Small Questions Which Don't Deserve Their Own Thread

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > No Music Discussion > Musician's Lounge > Small Questions Which Don't Deserve Their Own Thread

«‹›3 »

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

h_double posted:

- A quick look at google shows that the Zoom H4n has XLR + 1/4" INPUTS, but no outputs other than a headphone jack. So, you could plug outboard microphones into it, but couldn't plug it into an interface.

Possibly too late for Johnny Truant, but for future reference: the Zoom H4n is a basic usb audio interface.

# ¿ May 18, 2013 03:05

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 00:42

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Popcorn posted:

I recently found a very old recording I made on a dictaphone. It's very hissy and noisy: http://popcorn.gunsha.com/my-cat.MP3

I'd like to clean it up and remove the hiss. I tried using Audacity's noise removal (which grabs a bit of hissy silence and subtracts it from the rest of the song), but it just makes the song sound like it's underwater. Is this just because the hiss is too loud and the recording can't be saved, or is there some better method?

You're always going to have artifacts and it's a fine line walking between noise and artefact. Adobe Audition used to have the best noise print removal in, like 2001 or something. I'm not sure what mathematical magic your money can buy these days, but Audition still holds up in the sense that if you compare source and carefully crafted result, you can honestly say there's a marked improvement. Audacity? I don't know.

This is the balance I chose. Considering where it comes from, it's slightly more acceptable, but it was always going to be an excercise in turd polishing.

# ¿ Jul 31, 2013 20:53

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Ferrous Wheel posted:

sounds like audiophile nonsense.

Oh, it's much worse than that.

foonykins posted:

hippie-dippie bullshit [...] conspiracy theory thing involving Nazi mind control

... is quite an apt description of what this is about.

For more context, this link was posted in the synthesizer thread, and is what I suppose Ferrous Wheel is talking about (and not Natural Instrumente Fanatiker or whatever you'd call them, as you very reasonably assumed).

And it's just plain insanity. Mad, completely baseless ramblings from conspiracy theorists.

FW, you shouldn't be seeking to "disprove" anything. In my language we have a saying that a crazy person can ask more questions than a wise man can answer. It would just be a waste of your time.

By the way, if you watch the video on that page and the 440Hz version sounds worse to you, it's because of the artifacts of the stretching algorithm used in the comparison, which are evident enough to be noticable on laptop speakers.

The salt-on-a-plate thing there totally depends on the size of the plate, the density of the material used and whatever other stuff factors in with resonance. There are no magic frequencies. You could do the same experiment with a different plate and end up with other frequencies.

The whole page and indeed the whole website is full of bullshit and unfounded claims to the point that I'm sitting here, awaiting the moment someone tells me this is some Onion-style parody or something.

# ¿ Sep 10, 2013 17:45

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Can't comment on the Ultrasones specifically, but the mention of "surround sound" would make me very wary. I don't like any "enhancements" in my monitoring hardware. That's pure prejudice, however.

I'm pretty happy with my Sennheiser HD280 Pros. I know there are probably better headphones out there, but I've never felt betrayed by the picture they gave me.

Seconding open backs giving you a more natural sound if you can get away with them, though.

For a midi controller, $100 gets you a bunch of fairly awful compromises. You'll get some of these: toy-like mini keys, less than 32 keys, awful response, terrible production quality control, poor build quality. To avoid most of those, you should be looking at spending $200-$300. Unless you're specifically looking for something tiny and portable, I'd recommend no less than 49 full size keys (apart from the Roland A300 Pro with 32). Sweetwater has the M-Audio Keystation 49es for $99.95. If you need knobs and sliders, the M-Audio Oxygen 49 is about the least you can get away with at $149.99. These are mostly okay, though not spectacular.

If upping the budget more is an option, Roland's A49 is very good at $179. A-300 Pro for $219 at the time of writing if you need sliders and poo poo. I'm really a fan of those two and the latter seems a really good deal comparing to what it normally goes for. Korg, Akai, Novation and M-Audio are also generally decent brands of controllers when considering stuff from $250 and up.

