Moseph

Ah, I see. Another question, then: is the power to the audio interface provided by the USB connection or does the interface have its own AC adapter that plugs into the wall? My understanding is that USB-powered interfaces tend to have more of a problem with noise since the current supplied by USB is less consistent than you get from an AC adapter. I could see how having a bad connection from wall to computer -- especially on laptops, which aren't always great at powering USB devices in the first place -- could perhaps make any USB power issues even worse. EDIT: If the interface is USB-powered, you could maybe try getting a powered USB hub that has its own AC adapter and running the interface from that so that the interface isn't getting its power supply through the computer's power cord.

Is your guitar pickup a double-coil humbucker (which is less prone to noise) or is it single-coil (which is more prone to noise)? Have you tried plugging into a different outlet? Alternately, have you priced a new laptop battery? Knowing laptop batteries, it would probably be more expensive that the ground hum reducing thing, but it might be worth checking. Additionally, are you talking about using the ground hum reducer on the laptop plug or on a guitar amp plug? If on the laptop, is your laptop plug three-pronged? If it doesn't have that third grounding prong to begin with, the ground hum reducer is probably not going to do anything. Even if it is a grounded plug, the hum reducer may still not do anything because it may not be a laptop grounding issue -- it may just be electrical interference from the AC adapter that's messing with the guitar like you sometimes get from CRT monitors and florescent lights. There's a shielding thing you can do to the interior electronics-containing cavities of the guitar that's supposed to reduce this sort of interference, especially for single-coil pickups. If you're comfortable taking your guitar apart, you can get kits for this for ~$20 (e.g http://www.stewmac.com/shopby/product/3789).

Speaking of this, I often link a low-pass filter to my expression/volume automation so that when a sound gets softer, it also gets more muffled. (Specifically, I do this with VSL instruments because the VSL sampler makes it really easy to set up.) Meteo, I'm not sure whether this addresses your issue or not, but the thing I'm hearing in the mixes you linked that makes the instruments sound -- I don't know, too substantial -- is I think more a stereo imaging/illusion of depth thing than a transient/ADSR thing. It doesn't sound like the instruments are in a real acoustic space; it sounds like there're all the same distance from me and all playing through guitar amps that are pointed at me. My thought on this is to maybe try playing with stereo spread plugins and carefully controlling the stereo spread on different frequency ranges (e.g. bass stereo could be less wide than the treble range). I'd really have to play around with it myself to see for sure what would work.

Does this sound more like what you're going for? Exploring the Temporal Lobe With a Bomb in My Mouth (Edit) If people are willing to do it (and I would be, at least), I think the most helpful thing for you would be if you could post the audio stems for one of your tracks, let us mix them ourselves, and if any of our mixes seem to solve the problems you've been having, we can show you exactly what we did in the mix.

Can't listen to the samples since I'm on a Kindle right now, but I've successfully used multiband compression to help deal with samples sticking out. I'd need to check the project to be certain, but I think what I was doing was compressing and boosting the sampled instrument's treble and bass while the midrange was left alone or maybe even expanded a bit. The idea is to make the frequency ranges scale at different rates when the overall level changes so that you get a little bit messier of a sound that doesn't stick out so much.

Does other music that you didn't make sound okay in the back seat? Do you have a sub in the trunk?

Ended up getting Komplete 8 Ultimate, but it hasn't arrived yet. I think it's supposed to show up tomorrow. I'll post my impression of Session Strings Pro once I've installed and have had a chance to try it out.

The version you have is probably Kontakt Player, which would mean that you can't use libraries unless they specifically say they work with the Player version. Most don't.

Dunno if the mix you're doing justifies it, but another possible option would be a melodica, which sounds sort of similar to an accordion but is easier to emulate with samples. The Kontakt library has a passable one; I don't know if whatever version of the library you have has got it. EDIT: You probably don't have it, since the Kontakt library I'm looking at also has an accordion.

If you're not happy with a standard level fade, you could try automating a downward sweep with a low-pass filter.

I tried the demo a while ago and liked it but as far as I could tell you couldn't have more than two CC lanes open in the MIDI editor at a time which limits its usefulness for me.

Man, promised myself that I wasn't going to buy anything since I just impulse bought Komplete 8 Ultimate on sale, but just had to buy the Monkey Island SE bundle for $3.74. It's been probably 17 or 18 years since I've played Monkey Island 2.

Leaning toward Ultimate, but I've made a new thread on Session Strings.

