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Post by viciousbliss on Apr 14, 2018 20:02:33 GMT -6
Evidently there are NOT plenty of piracy laws on the books, because piracy is still a problem. Outmoded laws that are totally ineffective are not "plenty" - they're just useless, outmoded, ineffective crap. What's needed are effective laws to block and take down piracy sites and impose stiff penalties - jail time - on the operators. Prior to Napster piracy sites used to get taken down all the time and operators typically got a couple years in federal pen. Suddenly that stopped happening. Piracy existed, but not in music very much because music was uncool to pirate. Only lamers pirated music because music has no copy protection - it was like cheating in the game and the serious pirate sites - the "scene" sites - would ban you for uploading music. Piracy existed but at manageable levels because scene piarates took measures to keep the puiblic out - nobody wanted to get shut down and jailed. Half the fun was playing hide and seek with the cops - the other was being first out with a new crack. Nobody wanted the general public involved. You're probably too young to be aware of any of this. If we get effective anti-piracy laws and international cooperation via Interpol we can take things back down to a reasonable level. It can be done, and quiter easily. The tools are in place - they're used to fight terrorism and international crime. They're just not being applied. Absolute, total bullshytte. Established artists don't need "exposure". Yeah, right - that's why nobody listens to Garth Brooks or Metallica anymore. Pull th othert bone, it has got bells on! Which brings in barely enough money to support the tour. I've got some news for you (well, not really news to tjhoser in that end of the biz) the touring business is glutted. There arer far more artists touring than there is demand. The typical member of the public only has so much money they can afford to pay for live shows, and with ticket prtices through the roof (because records don't make money anymore) that means that people can afford fewer shows. At the same time you've got more artists than ever competing for that money. It's a huge clusterfuck. You've got people like Don playing casinos instead of major auditoriums and arenas as a result - and they're the LUCKY ones. 20 years ago a 5000 seat show was, if not nothing, then small potatoes. Acts played the small (5000 seat) shows because they were more intimate and fun than the bread and butter area shows. AFAIK, King Diamond hasn't toured the US because they can't break even on a tour. That's "free advertising" that we don't need. You don't give away the product you're selling for "free advertising". That's suicidally stupid. Which seems to be par for the course these days. Man,. you're brainwashed.... Let's hope it doesn't. Fair compensation would be good but do you REALLY think people would pay cable TV rates for streamed music of any quality? And high quality streaming would create a really serious bandwidth problem, which in turn would drive up your internet rates. There are real limits to how much a finite amount of bandwidth can support. We'ree in a big bubble right now and the bubble is reaching the technological limits of what's possible. You can't copy protect audio. It can always be copied via the final analog signal. You might as well try to hold back the wind. That's why the ONLY solution is strict enforcement of sufficiently serious penalities to make the average person think twice before stealing. When I was in the first year of high school there was a big fad for shoplifting. Lots of kids, even kids with the money to pay were shoplifting all kinds of stuff. Then a few kids got busted and a few others got caught, warned, and turned over to their parents. Suddenly shoplifrting wasn't cool and fun anymore. I'd wager they still get cracked but you just don't have access. If something isn't cracked it's only because there's a pile of plugs that do exactly the same thing, save for the artwork in the GUI. The only stuff that isn't cracked is that with a hardware component. The "interest" in the cracking scene is the competition between crack groups. No, it won't - because it's pointless. All you need to crack audiop is a recorder of some sort and a stereo line cord or a set of clip leads to attach to the speakers. It's trivial. You can't copy protect audio. Not "protection" which does not and cannot exist, PROSECUTION. Throw your little punk ass in jail for a couple years for running a pirate service. You upload, you go to jail and pay a stiff fine. You run a site, you go to jail for a much longer time and get socked with a fine you'll be paying for ther rest of your life. Without sites and uploaders, downloading will wither away. Incidentally, contrary to the image they promote of themselves, the people who own and run those sites are no "Robin Hoods" - thery rake in a pretty penny running those things. Effective promotion is very expensive. "Promotion" that is not expensive is not effective and, if it involves giving away free product, can even work against you. It's the major reason that I refuse to post my work on sites like Soundcloud. You read too much bad Science fiction and worse, you seem to believe it. (I read lots and lots opf SF too, but you have to be able to separate real science based stuffg from sheer fantasy.) And you REALLY need to lay off the Cory Doctorow, it's (he's) toxic. Napster never should have lasted more than two months before going down in a big Federal bust. The FBI seriously dropped the ball there. Right up until then they'd been doing hard busts of various types of pirate sites at a rate of at least one every couple or three months with a near 100% conviction rate and jail time. People on both sides of the aisle (both serious pirates and music biz people) were placing bets on how long Napster would last. It never happened. The big question is WHY? Evidently you weren't hip to the record collector network. Or weren't willing to pay the going price. Yeah, just like it wasn't practical to send huge files like Microsoft Office or a full Windows install. Or AutoCAD. Or anything else. Guess you never heard of a multi-part RAR, huh? Napster was a program, I don't think it was actually hosting anything. Everyone needs advertising. Even Star Wars. It would take a lot of resources to stop every site with pirated content in every country with internet access. I know little about Garth, but when did Metallica really alienate its fanbase? They pissed off some hardcore metalheads in 91 and 96, but not the people who loved the hits. Judas Priest did a lot of damage with Turbo and Ram It Down. Megadeth was nearly killed off by Risk. Didn't Aerosmith also take a big hit with Rock and a Hard place? I know Kiss was basically on life support because of Elder and Unmasked. Maybe "I was made for lovin you" could be blamed for putting off the rock fans. If the touring business is so unprofitable, why are more bands repeatedly touring than ever? You even see bands touring that haven't done a show in 30 years. I don't doubt that a lot of bands barely break even or lose money. It's hard to say how big a draw BOC should or shouldn't be. I love Revolution and Club Ninja, but for some reason I'm in the minority. There's a lot of bands from that era who had much higher sales that are also playing casinos. Some of these casinos have a pretty big capacity too. I was saying that King Diamond played to over 5000 people here twice in 2015 after only being able to draw maybe 1000 max at House of Blues/Metro from 98-2005. Downloading wasn't much an issue in 98. King complained about downloading a lot starting in 2002. It was probably more of a problem in 2002 than it is now. The increase in attendance is only due to more people becoming aware. Every person sharing videos and whatever on social media is advertising. There's plenty of high demand, unique plugs that haven't been cracked. I guess after Ilok 2 was cracked companies went and tried some new things. Some methods were easier to crack than others. Supposedly the Acustica stuff is impossible to crack despite no Ilok. I doubt companies pay money to pirates not to release cracked stuff. From what I understand the Ilok 2 stuff got cracked because some guy who hadn't done the audio stuff wanted a new challenge. The usual crack teams couldn't figure it out. If there were 100 crack teams out there, everything would probably be cracked. For plugins, I don't think many crackers care to make the effort. For music, I was talking about the future when someone invents some kind of sophisticated system so even analog copies aren't possible. Most of the time I'm reading stuff like Fanatical Futurist and Kurzweil, there isn't a lot of speculation there. Just analysis of what exists and where it's going. Kurzweil has promoted the idea that people who don't want to live with advanced tech could have set aside areas, sorta like the Amish. Did winrar exist in 96? I don't recall working with zip files and the like until maybe 99. The only way they could really have strict enforcement of piracy is if enforcement costs came down. Inevitably that would mean AI. Putting everything under a microscope. There shouldn't be a big incentive to pirate with youtube and streaming. Most people can listen to everything they want that way. Album sales aren't going to go way up if they start throwing downloaders in jail. You'd also need to ban youtube and streaming sites and limit the number of bands allowed to sell music. Then have those few bands/artists get all the media exposure. Probably ban home recording, anything that plays digital files, and regulate the industry so only a limited number of people can be audio pros. The lack of barriers to entry is what led to all this oversaturation. One could argue that oversaturation is a bigger problem than downloaders. Music of the past would also need to be suppressed. Today more than ever artists have to compete with the past. Before everyone just moved onto whatever was new. A lot of times you couldn't access things from the past due to lack of information and lack of product availability. Artists of the past must compete with modern artists. Probably tens of thousands of albums have come out in the last 20 years. It would not surprise me if more albums are released in a modern year than the total that were released from 1950-1990. I think we're moving in a direction where everything is going to be more widely available and much less expensive. Less money will go a lot further. Stuff like 3d printed houses selling for less than 10k. Being able to use self-driving rideshare services instead of paying for a car and all its costs. Better and cheaper healthcare solutions. I think the average smartphone now contains tech worth 900k in 1982. I don't think the world is going in a direction where we're bringing back high pay for factory jobs before outsourcing. It's going to be about needing less human work and people having more freedom to do with their time what they want. At some point society will raise the question about people who want to split off and live with only so much tech. But you would have to restrict the group living with less tech somehow because they would eventually develop the advanced tech they sought to avoid. Getting back to loudness. These artists and companies should really give people a choice. You don't see anyone caring to do that. They're too worried that if they're not insanely loud that it will damage their brand with someone for some reason. Insane loudness isn't an artistic choice, it's about control.