You could look at smaller controllers if it's got to be portable, but you're not going to save a lot of money doing so.

Specifically stay away from Alesis QX series and things like the Korg NanoKeys. Those are awful. On top of that, the build quality of the Arturia MiniLab doesn't make it worth its price as a controller either.

Ironically, the cheaper you go and the further you get away from normal sized keys, the more real life testing I'd recommend. Everyone's got their own standard of what compromise is technically workable and when toeing the line so closely, you can't really rely on internet strangers to share your standards anymore.

You'll find more opinions on midi controller keyboards in this thread: The "how do I make electronic/club/DJ music" Megathread! and this thread: Synthesizers! (One of us! One of us!). Just ask around.

# ¿ Sep 11, 2013 09:16

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Radiapathy posted:

The A-49 also doesn't have real aftertouch

Really? That's a weird omission. I mean, I thought it had exactly the same keybed as the A-XXX Pro series.

I guess if you're as big as Roland, it's worth it to nickle and dime that poo poo.

edit: for the benefit of the thread, I'll mention that if you don't like the joystick for modulation on the A49, you can probably map one of the two knobs to it (to set it to a fixed level, like for rotary effect on an organ or something).

Flipperwaldt fucked around with this message at 21:15 on Sep 11, 2013

# ¿ Sep 11, 2013 21:12

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Since neither of you specify, I'll just add for clarity that your best bet is to use a passive DI box and have a setup that allows you to record the un-amped, un-distorted signal from the guitar. Possibly along with the sound you use for monitoring while recording (output of amp or amp plugin is what I mean).

The neat thing about a passive DI box is that you can send the signal of that recorded take back through it in reverse (after some replugging, obviously), back into a different amp or the same amp with different settings, different microphones, different microphone placement etc. The signal the amp receives will be the same thing it would have received if you plugged your guitar into it directly.

Although this doesn't give you identical results to recording something through several amps simultaneously (you'd have sound from all amps leaking into all microphones, making their relative placement and acoustics a factor), I'm told this trick is used a lot. Of course some people are perfectly capable of doing several takes that are virtually identical and do. Cobbling together several takes is indeed a good option when you're almost there and a good excercise in getting close enough in any case.

When all you're using is plugins, you don't really need the DI box (your audio interface probably takes care of this for input), but the main thing is you record the 'dry' signal somewhere. Editing each layer to introduce timing imperfections, using a fully wet slight chorus or messing with the phase of the source sound are all fair game in fattening the resulting layered sound up. As is equalizing the source sound to (more or less) simulate different guitars.

Sorry if this is what you were doing all along; it wasn't explicit what you were EQ'ing and you wouldn't want to miss out on this technique if you didn't know about it. :shrug:

# ¿ Sep 14, 2013 01:14

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

HollisBrown posted:

I feel stupid for having to ask this but, how the hell do I split a 35mm output to a L and R channel and into 2 1/4" inputs. Basicly I on my interface I have an AUX in that has 2 1/4 ins and I want to be able to listen to my ipod/laptop through my interface.

The idea is this:

Plus a couple of those:

Now usually I'd recommend to just go monoprice, but recently I've read more than one horrifying review about the latter type of adapters, saying that the tip broke off and got stuck. It's worth spending a few bucks more to avoid this.

# ¿ Sep 17, 2013 22:41

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

HollisBrown posted:

I tried that, I did a 35mm->RCA with RCA->1/4" but I got practically no signal, it was present but really quite.

Why wouldn't that work?

I don't know. What sort of interface (brand/model) are we talking about?

I'm doing this exact thing on a Roland Quad Capture, which also has +4dBu inputs and it works fine.

Could this be a balanced/unbalanced thing? For the RCA->1/4" adapter, does the 1/4" end have a TS or a TRS configuration? Do you have a multimeter to verify center goes to tip and sleeve goes to sleeve?

edit and in the case of an adapter with TRS, what corrseponds with the ring, if anything at all?

