Compressing on the way in with a software compressor?

[UstadKhanAli]

 

""Bouncing" was similar in some respects... you had limited tracks, so you had to commit to a submix when you did a submix bounce to free up tracks on a analog multitrack - once you "burned" the source tracks by recording "over" them, there was no going back. )

 

 

I'm not saying that everyone has to do this, but I still love bouncing in Pro Tools, if only to make things manageable. I bounce with multiple keyboard parts, background vocals, or "sounds" just to make things more manageable. I have no problems committing to it...

 

And what I do is I make it so I can go back to earlier sessions if I really need to redo the bounced submix.

 

I know a lot of people lot to offput many mix/arrangement decisions until mixdown time, and those reasons are perfectly valid. I just like to commit to some things beforehand. But the whole beauty of all this equipment at hand is that we can do it however we want, all in the name of art. After all, at the end of the day, when someone's listening to our songs, they're listening to our songs, and don't care whether we bounced or added reverb later or whatever.

[WRGKMC]

I dont see any advantage to using a software comp recording myself. I'm kind of old school on some things. I tried it and didnt see any difference in sound quality in comparison to having it run as an insert later. Its not to say I dont use pre compression. I do have several hardware comps/limiters/gates I use for drums and such regularly.

Maybe theres something you can do with the side chain inserts to trigger ducking like a kick drum to gate a bass or something like that. I'm rarely board enough to mess with that kind of stuff anymore though.

I did do some experimental recording with plugins in steinberg and an earley version of logic pro for windows a long time ago. I had massive time delays tracking with certain plugins which made it impossible to monitor. After that I didnt bother with it.

I'm sure theres a way to do it with my setup but I just cant think of any benifits.

I usually fight temptation to over compress anyway. Having a littel extra dynamics is way better in the mastering stage than over compress.

[Phil O'Keefe]

Since Ken mentioned bouncing in PT, I thought I'd share an idea regarding that:

 

Some people used to complain about there being too few tracks in PT LE. It used to be a max of 24, then they upped it to 32, and of course, the optional MPT ups that to 48 tracks... but those are "active" tracks; you can actually have up to 128 tracks in a PT LE session. So if you have a section where you want 32 tracks of stacked BGV's (ala some of Roy Thomas-Baker's productions), how do you get around the track limitations? Yup - you bounce. But unlike tape, you can disable and "save" the source tracks, and go back later and change the bounce if you need to - just disable some of the other tracks temporarily, re-enable the source tracks for the bounce, make your adjustments, rebounce, then disable them again and re-enable the other tracks. All your automation and other settings are retained, so it's easy to adjust the bounce later if you need to.

 

I don't do a lot of bouncing for the sake of getting things grouped on stereo faders, but I do use mix groups and stem master outputs a lot to make adjusting things like BGV's en masse a bit easier.

[Music Calgary]

 

If everybody made art the same way, art would be pretty boring.

 

 

No 2 people make art the same way. And art is not boring...

[albiedamned]

Warning: anti-Pro Tools rant to follow

 

I cannot understand why any home studio person would choose to use ProTools. It's expensive, and it imposes hardware and track count restrictions on you. And it's plugins are way more expensive. Plus most people seem to acknowledge that it's only mediocre for MIDI sequencing. Sonar seems to me to be every bit as powerful if not more powerful, and it has none of those restrictions. The only real reason I can see to use ProTools in a home studio is if you're worried about compatibility with other studios, since ProTools is the most popular platform. But even then you could just export your tracks to WAV files and import them into ProTools.

[UstadKhanAli]

Is that right? Are PT-compatible plug-ins more expensive? I didn't know that.

[Music Calgary]

 

Are PT-compatible plug-ins more expensive?

 

 

Indeed. Exact same code -- twice the price in some cases.

[Phil O'Keefe]

PT HD plug-ins tend to be more expensive (as are most DSP based plug-ins), but RTAS / VST versions of most plug-ins are usually the same price. IOW, if you wanted to buy a VST version of a plug-in from Waves or McDSP, it's not going to be less expensive than the RTAS version.

 

Your comments about being limited to Digidesign and M-Audio interfaces is valid, and of course you're also correct about the track count limitations. While I do occasionally exceed the 32 track PT LE limit, it's not all that often that I do so... if you do, the Music Production Toolkit ($495, but it also includes a bunch of very useful plug-ins, as well as the "full" version of Beat Detective) gives you up to 48 mono OR stereo tracks, which should be enough for most pop / rock type productions.

 

As far as MIDI sequencing, PT still lags behind Sonar, Logic, Cubase, etc. However, things have gotten significantly better in the MIDI department over the past several PT upgrade releases, and it works fine for everyday MIDI tasks. The main thing it's lacking is embedded, editable MIDI notation, and I have to admit I really miss having that.

 

Sonar is a fine program, and you can certainly do good work with it. It may indeed be a better choice for some people, but when it comes to audio recording and editing (the bulk of my work), I still prefer PT. YMMV.

[Phil O'Keefe]

 

Indeed. Exact same code -- twice the price in some cases.

 

 

 

Examples please?

[Music Calgary]

http://register.waves.com/wavesstore/storemain.aspx

 

i.e. C4 -- $800 TDM. $400 Native.

[Lee Flier]

So, to boil the thread down, if your goal is to prevent converter clipping, no, you can't do that with software plugins. If your goal is just to capture the compressed sound on the track, then yes, there are ways to do it, but the benefits of doing it are questionable.

 

Yes, that is a good way to boil it down.