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Post by viciousbliss on Apr 13, 2018 15:32:34 GMT -6
CTRL/SHIFT/EJECT has become my friend (it turns the screen black)...amazing what you hear when you're not looking at things. That's very true. First read about this concept on nwavguy.blogspot.com What's always interesting is when you have a plugin in bypass, forget it is, and then you start hearing the adjustments despite the sound not changing. Stuff sounds different at concerts too when you close your eyes.
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Post by viciousbliss on Apr 13, 2018 15:30:58 GMT -6
Movie scores generally seem to have more dynamics then other genres, although I've heard about loudness war seeping in there too. The Bladerunner score I usually listen to is some kinda fan edit based off that 3 disc set from 2007. There's plenty of piracy laws on the books. The problem is resources that are needed to go after millions of people. Even if they were strictly enforced, I'm not sure how much extra revenue that creates for artists who aren't already famous. In some ways the piracy is good for established people because it makes their albums irrelevant while giving them untold levels of exposure. 20+ years ago if an artist made an album that alienated the fanbase, they were done. Now you have a lot of people, including a lot of younger generations, digging up stuff via streaming and buying merchandise and concert tickets. 20 years ago if I told people about King Diamond, rarely did anyone listen. His biggest drawing shows in the US might be 1000 people at places like House of Blues. Now he can sellout 5000 capacity venues with only Exodus as support mere months after selling above 5000 tickets with Slayer for Mayhem fest or whatever it was called. No album released since 2007 and no US tour since 2005, I think. So about a decade of no activity but somehow demand grew 5x over. What changed I think was that pretty much every person into that type of music became aware. If we include social media uploads in strict enforcement, there goes lots of free advertising.
Streaming will eventually get into higher quality stuff, maybe even fair compensation at some point. Flac streams. Maybe some 24/96 stuff at some point. Even if someone creates advanced piracy protections, it'll be broken sooner or later. The only reason some plugins haven't been cracked is because the interest isn't there. Mainstream music will attract a lot more cracking resources than some Ilok plugin. What is a lot more valuable than piracy protection is promotion. Mainstream releases would not sell without tons of promotion across so many places. Promotion will change over time too. It'll be a different world once people start hooking up to the cloud via their neo cortex. There's just no going backwards. Napster was disruptive, but people coulda seen it coming if they thought about it. A CD being data, internet allowing the transferring of data, mp3 compressing data, it was only a matter of time until someone decided to facilitate it. I had considered the idea years before Napster came out when I couldn't find a way to buy some Kim Wilde cds. A guy who ran a fan site and me agreed it would be problematic to send huge wav files internationally via dial-up.
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Post by viciousbliss on Apr 13, 2018 7:33:07 GMT -6
I always thought the Misfits stuff sounded quite good. Especially Collection 1. It might've sounded horrendous on a DAW with plugins. If I'm not mistaken, the old methods were a lot more forgiving when it came to loudness. Getting that same sorta glue out of a DAW seems much tougher. I definitely don't hear it on modern releases by classic bands. Maybe the only famous release that is known for not riding the loudness war trend is Chinese Democracy from Guns N Roses. I've yet to hear anyone complain that it isn't loud enough(though members did say they recorded real loud as can be evidenced by some bad distortion on songs like Street of Dreams). Plenty of people complained about Death Magnetic's loudness though. To the point of petitions and widely popular Guitar Hero remixes. Dynamic releases still have plenty of loud sounds and plenty of brickwalled releases sound as if the music has nowhere to go. It was mentioned earlier in this thread about quantization. To me, it sounds wrong. Going back to Guns, I think people are most fond of Appetite and Lies because they have Adler drumming. Even his supposedly "pieced together using every editing trick under the sun" drum tracks on Civil War from Illusion 2 sounds infinitely more natural than the stuff Sorum did. While I still enjoy Sorum's work to some extent, it always sounds a bit robotic and he's playing too many notes. Sort of a precursor to what engineers would eventually do with Pro Tools.