Flipperwaldt fucked around with this message at 10:20 on Sep 18, 2013

# ¿ Sep 18, 2013 10:14

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

ThePopeOfFun posted:

I'm looking for a digital audio recorder for a number of reasons. I need to record lessons, but I sing a lot as well and would like something that can do pretty well with music.

I haven't really any idea what to look for, but I know I want something similar to this:

http://www.consumersearch.com/digital-voice-recorders/samson-zoom-h4n

I was wondering if the sound quality is really that much better with recent models of the same device, or if the newer ones cost more for features I probably wouldn't use.

I've been drooling over the H4N for a while now, and from all I've read it's pretty awesome.

The (2009) Soundonsound review summarizes nicely in its conclusion:

quote:

I�m a big fan of the H4N, and found very little to dislike about it. While there are more �professional� portable recorders out there, you�d be hard pushed to find something that�s better on sound quality alone. This product is also aimed at a very different market, where it compares very favourably with the competition. The H4N is justifiably a little pricier than its H-series predecessors, given the improvements that have been made, but although there�s a lot of �bonus� functionality I can�t imagine using, you�re not paying a premium for it. If you want a good handheld recorder, this should definitely be on your shortlist; and if you want simultaneous four-track recording thrown in, it will be a very short list indeed!

The review also mentions several worthwhile upgrades compared to the previous version of the thing, including less handling noise, better external mic preamps and better internal mics.

Looking at what Thomann offers, I'm not seeing anything cheaper that's better or anything more expensive that doesn't add a lot of stuff that you're even less likely to use (like more external mic inputs). The H4N seems to strike a very nice balance.

# ¿ Jan 14, 2014 12:04

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Spikeness posted:

Weird question!

I'm looking for a way to hide one piece of audio within another!

I figure I could time shift/edit the piece I want to hide and maybe place that noise within another track of noise somewhere, but I'm worried that it may not hide too well that it may not come out audible when reverse engineered. I know it would be somewhat impossible to have it come out perfectly clear, which is fine.

I have a few ideas to test out, but has anyone here done anything like this? any ideas or resources on the matter would be great.

Knowing why you're doing this could really help define what acceptable outside parameters for 'hide', 'noise' and 'reverse engineering' constitute. What would you have at your disposal during reverse engineering, for example? An original copy of the sound you used to mask your message? Are you trying to demonstrate a proof of concept, or will it have to pass severe scrutiny from someone looking for something? Is messing with bytes an option? You could write something that embeds a byte of something in white noise every nth byte or something mathematical and also a script that extracts it again.

Best general tip I have is to take a hint from Dolby Pro Logic, which encodes a surround channel in the difference between left and right channels of a stereo track. If the content of the surround channel is quiet enough compared to what's in the center, it shouldn't be too noticable when played back on stereo equipment and will in fact be completely inaudible when played back mono, no matter how loud it is. But it should be recoverable when flipping the polarity of one of the stereo signal's channels and summing it to mono. Voxengo MSED or a similar plugin might be of help with that.

EDIT VVVV That's mostly going to give you results on how to hide some text into audio. Technically the audio you want to hide is also data, but compared to text, a huge amount of data. You'd need an even huger amount of audiodata to hide it in, probably beyond what is practical. Anyway, it still really depends on what your purpose is.

Flipperwaldt fucked around with this message at 05:11 on Jan 30, 2014

# ¿ Jan 30, 2014 04:44

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Dr.Caligari posted:

I had no idea where to ask this, but I have a Gemini TT-02 turntable I just use for listening to records. My daughter decided she wanted to play in that room and used the record player as a merry-go-round for her beany babies and broke the needle.

I found what I think it the correct piece, but the site is giving an error at checkout, and other places say that it is a discounted item. Is there a different type of needle/cartridge I could use?

Here is the cartridge I found, it identical to the one I have:
http://www.digilake.com/as/product_info.php?info=p7882_Gemini-CN-1000-Cartridge.html

These guys will surely be glad to help you out.

