zircon

Except which system got far more sales on launch and afterward? 360 or Wii? Nintendo, at least until the 3DS, has always been known for low prices. They've seen with the underwhelming 3DS launch what happens when you come out the gate with too high of a price tag. The $250 Wii made them absurd amounts of profit and market share, I just don't think they are going to piss away their share and price hundreds above that. If they do then they're in for another bad launch, just like the 3DS. Not saying it's impossible that they'll price high, just that I think it's improbable. Do you really think the PS3 was priced high because Sony "believed their own hype"? Because http://kotaku.com/5018899/sony-lost-over-3-billion-to-ps3-cost-pricing-imbalance Even WITH those higher prices they were still losing absurd amounts of money because of the production costs. Specifically: http://www.megagames.com/news/sony-not-losing-money-playstation-3-hardware-any-more It wasn't until 10 months ago that they STOPPED losing money, and it was estimated they were eating a loss of $240-300 per console. So no, I'm pretty sure their high price was 100% due to the fact that they didn't want to lose billions of dollars more on what they already were going to lose.

It would be unreasonable for someone to say they can just steal Magic: The Gathering cards because they're not professional MTG players. Obviously, the vast majority of people who create music are not pros. But the companies that make musical instruments would not be able to sustain their businesses if it were not for this large hobbyist market. Take it from me - Impact Soundworks sells a lot of libraries to hobbyists as well as pros. There is such an abundance of excellent free and low-cost software that there really isn't any justification for pirating it.

I bought my 360 arcade for like 300 in 2007, so no I don't think most consumers would go for a 400+ console out the gate. Ps3 and 360 prices came down fast.

I'm going to guess no less than $299, no more than $399. Probably $299 or $349. Anything more than that is not going to fly with most consumers.

Go here: http://zirconmusic.com/tutorials/videos/ And watch the 4-part series on "Making Music: From Hobby to Profession." It will help

When did he say anything about perceived volume? You've made your point Brandon, stop posting the same thing. Consider this a warning. Anyway, it depends on what format your music collection is in. If you're dealing with lossless stuff, you might check out Goldwave. You can do batch processing and normalize everything to the same peak volume. Now, this isn't going to affect perceived volume if everything is already at peak 0dB, but it's a start. For MP3s, check out MP3gain: http://mp3gain.sourceforge.net/ Although I've heard iTunes does a good job of this too.

I highly doubt it would have been possible for the Wii to have had the power of the WiiU in 2006. 5 year is a lifetime when it comes to component prices. The strategy of the Wii was quite intentional: forsake power and fancy graphics for a novel way of playing, thus targeting large swaths of new customers who weren't gamers before and keeping prices very low. It worked wonderfully.

There's no right way to do things when it comes to songwriting or composition. It doesn't matter what professional X does or doesn't do. For example, some people prefer to sketch songs out first and then fill out the parts over time. Other people (like me) write songs in a linear manner. When I finish the last note of the song, the whole thing is 99% done on the production end too.

Yeah, they would have gotten more ports, maybe. But why didn't they get good 3rd party exclusives? Because the Wii was hard to develop for, and that's because of Nintendo, who has openly admitted they've had a bad track record of working with 3rd party devs. Every indie game developer I know that has ever tried has said Nintendo has the worst process by far. They made it extremely difficult to get dev kits, get approval, etc. If they were easier to work with, we might have seen some better 3rd party games. Anyway, here's a report from someone who played quite a bit of the WiiU at E3. He reports that the handheld screen runs at roughly 480p (by his estimation) and weighs about as much as a DS/PSP, while the console is "noticeably" more powerful than a 360/PS3. http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/hub8f/alright_wii_u_haters_ive_played_the_shit_out_of/

Not sure that's going to be relevant. The Wii was about the same power as the GC, so there wasn't an improvement gen to gen. Whereas the WiiU actually seems to have considerably more power under the hood. Once you get to a certain point, the amount of extra power doesn't really matter. PS3 has better specs than 360, but that didn't make a difference in the end. It's hard to imagine MS/Sony's next consoles being an even bigger leap from current gen. Also the problem with the Wii (if there was one) wasn't the power, it was the lack of the third-party developer support. The Wii had enough power for excellent games. It's the same or better than a PS2, and there are plenty of amazing PS2 games, so the problem really wasn't the hardware at all.

