Arcana

The funny thing is that you asked in the Reason thread which is better. What do you think we'd say? If you had posted in the FLStudio thread, what do you think you would have received as a response? The answer, of course, and any respectable remixer will tell you this, is that there is no "better program". Go try both. You can download them for free. Come back here if you have specific questions about how to use Reason, and we'll gladly try and answer them for you. P.S. An NN-XT lets you load samples. Make one, load something from Orkester, and select the track labelled "NN-XT". Hit the three horizontal bars on the top-left corner of the sequencer window to get to the window where you can draw notes. Drag to draw. That should be enough to get you making noise.

I'm really enjoying this. I'm not a huge listener of rock music, so I'm probably not the most qualified to be giving good comments, but there's a nice ballad-like feel to this song. It has a good rhythm and excellent guitar. It has a laid-back, mellow feel to it, but yet retains emotion and passion in the performance. The bad notes that everyone's talked about are noticeable... but as mentioned, it's only five seconds and is easily ignorable. There's a lot of other great stuff here, just bask in the good feelings of that instead! Great stuff from Darangen... I'll be looking for more music from this remixer!

Just my cup of tea! The usage of the acoustic-style instruments gives this a bit more variety than your average hard trance song. Lots of changeups keep this from getting too repetitive. Piano at 2:00 is subtle but really adds a lot, for example. I don't have a problem with the levels, myself. Yeah, it's loud, but that's okay. Only real complaint is the fact that it ends so suddenly. Yeah, yeah... 6 MB limit and all, but a bit more of an outro would have been appropriate. But overall, a very enjoyable track and I look forward to hearing more from you. I have a few things I can learn from you, S|r NutS. Great work!

Darkesword has an 'sfpack' prog. on his site -> http://soundfonts.darkesword.com/ That one he has is a PC version. :\

Not really a samples request, but I figure some of you might know. Does anyone know how I can unpack sfpack files on Mac OS X? Apparently, the sfpack author has mysteriously disappeared as well, so a lot of people are concerned about the sfpack format. In any case I found a program for "sfark", but no sfpack files. In the meantime I will fire up my old PC to unpack the files but if anyone knows an easier way I'd be ecstatic to hear about it. Thanks!

And yet another demo link... Ableton Live 4, which is software geared toward live production, is also another one of those programs that has a demo. Works for both Mac OS and Windows. http://www.ableton.com/index.php?main=downloads Haven't ever used it and the site doesn't make it clear what the restrictions of the demo are, but I'll edit and let you know when I can read it. There are a ton of demos out there for people who are uncertain about what program to start out with or what they want to do with the music, so if you're new and unsure of what you want to do, go download a bunch of demos.

Mac Users can download a 30-day fully-functional Trial of Logic Express 7. You can even save. Requires a G4 or better; recommended 512MB of RAM. http://www.apple.com/logicexpress/trial/ Best of all, it comes with the 522 page reference manual. If you're really stuck with the program (I was), there's also a bunch of Quicktime Demos on Apple's web site (http://www.apple.com/logicexpress) that go through a recorded demonstration of someone using the program. Not the best substitute for a good tutorial, but it might help you pick up some of the features.

Happy Birthday I'd like to get it too, but I probably won't leap at the opportunity. I'll bide my time and eventually get it. There are many things that make the whole music process simpler in Reason 3.0 that are really worth getting (like soloing channels on the Device sidebar of the sequencer and assigning your knobs to anything you want in the combinator!)

I'm presuming that you want a General MIDI set in a soundfont? Try: http://www.personalcopy.com/ I've never used it for actually making music, but I used the PC51 soundfont to try to improve the quality of my General MIDI playback through my SB Live!.

Beta 3: Hush, hush... we're not supposed to talk about it. In Reason 3.0, you can assign the Combinator's 4 knobs and 4 buttons to different devices inside it. I think you can also split the keylanes this way, too, but I haven't tried it. Overall it makes doing things live a lot easier. Why the Combinator lacks faders though totally eludes me. I think it's an artifact of Reason's interface. Ideally, you should be able to make your own combinator interface with as many knobs, sliders, buttons, and key lanes as you wanted! As for Copy & Paste in Reason - there's also the "Duplicate Track" option if you right-click on a track. A bit easier than drag and drop.