Toadsniff posted:

Is there a program out there to help me find out the various instrument frequencies in an audio file?

Like the note frequencies? Melodyne. If it's more to help you mixing, look for a spectrum analyzer (Voxengo SPAN maybe) or a spectrograph.

# ¿ Feb 14, 2014 17:53

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Toadsniff posted:

I was thinking more like a slider that could isolate say a guitar playing, bass line or vocals in realtime.

Yeah, that would be awesome, but it doesn't exist. Can't get the eggs back out of a cake.

# ¿ Feb 14, 2014 20:39

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

bad posts ahead!!! posted:

I have to connect two computers to a single pair of monitors, is there something like this http://www.amazon.com/ROLLS-MX41b-F...ds=stereo+mixer but active rather than passive

And how would I go about doing this? One computer has an interface so I'm good with using a 1/4 inch cable, could I just use a 1/8 to 1/4 inch cable from the soundcard of the other computer?

Behringer Micromix MX400?

e: that's 4 mono channels, by the way.

# ¿ Feb 21, 2014 00:21

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

bad posts ahead!!! posted:

I know very little about the difference between mono and stereo, we are planning to work on music so we need both channels on each working, will that mixer do if I wanted to connect them to something like this http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0051WAM64/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_ttl?_encoding=UTF8&colid=32LA2XPXYYNZY&coliid=I1N90BMCSW4VKW Or is mono what I need for doing this?

there's also rca inputs but I don't know if we can use both that and the trs ins at the same time? Does "line" mean that the signal doesn't get amplified?

Sorry, brainfart. That Behringer thing of course also outputs in mono which is not what you need.

I wouldn't just plug both things into the speakers at once. You were right to look for a mixer.

Line level signal is a sort of lingua franca between audio devices. It is indeed an unamplified signal; compared to what drives speakers anyway.

Behringer Xenyx 502 would be a better suggestion, probably. Sorry about before.

# ¿ Feb 21, 2014 01:19

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Flanky posted:

Hi, I have a hopefully-not-dumb question! I couldn't decide what thread it would go in, so it's here now.

I only have a laptop to make music on, due to being overseas for the next year or so. It's very powerful, but geared towards games. The Intel chipset on my motherboard (the drivers call themselves "Realtek HD") seems to be completely unable to use ASIO4ALL. Trying to play anything with like 100 ms of delay is balls. I figured I'd try to see if I can find some sort of USB-based solution, since that's really all I can do about it afaik.

Is something like the M-Audio M-Track what I'm looking for? Or does that only handle external sources, and not stuff like VSTs on my computer itself? I'm kind of unsure as to kind of processing an audio interface like that does.

Here's the thread for it. But in short, yes, an external audio interface with proper ASIO drivers is the right solution to that latency problem.

It's not that the interface would do a lot of processing, more that the driver will allow it to be addressed directly by the software, rather than through several layers of operating system cruft.

Don't know much about the M-Track specifically, but it does seem to have ASIO drivers for recent versions of Windows, so that's good.

# ¿ Mar 5, 2014 16:17

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

I think it's a zither.

# ¿ Apr 3, 2014 00:48

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

himajinga posted:

Do those XLR>1/4" transformer plugs work the same as a DI box? I was given a friend's cassette 4-track he hadn't used in a decade and want to make sure it's me that's doing it wrong rather than it being broken. I'm running an SM57 into the female XLR end of an XLR/male 1/4" cable into the inputs on the 4-track and it's barely picking up any signal. Do I need to impedance match with a DI or transformer for this to work? I have some DIs in storage that I can get to if it'll solve the problem but if I need a transformer I'll just order some. If it's neither of these things I guess I'll trash the 4-track since it was free.

It's not broken and none of these things will help you, you need a preamp. It's not (just) about matching impedance, signal level needs a serious boost to line level.

The cheapest Behringer mixer will do that for you under $50, but I won't blame you if you feel even that's overreaching.

