timaeus222

It's both.

Awesome, thanks!

That's a sign of smoothness of playback. It just means that the playback is less laggy when using ASIO4All, but it does require that you have lots of RAM or else you'll get constant, annoying hiccups in the playback. In contrast, the Primary Sound Driver plays the sound back at a less smooth playback, but instead does NOT hiccup at all, and actually just adds some distortion to the sound as evidence of lagging. Neither situation actually impacts the rendered audio file.

Sorry for being persistent like this, but I think you accidentally missed my post too. I suppose I could have emailed you, but then we wouldn't all get the answer at the same time!

The most efficient way is to buy, literally, the "best bang for your buck". Best audio quality out of the box for the lowest price. I wouldn't say I know which microphones are best nor do I have the "best" microphone, but I can say that I have a solid idea of how it should sound based on analyzing music that I strongly believe is well-made. I think you just want a microphone for gaming LPs and such, but that's open for interpretation, and I'll assume that you're a music producer so this post helps more than just you. A good microphone setup is one that minimizes background noise through the installment of acoustic diffusers, absorber panels, and bass traps around your room. Acoustic diffusers, the way I interpret them, reduce messy room ambience, but doesn't eliminate them completely, and can make a small room sound bigger by, well, diffusing the sound. Absorber panels reduce the early reflections in the natural room reverb so that the sound is as dry as possible---as reverb-free as possible. Bass traps basically make the bass response of the room more accurate than without them, although I believe these are more often used when you actually have sub woofers and speakers with nice bass. A common type of microphone uses USB to connect to your computer, and as a result, you can use recording software compatible with your DAW, FL Studio, to record what the microphone picks up. Oftentimes, the microphone will preferably be set up to pick up sounds in your room, but not what's playing internally in your computer. What that means is, in a signal chain that goes input->microphone->computer, oftentimes you don't want the input to be from your software, such as VSTi's and sample libraries, as it wasn't your initial intention. Personally, I've somehow set it up to pick up both and it was what I wanted so I kept it, but that's just me so far. With the hardware you're using now, there isn't something "wrong" that you know of because you haven't encountered this before. Anything that can be "wrong" in your case merely pertains to whether or not you've taken the preferable precautions to fine-tune your room ambience and reduce overall background noise. It doesn't really count if you haven't even figured out how to set up the microphone or your room yet to say, "you're using your microphone incorrectly!" since you wouldn't be aware of the "mistakes" you can make. So then, the best sound possible would be just your voice, dry, without background noise, covering as full a frequency spectrum as possible, with as flat a curve as possible on the frequency response, and a wide but not too wide stereo image. Stereo image comes with what type of microphone you use and its pickup wideness or narrowness. You'll have a general idea if you read its manual, and then you may be able to return it if you think it's not right for you. Well, not necessarily. There is music from people in this community that I believe, without any reservations, is better-produced than in mainstream music in both its vocals and its instrumentation/instrumental area. A good example is zircon's Identity Sequence album being better-produced than most other mainstream artists (arguably, Pentatonix has a fantastic producer). When you listen to a woman sing, and you hear the intimacy/closeness of her voice (lots of treble), then it's reasonable to say that both the microphone was good "enough" in quality and the production was good "enough" in quality. If the microphone quality was bad, then the production would have to be exceptional to account for that and match decent production with good microphone quality. In the case of the "average" person, they may have to rely on great equipment rather than their production abilities, as the scenario is the average person. It's somewhat uncommon to find a person with good production abilities at that particular moment, which is why mixing and mastering jobs exist---to capitalize on that circumstance.In other words, it's a combination of either bad equipment and exceptional production quality, decent equipment and great production quality, or great equipment and good/great production quality. No one starts perfect, so you could either wait a long time before you get a microphone, or get a really good one from a smart recommendation that you trust. Absolutely. The microphone itself determines what frequency response you'll get (the accuracy of the sound to what you think you should be hearing). Like mentioned above, the production quality will have to make up for any flaws in your microphone, so if you're confident in your production abilities, feel free to get a microphone of okay quality if you don't have the money (or save up). If you're not confident in your production quality, try to save up money for the best recommended microphone at the best price. The better microphone is NOT always the more expensive one. I can analogize to headphones and how my $350 headphones have a flatter and more accurate frequency response than most $1500 headphones. Analogizing to restaurants, it seems like lots of stuff is priced based on how much it cost to make them, so even the most expensive headphones can be worse than a pair of headphones costing half as much, and the same can probably be said for microphones. I'd imagine the Sound Recorder functions in exactly the same way as the recording software I mentioned earlier, except it doesn't require a DAW and you'd, like you guessed, import the resultant audio file into FL Studio. Another example is Silver Spike's TapeIt, which is something you can load into FL Studio and then use to ONLY record what's in FL or any other DAW (but somehow I've made it so it records both what's in the DAW and what I say into the microphone, which is great for tutorials). TapeIt does NOT pick up music you play in a media player such as WinAmp (this needs to not be discontinued!). FL Studio does NOT improve the sound quality that comes into it by itself with any "special sound enhancements", nor would I personally recommend leaving the Windows default "sound enhancements" turned on in the Sound panel. It disrupts and alters the sound that comes into your ears. FL only hosts a sound recording software that requires a DAW in the first place. It's all about how good or bad the sound quality is coming into the host, and you can just EQ the result later. Some of those are good, some are not. It's hard to tell without having gotten better at it, so it takes a little direction to point people towards the more accurate and consistent tutorials. The people that say their tutorials are "sure-fire" are not considering that they are teaching an arbitrary art, or they're making a joke video with a satirical/sardonic purpose. Everyone perceives the results of production qualities differently simply because not everyone has the same audio equipment on hand as the person who made the video in the first place. A better way to really present those tutorials is in a humble way, and those are the best, in my opinion, because they are showing a person who isn't banking on himself/herself being right all the time.Personally, I'd recommend Sound On Sound magazine (which can be read online, of course), as I've actually found it, although very technical, very useful and correct at the same time. There's articles on many (but not all) topics. Off the top of my head, there's reverb, delay, EQ, FM synthesis, headphones vs. speakers, synthesizers, and so on. Specifically, what that means is to watch your signal chain---the setup of how your sound is processed and in what order. For example, if it's the case that the input goes into the microphone and the input is your software while the output is your speakers, your speakers will play sound that will layer onto the sound that your computer already made once, some milliseconds after the initial moment the sound is made by the computer software, which means the sound that you gave with your mouth is good to go, but you hear a doubled signal on audio that originated from your computer software (VSTi's, sample libraries, etc.) and it sounds like it's echoing. Hence, Acoustic Echo Cancellation must be a precautionary measure that is supposed to eliminate the possibility of your speakers or any audible output to go back into the microphone and be re-inputted. How this could happen is that you start the voice recording and you say something while you twiddle around on a VST and make sounds, and your voice is recorded once, while what you hear in your computer plays as normal on your speakers, and whatever sound from your speakers reaching your microphone is taken in and recorded on top of what you hear yourself playing on your VST. Your final recorded result would be you talking while quiet, slightly distant sounds from your computer are also playing, but some milliseconds late.Personally, I turn off all Windows "sound enhancements" to ensure that every "wrong" thing that occurs is all my fault, and that makes it much easier to figure out what went wrong. Otherwise it's just covering up your mistakes, rather than facing them head-on. It's like solving a math problem in the wrong way and getting the right answer by accident. Just like how you get credit for the right answer but not the wrong work, you would get a good audio result but not learn the behind-the-scenes of what actually went wrong.