 

I don't hestitate to compress while tracking with a hardware compressor, pre-conversion. In fact there's a lot of benefit to doing so, as you can be sure you're not sending the converter a clipped signal, and I tend to like the sound of hardware compression better than plugs in most cases, anyway. Of course, it takes some experience with using a compressor to get to a point where you can confidently do this and not regret it later. But once you get to that point, it's all good.

 

I see no benefit at all to tracking with a software compressor. If you want to add "flavor," you can add it in the mix. If you're short on DSP, you can still decide on your flavor during the mix stage and then print the effected track. Digital is much less "forgiving" than analog and even though in general I agree that committing early can be good, you can really hose up a track if you commit digital effects to it without being really, REALLY sure of what you're doing. If you record with no plugs inserted, you'll always have an "un-hosed" version of the track so even if you print an effected copy to save DSP, and decide later that you want to change the effect, you can go back to the original track and re-hose it.

[Phil O'Keefe]

 

http://register.waves.com/wavesstore/storemain.aspx i.e. C4 -- $800 TDM. $400 Native.

 

 

You're comparing HD / TDM with native. As I already conceded, TDM plug-ins do tend to run a lot more money, but so do plug ins for things like the SSL Duende, UA and TC DSP products, etc.

 

The original post by albiedamned didn't specify HD/TDM or RTAS/Native, but if we're comparing apples to apples here, then you would have to compare the cost of VST vs RTAS (both "native") plug-ins; if you do, I think you'll find that there is no cost difference the vast majority of the time - indeed, many companies include both VST and RTAS versions when you purchase their native plug-ins.

[UstadKhanAli]

 

http://register.waves.com/wavesstore/storemain.aspx i.e. C4 -- $800 TDM. $400 Native.

 

 

????

 

You're comparing TDM to Native.

 

(whooops, Phil beat me to it)

[albiedamned]

You guys are right - I didn't specify TDM vs RTAS/VST. I also didn't specify ProTools LE vs HD. The big benefit to ProTools from what I've heard is its hardware based processing, which you get in the HD systems. And so they charge you out the wazoo for the plugins. The LE based systems use the same CPU-hosted plugins as everyone else (RTAS, VST). But if you're looking at an LE system, then you're obviously not a big time high-end studio. So at that point again I don't see where ProTools makes any sense. You can get more features and less restrictions from Sonar or others.

 

And back to the high end world for a minute. With today's Core 2 Quad processors and software with multi-processor support, is there really that much that you can't do without the external processing you get from HD systems (or UAD cards or others)?

[MrJoshua]

ProTools LE makes sense for me because I like the layout and usability of it - I do very little MIDI work, and when I do it's just recording a keyboard part onto a MIDI instrument track so I can use a virtual instrument plugin. Almost no MIDI editing or drawing tracks, etc.

 

It's easy to edit and comp audio tracks. It's easy to set up and record. The workflow is intuitive (to me, at least) and I get the results I like with the program.

 

Then, just to put the icing onthe cake, there's the fact that at least 9/10 of the people I collaborate with also use ProTools systems - either LE or HD, depending. And I can send or carry a session over to a friend's house, or into a studio, work on it, then take it back home for mixing and editing without worrying about importing or converting anything.

 

If you need seventy-five inputs and outputs and stuff like that, sure, ProTools LE doesn't make sense for you. But if you need eighteen or fewer channels of I/O, ProTools LE is still a solid choice.

 

In the end, though, it just depends on what you want to do and how you want to do it.

[Music Calgary]

My bad. I have no clue *at all* about ProTools admittedly, hardware, software etc. I always assumed that TDM was for ProTools and cost more because of licensing -- even though the underlying code is identical. Thanks for the heads up.

[Lee Flier]

And back to the high end world for a minute. With today's Core 2 Quad processors and software with multi-processor support, is there really that much that you can't do without the external processing you get from HD systems (or UAD cards or others)?

 

IMO, no. And in fact, I'm not even very impressed with Digi's specific implementation of hardware processing.

 

External processing made a lot of sense 10 years ago; now, not so much. I do like the UAD cards cuz they sound nice, but I don't like Digi's business strategy of locking you into their hardware and I certainly don't think their hardware sounds any better than anybody else's. But it's convenient for them in terms of retaining a stranglehold on their users.

 

The only reason to use PT at this point is because it's what "everybody" uses so you can exchange sessions with almost any studio, and/or you just like their interface more than any of the others. Even though I work out of commercial studios, I've never been able to justify getting PT at my home studio.

[Lee Flier]

 

My bad. I have no clue *at all* about ProTools admittedly, hardware, software etc. I always assumed that TDM was for ProTools and cost more because of licensing -- even though the underlying code is identical.

 

 

Well TDM (which BTW stands for "Time Division Multiplexing") is for Pro Tools - namely it's DigiDesign's "high-end" processing engine that makes use of external hardware processing, instead of just using the computer's native CPU.

 

Pro Tools HD is their hardware/software package that is based on TDM; Pro Tools LE is the "prosumer" version of Pro Tools that uses native CPU. There are many plugins that were developed specifically for TDM and the underlying code isn't at all the same. That's why they're so expensive... although IMO a lot of 'em still ain't worth the money.

[Music Calgary]

Well TDM (which BTW stands for "Time Division Multiplexing") is for Pro Tools - namely it's DigiDesign's "high-end" processing engine that makes use of external hardware processing, instead of just using the computer's native CPU. Pro Tools HD is their hardware/software package that is based on TDM; Pro Tools LE is the "prosumer" version of Pro Tools that uses native CPU. There are many plugins that were developed specifically for TDM and the underlying code isn't at all the same. That's why they're so expensive... although IMO a lot of 'em still ain't worth the money.

 

Thank you kindly for the new knowledge Lee. Cheers.