I don't think it's a coincidence that legacy acts like Guns are the biggest touring draws for the most part. It's hard to say how modern stuff will hold up over time because I think users will end up with all the control eventually. The software out there today that works to fix loudness war mixes will evolve into stuff that is capable of recreating music in many different ways tailored to the users taste. Someone did something where they 1985ized a Bieber song pretty convincingly. I have no idea what their method was, but it's a taste of things to come. One thing I tried that worked was turning down the volume on the last Foxes album, converting the files to 96k, and then running them all through Peacock in Pro Tools. While it still retained some of the loudness war stamp, it was a completely different experience that didn't sound worse. You could hear different things and the music had more room to breathe. What's funny is the wife didn't even notice anything changed compared to the regular cd. She just thought it was the same disc despite it not being anywhere as loud.
Artists could offer different masterings. I don't see why it's so hard just to bounce things once with loudness war settings and then do another bounce with different settings.
A lot of tutorials are misleading I think, particularly the "gear doesn't matter" stuff put out by people like Graham Cochrane. Novatron, Azure, Seventh Heaven Pro, Phoenix, and the Weiss set definitely tell me gear matters. There is stuff that I think is objectively bad in audio. That 1997 Iggy Pop remaster where he wanted everything cranked into the red horribly. Loudness is like a high spot in wrestling. It's designed to wow people in the moment. That's the only purpose.
Anyone know any other well known albums released in the last 10 years that rejected the loudness war?
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Post by viciousbliss on Apr 12, 2018 8:04:53 GMT -6
Are people buying? Sales keep going down and I don't think it's only due to downloading and streaming. The average modern release from say 2000-present isn't going to stand the test of time like many classic rock releases or 80s songs featured on The Goldbergs have. A lot of these bands and producers are just very neurotic and insecure. They love being trendy too, as do many top engineers. I've seen so many engineers either at the purple place or in their youtube videos not only normalize all this insanity, but seemingly brag about how loud they get things. I just did a contest on recording.de and was very puzzled at the mixes that got voted to the top. It seemed that the ones where every element was loudest got the most votes. I didn't think many were good at all. They normalized all the volume levels, but you could still tell when the intent was to make every part of the mix as loud as possible. The majority of the mixes were like that, it just seemed like the ones at the top were loud and somewhat proficient and the others were loud with glaring flaws. My mix seemed kinda out of place. The sample mixes done by the band and one of the judges both emphasized loudness too. If I recall, the one synth part pretty much got lost in a lot of the mixes, even the band's. These weren't great-sounding tracks either.
The loudness doesn't do any favors for not so pristine recordings as I understand it. It helps to reveal more of the flaws. They've always talked about waveforms on the Steve Hoffman forums, but that's only part of the story. There's some brickwall looking waveforms on stuff I've seen from 93 or 94. But it sounds 10x better than more modern brickwalls. The average person I don't think cares much unless it's really obvious. I doubt the average music fan in 1991 was thinking "you know what would get me to buy more cds, brickwalled mastering". Maybe they think the loudness appeals to hyper teenagers. Mostly I think these people live in their own bubbles.
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Post by viciousbliss on Apr 2, 2018 6:15:30 GMT -6
Looks great! If only I could afford hardware. John, you have some impressive stuff in your website portfolio, why not highlight some of what you used and link to the soundcloud track the gear is featured on? For me, I'm not sure what I'm getting next. There will probably be more plugins, I just can't think of any obvious holes right now. Something big will probably come along later this year. My next thing is to get a Ryzen 2 or Threadripper if I can't fix my old Xeon workstation. Or if the 1100 it scores on cpuuserbenchmark's multi-core mark isn't enough and I need 1400 or whatever a Ryzen 2 2700 ends up scoring. If you stocked software and computer stuff and got into the price range of everyplugin and microcenter, that would be a big deal. Good luck with it all.