No ideas on that one? Sorta like the layer channel in FL... Best one I can think of for now is to Copy and Paste the track.

The NN-XT (maybe the NN-19?) sampler will load soundfonts. Remember that accepting MIDI IN and Soundfonts aren't quite the same thing.

I have a technical Reason question! I often use the mouse in the sequencer to lay out triads. However, when I do this, all of the velocities are the same, and that's really dull and boring, so I want to change them. But in the velocity lane, it shows the three notes in the one lane, and when you use the Pencil to draw in the velocity, it changes ALL THREE notes. I can't change the velocity of one note at a time unless I drag one note away, change it, and drag it back. This is a total pain and I hate it. Is there any better way to adjust the individual velocities? Thanks! Off-topic P.S. Is anyone here beta-testing Reason 3?

While Chozo is widely known as the ancient race on some planet in some Metroid series (at least, I've played only one Metroid game and I knew what the Chozo were), I don't think the Tesseract in Chrono Trigger as being a "log" of time is common knowledge. It sounds like something taken out of a Chrono Trigger "Perfect Guide" that was never made widely available. A tesseract is NOT a phenomenon of physics, and a fourth dimension is NOT necessarily time. The common name for a tesseract is a hypercube, or a 4-dimensional cube, which is basically a node with four connections to other nodes, or a geometric shape that looks like two cubes joined together at the corners, or a cube inside a cube. Hypercubes and n-dimensional cubes used extensively in distributed systems research because it takes only an average log(n) steps to go from one node to another in an n-dimensional cube (if I recall correctly).

You might be better taking the text that's in front of your face (well, it was in front of mine ) and call it, Chronicles of the Tesseract - Chrono Trigger Cinematic Interpretation The soundtrack would be, of course, Chronicles of the Tesseract - Chrono Trigger Cinematic Interpretation Soundtrack. By the way, what is a Tesseract?

Maybe it's your intention, but if you want anyone to read this thread besides the people involved in the project, you might want to leave "Chrono Trigger" in the title of the thread somewhere. It goes also for your web space and your banner. I was wondering for a moment if Chronicles of Tesseract was a new online game MMORPG with beta applications due on Dec 1.

I have a question! How do you make a smooth transition from a realistic sounding instrument to a synthy techno instrument? So, for example, I have a flute or something and I want to end up making it sound all... well, sawtooth-like or something over the course of a few seconds while making the transition really nice. I don't have an actual song example that I can think of, but I hope I got the idea across.

SGX will come in here with a better answer, but the Reason sounds can be made pretty phat with some creative effects processing. The default songs are pretty boring. Fool around with the effects and see what you can do. Propellerhead has a number of songs that they make available for download from their site. Listen to those and see what you think. It's pretty much agreed-upon by most of the members here that Reason has pretty good sounds and samples right out of the box, and that there's nothing wrong with its sound quality.

Does Reason's sequencer offer away for you to view the piano roll for two or more tracks simultaneously? I have a feeling that you can't and would need to use some other sequencer...

I've heard this said (re: poor sound quality) said about Reason's samples as well, but with effects and EQing, they can be tweaked well. Here's a dumb question. Does anyone have guidelines to make these things "sound better"? I confess, I'm still new at this all and I still need to develop my ear, but any knowledge would be more useful than none. This is a slightly (actually, a pretty dramatically) OT question so if it is let me know and I'll start a new thread instead. Thank you for your attention.

Probably! Okay, so I've been using Reason's demo for about two weeks so take that as an indication as to the quality of my advice, but... So create some instrument - a subtractor works fine. Make sure that there's a circular MIDI jack by its Track under the "In" Column in the sequencer. If sounds play, then you're pretty much set. If sounds do NOT play, you have a bit of work ahead of you. So let's assume the worst. Sounds don't play, so go up to the Preferences section and then check the "MIDI" settings. There should be a box asking where you want sequencer input to come in from. Select your keyboard (don't select its MIDI input - make sure it's your keyboard). Restart Reason and try again. Once your keyboard works, set your locator bars to where you want to record. Press the Record button on the Transport (or use *). Optionally use the "Click" button to enable metronome clicks. Press play. Play your MIDI keyboard. Press "stop" (or use space) to stop playback. Reason will automatically disable recording after this, so if you want to record again you need to re-enable recording. By the way, if you use samplers like the NN-19 or the NN-XT, Dr.Rex, or Redrum, many of them don't have sounds attached to all of the keys.

