New Vision DAW... Day One

[Marty Frasu]

It came just how I like it, all the sounds were installed and their tech Ryan, had authorized all the sounds, so it was ready to rock. With a 64 bit OS and 8 core Nahalem processors, that baby rocks. Native instruments seem to work better on a PC for whatever reason.

David is picking his favorite sounds. He has an awesome ear, he knows EXACTLY what he wants out of any given patch, we make minor performance tweaks to the sounds.

In play sometimes we bring in some of the close mics, we may adjust the release and velocity parameters to David's liking.
We will have Midi CCs sent from Logic, to dynamically balance, the mic levels on some patches.

There is never enough audio outputs, we use ADAT light pipes to get the sound from the Vision DAW back into Logic.

I wish there was a one-wire connection that would carry all the midi, a bunch of audio channels and word clock like MADI+Midi. Maybe someday.

[geah]

Are you guys running most of your samples on the new 8-core machine? And how many patches are you able to load on the new machine?

[Marty Frasu]

We also Have Ploge Bidule and Kontakt 3.5. We use Ploge as a Plu in host for instances of Play, We also run Kontakt 3 Stand alone.
If you look at Logic 9, Plogue has presented Logic 9 with 4 virtual midi busses, each with 16 channels. Stand alone Kontakt presents Logic with one virtual midi port. This takes care of all the midi routing. It is a bad idea to load more than 2 GB of samples onto any one application. This will change when Snow Leopard comes out, but this is today.
The Apogee Symphony System has V-Busses, up to 64 virtual audio channels that you can use to pipe the audio out of one application to another. I intend to use it to get the audio from Ploge and Kontakt, back into the logic mixer.

Within Logic, perhaps the best way to address this is setup a software instrument, use the external synth Plug-in and select the Midi out and audio in for the appropriate instrument. This keeps all the instruments the same. Automation and plug in slots.
As opposed to addressing it as a midi instrument and have the audio return in the environment as an input.

we need to print a lot of audio files to Pro Tools, perhaps V-Bus can help with that too.

[Marty Frasu]

How many samples? I don't know yet.... Still Loading, trying to break it, If anybody can, It's Big Dave Newman ;-)

[Jeff Hayat]

Hiya Marty - some good info, thanks a bunch for sharing.

Ok, ready or not - here goes. :D

David is picking his favorite sounds. He has and awesome ear, he knows EXACTLY what he wants out of any given patch, we make minor performance tweaks to the sounds.

Why?

In play sometimes we bring in some of the close mics, we may adjust the release and velocity parameters to David's liking.
We will have Midi CCs sent from Logic, to dynamically balance, the mic levels on some patches.


Why?

I am very curious as to why all the time and energy spent into selecting sounds and tweaking, etc. Now, if David is doing a MIDI score (no orchestra), then there is my answer. If not, then why all the time? Obviously patches do have to be selected, and so on, and of course the director/prod./studio/etc. want a good mock-up. But do you guys really spend a crap-load of time perfecting the mock-ups and making them as good and as close to the real thing as they can possibly sound? Wouldn't doing a mockup that simply sounds good and gives everyone a good idea of what the orchestral version will sound like be well enough?

Thanks in advance. :)

[JH4music]

I wish there was a one-wire connection that would carry all the midi, a bunch of audio channels and word clock like MADI+Midi. Maybe someday.

I'm doing this with ethernet. I get 32 channels of audio per slave PC + 20 midi ports. Been working flawlessly on a Core 2 duo system with Vista 32 for a few months, and I just put this setup on an i7 PC with Vista 64.. which is amazingly powerful. The three main software programs you need are Audioport Universal, Jbridge(If you are on a 64 bit system), and IPmidi (or any of the other various ethernet midi software.)

You already have Bidule, which can be used in rewire mode to stream all of this audio into Pro Tools as RTAS. If your DAW supports VST or AU, then you can instantiate audioport directly in your DAW.

[Jack W]

Hey,

Tell us how the new VBus works w/ Play when (& if) you get it working. I had the 32 chan. version of it and when I went to Apogee support they didn't know what Play was. Maybe things have changed since then.

Liked your new song.


Jack

[LEX]

Marty,

There are MADI solutions.

http://www.solid-state-logic.com/music/Xlogic%20MADI%20Xtreme/index.asp

Is the first place to start. The guys at Euphonix are pretty exclusive with the SSL MADI (unless they release their own card). Add whatever converter boxes you need after the cards.
Unfortunately, the RME MADI card is plaqued with problems, so the SSL route is the best option.
But the RME's do work if 64 channels or less. Multiple RME MADI cards are problems.
For about 1500 bucks, it is a descent option for slaves.

Midi, stick with MOL. It functions better, 1 ethernet cable, 1 switch per system in a bundle and forget about it.

MADI is definately the way to go if you want to spend the money on it. Unlike ADAT, it is truely a Pro option and the easiest to configure and run.

Best of Luck.

LEX