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Post by viciousbliss on Mar 26, 2018 6:50:17 GMT -6
I've read stuff that says SRC can be done accurately. There's that one site that shows the reconstructions from various programs. Audacity always seems to be the best. I definitely hear big changes when converting an 88 or 96 24-bit file to 16 and either 44 or 48. Same if I turn the 16-bit dither on in either Peacock or Oxford Limiter. I'll have to try converting an 88 or 96 to 44/ or 48 and leave it all at 24 bits. The worst part about 88k or above is cpu. With Azure's latest update, I find myself doing a lot of guessing which settings to change and hitting bounce. Sometimes I can get real-time playback, but not too often. The HQ version never gets real-time playback even if it's the only plugin active. I will have to try it on my erratic Xeon workstation which scored around 1100 multi-core points on cpuuserbenchmark. Single core was bad at around 70, but that doesn't seem to matter anywhere as much as the multi. That 1100 is almost twice the 600 this computer scores. Maybe a minimum setup for a 30+ track session with one or two cpu-intensive plugs should include either a Ryzen 1600 or Intel 6850k, both scoring around 1000 on multi. These years old Intel chips seem to be rising in value ironically. One would think if a Threadripper 1950x is around $700 that an Intel 6950x would not still command prices around $1500 with stock selling out. AMD prices continue to fall as the 1600 was $149 the other day. Ryzen 2 will be out soon too.
The type of plugin matters a lot. From what I recall from the ultimate plugin analysis discussion, pure digital plugins are fine at 44/48 in terms of aliasing. Other stuff like EQ cramping could still happen without the plugin doing something about it.
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Post by viciousbliss on Mar 24, 2018 14:37:45 GMT -6
just clicked it again now and it's fine. I never got that message.
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Post by viciousbliss on Mar 24, 2018 12:29:04 GMT -6
www.mathieudemange.fr/rx950-classic-ad-da-converter/I find it very useful in getting rid of a lot of that harsh stuff digital exposes while also bringing out a sort of warm energy. Also compresses the dynamics in a pretty natural-sounding way. It's only 19 Euros and well worth it.
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Post by viciousbliss on Mar 13, 2018 15:07:52 GMT -6
Wouldn't any significant change to a mix beyond tech fixes be considered an artistic choice? Ultimately we're all at the whims of what the public wants. And what they want is somewhat controlled by whatever media they consume. People generally don't want to dig to find cool stuff and are satisfied with whatever drek gets paraded out in the mainstream. I've heard some pretty atrocious stuff on Smule. I think if someone is just ok it can polish them up quite well. Music going digital kinda opened up Pandora's box. It's a reflection of society. Things move much faster now. Perhaps a lot of things will be better beyond what we can comprehend. Right now it's this weird in between phase where we have all this tech but the real revolutionary stuff hasn't become widespread.
Getting back to audio software, it's too bad we don't have much insight into what specific things are being worked on. But we see that the end goal is to keep removing barriers to entry. Probably it's more important to watch for things like Smule. There may come a day when bands just record each part into their phone and have some program mix it all.
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Post by viciousbliss on Mar 12, 2018 22:34:55 GMT -6
Most impressive. Moreso if it solves all those problems will little tweaking from the user. I will have to try the PC version when it's available. There's definitely an expiration date for audio engineers and most jobs, probably before 2029 if Kurzweil's predictions are remotely accurate. There's already some cyberneticish implant to treat Parkinson's. The trade off being money and its equivalents being less and less necessary. In a lot of ways, the consumer has already made so many audio people obsolete. Once Napster came out it showed that most people would listen to the same songs over and over in substandard quality if it meant music would be free and convenient. Bands and labels started responding to this philosophy too. As time has gone on they've opted for quantity over quality, whatever made things cheaper and faster to produce. Post-2002 is where I've always felt the decline started for Rock, Pop, and Metal. The human element has been disappearing from music gradually for quite a while. There's not a lot of incentive for an unestablished artist to invest in their craft and hire someone to create some grand sound design. It's not even possible to find band members a lot of the time because everyone's tastes are so fragmented. Without an incentive to form groups and compromise, creative people need ways to generate a band. We should be seeing more products of this nature sooner than later. I'm definitely curious how long we have til we reach the tipping point where what we have now looks primitive by comparison. Most plugins will probably have AI type features built into them like this Gullfoss at some point. Then the DAW. It will get to the point where the user is only needing to provide basic instructions to the DAW and AI will do the rest. I could see there being sort of blank slate virtual instruments that take on the sound of their counterparts on existing albums once a scan of the cd is done. That could be done with other aspects too, like eq settings, saturation, compression, etc. The next 5-10 years will potentially see some pretty radical changes. Home computing is finally showing big gains from year to year and I'd be surprised if it slows down at all. I think these new Ryzens are supposed to be significantly faster. Gains made from year to year will probably get bigger. Some other company may introduce home computers beyond what Intel and AMD are doing now. For hardware, I think it will get into the territory of 3d printed stuff and people putting it together themselves before something else does it for them. Eventually hardware will be obsolete. Analog modeling will inevitably reach the point of being equivalent given how close it is now. All we can really do now is hang on for the ride I suppose. That's either brilliant satire or a very depressing view of the future, perhaps both... Actually, I just discovered fanaticalfuturist.com after typing this. There's way more stuff going on than I can even keep up with. Everything I've talked about exists, it's just a matter of time. Kinda like how the Internet existed with bulletin boards that took 20 min to dial into and then all of a sudden the www was accessible for everyone. For us, rapid advancements may mean we should invest less and just subscribe to a couple companies while using existing stuff until it becomes obsolete. Stuff like smule is also out there. Maybe a lot of their users wouldn't hire someone, but now if someone wants to record their karaoke track, they can get a pretty polished result using smule on their phone. Is this new plugin making artistic choices or just intelligently fixing obvious issues? I won't be able to test for a while.