This is a good start. The first thing that sticks out to me is the fake guitar. FL Slayer? Also, the arrangement is quite close to the original. Even the bass part is very similar.

Random signatures: Super old drawings:

Man, you should extend this. This sounds awesome!

You can use a program like TapeIt to record what's playing in FL. There really shouldn't be a difference in sound, and I've never heard even the slightest bit of difference at all, so something else is up. Maybe your sound output is using a driver that has certain aspects of the Windows built-in sound "enhancement" enabled. Make sure all of those are off on all drivers, not just the one you're using. Scroll down, too. There are more than 4.

Oh yeah, this source tune. The biggest issue with production that I'm noticing here is in the drums. The guitars, bass, and other non-percussive elements are mixed well. The drums are buried, though. If you listen closely, the snare and kick are barely audible. The toms are better, but can be even better. Maybe this could help you. Although the production with the non-drums is good and the arrangement doesn't feel repetitive, it could use some sort of breakdown section to bring down the energy as a change of pace. Right now it's just high energy, and that's it. The dynamic curve is pretty flat, and that gets tiring to the ears.

Man, that third demo is inspiring a new song from me.

You can get a custom avatar if you ask Larry and you're a posted remixer, but it would have to be 32x32, GIF, and good quality.

Nice, even though the sax is fake, it actually is done really well and fits in context.

So if sometime in the future I were to submit an album that acts as the original soundtrack to my own novel/book, could there be any options to include the novel as merch, or something to that effect?

Awesome arrangement man.

That was pretty darn cool, actually. This could have passed in 2004 or so.

