Recording Sound

[No_One]

I've been using Audacity to record sound and exporting the files into ReCycle, this is ok if your track is under 5mins but if it's over you have to chop the track up which is pretty annoying.

Just wondering if anyone knows of any better ways to capture sound if the track is over 5mins?

[Coschi]

Depends what you want to do,

If all you want is a single input or stereo (two instruments if you like) and then use that take in recycle i'd suggest Sound Forge for sure, the nicest audio editor i've worked with and it's compatible with dx plugins so very versitile

if your looking more at sequencing multiple tracks (more than two) and want to stick in the same program take a look at logic, cubase, or cooledit. they all do more or less the same thing but different interface etc.. personal preference really

when recording a live sound i like using about 12 mics into a protools rig and postmix in acid pro

For you, you wanted guitar and vocals yeah?

If you're prepared to spend a little money, you could get a little two channel mic preamp (or mini mixer) (Behringer make plenty of this stuff cheap) and get two mics, one vocal and one instrument (invest in a Shure Sm57 you'll never regret it) and get a cable to go from the preamp/mixer into your stereo in on your pc and record with sound forge, then fuck with in recycle

[Guest Øskorei]

How do you find Audacity ? For really basic slice & dice (ie chopping annoying silent moments from the end of tracks when burning for compilation) it's great. I use it for super-fast quick editing. But if you want to step up with a few other more serious studio software, PM me, I'll be happy to make you copies of Soundforge and Steinberg Wavelab. Only if it's for personal use, tho ! Then again, it really depends on what you're doing, eh ? Please elaborate, for I think there might be more than just a few bedroom-vibe-creationists on this forum.

On a potentially unrelated note to your requirements: Hey, and is ReCycle the precursor to "Reason 3.0" ? THAT is some cool shit, I d/l'd a demo version, which times out after 20 minutes, doesnt allow saving, and is pretty useless for anything more than a , um, demo. For those unaware, its a program that allows for unlimited rack components including sequencers, delays, vintage synth units, and unlimited mixing desks - AND users can (ie need) to patch each component as required. It's fucking amazing, and if I ever have the $$, I'll buy it, along with a USB keyboard and convert to the 'dark side' of non-organic music. You could basically build tracks from the ground up. That said, Ive no doubt that with the right physical interfaces, you could use it as a conventional studio for guitar/drums/bass/vocals.

[chilli]

Not sure what you're trying to do... the whole point of Recycle is to chop audio (it is not a precursor to Reason Osk, but a separate program). I assume you're talking about a 5 minute max capacity for Recycle, because Audacity has no such restriction. Recycle is really just for chopping drum breaks and samples.

BTW Sphinx, if you have ProTools why the hell are you doing your mixing in Acid? Not that there's anything wrong with Acid, but ProTools is purpose designed for audio mixing, whereas Acid is oriented more towards loop based stuff. Granted, they've expanded the program into a much more comprehensive DAW now, but it surely can't match PT for mixing?

If anyone cares, I usually use Ableton Live as a basic ideas sequencer... I record all the audio and midi into that, often with Reason rewired into it and a couple of VST instruments and effects. Once I've got a basic mix in Live, I'll export all the tracks as individual WAV files and mix them down in Cubase. I used to use Soundforge for audio editing, but for most of what I do its overkill, so I just downloaded Audacity and plan on using it as Ableton's external editor, for cleaning up samples and chopping.

I've been using Battery 3 triggered from a TriggerFinger for drums, but I just got BFD to check it out, which looks awesome for live drums and editability... Amplitube 2 for guitar and sometimes other stuff. Of course all this stuff is for educational purposes, I'll buy it when I start using it to make money.