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Post by viciousbliss on Mar 12, 2018 6:56:02 GMT -6
Most impressive. Moreso if it solves all those problems will little tweaking from the user. I will have to try the PC version when it's available. There's definitely an expiration date for audio engineers and most jobs, probably before 2029 if Kurzweil's predictions are remotely accurate. There's already some cyberneticish implant to treat Parkinson's. The trade off being money and its equivalents being less and less necessary. In a lot of ways, the consumer has already made so many audio people obsolete. Once Napster came out it showed that most people would listen to the same songs over and over in substandard quality if it meant music would be free and convenient. Bands and labels started responding to this philosophy too. As time has gone on they've opted for quantity over quality, whatever made things cheaper and faster to produce. Post-2002 is where I've always felt the decline started for Rock, Pop, and Metal. The human element has been disappearing from music gradually for quite a while. There's not a lot of incentive for an unestablished artist to invest in their craft and hire someone to create some grand sound design. It's not even possible to find band members a lot of the time because everyone's tastes are so fragmented. Without an incentive to form groups and compromise, creative people need ways to generate a band. We should be seeing more products of this nature sooner than later. I'm definitely curious how long we have til we reach the tipping point where what we have now looks primitive by comparison. Most plugins will probably have AI type features built into them like this Gullfoss at some point. Then the DAW. It will get to the point where the user is only needing to provide basic instructions to the DAW and AI will do the rest. I could see there being sort of blank slate virtual instruments that take on the sound of their counterparts on existing albums once a scan of the cd is done. That could be done with other aspects too, like eq settings, saturation, compression, etc.
The next 5-10 years will potentially see some pretty radical changes. Home computing is finally showing big gains from year to year and I'd be surprised if it slows down at all. I think these new Ryzens are supposed to be significantly faster. Gains made from year to year will probably get bigger. Some other company may introduce home computers beyond what Intel and AMD are doing now. For hardware, I think it will get into the territory of 3d printed stuff and people putting it together themselves before something else does it for them. Eventually hardware will be obsolete. Analog modeling will inevitably reach the point of being equivalent given how close it is now. All we can really do now is hang on for the ride I suppose.
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Post by viciousbliss on Mar 8, 2018 3:28:11 GMT -6
www.arturia.com/products/software-effects/preamps-bundle/overviewThought this was worth checking out because The Softube trident is so expensive and I never really took to any of the previous 1073 emulations I tried. I like these so much for my rock and metal stuff when followed by Kotelnikov GE that I don't feel the need to get the Azure or Weiss anymore. Excitement, clarity, cpu efficiency, ease of eq moves, and turning the input up to get a bigger and tighter sound are all there. Stuff could still be iffy using the Azure and Weiss. And their cpu usage is really high along with their price tags. I'd definitely recommend trying this Arturia stuff and Kotelnikov before throwing down on those expensive plugins.
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Post by viciousbliss on Mar 7, 2018 6:57:20 GMT -6
that's right
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Post by viciousbliss on Mar 6, 2018 15:25:45 GMT -6
www.acustica-audio.com/store/t/acqua/equalizer/azureI've been using this for a couple weeks and it's definitely something special. In the past I've considered Acustica stuff to be a bit overhyped. Slow gui, high prices, sound not all that different from regular plugins. This one really helps to tidy up a mix. Incredibly smooth. You can make notable adjustments and it never really sounds bad. The pre-amp provides a good bit of glue, you just need to adjust the eq because it is a bit colored. Definitely interested in what everyone here thinks of it if you've tried it.
