The Song Fight Bulletin Board

A quick Google found this. http://www.kreatives.org/kristal/ I know nothing of it and haven't tried it but maybe it's what you're looking for Neil. It's free at any rate.

I've used Audacity at work many times. It's great for stop - go recording of content. I used it mostly to capture audio tapes and phone recordings. It tracks but, unless they have improved it's interface, I imagine utilizing it as mixing software would become tiresome pretty quickly.

It also crashed alot when I had a lot of things running at once.

Kristal looks great.

Well i just recorded a song with Kristal, works well enough. Very similar to acid, and the help files make things really easy. Mixed in a (poorly done) harmonica track just to see how the level balancing worked. The only odd part is you can only save things in the kristal media project format or wav. So I had to save as a a wav and convert it to a mp3 in Fruity Loops.

most likely kristal's developers didn't want to pay the mp3 licensing cost.
-bill

<a href="http://trikuare.cx/audio/sfencode.html">For great justice</a>. Initial setup is a bit annoying but it'll give you pretty good encoding quality without taking a lot of bandwidth. Since you're using an external encoder anyway, I mean.

So by posting that link to Kristal I actually helped someone? That seems odd. I'm having this sensation I've never had before. The sides of my mouth have this uncontrollable urge to turn upward. What's this euphoric feeling coming over me? SOMEBODY MAKE THIS STOP!

I really wish I was good at quoting Dr. Suess books. Something about the grinch's hart growing 10 times its size, seems appropriate.

NeilThrun wrote:I really wish I was good at quoting Dr. Suess books. Something about the grinch's hart growing 10 times its size, seems appropriate.

And what happened then...?
Well...in Who-ville they say
That the Grinch's small heart
Grew three sizes that day!

wow! this kristal thing is awesome. just leaps and bounds beyond the little digital four-track i've been using.

what i really like is that it's got a straight-forward interface, but enough gadgets and tricks to make it really flexible. i think it's nearly perfect for hobbyists (like me). and it supports VST plug-ins, which my old software did not.

oh, the fact that it only exports to .WAV (well and .AIF, and .FLAC and .OGG) files isn't a big deal: decoder/encoder.

now i have to go hunt me down some neat plug-ins. oh, this is so bad for my study habits...

heh.

njm

Speaking of a digital 4-Track

http://www.digitalsoundplanet.com/home.html

this site has a free one to download and a free MIDI(16trks)/Audio(4Trks) Mastering!? suite
also free...

It apparently offers somthing about online collabs in 'custom' studios made for the particpants...erm....I dunno wat that means ...I think its some kind of forum which allows upload and download of files from users....but I aint sure, Im gonna have to check it out
But all Ive done so far is download the software, tell you lot and now Im gonna try it out.

I was gonna post direct links to each page with the downloads available, but that made the box, and therefore thread, go wide as and I hate that.
But iI couldnt rember the code to make it small and i couldnt find it in the forum....bah

if anyone can remind me---the code tho, not a website that does it

cheers
-Me$$iah


[EDIT]....Well it works in my studio computer, but not in the one Im on now. I dont know why that is...unless its related to soundcards or somthing..I was linked there from a Pulsar site.....

if anyone else tries it Id be interested in hearing whether or not it works on your comp

Also speaking of code...How do I link a pic up in my sig

cheers

I got a load of music software back from the days I used to use a PC. What os are you using? XP is backwards compatible i guess. I can post it to you if you PM me with your address details. I sold Cubase, but I think I have Logic 4.7 and various other plugins and wave editors etc.

Will it cost any wonga? Nah, just buy me a kebab sometime.

Me$$iah wrote:Speaking of a digital 4-Track

http://www.digitalsoundplanet.com/home.html

i was using this for a long time. it's all right: very bare-bones (for effects you got reverb and chorus and it's not VST-compatible so far as i know.) the collab opportunities are quite interesting, especially b/c they do offer their own server space for uploading your files. the great thing is that, b/c it's all the same software, you just upload a single file (of up to four tracks and a master track) and your fellow collaborators get all the data in one place. that said, the files are HUGE (like 100K or something).

so, i'd say a good place to start; the software is very user-friendly and doesn't overwhelm you with loads of possibilities that you may never use. the version with all the midi tracks is pretty cool, but i don't use midi (or at least don't know how.)

If they managed to get an entire audio track down to 100K, I'd be very impressed. ;)

Anyway. This sounds a lot like ResRocket DRGN, which was just plain cool (at least based on being an avid user of their free MIDI-only . Unfortunately, the business model kinda sucked; they rented virtual "studio space" on an hourly basis, just like a real studio, only stupid. (If they'd done it based on bandwidth instead of time I think it'd still be around today.)

nyjm'
You used it..cool...were your songfights recorded on it??

It was the collaboration thing that intreaged me, tho I aint checked it out yet ...I been far to busy, but I do intend on sometime....hehehe yay for apathy

Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails released the source from another track from their latest CD. This time, the song "Only" is available as a ProTools project folder and I downloaded it to remix the track. It's pretty cool because when you open the ProTools session file, it gives you all the master session tracks, with placed and cut samples, etc. Pretty sweet.

I took a screencap of it if anyone is curious to what a Nine Inch Nails song looks like in ProTools.

Aaah, Pro Tools. I used the free version a few years ago and I really liked using it. I did a couple of songs with it and even some post production for a friend. What I liked was that you just had these 2 main windows, the edit and the mix. I thought about upgrading to a "fuller" version but didn't want to fork out for their hardware. I actually spent many agonizing days pondering which way to go software wise and in the end opted for Logic.

I would still recommend Pro Tools free for anyone who doesn't have much cash to lay out or is still in the pondering stage and not sure which way to invest their savings. But that's their trick I think - they get you hooked with their free version. You can do pretty much everything, but you are limited to 8 tracks of audio. M-audio have now teamed up with Avid and they have brought out special versions of Pro Tools which you get if you buy selected m-audio hardware.

http://m-audio.com/index.php?do=product ... D=protools

If they were doing this 3 years ago then I would have gone for it as I had m-audio hardware which I liked and wanted to keep.

trollin' through old threads.

Me$$iah wrote:nyjm'
You used it..cool...were your songfights recorded on it??

It was the collaboration thing that intreaged me, tho I aint checked it out yet ...I been far to busy, but I do intend on sometime....hehehe yay for apathy

i used Digital SoundPlanet's AudioFree software for about two years (i.e., lots o' crap i will never subject you guys too.) it was a good primer. for songfight, i used it for about half of my songs: Ancient, Digital Chimera, Everybody Now, Me the Merciless, Turn the Power On and Ellis Island. Everything since Ellis Island has been with Kristal or at least re-worked with it.

to give you a good idea of the difference in production capacity, check out Ellis Island verus the music for Hope, Oath and Suspicion's Rattle.

I use Pro Tools. I think it's the easiest DAW out there. But it has three MAJOR problems.

1. Doesn't use VST. Uses audiosuite (proprietary). Not a big deal, since mostly everything I want comes in AS versions.

2. You need Digidesign hardware to run it. This is fine as long as you're happy with what they offer. But if you like someone else's product more (except M-Audio, now), you're screwed. But here's the thing that really sucks: If your Digi hardware breaks, you need to buy more Digi hardware to open all your songs. Granted, the source audio is easy enough to get to, but you won't have any of the layout/crop/loop/etc. info.

3. You need to buy upgrades when you upgrade your OS. I upgraded to Tiger recently, and now Pro Tools won't run at all. WTF? Why should I shell out $$$ to get my software to work? Every other app works in Tiger. It should be a free upgrade, bitches.

</rant>

I never really understood what made ProTools so much better than Logic, anyway.

The only annoying thing about Logic that I've found is that Logic Express limits you to only 8 digital audio tracks (which you can finagle into 12 if you don't use buses), though Pro doesn't have that limitation (the site lists the limit as 64 which is still somewhat arbitrary but at least that gives plenty of room to work in; I don't think I've ever used more than 15 tracks on a song). The way they implement the limit does make GarageBand importing much more difficult than it needs to be, though (which is funny since Express is supposed to be a simple GB upgrade), and also Expresss supposedly doesn't allow you to add third-party VSTs (not that I have any VSTs to try this with), though it does seem to allow third-party AudioUnits.

Also, Logic will run on any hardware you want, even the built-in stuff. ASIO helps but isn't required. This is especially cool because even if you have an expensive 8-channel FireWire DAW interface box at home you can still edit/mix/sequence/etc. on the airplane or in the library or whatever without needing to lug anything extra around.

Someday I'll get around to buying Pro, rather than using my *ahem* extended free trial of Express.

Caravan Ray wrote:Don't know what Acid does - but Audacity is free and very useful.

And you can get a free sample of Fruity Loops which is very cool

BTW now I have a Mac- I can't use my free sample Fruity Loops anymore and I miss it. Does anyone know anything for Mac that is similar to Fruity Loops (and similarly free?)

i think there's a free version of logic that runs appleloops (similar to acid/fruity loops).

There's a free time-limited trial of Logic Express, and GarageBand is "free" in that it comes with iLife which comes with new Macs.

GarageBand is actually a pretty capable production system, as long as you don't need effects automation or third-party VSTs (which are the only real missing things in it).