[komodo]

hey guys

my pick for audio multitracking/mixing/software synths/etc is ableton live, hands down.

soundforge is a great wave editor but isnt designed for recording the same way virtual studio packages like ableton are. reason isnt really best for audio streams the way youre thinking oskorei, but you can use it as a fully integrated plug-in (virtual instrument) with ableton (or cubase etc.) and handle your live/sampled audio in the master program. my current plugin selection are the waves platinum digital effects, absynth virtual synthesizer, reaktor, and guru drum machine.

edit:

whoa that was trippy IB, simultaneous posts recommending ableton. synchronicity! it must be true

Edited May 16, 2007 by komodo

[chilli]

Yep, its a sign alright

I love Live, it just doesn't seem like its very good at handling a shitload of tracks, and I've found when I mix in it it sounds muddy... I know this seems stupid, I used to be of the opinion that it didn't matter what you used to mix, but over the last couple of years I can't seem to avoid the fact that the different sequencers have different "flavors"... Live's seems to be muddy and Reason sounds kind of flat and boxy when I've tried mixing in it... Cubase seems to me the best way to mix and sum the tracks at the moment... crisp and dynamic... still no sidechain compression in version 4 though WTF?

[Guest Øskorei]

Bring back the 4-Track reel2reel. No better way to understand what's going on !

Anyone use the straight -USB - Interface Behringer electric guitar ? I picke done up about a week ago at the Turra Music store ((not plugged in) and it really is a log of crap, despite the huge possibilities to record direct from axe-output into USB, and use the in-house software.,

But, yaaaaaar, where's the room sonics in that shyte ? Not a fan, even if it was a well-engineered instrument.

[chilli]

"...where's the room sonics in that shyte ?"

Try a good virtual amp and convolution reverb... what excites me about those things is the possibilty of using them with non-guitar sounds... oh wait, is it a MIDI guitar or just a USB electric guitar?

Edited May 16, 2007 by IllegalBrain

[Guest Øskorei]

Either way it's not an organic sustain, in free-air.........

[chilli]

Either way it's not an organic sustain, in free-air.........

Well of course its not organic, but neither is playing through a real amp... I guess you mean analogue. Tape is nice for adding warmth, but I'm glad I don't live in the days of pure analogue recording.

[Guest Øskorei]

(If you were into psych-rock) I could play you some first-pressed analogue reproduction stuff that might just change your mind. Thinking Cream, perhaps some early Steve Hillage. Or even an hour explaining the nuances in LZ2 that can never be reproduced for CD. And of course most of the best Floyd was before digital recording........

On another 'note', sure once we use devices to capture the sound from instruments, it ceases to be truly 'organic'. But I wasn't really speaking that anal.

[chilli]

I didn't mean the stuff didn't sound better... I love the analogue warmth, I just meant I'm glad i have the convenience of total recall, unlimited track count etc. And I wasn't being anal... a guitar nor the noise it makes can never be organic unless perhaps it was some kind of flesh guitar... have you seen from Dusk Til Dawn? The vampires use the corpses as guitars, its gross.

[Coschi]

BTW Sphinx, if you have ProTools why the hell are you doing your mixing in Acid? Not that there's anything wrong with Acid, but ProTools is purpose designed for audio mixing, whereas Acid is oriented more towards loop based stuff. Granted, they've expanded the program into a much more comprehensive DAW now, but it surely can't match PT for mixing?

Few reasons really, firstly i don't like the pt interface at all, most of my experience is with logic and acid (and cubase but i pissed that off as soon as i could) logic is the business imo. I'm sure pt is more than capable of doing everything i do, but the plugin chain in acid is soo simple, adding tracks and lining them up etc...

that and the fact that i don't have protools, whenever we record seriously we hire a protools rig with about 12 mics, spend a weekend recording, and dump all the audio onto our pc and mix from there. literally all i use pt for is getting the takes, everything else i do elsewhere