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Post by viciousbliss on Mar 6, 2018 15:18:44 GMT -6
I started testing this after Jantex said it was about the best thing he ever used, hardware or software. I'm swapping it in for Sknote SDC in my chains. The Weiss uses even more cpu than that. The results I'm getting are the best out of anything I've ever tried. Maybe there's something better out there though? I'm waiting for someone to post some criticism somewhere.
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Post by viciousbliss on Feb 22, 2018 15:05:39 GMT -6
After much discussion of this with Andy from Cytomic, I believed it was objectively provable to say most plugins benefit from being run at 88/96. Particularly eqs so they won't cramp and analog-modeled plugins so they won't alias. I remember he wasn't particularly fond of Pro Q2's Natural phase mode thinking it was too big a compromise to avoid the cramping at 44/48. The latency was quite high, for one. Pure digital plugins work the same at either rate, I think. Not sure if any eq has come up with a better solution than natural phase mode when being run at 44/48. Natural phase? You mean 'Phase Shift' ? ? That's the basic operating principal of most analog EQs in the hardware world. Nope, it's a selectable mode in Pro Q2. Zero latency, natural phase, linear phase. www.fabfilter.com/help/pro-q/using/processingmode
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Post by viciousbliss on Feb 21, 2018 16:40:08 GMT -6
After much discussion of this with Andy from Cytomic, I believed it was objectively provable to say most plugins benefit from being run at 88/96. Particularly eqs so they won't cramp and analog-modeled plugins so they won't alias. I remember he wasn't particularly fond of Pro Q2's Natural phase mode thinking it was too big a compromise to avoid the cramping at 44/48. The latency was quite high, for one. Pure digital plugins work the same at either rate, I think. Not sure if any eq has come up with a better solution than natural phase mode when being run at 44/48.
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Post by viciousbliss on Feb 15, 2018 21:37:38 GMT -6
I wonder how much a difference running these things through 2" tape and a Neve console is making. The results just seem a lot better than using any of the algorithmic or convo plugins I've used before. Would tacking on Phoenix and something like Tapedesk, VCC, or NLS yield some similar result? The price is low enough that you're not gambling much money on these IRs.
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Post by viciousbliss on Feb 15, 2018 12:58:11 GMT -6
They just released an Analog Pack for $29 including:
Hammond B3 AKG BX-10 AKG BX-20 EMT 140 Vol 1 EMT 140 Vol 2 Ecoplate Fender Spring
I've gotten some great results using the BX-10, B3, and EMT 140 Vol 1 so far. These things can really transform a mix. The Cathedral setting on the Quantec is also really unique. When I took out Tsar-1 and replaced it with one of these IRs, it was like night and day almost. These analog reverbs have been a lot more useful for me than the AMX-RMX. What I like about the B3 and BX-10 is that they don't have this horrible spring sound I've heard in other plugins or the Altiverb spring IRs. Pasttofuture's quality is far above the quality of the gear section in Altiverb 7. There's some overlap with this bundle and the BLKFRI one, but it's still cheaper than buying things separately.
Sometimes I'm adding the Altiverb depth and speed modulation, sometimes not. I also started experimenting with this Abbey Road reverb trick where you cut the highs down to 10k and cut lows below 600hz. Always seems to yield a good result if I tweak the numbers a little.
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Post by viciousbliss on Feb 13, 2018 11:09:00 GMT -6
I ended up turning off the mod speed and mod depth in Altiverb. Don't think it needs the extra modulation. There was one instance where I liked Little Plate better, but I haven't acquired the EMT140 or Ecoplate IRs yet. I did get the rest of the Quantec and there's definitely some useful stuff in there. I wish there was some more variation in the AMX IRs. Maybe that's how the original presets are, where rooms, plates, etc all have pretty much the same length.
