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Lord Tim

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Everything posted by Lord Tim

  1. For clarifications sake, do you mean: You would like 2 outputs: one for the master out, one for monitoring (eg: headphones) You would like to be able to solo tracks but have it ONLY affect one of those outputs, so for example, all of the tracks routed to the monitoring bus, if you solo one of those tracks, it would only change the solo state on that bus, while leaving the master bus unaffected, and vice versa. Is that correct?
  2. Lord Tim

    "Remember" _Colab

    This was a fun project
  3. Lord Tim

    Eagle Fly Free

    I'm going to file that bit of information away for later, we might actually be in need of some 3D work!
  4. ^^ Craig is on the money. A de-esser might help somewhat but you're likely going to remove a lot of stuff you'll want to preserve too. It's basically a dynamic EQ / multiband compressor set to a specific frequency, so EVERYTHING at that frequency will be cut. A de-noiser will let you zero in on both the hiss and the hum and get rid of it, sometimes surprisingly transparently too! That all said, if you have access to the multitrack mix at all, absolutely start there first. Gating, cutting out or muting noisy parts, or applying de-noising to the tracks themselves will give you VASTLY better results than trying to do it over an entire mix. But having said all of that, if you do want to try the de-esser route, CbB comes with the Sonitus Multiband Compressor. Set band 4 to where the hiss is and up the ratio and drop the threshold of that band (you can solo each band to zero in on where it is). That's basically a very over-built de-esser. But I'd definitely recommend Craig's suggestion first.
  5. Yeah, do a clean install and use the Cakewalk installer. There's entries in the registry that will tell either that or Bandlab Assistant it's already installed so it'll need to be wiped using those instructions. If X3 plays, so should CbB so it's definitely some config issue that we can sort out once you have an otherwise working copy of CbB - I'd probably suggest that this clean install will already fix the problem for you.
  6. That's a good point. Try running the Cakewalk Installer HERE and see if that gets you a full installer. If not, you may need to do a Clean Install, and then run the Cakewalk Installer.
  7. I have a vague memory of someone posting a full installer in a previous release or Early Release thread not too long ago, to help someone out that had a particularly broken installation. If you can find that (can anyone remember where it was?) you should be able to get that in and then apply all of the updates going forward. Then we should troubleshoot what led you to having to do this in the first place. I'm not seeing many people having catastrophic problems with the last update, so I'm sure it's something we can dig into and help you solve it.
  8. Lord Tim

