Fun With Music Software
May. 7th, 2006 05:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
filkertomFor reasons neither I nor Sony/Sonic Foundry Tech Support can fathom, Acid Pro 6.0 doesn't run on my laptop. It installs, but hits the "scanning for VST instruments" and then quietly stops, which is an improvement from the first couple tries (before I reluctantly updated the laptop to Service Pack 2), when it did the "acid60.exe has encountered an error and needs to shut down. We are sorry for the inconvenience. Would you like to let Microsoft snoop around your computer's innards?" thing.
Fortunately, it runs just fine on the desktop. And the special edition of Kompakt is simply great. There will be many new noises coming soon, oh yes.
On other fronts, I've found a few more useful functions in Band in a Box that make life and arranging much easier. It still ain't close to perfect, and for all its power it's simply not as controllable as SuperJam. But I'm getting a lot better at coaxing the right noises out of it.
And I'm probably going to cut down on the number of VST and VSTi plugins I'm using. Bandstand, Kompakt, the Kjaerhus Classic series, and Spectralive are the only ones I'm using a lot. I'll go through the list soon and make sure of a few things. (I would keep the sfz Soundfont player in there, but Kompakt reads Soundfonts and is much more stable. It can also use up to eight at a time.) If I can afford it by then, I'd like to get either MOTU Symphonic Instrument or Garritan Personal Orchestra. And there are some guitar Soundfonts at Sonic Implants that have been calling my name, particularly the Acoustic, the Rickenbacker finger and pick basses, and the Stratocaster.
How's your Week In Music Software going?
Fortunately, it runs just fine on the desktop. And the special edition of Kompakt is simply great. There will be many new noises coming soon, oh yes.
On other fronts, I've found a few more useful functions in Band in a Box that make life and arranging much easier. It still ain't close to perfect, and for all its power it's simply not as controllable as SuperJam. But I'm getting a lot better at coaxing the right noises out of it.
And I'm probably going to cut down on the number of VST and VSTi plugins I'm using. Bandstand, Kompakt, the Kjaerhus Classic series, and Spectralive are the only ones I'm using a lot. I'll go through the list soon and make sure of a few things. (I would keep the sfz Soundfont player in there, but Kompakt reads Soundfonts and is much more stable. It can also use up to eight at a time.) If I can afford it by then, I'd like to get either MOTU Symphonic Instrument or Garritan Personal Orchestra. And there are some guitar Soundfonts at Sonic Implants that have been calling my name, particularly the Acoustic, the Rickenbacker finger and pick basses, and the Stratocaster.
How's your Week In Music Software going?
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-07 10:19 pm (UTC)My mixer is dying, which his going to make doing a final mixdown for the new CD a little tough, since as part of it's death it seems to feel the need to put a whole lot of hiss anytime I try to transfer things to my laptop.
I need to get a way to either record straight to the computer, or a firewire mixer that will enable me to go straight to the computer from the DA88.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-07 10:29 pm (UTC)And you might want to try the freeware Reaper (http://www.cockos.com/reaper/) DAW, which seems to have been put together to address problems with earlier versions of Acid Pro than 6.0. Pretty powerful and fairly stable. The Kjaerhus Classic effects listed above are also freeware, and damn good.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-07 10:43 pm (UTC)I'm considering moving all music stuff to an AMD64 that I now have available. I've also learned that I might be able to buy one of the Sonar packages at an upgrade price because I was a registered Cakewalk owner...like fifteen (!!) years ago. (If that works out, they get my vote for most liberal upgrdate policy ever seen.)
I downloaded "Reaper" after your last heads-up and ran into one potential show-stopper. Importing a multi-instrument MIDI generated by BiaB dropped all the parts into one track. I haven't looked closely at whether that's configurable, but even so, it's a surprising default.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-07 10:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-08 03:19 am (UTC)I've no idea where I'm going to build a green screen room.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-08 11:55 am (UTC)-=ShoEboX=-
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-08 11:57 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-08 08:25 pm (UTC)I'll hide now...