# ¿ Aug 12, 2014 23:48

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

iostream.h posted:

Also, where's your metronome?

Zoom H4N, man. Great recorder with an amazing feature set, including a metronome. Can't knock the Tascam though, that thing is legit.

# ¿ Sep 3, 2014 13:39

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Length of the wire matters, I think. You've got to check what the wavelength of am radio is and use a wire length that is related to that. I don't know. My father occasionally mumbles about things like that, but I haven't been listening very well.

# ¿ Oct 20, 2014 10:54

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Drink-Mix Man posted:

A friend of mine has been sending me files he recorded in Audacity for me to re-edit in Cubase. When I export the .wavs out of Audacity and attempt to manipulate them in Cubase (copy/pasting, or just using any processing commands), they tend to crash Cubase for some reason. Any idea what might be going on?

So far, the only solution seems to be to import into Cubase, re-export, then re-import again which results in a more stable file.

As random a guess as anything, but maybe Audacity writes metadata to the files that Cubase can't handle? WAV metadata is poorly standardized.

# ¿ Dec 24, 2014 12:50

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

MockingQuantum posted:

I can almost guarantee that's what it is. I had the same issue on a recent project. Cubase doesn't always handle marker info from other programs well, so if there were tags or markers in the Audacity sessions, that could be what's tripping it up.

Well, if it is that, then apparently FFMPEG might be able to strip metadata altogether. Wouldn't be too hard to set up a shortcut to drop files upon. If it's going to be a frequent occurence to process files like that anyway.

# ¿ Dec 25, 2014 03:18

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Combat Pretzel posted:

Dabbling here and there in Ableton, I suppose getting a cheap MIDI keyboard helps immensely getting ideas down instead of mouseclicking in a clip view, right?

Yes, definitely.

# ¿ Jan 23, 2015 17:57

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Combat Pretzel posted:

Cool, thanks. I was starting to consider myself to be completely inept, especially when seeing people laying down melodies in Youtube tutorials (which they probably practised for) just like that with the mouse.

I guess if you're a trained musician and have a background in music theory, it shouldn't be too much of a big deal to click something halfway sensible together.

I imagine it'd be like seeing the matrix for what it really is or something.

I mean apart from all the cheating and editing you can do in a youtube video, it's also possibly just knowledge, not just innate talent or something.

I've got neither and a keyboard is a neat way to quickly audition whether a couple of random chords go together or to introduce a little human rhythm in a world of 1/16ths. And if you've got either or both, you can do a lot more with it, of course.

# ¿ Jan 23, 2015 20:07

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Drink-Mix Man posted:

On a track like this: https://soundcloud.com/colorcode-1/night-owl, which (except for the drums) was just recorded to one track, how would one remove the crazy ear-splitting frequencies while still keeping the effect of me fiddling with my keyboard's resonance knob throughout? With my usual EQ (or any other VSTs I have), I can't seem to figure out how to cut or even identify the harsh stuff without taking out something else I like. Am I asking for too much?

A spectrum analyzer clearly shows the excessive peaks, so that would be a way to figure out the frequencies. Voxengo SPAN would be good.

You can tame those frequencies with a multiband compressor or a good de-esser (which is a special case multiband compressor). Ideally you'd want to set as narrow a band as you can get away with and automate the center frequency to match the frequency of the peaks (on most de-esser plugins that rather means automating both upper and lower freq simultaneously instead). On a multiband compressor, use only one band and deactivate the others. Lots of work, and if you can live with the overall mix being slightly different, you can well get away with widening the band and more or less compressing the whole region between 800Hz-2000Hz to hell. Use your ears, though.

Anyway, that's the theory and from the testing I did on a couple of second long fragments, it should work really well.

# ¿ Jan 24, 2015 03:04

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

baka kaba posted:

beaten comprehensively! I'll see myself out

No, this:

baka kaba posted:

Like an EQ band that only notches when it needs to, if you like

explains pretty clearly why selective frequency compression is the superior choice in this case.

# ¿ Jan 24, 2015 03:19

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

For some reason the domain of cheap dj mixers -even today- has always been one riddled with tiny brands you won't even find a website for. I bought the exact same mixer second hand in 2007 or so for 50�. This was in Belgium and though I don't remember what was printed on the front, I feel like I would have remembered Texas Audio. Possibly it was Realistic or another 80s Radio Shack or Tandy store brand. Because that's where you'd buy equipment for that in those days. Dj'ing was too low brow for musical instrument stores.

If it all works, $40 isn't being ripped off exactly, but it's not a diamond in the rough or anything. Cheap mixers of that age have a relatively high level of self noise. Per se, there isn't anything wrong with it otherwise. It's just a budget prdouct. The main reason $40 is acceptable though, is that a new five channel mixer would cost you a multitude of that. Even in the current day budget range, think $150 or something.

Take a look at this "Lux Sound mx 6550" for sale in Argentina that I found by googling for the wonderful phrase "effect sound machine".

It's the same thing apart from the metering that drops the vu meters for those newfangled LEDs. You will find not a single shred of information on Lux Sound either.

Compare it with what happens today. A supermarket doesn't have its own division designing store brand washing machines. They just shop on AliBaba and have the chinese print their brand on something possibly halfway decent they can get for a good price. Now imagine small 80s mom-and-pop electronics chains with three stores doing the same thing because they want a mixer in their product line. If it's old enough, those would have been built in Japan instead of China, though. Perhaps they were visited by an enterprising intermediary who took care of importing the poo poo and printing the front plate and all that. Who knows what people did without the internet. It wouldn't have been big players though, like Aldi these days importing things around the world through their Medion/Lifetec/Topcraft brands.

It's important to realize that we've only been storing records of such obscure poo poo since the nineties with the internet. Anything before that, unless it was popular or had special merit is lost in obscurity. I have a mediocre string synthesizer, designed and built in Italy in the seventies and googling the whole brand will net you around five pages on Google. One of those is mine, trying to aggregate any information I found about it. The others are about a vst plugin that sampled it because they had a working one lying around. That's a whole brand, making and selling probably a couple of hundreds or maybe thousands of synths across Europe and it would have disappeared completely if it weren't for three or four people stumbling upon one of them and becoming curious about it.

# ¿ Jan 28, 2015 14:38

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

The new one has light up faders and usb in :pcgaming:

Anyway, clean it up with a microfibre cloth and a dab of linseed oil soap, de-oxit the poo poo out of the faders and you'll find someone else you can offload it on for about the same $40. There's no shame in that.

# ¿ Jan 28, 2015 15:23

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

CaptainViolence posted:

I'd prefer not to have to transcode it more than I have to

There's no transcoding in the process you describe using Audition as long as you go from wav to wav with the same samplingrate/bitrate. It's a lossless fileformat. You won't lose quality like when opening and re-saving an MP3.

I'd say even if there's some convoluted way for doing this in Logic, go with Audition, it's made for that poo poo and will allow you to do sample accurate snipping with ease.

# ¿ Mar 21, 2015 22:14

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

supermikhail posted:

Any thoughts?

I keep wondering if you're even having any fun. The way you describe it all makes it sound very worrisome and stress inducing. Arguably that's not what playing music is for. And neither is posting/making threads.

Relax a bit and :justpost:

# ¿ Mar 23, 2015 16:57

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Vlad the Retailer posted:

Are there any libraries/programs capable of taking MIDI messages, modifying them/creating new messages, and spitting them out to another device?

(context: The Volca Sample uses CC messages to change the sample's pitch rather than, you know, actual notes.)

This looks promising. And midi-ox, maybe?

# ¿ May 14, 2015 22:55

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

The Mystery Date posted:

I recently reformatted the computer I record with, and after reinstalling and setting everything up again, it's as if my computer can no longer run things that it had no problem with before. For instance, if I run just a single instance of Kontakt with Alicia's Keys (piano sampler), it cuts out notes and the "Disk" bar in the upper right hand corner goes up to the maximum. The latency of my sound card has also decreased from less than 10 ms to over 50 ms. This is preventing me from doing pretty much anything until I get it sorted out. Any ideas as to what could be wrong?