    Eagle Fly Free

    After Effects is what I usually use, but I've been investigating Nuke a bit lately to see if that suits my workflow. And you're right, blue is much better for light hair but sometimes you're stuck with the studio or screen you're given and you need to wrangle the chroma levels a bit to make it work. Still better than rotoscoping though ?
  9. I think additionally to this, there's a thought when you start out that adding effects (particularly reverb) will make things sound bigger or hide any problems you have with the performance. And yes, reverb when used properly *can* make things sound huge, but in general it does exactly the opposite for elements you want to be up front, like a vocal. Think about a sound source in a large room, eg: a vocalist. If the vocalist is halfway down the back of the room, you'll hear more room reverb and it'll sound a bit duller and sort of distant. Put that same vocalist right in front of you and while you'll still hear the reverb of the room, but it'll be MUCH quieter than the direct voice itself because that's right in front of you. Which one of those 2 scenarios will give you a more up-front vocal sound that won't get lost? It's not necessarily level (although that'll help), it's how we perceive a sound with its relative level of reverb and EQ. Taking mixing environment out of the equation for a second, the other big thing that trips a lot of people up are clashing frequencies, and getting sounds to be huge in solo. Long personal story incoming (I'm sure I've shared this one before, but it's worth repeating here), but this taught me a HUGE lesson in what not to do... In the late 90s we recorded at a fantastic studio with a big Neve console, Studer 24 track machine, great rooms and outboard gear... it really had everything going for it, except the dumb wanna-be producer kid (who may or may not be me) who thought he knew a lot more than he really did. We tracked everything one by one, which was fine, and then we got to the mix stage. My goal was to make this thing sound like the heaviest, chunkiest metal album ever, so we meticulously went through every track making sure that the bass had huge low end, bright snap, none of the annoying honky mids... guitars had low end CHUNK, cutting sizzle, heaps of gain for that metal crunch... snare was like a cannon going off, each tom sounded like an explosion... everything had heaps of reverb so it sounded like it was the size of a planet... you get the point. Every part of this was EQ'd and effected to sound utterly gargantuan. Then we started the mix and ... mud. We couldn't hear the kick drums, so we turned those up and now all we could hear was the thud of the kicks which was making the bass seem wimpy. So we turned the bass up. Why couldn't we hear the guitars now? All we could hear was the sizzly high end, all of the guts went away. Also where did the snare go? Better turn them up. Wait, vocals are too quiet now, better turn them up. Hold on, where are the kicks now? ... rinse and repeat. Dumb producer wanna-be me didn't get the idea that frequencies can build up and mask other frequencies. And that effects can sound great in isolation but can really determine where things feel like they sit "front to back" in the mix. I was so concerned about everything individually sounding huge that I missed the big picture of the mix. Ultimately this was a complete write-off for a mix. We still released it, it still went OK but it's right up there with one of the most toilet grade mixes I've ever had my name on. That taught me a big lesson about what I think works and what REALLY works is 2 different things, and to start listening to all the people who tried to tell me otherwise. As a post-script to that, years later we re-recorded that album and it obviously turned out a lot better, and as a bonus I got a rip of the original multitracks and did a remix of it. There were a few poor tracking decisions but overall, with the knowledge I have now, the mix was about 1000x better than the original and a lot of the problems we couldn't solve, or I was trying to hide on the original just wasn't a thing anymore once I learned how it all fit together correctly. Mixing is a bit of a dark art in that a lot of stuff we assume should sound a certain way is just wrong. If you pull apart a professional mix, you'll wonder why the guitars are so thin, why a lot of the mix is so dry, why it sounds so weird and poky before it's been mastered, etc. And yet when you listen to the final result, it all works together perfectly. File this under: THINGS I WISH I KNEW IN THE 90s ?
  10. ^^ Yeah, that's right - Aim Assist is what I assumed what Terry meant when he said Now Time.
  11. Well I hope Richard gets something out of it once the dust settles a bit, but if not I like to at least have some useful replies for other people to see and hopefully twig something that will help. I can say for sure that I certainly needed this kind of post back in the day. Would I have have listened? Maybe? ? But eventually this stuff sunk in and I saw a real improvement in what I did. Shame it took so damn long though... ?
  12. The issue wasn't misunderstood on my part. You said you had issues with your mix and needed help. You said it didn't translate to other environments particularly. I've seen this problem time and time again over the last 30 years - and, at some points, by myself. You may very well have issues with reflections on your desk. But if it's going to be an issue there, it will be 10% of your problem, as opposed to 90% of it being your room in general. Real world experience here: for years I worked out of a bedroom with terrible sound treatment and had to continually check my mixes on many other systems to get anything near useful out of them. When I got a professional to finally design my studio, we meticulously went through every part of it making sure the #1 thing was the room didn't screw up what I was hearing, and the difference between untreated and treated as it was being built was MASSIVE. You can not mix if you can not hear it. That's the real answer here. If you feel like the blanket helps then sure, but I can all but guarantee this isn't your main problem. You can have whatever you like in the box but eventually you need to adjust the balance of everything, and this comes out of your speakers, which is in your environment. And with a bad environment, you can't trust what comes out of the speakers, and that will influence your mixing decisions of what's in the box. See what I'm getting at? Start there then circle back to my other points in my reply re: mix / mastering. If you really do want help, it's available here (and not just from me, but others who have done this work professionally and commercially for years) but you need to go into it with an open mind with suggestions or nobody will be able to genuinely help you. I've been on the other side of the fence with ignoring great advice and believe me, you don't want to waste the time I did back in the day.
  13. Lord Tim