[Coschi]

furthermore, if your messing around with guitar on pc a big step up from amplitube (imo only of course) is guitar rig 2. pm pm pm if you like

some fuckstick broke into my house a little while ago, stole my laptop and external hdd (i must say they were very nice about it, didn't damage anything, just in and out with what they wanted) i lost 10 years of recording all shit i'd done, about 30cds worth of band recordings, fucking everything basically (all my photos too except for two rolls o kept from when i was about 10) soooo actually, it was like a fresh start, i'm kinda happy to be away from all that pc stuff, it's really easy to get caught up in customising your programs, searchign for that ultimate plugin set, getting all the right outboard gear etc... and not actually do any fucking recording

all replaced now with a zoom mrs8 (8 track, drum pads, battery powered, totally portable)

and i just recently got a zoom mrs802 same deal with with cd burner and hdd, this guy sits at home

i much rather play with flashy lights and sliders

plus i love the plug and play, very much over the pc approach

BUT totally depends what your doing, i can't do shit for a drum loop with this stuff (ahh but my sampler can!) always a way

Edited May 17, 2007 by Sphinx

[chilli]

Yeah I find I'm most productive when i just stick to what I know... I just thought you had bought PT, which seemed like a waste if you didn't use it for mixing... mind you, I tried the m-powered version out for a while, and I didn't find the interface very friendly either. As far as Guitar Rig goes, I've got a copy here somewhere, but I prefer Amplitube 2 for the same reasons you like Acid... I'm used to it's interface, and I find it a lot more straightforward and intuitive... besides, there's not a lot of difference in function as far as I can see... am I missing out on something?

Those Zoom portables look cool, I saw one in Future Music a while back... I also would like to try to integrate more real hardware into my setup, but without ditching the software entirely. What I hate about the PC is its so fucking unstable... there's so many variables that can fuck up and leave you sorting out a problem for days, weeks or months... I was seriously tempted to get an MPC a couple of months ago, and I think I still will, just so I can stay creative when I'm having computer complications.

That sucks about the break-in, but have you now started backing up your stuff? I make multiple back-ups of all my projects every couple of weeks now after having lost hundreds of tracks due to harddrive failure... I really should keep extra copies of the disks elsewhere too, and I'm moving everything to DVD-RAM, which is supposed to last for 30 years or 100,000 rewrites.

So are you in a band? What kind of music do you make?

[Coschi]

Back when i had a pc for recording i'd always stick to logic, smooth, looks nice, you can seriously control the beast and it always runs smooth. I've been out of the daw loop for a long time but when i was doing it main stability factors where processor and chipset. golden combo was asus everyting (mobo, graphics) with intel chipset and intel processor. 2 gig of good ram and you're laughing. again though depends on what you're doing, i used to play around heaps with softsynths and that's pretty heavy on the processor, but if you setup a dual boot (one os only for music - windows xp pro) it always goes pretty smooth.

Like you say, interface, personal preference, pretty much what it comes down to. most of this stuff all does the same thing at the end of the day, that is if you can get it to do it (interface).

yeah the zooms go alright, nothing like taking two guitars and the recorder down to the beach and laying down some tunes

i backup everything necessary, band takes stuff like that (yep i play, experimental/psychedelic rock) and whatever i do that i think is of any value. i used to be pretty perdantic about keeping everything but i'm focusing nowdays more on learning new techniques and improving my playing in general (want to study jazz and be a session player ) still important to hold on to what i do but i don't really do all that much anymore except for the band

yourself?

[chilli]

The main problems I have is with driver and IRQ conflicts and temperamental USB/firewire conncetions for controllers and audio interfaces... it makes me want to ditch the fucker out the window.

[Coschi]

I used to be pretty concerned about that stuff but when i had a solid setup running xp or win2k i never had a problem. keep usb devices to a minimum and manually assign irqs if you really want

or just ditch it and buy a nice standalone unit (fuck behringer)

[chilli]

Someone else told me to try manually assigning IRQ's but I don't really know how to do it... do you know much about it? As far as I've been able to gather, i need to reinstall XP with ACPI disabled, and then somehow assign the IRQ's from the BIOS. Fucked if I know how to do that though.