Things I have tried so far are: restarting, doing a memory diagnostic (6 gigs - fine), switching to the on-board windows sound card, and messing around with my DAWs options, all to no avail. A variety of google searches have been fruitless, as I'm not exactly sure what to look for.

Edit: If it matters, I'm on a Windows 7 system with a 2.8Ghz i7 and 6 gigs of ram using Studio One 2 and mostly Native Instruments vsts.

What sound card and did you get proper drivers from the manufacturer? Did you plug the sound card into a usb 3 port (if applicable) and did you get the proper drivers for those? Do you have a native usb 2 port to try troubleshooting?

# ¿ Jun 10, 2015 11:20

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

El Kabong posted:

That's a good idea, but what would be one step up from a phone?

Zoom H1?

You're being annoyingly vague about what you have in mind.

# ¿ Jul 8, 2015 01:19

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Southern Heel posted:

I have a book on jazz theory designed around using the piano to illustrate concepts. I have a midi keyboard, and would typically boot up a DAW, load a piano VST and then set it to monitor the keyboard: but this seems a little overkill for just plinking away at a couple of chords. Is there a better option?

Windows? SaviHost. Put the exe in your vst folder, rename it to that piano vst's name, make a shortcut to it on your desktop or wherever. First time, configure input and output devices and maybe hide some of the visual clutter, but that's it.

# ¿ Jul 17, 2015 21:47

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Relayer posted:

I've ruled out a mic issue because you can hear these resonances just standing in the room listening to the guitarist play.

Could it be Room modes? Or is it the same in different locations?

# ¿ Jul 19, 2015 23:11

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

You need to specify whether this needs to be a stand alone thing or if it being an accessory to a computer/tablet is ok. That's go!ng to make a lot of difference to the answers.

# ¿ Sep 7, 2015 19:19

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

I thought you'd be inundated with all kinds of answers by now; I suggest crossposting your question to the Synth thread. I'm sure someone there can give you an actual informed answer instead of the dodgy guesses based on spec sheets I'd be able to give you.

# ¿ Sep 8, 2015 20:10

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

It's a bit left field, but if this isn't necessarily about doing everything live, the Zoom R24 is a drat flexible piece of kit, though it would still run you $500. But then it would have all the effects built in, can build entire songs from loops and whatever.

# ¿ Sep 24, 2015 00:01

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Really, really depends on the arranger keyboard. Not even whether it's technically possible; really whether they have allowed you to output the preset patterns over midi. I've had some older Roland and Casio junk in the past where this was just a big no-no. I've always assumed this was to prevent people from "pirating" those patterns, effectively. Which is a big-ish deal if that is half of what your device does, like in the case of the Roland Arranger module something or other I had.

I don't know if things have changed in the past 30 years. But I wouldn't just assume it's possible by default.

# ¿ Oct 1, 2015 23:20

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Drink-Mix Man posted:

What type of cable or adapter would I want to use to send a stereo mixdown from a Tascam 414 cassette recorder into the 1/4" input of a typical digital interface? Would something like that be an unbalanced or balanced signal? Stereo or instrument cable?

1x 2 Male RCA / 2 Male RCA Cable
2x 1 Female RCA / Male 1/4" TS Jack Adapter

Or equivalent. It'll be unbalanced all the way.

Stuff like this works fine on my Quad Capture. What's your interface?

# ¿ Mar 25, 2016 22:26

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 00:42

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Drink-Mix Man posted:

Just a little Alesis iO2 right now, though soon upgrading to either a Zoom R16 or a Digi 003

Yeah, that should work with all of those.

# ¿ Mar 26, 2016 00:34

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > No Music Discussion > Musician's Lounge > Small Questions Which Don't Deserve Their Own Thread

«‹›3 »