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Fray

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Everything posted by Fray

  1. http://www.soundexpert.info has a bunch of listening tests. One thing to know about any lossy format is that once it's compressed, you can't do anything to the signal without decompressing it -- meaning that when you compress it again, you'll degrade the signal further. So for collaborations or backing up your mix, you really want to use a lossless compression like FLAC. Equalizer types either refer to the controls offered (Graphic, Parametric) or the filter shapes (Shelving, Peak, Highpass, Lowpass, Bandpass), not the algorithm used to implement them. ... Except for "Linear Phase" Equalizers. All signal processors shift the phase of the signal from what I understand -- the unique thing about equalizers is that they will cause a different phase shift for each band that you boost or cut. I haven't found an explanation of Why This Is Such A Bad Thing, so if anyone knows, please tell It could be a marketing thing, linear phase equalizers are a lot more expensive, hehe. Cuts are supposed to be more transparent to the human ear than boosts, but I don't know if they're exempt from phasing issues. Probably not. As for cuts everywhere but one spot vs. a boost at that spot... I think it would be impossible to pull the same curve off with the controls an equalizer offers. But I don't really know. You can't measure a specific number of EQ instances before there's a noticeable sound degradation. Totally depends on how the EQ is implemented and what you're doing with it. It's great that you're reading up on all this stuff, but TBH you're overthinking it! Don't get me wrong, it pays to know the science behind this stuff, but don't forget that your ears are the most important tool when it comes to deciding if you've distorted the sound too much, or if one type of EQ sounds better than another.
  2. Yep, BFD is an acoustic drum sampler -- a kit is going to be a prepackaged full set of drums (snares, toms, kick, cymbals, etc.) that were most likely all recorded at the same time in the same studio, and tuned together so they sound their best. So in theory it might not sound as good if you mixed drums from different kits, but since the trend is to color the percussion a lot with EQ and compression, it all comes out in the wash usually.
  3. That's a strange and interesting song Yep, it's a pipe organ. Real organs have a bunch of different stops that you can use to tweak the sound -- they're capable of producing a pretty broad range of timbres. You usually hear them drenched in reverb because they're most frequently found in large churches. A live recording made in such a place will have huge amounts of natural reverb. The one in this piece still has a good bit of it, but not that much.
  4. Well, it depends on what kinda plug your speakers accept. Is it a single stereo 1/8"? If so you need what max gave the picture of.
  5. Almost everything I've ever read says don't bother with the fancy cables, ever. The super cheapo ones might be a little less reliable, but the diamond-encrusted plutonium core shit generally does nothing to help your sound quality. And yeah, you can just buy Y-adaptors at radio shack. You aren't doing anything wrong, the impedences and such should be compatbile. Sometimes you can find cables with RCA on one end and 1/8" stereo on the other. I have no idea if adaptors degrade the sound quality or not. Edit: here's a FAQ on it http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/Jan02/articles/faq0102.asp
  6. You rock for for posting all this Tensei Not sure who was going on about heavy compression, but I bet it has a lot to do with how the original recording sounded. Using a lot of compression on a sampled drum kit seems like a worse idea than it would be on a live kit. I totally agree that the 15ms attack seems kinda bad... maybe he was dealing with a really sloppy, boomy kick or something. Out of curiousity, do you ever use side-chain the kick into a compressor on the bass? I did that on CHIPP's mix and it seemed to control things pretty well.
  7. Glad to be of help I've never tried putting it that low, interesting to hear that it still functions. I don't think it does either, but I think the numbers are pretty small. Maybe a little bigger on USB/Firewire interfaces as opposed to PCI. I think I read a SoS article about it, but it's still pay access only on the website
  8. That's exactly what I did for a few of the tracks in CHIPP's Valkyrie Profile mix. One instance didn't hit my CPU that hard, and my machine isn't top of the line by any stretch (Athlon XP 3000+). Of course, I use pretty high latency (~50ms) when mixing. If you want to set your latency low for tracking or whatever, the convo reverb should be one of the first things to go if your CPU usage gets too high. BTW, I really like how they sound -- I think the general idea is that you can get much better quality out of an inexpensive convolution reverb than you can out of an inexpensive traditional one, it just eats up way more system resource.
  9. It's not so much that it's an estimate -- it's just that you can configure how low you can get that number by changing the DMA buffer size on the Driver Profiles page in Sonar. Of course, once you set it too low you get dropouts and such. So if you have a problem of only being able to put it down to, say, 10ms in Cubase, you might be able to tweak a similar adjustment in that software to get the latency lower. Or you might be able to adjust it directly in your driver (mAudios can) -- it's just that Sonar is capable of overriding the values from the driver.
  10. So are you guys doing anything fancy to measure latency, or are you just looking at the slider in your app's control panel?
