There’s a lot of chatter about Reaper on the the tubes these days.
(more…)

I’ve used Kontakt since it was first released. Literally. I happened to be in GC on the day when the boxes first arrived and the sales clerk tempted me with an offer I didn’t want to pass up. Plus, I needed a sampler, and it looked so sexy. It’s taken NI a while to get the software as functional as it now is; for me at least, it was pretty baffling at first. But getting in on it so early I’ve been able to grow with the software, both in terms of understanding sampling and understanding the workflow. That said, I still have a long way to go before I’ll be really able to exploit it’s potential.
(more…)

I can’t find a price for this, but it is so slick it is beyond cool. I most certainly can’t afford it.

Since the digital lofi studio is primarily software based, I have always been interested in control surface integration. Fortunately, this is another area that Cakewalk have never really dragged their feet on, hopping on protocols and technology seemingly as soon as their introduced. When I was first setting up digital lofi, I purchased the Event EZbus, which promised to cover all my needs. It has ended up as my digital mixer. As a control surface, eh. Since the faders aren’t motorized, switching between the EZbus as a control surface and digital mixer requires the user to be a lot more aware than I usually am in any tracking/mixing situation, and relies on the LCD display to provide the visual feedback. As an audio interface for my DAW - well, there’s not too much point in dwelling on that. Suffice to say that the drivers never made it beyond the second or third revision, USB (1.0) is a terrible method of piping multiple audio streams, and it never really worked with Sonar. (As a digital mixer, although I have no real point of comparison, it suits my needs very well. The sound is clean, it offers great internal and external routing, and instant recalls of recording profiles are very useful. I would love to know some of the nitty-gritty of the specs: who made the preamps, the A/D converters, et cetera.)

Don’t get me wrong, I love the Mackie Control. But this MC is a thing of design beauty. And that you can set it up with any software application (DAW & non-DAW related) is truly genius.

Technorati Profile

I admit it, I like gear porn. I love seeing what cool things people are doing with music tech (well, technology in general, but trying to stay on topic here). Of course I can’t afford most of it, or it doesn’t have any use for me, but it’s interesting to see how people are making use of new code and advances in hardware (as well as globalization to produce amazingly quality budget gear, but, again, that’s another discussion).

The above link takes you to the zZounds.com coverage of summer NAMM.

The Ableton users just get more smug all the time, as well they should. Though it’s not a cheap proposition, the upgrades keep flying fast and thick. A couple of the guys I worked with in the web department at my last job were into Live. In fact just yesterday I was talking to Jon and saying that I didn’t think Ableton’s big announcement was going to be version 6. Apparently I was talking out of my ass.

But that’s not why I’m posting this. Halfway down the page is a link for the Alesis ControlPad. Where was this thing 2 years ago? I have the M-Audio TriggerFinger, but, not coming from the DJ paradigm tapping out beats is something I still really haven’t gotten the hang of. (Still really useful for a variety of tasks.) For some reason I think that using sticks is going to help me. I hope I get some paying work soon so that I can get this one when it hits the market.

  From Matrix Synth

And I used to get pissed when people would take albums from my college radio station.

As most people who care about such things are probably aware, Native Instruments is having an anniversary. Which means, for us, special offers. If you use Native Instruments software, and you’ve been waiting for a chance to catch a few deals to round out your collection now’s probably your best bet. (How good these deals are, depends I suppose on your perspective.)

I’ve picked up the download B42; it was my first commercial soft synth and I have a soft spot for it. Do I need it? Well, I didn’t really 99 dollars need it, but there are some improvements I’m glad to have, and I’m looking forward to using this more.

Grabbed an Absynth sound bank. This synth still leaves me a little baffled. I first purchased it at, again, GC (really, I don’t buy that much there except when they’re blowing shit out) shortly after ver. 3 was released and I was able to pick up the boxed copy for a song and got the upgrade for free. (Same with GuitarRig.) I do hope to learn this better, and I hope to deconstruct this bank as needed. (I am, also, truth be told, a bit of a preset whore. But I am continually trying to get beyond that.)

And, finally, via post, I will be receiving the Kontakt 2 Tutorial DVD and Kontakt Experience Banks, which is what I’m most excited about. I am planning on really learning Kontakt.

Trying to control your VST (effects) from an external hardware controller?

As near as I can tell there are two ways to approach this. One is more cumbersome than the other.

Probably the easiest way is to open the Track Inspector and fully enable the FX view. This will expose 4 widgets that can then be assigned to the to various bits of the VST effect (e.g. cutoff filter, LFO speed, et cetera). Witness:

(One look at this screen cap and one can see instantly why this method is less than perfect.)

Anway, after you scroll to your desired control, you can then right-click on the widget and “Assign Remote Control” as such:

The other method has only worked sporadically for me, and thus is more of a headache.