[No_One]

How do you find Audacity ? For really basic slice & dice (ie chopping annoying silent moments from the end of tracks when burning for compilation) it's great.

Audacities good, it just lacks a few features ReCycle has (but ReCycle won't let me import tracks over 5 mins do it's a trade off).

I am/was recording the vocal track as one file, then the guitar track as one file in Audacity (trying to keep it under 5 mins) then opening that file in ReCycle, adjusting the levels/start points etc. then assigning that track to a sampler in Reason 3.0. I'm after a way to use only one program to get the tracks into Reason at the moment.

Got hold of Mixcraft 3, I've only used it briefly but it seems like it's a winner - still be good to know if there's anything better to use to do it.

Do those IRQ's have anything to do with stutters in some recordings? I find occasionally I'll record and when I play it back the track has stutters/jumps where the processor must have been doing something at the time which made it skip? Is there a way to stop that?

[chilli]

"I am/was recording the vocal track as one file, then the guitar track as one file in Audacity (trying to keep it under 5 mins) then opening that file in ReCycle, adjusting the levels/start points etc. then assigning that track to a sampler in Reason 3.0. I'm after a way to use only one program to get the tracks into Reason at the moment."

Well adjusting levels and trimming the audio can both be done in Audacity can't they? What are the particular features you are using Recycle for that Audacity doesn't have? That's what sucks about reason is that you can't directly record or input audio, and there will always be extra steps involved everytime you want to do something... which is why I use Ableton Live with Reason rewired into it. Ableton doesn't have a dedicated audio editor either though, but you can do a lot more with the audio than you can with Reason... also, you can assign a dedicated audio editor such as Audacity or Soundforge so that when you click edit in Live it opens the editor and updates it in Live when you save.

You could also try FL Studio, which is actually a very fully featured program, despite not being able to quite shake its reputation as a toy... I just can't adjust to the interface though, too dark and clunky, but if I recall correctly the latest version has an audio editor.

The stuttering sounds like it is probably to do with the drivers for your soundcard, more specifically the size of your audio buffer... what soundcard are you using? If it is a professional card, it should have ASIO drivers designed specifically for it, if not, you can download the excellent ASIO4ALL, which is basically a software emulation of ASIO that works very well... if you already have the best drivers for your particular audio interface, then try adjusting the size of the buffer until it sounds good.

Edited May 17, 2007 by IllegalBrain

[komodo]

shiva, how about just dl an ableton live torrent? live with reason as a slave works a treat, should meet all your needs, and you can skip the whole audacity/recycle biz as the beat matching in ableton is excellent. also you don't need to run your tracks in a sampler, you just multitrack them in live.

and yeah like IB suggests, increasing the buffer size on your soundcard reason should solve the stutter, or else it may be the hard drive speed, or memory available. the tradeoff is, as buffer size goes up, latency goes up too, so when you trigger MIDI you experience in and out delays.

Edited May 17, 2007 by komodo

[Coschi]

yep buffer size, but you can't really put up with more than ~10ms latency..

headaches headaches !! very glad i don't have to fumble with this buggery anymore

SUCKERS hehe nah i'm massively limited too bah only limited by creativity

As far as I've been able to gather, i need to reinstall XP with ACPI disabled, and then somehow assign the IRQ's from the BIOS.

that's pretty much exactly what you need to do, good work

this sould have most you need to know

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/mar02/arti...usician0302.asp

anyway man like i said this stuff really isn't that big a deal unless you want to be totally on top of how your system is running (again not a big deal - lose focus - make more music!) from my experience the most significant difference is when i setup a dual boot system.