  11. I guess you could do that... I don't really bother Just keep the volume level reasonable on them, don't try to "crank it" or anything and you'll be fine with the bass. Was the guy in the store trying to sell you on a sub woofer or something? I think headphone outputs can be a problem in terms of impedence matching even if you keep the volume low. I really never can wrap my head around the imedence issues though
  12. Yep, but at least it's a good chance for them to learn about the games that came around before they were born, or at least sentient ... I don't think Myst was the first CD-ROM game. 7th Guest was earlier at least. I think Police Quest IV had a CD-ROM version, it was around the same time, maybe a little later than Myst though. Save points predate even the NES. You could save in Zork for example, and I'm sure that wasn't the first text game to feature it. Although if you mean little protected areas in places like dungeons where you normally couldn't save... I don't know Probably would be an NES game, or maybe a PC RPG. That's a pretty nitpicky first though. First completable game would probably be some early text adventure or other. Those had a real start and finish, and when you were done, you were done.
  13. Right, I'm sure there are plenty of ideas in counterpoint that are still relevant and useful. I'm not trying to dismiss counterpoint as a whole or any study of theory for that matter. Believe me I'd love to take some music theory classes, if nothing else for the sheer enjoyment of it.
  14. What exactly is a parallel octave/fifth again? Would a parallel fifth be something like C,G,D,A, played in sequence? Or the two-note chords, C+G,D+A? Proph, I get what you're saying about learning rules before you break them, but I'm not really sure most of the old, i.e. outdated, rules are really useful for anything besides historical perspective. Music history is filled with instances where such-and-such chord shape or melodic pattern was considered too dissonant. But then someone (or a few someones) came along and started using them until everyone got used to it. Or it may have just been a limitation in the tuning of instruments at the time. So those particular rules aren't something we really need to be concerned about anymore.
  15. Is it just me, or was that game brutally hard?
  16. Interesting... In the golden age of copy protection, there were quite a few games that made you refer to the instruction booklet or a "journal" (like Pool of Radiance). But I've never heard of one making you use the actual box. I wonder if it was a copy protection attempt?
  17. I think The Ancient Art of War is supposed to be the first RTS. I think Catacomb 3D was the first game with texture mapped walls, followed very shortly by Wolfenstein 3D. Was Defender the first side scrolling shooter? The Magnavox Odyssey was the first game system to have exchangeable cartridges. Did Narc come before Splatterhouse? Narc is the first really bloody game I remember seeing in arcades. Once again I'm sure some obscure C64 or Atari title did it earlier Punch Out is the only arcade game I've ever seen that responds to you pulling the joystick up (i.e. as if you were yanking it out of the cabinet). Were there others? Wikipedia claims centipede to be the first arcade game with a substantial female player base. That's kind of a fuzzy first, but not the first time I've heard the game was unusually popular with the ladies. AFAIK Excitebike was the first NES game to offer a builtin level editor. Night Trap is supposed to be the first game to use FMV with live actors (obviously Dragon's Lair had FMV long before, but it was animated -- not sure if it was the first one). Final Fantasy 7 was the first RPG to be played by jocks. TBH I think a lot of the firsts people are mentioning have been done ages before in games for PC, Commodore, Atari, etc., albeit in a much more crude way. I don't really think Harvest Moon or FF7 really offered many truly new gameplay features. The ones from the 80s - early 90s are a bit more believable. Edit: I think one of the Phantasy Star games (I think III was the one that did it) was the first RPG to progress through multiple generations.
  18. Didn't see the "mp3 editing" bit. Nothing edits mp3s directly AFAIK -- you have to decompress them to .wav, edit, and then reencode (bad). If you're going to edit something, try to get the source lossless, i.e. uncompressed or using a lossless format like FLAC. For .wav editing, Audacity is the best free one.
  19. OverCoat magazine gave Renoise a 0x2f out of 0x30!
  20. I bought those, though I really couldn't help but feel like I was being had. It's like $40 for a few pieces of foam, jeez. There's got to be a DIY solution that gets you 90% of the way there without costing so damn much.
  21. I like the action on the higher end Fatar's too. But it seems like they have a poor reliability record (I say this mostly from skimming Harmony Central user reviews, so take that for what it's worth).
  22. That looks like a good pick for you. If you're really interested in learning the piano as an instrument, it's nice to have the builtin sounds and speakers -- this way you can play without needing to have your computer on. Plus you don't have to worry about latency or having to horse around with velocity curves. I've always liked the feel of DP's with builtin speakers too -- you can (slightly) feel the vibration of the instrument through your fingers, which makes it feel just a little bit more like the real thing. For playing piano/EP type sounds (unless you're going for something trippy), you really don't need pitch or mod wheels. That's more for synth work, and you can always buy a more synth style controller later for that kind of stuff. For now you can just do it with a mouse like others have said.
  23. Now why would you go and do a thing like that? ... I mean who doesn't like having a 150-pound keyboard taking up half their apartment?
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