Better processor, more memory, dual analogs, bigger/better screen, more storage (afaik), more powerful graphics processor, reverse touchpad, multitouch screen (again, afaik 3DS is not multitouch), cross-connect with PS3 for cloud saving and multiplayer and so forth. Not to mention PSN, all jokes aside, is a much better unified platform for online play than whatever was in the DS. Even with 3DS, Nintendo still misses the mark with online play.

Why do you need 3G on your gaming handheld? PSP, DS and 3DS don't have 3G, but all of a sudden you can't even get the normal wifi version of the Vita because the 3G version is on AT&T? That's... stupid. You don't need to be connected to the internet at all times. If you're away from a wifi hotspot long enough that you need internet access, you don't have enough games on your handheld. (Or you don't have a phone capable of creating a mobile hotspot.) The ball is in Nintendo's court now. I have a DS and PSP, and while I prefer the latter marginally more, I was expecting the 3DS to kill the NGP. But the Vita being lower priced and having way more interesting features across the board has me leaning the other way.

Don't get any closed headphones. IMO Senns are typically very closed and thus make it hard to do bass mixing properly. Get semi-open headphones like AKG240s or Beyerdynamic DT880s.

Considering Apple follows the same design pattern, I don't see the problem. In the last 10 years, the way we use computers has changed dramatically. Effectively limitless storage, memory and processing power all mean that people can do (and store) way more now than they ever could before. The problem is in interaction. Notice how many of the most significant and lucrative products in the last 10 years have related to user interfaces * Mac OSX * Apple iPod and the music players that followed * Touch-screen smartphones / tablets * Nintendo Wii * Nintendo DS (Stylus) etc. People like "apps". People like touch. People like cohesive interfaces where they can easily get to their photos, music and videos. People, in short, do not want to think of computers as "computers" but simply tools that allow them to do X, Y or Z. In other words, people aren't (and don't want to be) Linux nerds. Apple has been capitalizing on this for some time now. There have always been MP3 players more powerful and fully-featured than the iPod, and there were great smartphones well before the iPhone. But these products were successful because of their superior user interface design. Likewise, the Nintendo Wii blasted open the market for video games by taking the focus away from increasingly arcane controls and letting people simply play the games intuitively. As a power user of Windows, I would be disappointed if the newest version did not come with any improvements to, say, multicore threading or audio processing. But I understand why Microsoft is moving in this direction, and it really makes the most sense.

Well, IMO what you pay for with a Mac: 1. The OS + built-in apps. OSX is a very nice OS that comes with some fantastic built-in software. Stuff like iMovie and Garageband adds a lot of value. 2. Support service. It's nice to be able to take any kind of Mac to any Mac store and get the same level of service anywhere. Technical support, repairs, warranty stuff, you've got one-stop shops all over the U.S. There just isn't anything comparable even for large PC manufacturers. If you get a PC built for you, it might cost an extra $75-100 on top of parts. Getting walk-in, all-inclusive warranty and tech support service might be another $200. Fill up with nice, well-made music-making, movie and photo apps... you see what I'm getting at. I think the argument that you pay for hardware quality is not accurate - these days, you pay for the software and service.

Locking this thread, and issuing a one-time warning. You're a nice guy, and I love to see people participating in the community (and this forum in particular), but please: 1. Put a little more time and effort into your threads. Use capitalization, proper grammar and spelling. Your thread should be more than a single sentence. 2. Stop making so many threads. You shouldn't be making 1-2 new topics a day. 3. If you're going to make a new thread, make sure it is something relevant to the forum; discussion of music production, composition, arrangement, VSTs, composition, etc. It can be a question or maybe a piece of advice you're offering (provided you are clear, thorough and detailed.) Something like this topic doesn't belong here, or really anywhere on the OCR boards.

Just X - the original doesn't have vibrato. If you want pinch squeals w/ vibrato though, just hit high velocities.

By modulate you mean vibrato? You just need to draw in automation for MIDI CC #1 (modwheel). Low CC1 values = vibrato, higher = harmonics, highest = pinch squeal.

Yep, I would try to get 6 full instead of 7. You're not getting anything incredibly new and useful with 7. The key stuff is Kontakt and Battery. As for Massive vs. everything else, I don't really understand the Massive hype. I use it myself, but while it has some nifty features, it's a CPU hog and sounds very digital (which may or may not be what you want.) Fundamentally it's just a wavetable synth with some neat FX. That's all. A synth like Zebra has far more powerful and flexible oscillators, plus a more flexible architecture. Razor at least has a novel synthesis method and a different timbre. Before you say that Massive is dirty/gritty, I guess it can be, but if you really want to get that ultra-commercial sort of bass sound you need to do a lot of processing outside your synth anyway, and/or resampling (a la Noisia, Prodigy, and so on.)