do this:

say you have two hard disks, a 40GB for windows and stuff and a 300GB for storage

chop up the 300GB as finely as you can, ideally try to get about 5 60GB partitions out of it, or small if possible (the purpose of this is to restrict the physical motion of the magnetic pickup, if you have one 300GB partition a file can easily become fragmented to a point where the pickup need to span the entire disk which takes longer and causes more mech wear on your HDD, if working in a 60GB partition the file can only become fragmented in that range which isn't as bad... make sense?)

partition the 40 into a 15GB (for music) and a 25GB (everything else)

boot with xp cd inside, install normally on the 25GB, install all your games, programs etc...

once finished installing, boot again with the xp cd inside, say new install, new install, etc... this time select the 15GB partition and do it all again. this will be your music os, disable internet, no games, no excess programs, install ms office and your music shit and that should be it

defrag regularly

just runs smooth

[chilli]

"yep buffer size, but you can't really put up with more than ~10ms latency.."

It sounds like Shiva is only having trouble playing stuff back though... before I got a decent audio interface, I used to have this problem and I'd have to change the buffer when I played back more than a few tracks... but ASIO4ALL really saved me back then, it allowed me to get very low latency with playback and midi/audio input... here's the link BTW Shiva.

Thanks for the links Sphinx, I think I'm going to have to try the IRQ stuff out because I have a very annoying probkem with my TriggerFinger, it keeps switching off and I've tried everything else, so I might as well give that a go... mind you, it seems like I'm having problems with a few devices lately (phantom powered mic, firewire interface and usb midi controllers and now my LCD monitor) and I think it might be a wiring issue in our house which really fucks me off.

Yep, I had a dual boot system happening for a while, but ditched it because of inconvenience and I could never seem to get the sizes right, because I only had the inspiron's 60GB HDD to play around with... I think I'll give it another go now that I've got a roomy external HDD.

I totally feel you regarding just making the music, it's what I've been trying to do,but it's so frustrating when you're working on a track and for no reason the audio drops out and the only way to get it back is to restart the computer, or you're banging out some beats on the TriggerFinger and it cuts out and requires the program to be restarted... rruuaaargh. Bring on an MPC and a couple of synths I say... oh wait, I don't have any money.

[Coschi]

"Do those IRQ's have anything to do with stutters in some recordings? I find occasionally I'll record and when I play it back the track has stutters/jumps where the processor must have been doing something at the time which made it skip? Is there a way to stop that?"

Do the playback pops always happen in the same spots?

if you can identify whether you're having a playback or recording issue you can work from there

What happens if during playback you increase the buffer size to max (rediculously high latency) do you still get pops? And in the same places?

you see what im' getting at

if it's only a playback problem (and hence you don't see it with massive buffer size) and the pops aren't actually in the recording then you can just put up with it during recording and then have a big buffer when you bounce so you get a clean mixdown

just a thought..

i could never get a pc recording solution to be 'perfect'

IB, i had a few buggy issues with my firewire also (roland us-122), but only that on power up it would usually have to reinstall drivers automatically (pain in the ass to watch though). i haven't been up with this stuff for ages so i'm not sure where their firewire technology is at. before the roland (i used with my laptop) i had a standard pc with a c-port 10/10 pci thingy which worked way smoother than firewire ever did

definitely give the dual boot another go too (like i said, really can help with stability issues). i'd partition 20gb for audio os and 40gb for the other, 20 is more than enough for all the audio software you'll need and 40 is heaps for all the rest.

i just remembered two more things which helped significantly:

1. if you can be fucked, backup all your multimedia files and format those drives. format them through the shell and set the cluster size by typing 'format /a:size' where a is 64K for multimedia storage (what contains your audio and video files) - this may help in preventing fragmentation. format os drives as normal through xp setup.

2. in your audio os windows, goto system properties -> advanced -> performance settings -> advanced -> Change Virtual Memory -> select the audio os drive -> custom size -> Min: 2048, Max: 2048

This holds your virtual memory size at 2GB and never resizes it, again this prevents defragmentation on your os drive and shit runs quicker and better

or just get your mpc