Given the ongoing NI upgrade/crossgrade sale, I've decided to crossgrade from Kontakt either to Komplete 8 or to Komplete 8 Ultimate. One of the things that's in Ultimate that isn't in the base Komplete that most interests me is Session Strings Pro. I'm interested in Session Strings Pro both because I don't yet have a small ensemble strings library and because I hope it may allow me, when layered with my go-to large ensemble strings (VSL SE+), to do a more convincing large ensemble divisi. I plan at some point in the future to get a strings library (probably LASS) that has actual divisi capabilities, but if Session Strings works well enough in this regard I might be able to forego or delay that purchase. Does anyone have opinions on Session Strings Pro? I'm leaning toward the Ultimate bundle since I think the extra stuff is worth the additional money (the crossgrade is $200 base vs. $400 Ultimate for me), but any info especially on Session Strings Pro to sway me one way or the other would be appreciated.

Fuuuuuu... Crossgrade to Komplete 8 for $200? I guess I'm buying this instead of all those Steam games. Question: has anyone used Session Strings Pro, and is it any good?

Check Options > Preferences > Audio > Device > ASIO Driver to make sure that Reaper is set to use your interface rather than the soundcard. You don't have to output MIDI data to any of your devices to make Reaper produce sound. Reaper can deal with MIDI data and produce sound internally. Reaper interprets MIDI data as sound by passing the MIDI data to a virtual instrument (a VST in most cases) which produces a sound that is played through the interface. In other words, the VST does the work that you're used to having the MS Synth on the soundcard do. Reaper doesn't have much in the way of included VST instruments (which is fine since there are a lot available online), but it does have the ReaSynth VST which will at least let you make sure everything is working properly. To add ReaSynth, select Insert > Virtual instrument on new track. An instrument selection window will come up. Click the Cockos listing, select VSTi: ReaSynth (Cockos), and hit OK. The FX chain window for your new track will appear. This is where all of the VSTs associated with the track live. You can close this window (if you need to reopen it, hit the FX button on the track). Now open the Virtual MIDI Keyboard (View > Virtual MIDI Keyboard) to see if it works. Hitting keys on the keyboard generates MIDI data which is fed to ReaSynth, and ReaSynth's audio output is played through the interface. If everything is set up correctly, you should hear a tone when you click on the virtual keyboard.

Make it absolutely clear to them that they need to give you a locked picture (i.e. the timings of the cuts are finalized) before you can do anything substantial, and once they've given you the locked picture, they must not change any timings. If they screw around with the timings and give you a new version after they've already had you working on something else, there's a good chance that you'll have to rewrite everything to make it fit to the new timings. You do not want this to happen. If these people are experienced filmmakers they shouldn't need to have this pointed out to them, but since they're hiring extras to write their music for them, you can't assume anything about their level of experience. Definitely make sure they understand that once they've given you the locked picture to work with, they are not to change it.

Here's what my own testing in Sonar reveals. One instance of Kontakt with two large patches: Kontakt says the RAM commitment for the samples is 1.1 GB. The Sonar process (which is Sonar plus Kontakt plus samples) uses, according to Task Manager, 1.46 GB of RAM. Two instances, each with one large patch (same patches as before): Same RAM commitment for the samples, but Task Manager says Sonar is using 1.52 GB of RAM. So using an additional instance of Kontakt has an overhead of 0.06 GB (60 MB). It does save some RAM to load all your samples in one instance of Kontakt (probably on the order of 180 MB if you drop from four to one), but the bulk of your RAM commitment is from the samples themselves.

Update is if you have a previous version of Kontakt and want to update to version 5. If you don't have any version of Kontakt, you need the complete option. As far as whether Kontakt is worth it: I don't think it's really worth buying for the included sample libraries; buy it if you're interested in using third party libraries that need Kontakt as a host (for example, stuff from 8Dio, Soniccouture, Soundiron, and Impact Soundworks).

http://www.audiomidi.com/dp/B008HUGDBU FXpansion Etch filter for $20. Youtube demo video .

http://slork.stanford.edu/

Slight elaboration on your harp section: harp glissandi don't need to be strictly diatonic. The accidentals are set using the seven pedals at the base of the harp. Each pedal corresponds with one of the seven C major pitches and can sharp or flat its pitch. It's possible to set up nondiatonic scales by configuring the pedals nondiatonically: for example, C D-flat E F-flat G-sharp A B-flat.

With careful wave editing, you can probably transparently fix the peak. There's no way for me to say how well any of these will work without actually attempting them, but here are some approaches you might try: Find a similar peak and splice it in to replace the loud peak. Select the peak, perform a gain reduction, and blend it back into the rest of the sound. Use a compressor only on the peak (if you have a compressor that can do destructive editing you can use that; otherwise, automate the compressor's bypass so the plugin is only active for the peak). Automate a decrease in the track's gain to compensate for the peak. If all else fails, rerecord only the section that peaks and then splice it in to replace the bad part. There's no reason you need to redo the entire 16 minutes. In fact, this should probably your preferred solution.

I'd start by seeing if you can fix the latency so you can monitor from the computer rather than patching together a signal routing solution. Are you using ASIO drivers?

Some of the Choirs demos also sound awful, but that's still a good library that can be used much better than it is in the demos. Don't know if that's the case for MOR, though, since I haven't used it.