What are you using for the drums? What plugin?

A few things based on what I heard: 1. If you're using Shreddage, you need to be on those double-tracked patches. Load up one of the master DT multis and then pan the two Kontakt outputs hard left and hard right (I mean 100% for both.) Then put different amp sim presets on both. From GR4, I recommend stuff like Chemical Thrash, Slip Note Wide (with delay turned down or off), Nickel Power and Big Monster. This alone will make your tone sound way better. It's what I designed the library for. 2. Layering the guitar with bass in the same octave makes it sound worse. Put the bass an octave below. 3. Guitars could come up in volume for clarity, and then you can futz with the EQ of them vs. the bass (I like for the bass to be really low, and not low-middy/round like yours is now.) Sometimes the guitars can be EQed with lots of low presence for that extra power. 4. Watch your palm mute sequencing. I believe in a few points, you used some short palm mutes that didn't 'connect' to anything. Generally, you should be dragging out the length of your mutes so that you hear the full sustain of them. It's counter-intuitive but believe me it sounds better than having the sound die out completely between mutes. 5. Check the release time of the guitars. You want it to be low. In Shreddage, I think values of 50-55 are good. This means you need to be more careful with sequencing but real guitarists wouldn't have their notes fading out in a passage, they would all be manually muting them to silence. You might turn up the chordstops/releases to compensate. Some practical advice for ya. Hope it helps.

OK, and what does the mixer track for it look like?

Can you take a screenshot of what panning control you are automating?

It's one thing to say that you don't like the way the songs are mastered, but it's another to make factually incorrect claims. This really isn't fair to Josh, especially when you don't know what you're talking about. 1. Fear of Haze is not clipping. None of the drum hits are. They're getting limited/compressed a bit, as you would expect in any piece of music with drums. 2. It's not that loud. Average of -7.88dB in the left channel and -8.09dB in the right. Compare to the following mixes: * The most recently posted FFXIII mix: -6.58/-6.74. * tefnek's "Drop and Roll" from Streets of Rage: -7.29/-7.27 * Tetris Thirty-Plus Mix: -7.91/-7.84 * Sixto's recent Mega Man 2 mix: -7.61/-7.56 * Goat's "Froggy Mosh": -6.83/-7.34 And so on. I could find plenty more examples. This album is, objectively speaking, no louder than countless other mixes and projects on the site. If we were to compare to popular electronica, you'd be even more shocked as tracks like Pendulum's "Self vs. Self" has an average loudness of -4.78/-4.90 (and, IMO, it still sounds absolutely amazing. Nobody complains about the loudness.) That's literally twice the loudness of Fear of Haze (+3dB = loudness increased by a factor of two.) 3. This doesn't even make sense on so many levels. Digital audio - and sound in general - is not measured like that. You can't say one song is '80 dB' and another is '90 dB'. Digital audio files have a variable amount of dynamic range depending on their bitrate. For example, 16-bit audio (which is everything on the site) has a dynamic range of 96dB. This means that the difference between the quietest sound and the loudest sound can't be any greater than 96dB. Audio files thus are measured starting at -96dB (or lower, depending on bit depth) and have a digital limit of 0dB. Anything above 0dB is clipped audio. Practically speaking, this has little to do with peaks. The "peak" just refers to the single loudest point of audio. A song could be at -50dB the entire time, and then a single snare could peak at 0dB. In fact, it is standard practice in any genre of music to normalize the audio, bringing the loudest peak to 0dB anyway. So, it makes no sense to tell anyone what the "maximum volume peak" should be. It should always be 0 dB. But not only does that not make sense, but using numbers like 70, 80 and 90 dB don't make sense either, due to the way sound is measured (as I described). You're most likely referring to the dBSPL scale, which is based on the threshold of human hearing (0 dBSPL = silence, 130 dBSPL = threshold of pain, etc.) However, you can't compare pieces of music on this scale. For example, if I put on "Fear of Haze" and turn my speakers all the way down, it's 0 dbSPL. If I turn them up to a low volume, that might be 40 dBSPL. In other words, dBSPL can't be used within a piece of music to measure loudness. It's more of a measure of the volume output of speakers or headphones. So, what you really REALLY mean to say is that the average volume level (RMS - root mean square) of the track is too high. But, as I said earlier, that isn't really true either because there are plenty of tracks with as high or higher average levels.

I'm on this.