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Post by viciousbliss on Feb 9, 2018 9:43:33 GMT -6
gumroad.com/pasttofuturereverbsgumroad.com/pasttofuturesamplesI decided to give these guys a try the other day since stuff is so cheap. Got the AMS RMX16 and Taj Mahal preset from the Quantec Room Simulator. Must say that these sound better for my stuff than anything else I've used. Smokes the Tsar-1, which I had recently started using again. Note that I'm importing these into Altiverb and using its modulation. The AMS is significantly better than Nomad's 80s Spaces and the ones that come with Altiverb. Everything was created using BASF or Studer tape through a Neve console it seems. For $40 you can buy their Black Friday bundle which has: Lexicon Model 200 *AKG BX-20 Spring Reverb *Post Futuristic Reverberations *EMT 244 *Ecoplate *Holy Grail Reverb *Lexicon 480 *Fender Deluxe Spring Reverb *Lexicon 300 *Lexicon PCM 60 *EMT 140 Bonus; *Tape Tr-808 *80's synths *Analog Conga Only the newest stuff like the AMS, Quantec, and BX-10 appear not to be in the bundle. That Taj Mahal from the Quantec is like nothing else I've ever used. U-he's free Protoverb is sorta similar. These verbs are among the easiest I've ever worked with. Blend easy as advertised. Clear, smooth, big, yet a lot of exciting highs and energy. Makes the Tsar sound dull by comparison. Not sure what I'm getting next. Leaning toward getting the rest of the Quantec library and getting the black friday bundle a little later.
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Post by viciousbliss on Feb 8, 2018 8:48:35 GMT -6
Hi Wiz, Not to get into the weeds off topic, that was a MOTU PCI interface at 44.1 kHz, all digital, from 2002. To be fair, that two mic recording sounds pretty good today. My early multitrack ITB from that era didn't hold up sonically to the recordings I'd done 16 trk of ADAT to my Mackie 32/4 mixer and mixed down from there. But I miss that Bomb Factory plug! Don, have you tried the CLA76? When I first started mixing a little less than 3 years ago, I tried recording vocals with my Motley Crue Livewire sound choice cd version and remember being able to swap out the BF76 for the CLA76 without it being too noticeable. I'll havta try it again now. These are probably the only two 1176 comps I've ever really liked, although I've never tried UAD and probably never will unless I get it for free or fall into a pool of money. There's a lot of Bomb Factory hate out there but I've never found their stuff to be horrible. Speaking of cpu usage, a lot of those Acustica comps use a ton of cpu, right? I just tried their Shadow Hills equivalent and didn't think it used a ton of cpu. Just found it underwhelming next to Sknote SDC.
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Post by viciousbliss on Feb 5, 2018 21:36:23 GMT -6
www.sonnox.com/toolbox/voxdoublerBeen testing this new combo of Thicken and Widen. Very useful. I like the Thicken last in a chain before RA or some limiter. It's a little better than Fix Doubler in most respects but can't do everything the Fix does. Widen works better for me on an aux than Waves Doubler or the H910. Both have a little bit of a learning curve. The doubles are almost as authentic as what Revoice creates based on my own experiments(I still have to make doubles using the latest Revoice update though). The big difference being you can tweak a new track a lot more. I'm using Thicken as a harmonizer more than for creating overdubs. Both of these help with mixing vocal harmonies. I plan to use Thicken for overdubs on a new session soon. Looking forward to see what else develops in this toolbox line since the prices aren't astronomical like their other stuff.
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Post by viciousbliss on Feb 5, 2018 21:19:04 GMT -6
I think some older plugins actually sound better like Cranesong, Echofarm, and even the L1. Overloud's stuff seems about as good as any and uses hardly any cpu. Recently I went back to using the CLA76 and CLA2A and I'm favoring that combo again. Newer computers like a 1950x Threadripper, 7820xe, or even a Ryzen 7 are probably hundreds of times more powerful than these DSP cards. cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-2320-vs-AMD-Ryzen-TR-1950X/m1735vs3932661% more powerful than the I5 chip in my old computer. It's in multi-core scoring and in my experience that's what matters most for what we do. These UAD things are probably closer to that I5 chip than the 1950x. I've tested Acustica stuff and have always come away underwhelmed. Their hardware comparison videos show the plugins sounding thinner, which is why they probably disabled comments. There may be some things about a hardware and tape workflow that can't be reproduced by stacking plugins. I've seen more posts popping up with people claiming the Seventh Heaven is a near clone of the M7. There's some old GS thread where people were preferring the dreaded Bomb Factory 76 over some reputable piece of hardware. I'm sure there's some plugs that could sound better with higher cpu usage, but the trend lately is for more efficiency without cutting quality. Like Disto-S. Then there's stuff like Elevate that are heavy on cpu. I'm not sure how viable it is for developers to make heavy cpu stuff considering how many people on these forums work on decade old desktop computers, laptops, or even stuff so old that it runs Windows XP. My thinking is that we'll continue to see higher quality and lower cpu stuff since everyone is not running stuff with 1000 and higher multi-core scores.
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