So I've tried out MuSE and Rosegarden for Linux really, really briefly. Let it be known that I'm still dramatically new at this whole audio production thing, so these shouldn't be really taken as good constructive reviews. MuSE is probably the most well-known sequencer, but it crashed a lot when I was trying to use it and it didn't go well with JACK. It looked pretty typical in terms of its abilities, but it doesn't seem to come with default sounds or any kind of synth, so I couldn't use it that much. I would need to grab some soundfonts and play more. Rosegarden on the other hand looks really promising. Again, it doesn't come with defalt sounds, but what is really cool about Rosegarden is that it has a notation editor in sheet music - really nice for transcribing that Mozart Sonata you've always wanted to hear. I again need to grab some GM soundfonts and play with the sequencer a bit. Edit: I played with Rosegarden some more when I got a MIDI controller. For those wondering, the Linux 2.6 kernel automatically detects USB devices like MIDI Controllers. In fact, instaling my controller (Edirol PCR A30) was easier in Linux than it was in Windows. Who says that Linux has no hardware support? You literally plugged it in, turned on the power, and set the Inputs in the MIDI devices section in Rosegarden and you're playing music. No extra drivers or any other crap. (That said, I don't know if the knobs and faders are assignable - I haven't even tried that in Windows yet). Rosegarden does in fact come with a bunch of soundfonts. Nothing spectacular, but it does the job. Actually, I find that Rosegarden works very similarly to Cakewalk Home Studio. Both have a notation editor, both use a lot of General MIDI instruments. If you're poor and don't want to run Windows, I would recommend Rosegarden as the sequencer of choice. It was really painful to install all of the software, though, so Linux is still definitely not your ideal sequencing and production platform. You need to find the soundfont plugin (FluidSynth), the general plugin library (LADSPA), the low-latency audio server (JACK), and the realtime module for the kernel. There's also other plugins and stuff that I don't even have a clue of what they do. There's even a VSTi interface that can plug into programs that requires WINE to run. There are two distributions though to make life easier: AGNULA has Debian and Redhat-based distributions for audio production, as well as a user community and lots of documentation. It's not linked on the front page of this thread, so if anyone reads, they should add it: http://www.agnula.org Planet CCRMA is the Linux distribution from Stanford and is based off of Fedora. It's already on the front of this page. I would think that if you use these distros instead of finding everything in bits and pieces, things should be much more stable. I haven't tried either of them, though. If you want to install these yourself, you'll probably want to be comfortable with the following: - You will need to compile the kernel. 2.4 requires some code patches. 2.6 requires just a module. Overall, compiling the kernel isn't hard. - You need ALSA. ALSA comes built-into 2.6 kernels, though. - You need KDE development headers for Rosegarden. - You need to be reasonably comfortable with compiling things and being able to tolerate numerous configure errors and possible missing libraries. Be prepared to do a lot of hunting for things. Linux audio looks a little far off, but I believe that it has some good conversion tools, some wave editors, and stuff like that already. Anyway, when I get around to grabbing some samples, I'll go back to these programs because I actually know a bit more about audio production and can probably provide a better review. Edit: I added a bunch of notes about Rosegarden. It does come with a number of sounds by default, most of them being soundfonts, as far as I know. The MIDI controller plugged in and worked without a hitch in Linux 2.6 - just leave it off when you boot up, turn it on, and it'll be automatically detected. Launch your program and you'll be able to select it from the MIDI input section. I take back my earlier statement that Linux audio production is far off. It's still behind Windows and Mac, and no professional is ever going to be using Linux in their music production, but if you're a beginner and want to fool around with General MIDI, soundfonts, and similar, and pay absolutely nothing, Rosegarden is becoming a viable alternative.