Still looking for musician-friendly recording software

Posted: Tue Apr 29, 2008 1:09 pm

Posted: Tue Apr 29, 2008 4:34 pm

Reaper was already mentioned and dissed.

You could always try Linux. See what's going down in the wonderful world of Ubuntu (Studio).

Posted: Tue Apr 29, 2008 5:44 pm

This is going to be no help at all but here goes anyway...

The only truly "musician friendly" recording software is the software that the recording engineer uses when recording said musician. A musician writes and plays. He/She shouldn't worry his/her little head about what software to use. The engineer records. He/she is the one that picks the software to use and learns how to use it in such a way that it won't interfere with a musicians mojo. Let a pro or semi-pro or even an amateur do it for you.

But really, if you are looking for something easy enough for any musician to use you might look into getting one of those all-in-one boxes.
-simple, play, stop, rewind and fast forward buttons. Easy enough for any musician.
-no brainer A/D-D/A
-built in preamps
-easy to use EQs, dynamics processors and effects
-portable, for recording on the go
-many have expandable options
-many have built in CD burners for printing mixes
-many have some sort of computer interface so if the need arises to do some major editing everything can be put into a computer for just such a task.

Then there is the portastudio. The musician's best friend. Put in a tape, plug in. Press record. Play.

Posted: Wed Apr 30, 2008 4:34 pm

"I will bet that 20 of those thirty clicks were a one time thing. ...
I don't know where your thirty clicks are coming from..."

Well, I told you where they came from....they came from doing what the manual said to do.

In my last session I did mess around with setting up templates. I am of course willing to invest in this and see whether I can get used to it.

My problems at this moment are that:

If I open a three-track wav it opens them on one track so the three tracks are no longer individually editable

It won't export multitrack wavs so I could port stuff to another program and back (this is really, really bad)

The Hi-Quality Pitch Shifter mentioned on the box, and a very major reason I purchased the software, does not seem to exist once you get into the manual

Meanwhile my guitar is wondering where the heck I am....

P

Posted: Wed Apr 30, 2008 4:38 pm

"I will bet that 20 of those thirty clicks were a one time thing. ...
I don't know where your thirty clicks are coming from..."

Well, I told you where they came from....they came from doing what the manual said to do.

In my last session I did mess around with setting up templates. I am of course willing to invest in this and see whether I can get used to it.

My problems at this moment are that:

If I open a three-track wav it opens them on one track so the three tracks are no longer individually editable

It won't export multitrack wavs so I could port stuff to another program and back (this is really, really bad)

The Hi-Quality Pitch Shifter mentioned on the box, and a very major reason I purchased the software, does not seem to exist once you get into the manual

Meanwhile my guitar is wondering where the heck I am....

P

Posted: Wed Apr 30, 2008 4:40 pm

Woops, sorry...

Posted: Wed Apr 30, 2008 4:55 pm

Okay. Talking about specifics helps. If you name each track appropriately, you can save your project to new folder.(make sure you select delete unused files) When you navigate to that folder and open the audio file folder you will see all of your tracks as individual takes.

If you want to import the tracks into say ProTools you can do that either a track at a time or, I'm not sure but I think you can import multiple tracks simultaneously in the later versions. (Latest I used was 6.9).

The export function in Cubase means mix down.

There should be an in depth manual on the install disc in pdf format.

Posted: Fri May 02, 2008 7:24 am

Huh. I'll try it.

pr0gr4m of course has the best idea -- to just get someone to do it for me. Maybe when I get to where I can get good takes down faster. I'm not a particularly good player or singer yet.

I did look at the Tracktion site, and the product page for the basic product presented three features: Sounds, loops, and MIDI. As far as I could tell the program didn't even -have- audio inputs.

This of course is the exact opposite of what I want. I am doing play-guitar-and-sing. Push the button and record. Some little pitch fixer for the five or six notes I can't hit. Reverb, eq. That's all, and any feature bloat beyond that is a hindrance.

It might be that Audacity -is- the best program. If I can port the vocal track to my Sound Forge for the pitch touch-up (it has a beautiful function for that) and then bring it back into Audacity for the mix, that'll be everything I'd need.

H

Posted: Fri May 02, 2008 8:24 am

you should check out adobe audition 3, its the best for multitrack recording and editing. if you dont use midi a lot it will be perfect for you

Posted: Fri May 02, 2008 9:26 am

Tracktion does in fact do audio and very well actually. They have a video tour of Tracktion on the Mackie site. You should watch it . It's quite amusing actually.

http://mackie.com/products/tracktion3/media/tracktion3.html?keepThis=true&TB_iframe=true&height=383&width=456

Posted: Tue May 06, 2008 12:10 pm

Vegas

I used version 3 and 6.

Tested 4 and 5 but they had lot of crashes and rendering problems.

Version 6 its great. It just lacks a couple of Plugins (bombfactory and such) but its great. And is the BEST AUDIO EDITING PROGRAM.

...

...

That's all.
eFe

Posted: Tue May 06, 2008 12:49 pm

Is tracktion 3 still a CPU hog?

Posted: Tue May 06, 2008 2:11 pm

Tracktion is a bit of a hog, yes. I think that is its one downfall. I haven't had issues with it though and I'm sure your new comp will deal with it quite well. I have yet to see 50% as opposed to Tracktion 2 where I was occasionally seeing up to 60-70% on the CPU meter. Ridiculous. And, that was with the demo songs. The bundled plugins are murder. Particularly Mackie Compression. After as few as two instances I was experiencing glitches at a buffer setting of 128.

Posted: Tue May 06, 2008 2:35 pm

That is about what I was seeing with it too. I tried it, mainly because it has the nifty feature that imports Mackie SDR project files. I loaded one of my 24 track 24 bit 44.1kHz projects to test it out, the cpu hit 90% on playback before my old PC locked up and needed to be rebooted.

Posted: Thu May 08, 2008 1:54 pm

Logic 8. Interface redesigned by Apple.

This topic sponsored by: