play Trilian patches in Omnisphere. I didn't see it because I haven't updated Trilian yet. And probably won't. I am not so desperate for a VST3 version that I'll trash dozens of projects to get it. Fortunately, Keyscape was not similarly fuched with.

Little-known fact: the "Ex" in "FedEx" once stood for "express". No kidding, they once touted their advantage as being faster than other carriers. The amp did not arrive on Friday as promised. Consequently, I was unable to take a nap because I was waiting for the delivery all day. Consequently, I was dead on my feet by the end of Friday night's gig. I got out of there at 2:00 AM and crashed at a friend's house nearby rather than make the long drive home. Despite being completely wiped out, I left early Saturday so I wouldn't miss the delivery. It didn't come. Now, the tracking page has removed any mention of estimated delivery date. The amp has, however, made it from Troutville, Oregon to Portland Oregon over the past three days. I'm guessing they had to stop and get carrots for the donkey.

Imagine you have a boat with many passengers, and it's leaning to the left. Would you tell all the passengers to take a step to the right as a group, or suggest that maybe the wrestling team might enjoy the view better from the right side of the boat?

I don't know, honestly. What's the difference between an orchestral violin and a bluegrass fiddle? I've always assumed the only difference is playing technique. Well, on second thought they may also be recorded differently, e.g. close- vs. far-mics, reverberant spaces vs. dry. But in a modeled instrument these are not baked into the sound as they would be in a sample library. You'll use artificial reverb to place the instrument in a virtual space, rather than choosing a mic position like you would in a Kontakt library.

The reason this doesn't affect RMX, Trilian and Keyscape is that the root cause of the problem was a change made only to Omnisphere, in which a 9th output was added. I have no idea why they did that, since you can have at most 8 individual voices in a Multi. It means that when you created your project prior to the Omnisphere update, CW saw that it had 8 outputs and calculated all the other instruments' input source offsets accordingly (think of them as being numbered 1...N internally; inserting a new one throws the whole list off). Then, when you subsequently re-open that same project all the offsets are thrown off by 1 (or the number of Omnisphere instances). Kudos to Noel for figuring out a fix quickly. Know that this was not an easy fix to implement. As a fellow coder, I can testify that our Noel is a frickin' bit-ninja. [EDIT] I was wrong; Trilian was also affected. See below.

There are less-expensive mastering tools out there, Marcello. They won't be do-all suites like Ozone, so you'll have to run down individual plugins for EQ, compression, limiting, phase analysis, saturation, and all the other cool stuff Ozone does. For example, there is Limiter No. 6. It's free and works well, with its only downside being it's complicated and not very user-friendly. Which just means its learning curve will be steeper than Ozone. But think of it as "sweat equity", trading your time to save money.

Thanks for taking a closer look, which I was too lazy - er, too busy - to do. The pictures certainly reinforce what I heard: a scooped spectral imbalance. First thing I'd do before commencing any mastering or master-bus processing at all, would be to do something about that 2K bump. The OP is probably being held back by his monitoring environment (headphones?) while mixing. That's where spectral images come in handy, showing you what you maybe can't hear well. I'd also note that this type of composition can't be evaluated from a whole-song analysis, because it's sparse in places and full in others. OP picked a tough song to first try mastering on. I'd concentrate on the loudest part of the song when setting levels and dynamic reduction, as the quieter parts may well fall into place naturally.

Your DIY master is definitely better. The automated one sounds dreadful, with obvious compression artifacts and distortion.

No, if you're doing it right (i.e. not smashing the bejeezus out of it with compression) the two peak values will often be slightly different. As long as they're within 3-6 dB of one another, it's unlikely to indicate a problem. The tiny 0.9 dB difference shown in your screenshot will not be audible. That's for peak values, though. RMS values should be fairly close. If there's more than, say, a 3dB difference, the mix may sound unbalanced to the ear. In that case, you'll want to review each track's pan position to make sure left and right channels are equally represented, such that they sound balanced to the ear. Headphones are good for that. In your screenshot you show a mere 0.4 dB difference, and nobody's going to notice that.

I ask because the Kontakt universe offers an amazing number and depth of virtual instruments, ranging in price from free to several hundred dollars. But the free and cheap ones require the full Kontakt product, not the free player version. Kontakt itself comes bundled with a lot of sampled instruments, including an acceptable French horn.

^^^ Excellent point, Cactus. Excessive sub-bass can make mastering difficult. I wouldn't expect an automated mastering tool to be able to handle it.

Or, if it's no big deal to simply detect a change, just a warning messagebox would have saved me a week of head scratching. Like "WARNING: This version of _______ may be incompatible with this project."

Sorry, my bad. Guess I figured everybody here has Boz on speed dial in their Favorites bar. Das Boot Le Snappet El Clapo $15 each, $29 for the lot.

Yeh, Larry, this has already been posted before. But the sale price is back on again until the 29th and I couldn't find the previous post to update it. I bought the bundle the last time it was on sale. It was merely an impulse buy, like grabbing gum at the grocery store checkout line. But I have gotten a LOT of use out of these simple one-trick ponies. Here's a tune that uses only these for percussion, plus another favorite cheapie, Skaka by Klevgrand (sadly not on sale atm, but keep an eye out). https://soundclick.com/r/s8hb75

And "how do I plug it into my iPhone?"