    Eagle Fly Free

    VFX guy here as one of my other day jobs, and I feel your pain Light coloured hair in front of a green screen is pretty bad, but you know what's worse? Cymbals and drum hardware. I have PTSD from one of our clips where I had to roto out all of the drums to stop them from disappearing into the matte. ?☠️
  14. If you don't necessarily want to see the digits but still want the now time, try ALT+X to hide the digits. I was finding that was in the way for me too, but this definitely helped me!
  15. Backup arriving; he's right. No matter how good your gear is, if your room is fighting you, you can't actually hear it without certain frequencies building up or cancelling out. This isn't just for acoustic instruments in the room either, imagine you've put a song together with a softsynth and you think "wow that sounds wimpy" and you've fattened the sound up to compensate. That might sound great in a room that's nulling 120hz, but in other rooms, you might find that this is way out of control. And if your mix guy is under the impression that this was what you intended for the sound, it won't be fixed, and then mastering at the end (if you get it done elsewhere) ends up as a compromise/fix mistakes session rather than a final shine and prep. Flutter echoes can be a thing, and a lot of good studios have a cloud above the mix position. I was going to put one in here but I found that even without it the sound was pretty balanced and not a problem for me. I have a keyboard and monitors/computers on the desk in front of me, mixer to the side, and if there's any flutters, I'm not noticing them. But what was a MASSIVE difference was setting up the angled walls, tuned resonators, etc. in the room - the difference was literally night and day. This all aside, I'm listening to the songs now... The biggest 2 things that stick out to me are: Mastering - this stuff is pumping like crazy, like the bass management hasn't been set up correctly first before it's hit the limiter. This can be traced back to the room issue for a start, but this can be mitigated by better mixing, and then if that hasn't solved it, then better mastering (although everything before that point is always the better choice to sort out first) Mixing in general - the vocals are getting lost behind a lot of things, both with level and effects. You'll find that your mix might sound great alone but once it's mastered you're changing the balance of the instruments. Things like overheads, guitars, etc. will suddenly seem WAY more prominent in the mix, and things like vocals and anything with a lot of transients like snare and kick will just disappear. Turning those up can work, but it might also make the master pump. Reverb in general is a little loud, and that'll be further exacerbated by mastering effects changing the balance. And I think the last thing is I'm not hearing a lot of clean ups in between phrases, and all of those little noises, hums, hisses, thuds, etc. all add up once they're all blended together. Like I said, if this is all sounding decent during tracking and then you get it back at the end and you go "this sounds dodgy" (especially if you listen in some other environment and notice it more) then it's definitely your environment first. Then the mixing decisions. Then the mastering. The sounds and performances themselves are fine, but they're getting lost in the problems.
  16. Frozen tracks really just set that track back to the state it was in when it was originally frozen, so any edits done on it later (be it manual edits, arranger stuff, etc.) will be lost when you unfreeze it. Your best bet is to unfreeze everything before you do any kind of work on the track then refreeze again, or if you think you might be doing any of that kind of work, either copy the frozen clips to a new track so they're just treated like any other audio clips, or rather than doing a freeze, do a bounce to track and then archive the original tracks to take them offline.
  17. If you're trying to do anything through the old Cakewalk site or addresses, it'll fail - that went away in 2017. All of that stuff was owned by Gibson, which is an entirely different company to who owns the current Cakewalk assets, so anything online is just there as a courtesy for us older users, basically. Any expectation that this stuff would continue to work isn't really correct since that company as it was doesn't exist now - only the intellectual property was sold to Bandlab, nothing else. But as I said, they'll do their best to get people access to their older paid products if they can. Shoot a message over to support@cakewalk.com if you haven't done so already, and let them know your details and I'd say you'll get that sorted out within a few days.
  18. I tend to aim for around 1400x1400 px in size, since that's usually the minimum a lot of music sites (eg: CD Baby, Bandcamp) prefer you to use. But yeah, so long as it's not completely tiny and it's square, it should look fine with most reasonably sized images.
  19. This forum is aimed towards Cakewalk by Bandlab, which is a Windows app, rather than the Bandlab music app, so any help you might get here will be limited at best. You'll probably have more luck in their help section here: https://help.bandlab.com/hc/en-us
  20. If any part of the UI or menus are missing, it's usually because they're hidden by a Workspace. Try choosing Advanced from the Workspace dropdown menu and see if they turn up for you.
  21. Lord Tim

    Eagle Fly Free

    Nice work We've covered a few Helloween songs over the years and I can definitely say that it's not an easy thing to do - Kiske was insane back in his prime (still great now), and Ingo's drumming was nuts.
  22. Ha, I'd struggle going back now. For me there most definitely are must-haves in CbB. Ripple Editing, the Arranger, Tempo track, nested folders... way too many to list!
  23. ^^ good advice. Sometimes you'll find older projects crash and burn due to odd window layouts, so opening in Safe Mode (even without bypassing any plugins) will allow them to load properly. I'd also strongly suggest grabbing Cakewalk though - you can load that in side by side with X3, it'll use all of the same plugins that are locked to X3 and works pretty much identically, except there's literally years and thousands of bug fixes and extra features. Even if nothing in the list is a must-have thing, I'll definitely say a lot of the little things really add up over time to make it a much more intuitive experience.
  24. I only have the subscription version of Talent. If I play my cards right, just the albums AFTER the next one will suck.
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