First \”Rescan your existing plugins.\” When you get to the configuration screen, scroll to the desired VST effect, and bring up its property box, check \”configure as a synth\” . When you open projects that already contain, say, CamelSpace it will still show up as a VST effect. But if you delete and re-add it from the VST from the Soft Synths menu then you can use MIDI. Create a control track, and route that to the CamelSpace and Bob’s your uncle. (Well, Bob’s your very grouchy uncle who owes you money but is hard to track down.)

For either method this is where track templates come in very handy; I recommend a well organized Track Templates folder.

Before diving in on the code with this site, I did a little experiment with a blogger.com account. But since the blog was always more about learning the software than what ever I was muttering on about, this was more of a pain than not to keep up.

Anyway, as I wrestle with the code and CSS, I imported those old posts (again, more just as proof-of-concept). Not much of interest, they’re mostly just abridged versions of things I posted on audio geek boards.

But, hey, it worked.

We’re at that time in the software development cycle: new versions coming, users thinking of what the next upgrade cycle might contain. (Though, we’re pretty much constantly in that stage of the development cycle.) I’d wager it’s pretty much the same with all the big squencing/playing/composition environments; log on to, say, the Ableton user forum and you’ll find lengthy speculation as to what tweaks, improvements and gimcracks the next point-version might contain.

For me, obviously, Sonar.

I by and large stay out of those types of threads, mostly because I’m so not a platform/sequencer zealot (whatever it takes for you to get the job done, hey, there you go); likewise, I stay out of the “Features I’d like” threads on the CW forums. I am very satisfied with my early investment in the Sonar package; I’m always pleased and surprised with Cakewalk’s upgrades.

That said, there is a lot of merit to the chatter of users.

I’m definitely coming up against a problem with VST effects not being easily exposed to MIDI imput from a hardware controller. There are workarounds but they aren’t necessarily, uh, intuative. I’ve spent a few nights wrapping my head around getting the 914 Fixed Frequency Filter, CamelSpace and the Ohm effects to respond to my TriggerFinger MIDI messages. I’m a big proponent of the current SynthRack version of handling softsynths, with the seperate tracks for control and output (I love routing my MIDI tracks through different instruments/drums without having to insert new tracks for each of them). But to control VST effects with a hardware controller does require a rather ungainly workaround. There needs to be a way to make audio tracks open directly to MIDI input. If they can implement this without chucking the current workflow I will be thrilled.

I’m not speaking about “native” VST support. Though you hear it less these days, people do still try to whip out that dead horse in regard to the VST adapter thing. This whole argument that Sonar needs “native” VST support is such a logical fallacy (my new favorite pseudo-meaningful phrase to throw around in forum postings). As the Cake bakers are able to point out, there is, for all intents and purposes, no difference in how Sonar treats its plugins compared to, say, ACID or Tracktion. (Well, other than the VST effect kludge I mentioned earlier, but this is a problem in Sonar not with the VST adapter; and I have no idea how other sequencers handle this.) As I’ve maintained for a long time, keeping it as a separate app allows code updates to be much more quick on there feet, allows me to use my VSTs with Project5 and SoundForge 7 without seperate configurations, and lets me configure my plugins when I want not when the application thinks I should. And Sonar has made great progress in integrating the plugin tools into the application.

That said, there is some way to go. Renaming and organizing plugins? Oy! I’ve given up and have resigned myself to scrolling through my absurdly long list of VST/VSTi plugins. Track templates go a some of way to alleviating some the headache involved in this, but it falls short as a complete solution.

I’m also onboard for improved Video tools. I’m trying to do some music for a friend’s film and I’m having a bitch of a time getting it all to work. Right now I have so many video conversion apps, rippers, codecs kicking around I wonder what exactly the solution is.

Granted, this is not entirely the problem of Cakewalk; with the current goldrush for the dominant video paradigm, and a lot of competing tech, it’s hard to know what is the best format for your own work. However, I’m not looking for a full-on video editor, which is the reason I’m not inclined to buy Premier or Vegas (also, frankly, I don’t have the resources). But some way to better manage video content, use multiple clips, or even rip from DVD would be just excellent.

Other areas I see as ripe for improvement:

• color choice for project markers; I need multiple colors to easily identify them.
• MIDI FX - we’ve got MIDI out from softsynths now, so the field for this is wide open. Grab some of the best ideas from Project5 and give us a really boss arp/sequencer/harmonizer/chord generator. Come on, you know you can do it.
• Better audio editing/dedicated editor - okay, I’ll pile on this bandwagon: the sooner I can ditch SoundForge the happier I’ll be (I refuse to give Sony any more of my money). Spectrum analysis? Sample level copy/delete/paste? Yes please.
• Some of these configuration dialog schemes need to be re-skinned or at least re-sizable. I’m looking at you key-bindings and colour scheme.
• Bus/send templates. It’s so obvious I’m surprised it’s not in the current version (though, admittedly, I know nothing about coding something as complex as Sonar). But since I’m all but forced to scroll through the aforementioned absurdly long plugin list just to get to my Voxengo plugs, having to do this every time I create a new bus or send is annoying.

I’m sure there’s more I’m missing, but this post is already ripped off from something I posted on KvR, and too long by half.