Here are the lines that I couldn't understand clearly enough, because they need their transients (fricatives and sibilances) to be more audible: 0:17 - 0:21 0:24 - 0:28 The other vocal parts sound most like a speech synthesizer since they're more exposed than at those two timestamps. There IS that buzzy tonal character of a vocoder, but it's not a real recorded voice. sounds more like real vocals, purposefully spoken robotically to make it sound more robotic but not unnatural, and chopped to fit the tempo where necessary. Robotic is fine, but it should still sound like a human when you take out the vocoder.Other than that, great dubstep work. Likable wobbles here, and great drums.

Haha, that's me being nice, and giving the benefit of the doubt. Everyone starts somewhere, and this wasn't that far below where I was in my first few months. I used fake guitars too, but I actually amped expressive synths with Guitar Rig instead, and even fooled a judge somehow.

A little iffy here and there with the mixing and orchestral articulations, but other than that, pretty fun track. Kind of a primal feel and sounds a bit like Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure.

Woah, loud. Great performance, could be less bright overall. Dave's also right about the weird diad dissonance at 3:34. Oh well.

I figured I'd polish up my Round 2 mix. It's done, and in the sub queue since August. Funky Moles & Trashy Ducks Moar bass, cleaner treble, clearer stereo image, more variations/fills, fixed levels, and upgraded strings.

Yeah, the drums sound like East West Stormdrums mangled with distortion and a lot of compression.

Yeah, but at the same time, I've heard people say that Gen 3 has the "best" music.

This is actually quite good man. Arrangement-wise, this is really well done for the most part. The first and foremost arrangement issue is what sounds like a sampling of the source tune until 0:14. Minimal sampling is encouraged by the Submission Standards and Guidelines, so that intro could be reworked, just in case of that being a large enough issue when combined with the others, which, right now, it is. The second two of three arrangement things I have the most issues with are the leading at 1:47 and the piano part at 2:04. Like Gario heard (he said it in a different way), the lead is too exposed compared to the previous lead. It needs to fall back in line with the track's overall volume and have some reverb to make it fit into the soundscape. It also seems more basic in its melodic flow than the previous lead, which was more awesome. This sticks out because there isn't much else consciously accompanying. It takes a while to realize there's more than the lead and the more obviously audible elements, and a more spacious soundscape would help in that regard. The 2:04 piano part sticks out as oddly positioned and dry. You've had all these electronic elements, and suddenly this sequenced, mechanical piano part comes in, just like that. Organic instruments in electronic music is fine, but it's the only organic instrument here, so it would be important to make sure it isn't neglected in such a way that it's overshadowed in competency, as it's a large portion of the arrangement. Sure, the piano partwriting sounds stiff and robotic, but to me it just sticks out regardless, due to the mixing exposing it as a sort of low-mids "solo" panned widely for an unknown reason. The abrupt ending by itself wouldn't be enough for a rejection, but fixing it wouldn't be a bad idea. As for the production, it's not bad. The main thing to work on here, with this being Drum & Bass, is the drum programming and the loudness. This is quiet compared to most tracks on OCR, and like Gario said, it'll feel awkward if this is played in between louder tracks. I know it's hard to hear sometimes when something is loud or not because you're not accustomed to paying attention to that, but that's a topic that needs to come up sometime. The drums have basic timbres that sound relatively unprocessed, and would benefit from some layering to get the "perfect" timbres, overdrive/distortion to scale up the harmonics (make something sound stronger) and compression to "glue" the drums to a "ceiling" (the 0dB ceiling) and maximize the punchiness. Some references to loudness, assuming the production is good enough already: , almost too quiet until 0:30, even for orchestral. May be a borderline NO/YES, but a YES would probably have a pretty darn fantastic arrangement. Medium --- Could be louder but is not problematic, and if the VGM arrangement is terrific, this is a YES on the judges panel. Medium Loud --- normal/good enough volume for OCR, for any powerful non-electronic genre, and if the VGM arrangement is great, this is a strong YES or a Direct Post.Loud (Example 1, Example 2) --- great volume for OCR, and approximately where Drum & Bass lies in the non-VGM world. With a great VGM arrangement, this will likely be a Direct Post. Example 2 is ambient just so it's clear that the genre has nothing to do with the loudness. LOUD, but still good to go, and typical of hardcore electronic music! With a great VGM arrangement, this is an easy Direct Post. TOO LOUD ( , Example 2 [The MP3 is louder than the YouTube video]) --- shouldn't listen to this kind of loudness too often to keep your ears safe for music production. This kind of loudness may be overlooked sometimes by a judge and made into a YES on the judges panel or a Direct Post because it's solid *enough* and not clipping. No offense intended. You're at the "Medium" loudness, the way I hear things.

Nice, I like the little ear candy parts.