John Bradley

I’d be happy if the Arturia Software Center didn’t take an hour to update the V Collection whenever I allow it to do so. And didn’t render my computer useless during that time by constantly stealing keyboard focus from whatever other window I’m trying to work in.

They gave me enough new toys to play with that it's worth the $100 to me, regardless of whether I'll ever actually use them in anything. I enjoy the "exploring vintage gear I couldn't afford back in the day" aspect of their collection. Changes from V Collection 8 to 10: New: SQ80, MS-20, Acid (TB303), MiniFreak, CP-70 Augmented: Strings, Voices, Grand Piano, Brass, Woodwinds Improved: Piano, CS-80, Prophet, Prophet-VS, Minimoog, Wurli Five new synths, five 'augmented' things that might be of some use, and improved versions of the Prophet and Minimog (both of which I regularly use) plus some others It's a sweet deal.

It's about time Arturia put together a "deal you can't refuse" sale. I went from Synth Collection 8 to 10 for $99, and got FX Collection 5 for $49 (bought "3 delays you'll never actually use" many years ago). Quite the savings over the unknown many hundreds of dollars they'd normally charge!

It's a nice price and I was slightly tempted. Would've gotten me from Ozone 9 to Ozone 11, and newer versions of Nectar and Neutron (from 3 to 4), plus some other stuff I don't care about or use. But I decided using slightly older versions of Ozone, Nectar, and Neutron wasn't the thing keeping me from Making It Big, so I passed on them as unnecessary.

It's a pity that the functionality of Boz's Pan Knob (and now Pan Knob 2) never made it into CbB. (I haven't looked at the new Sonar, but I'm assuming it's not there either.) It'd be so much more convenient to just grab and/or automate the console pan knobs than instantiate a plugin and open its window when you want to tweak the mix, especially if you want it on all the stereo tracks or busses.

You can probably find it, or something close to it on https://freesound.org/

Just hit the snowflake “freeze” button in the track view. It’s non-destructive; you can always unfreeze later and do more editing and/or tone tweaking.

I’ve used Ozone 9 (as an effect on the Master bus) on dozens of songs. The ‘AI’ listens to the part of the song you feed it, and configures 4 modules accordingly. an EQ to get the overall tone balance ‘good’ (as seen in Tonal Balance Control) a multiband compressor if needed (it very rarely enables it on my projects) a dynamic EQ to cut certain freqs to ‘help’ the limiter a limiter to attain the desired LUFS output and prevent clipping on the final output Point being, it doesn’t do very much at all. The EQ tends to have subtle effects – wide Q, few bands, and maybe 1-2 dB of boost or cut. The dynamic EQ I can’t hear doing much of anything. Mostly the limiter is the only thing that has a large effect, dramatically increasing the perceived volume. it’s convenient having ‘AI’ setup reasonable starting values for the modules, which you can change or disable as you see fit. For my purposes it mostly just makes my mixes suitably loud without changing the to any appreciable degree. YMMV. It’s quite possible it does more in Ozone 10 or 11. Dunno. I see no reason to upgrade. As for the OP question, yeah, set the interface to the largest buffer size (1024 on my Focusrite 2i2), freeze everything worth freezing, etc. If the errors appear during audio export, you can bump up the export buffer size beyond the audio driver’s to 40, 60, 80, etc. milliseconds.

I use it all the time in ‘universal mode’ to tighten up timing of rhythm guitar parts without touching their pitch.

Hear hear! I'm currently doing a song that has 24 tracks of vocals... so far. (Everything is double tracked.) Getting that tightened up in both pitch and timing would be well-nigh impossible without Melodyne Studio. Other than having much better singers and making them do take after take until they get it right, which isn't feasible for a whole host of reasons!

I’ve had a number of my Christmas songs copyright claimed on Youtube – though still allowed. The copyright trolls just want to claim any nonexistent revenue I’d get. I’ve pointed out to Youtube that the claimant has no business claiming copyright on new performances of songs that are centuries old and most definitely in the public domain (e.g, Auld Lang Syne, Greensleeves, hymns written in the 1800s, etc.) and I’ve been completely ignored. If I had any hope or intention of making money with my vids I’d be annoyed, but as is, I’m mostly bemused.

The way midi tracks display when there are overlapping clips has been annoying me forever. And CW just loves creating them when you play around editing in the PRV long enough and start copy/pasting or ctrl-drag-and-dropping, or whatever. I’ve never once wanted overlapping midi clips, but there ya go. I’m used to bouncing them back to a single flat clip and re-splitting them at my markers (and losing my edited clip names in the process), but yeah, if the Track View wasn’t lying to me by saying there’s no notes (or fewer notes) where there blatantly are some, I probably wouldn’t care about the overlapping clips thing. —- FWIW, my use case is “I never record any midi; I compose & ‘type it in’ in the PRV.”

Or put the effect on stereo bus and route the track there. I do it all the time when I want to fade out or mute an instrument (via volume automation on the track), but *not* abruptly cut off any reverb or delay.

It should be noted that licensing the rights to do a cover is a mechanical process, and surprisingly inexpensive. On the order of $250 per song. Of course for that to make sense you have to think you can sell $250 worth of downloads, which is pretty unlikely for most of us. So personally, I don’t even try to make money with my tracks. It’s easier that way!

I do this all the time. Depends what you mean by “legal”. It’s still the same song, so you can’t sell it without licensing it first. You can typically post it on YouTube and SoundCloud without issue. YouTube will identify that there’s a copyright claim on the song (sometimes erroneously, such as songs that are in the public domain), but nearly everyone not named Don Henley has figured out it’s in their interest to allow covers on YouTube - sans monetization, of course.