735 – Filmmaking, music, and other paths to an early grave

I’ve never been happy with the soundtrack on the Bank Scene. The music was cool, but sounded too out of place — didn’t work. I wasn’t going to mess with it again until we had everything in the can, but since I had some time on my hands, I decided to try something else. It is at the very least, more ’soundtracky.’ This isn’t final either, but hopefully it’s going in the right direction. What do you think?

Another day, another pass through the audio editing process. Reaper turned out to be a dud, which is a bummer, as I really liked the interface. Everything was going great until I dropped in a few EQs and a noise filter or 2. Ugh! Static!

Random static was introduced in various places. I watched my CPU usage and it was barely moving, so I know it wasn’t that. Besides, I’m running a Black Edition AMD Phenom 955 quad running 4ghz with 8 gigs of ultra-low latency ram all overclocked to their rightful speeds on a fast tweaked-out raid.

I know there’s no bottleneck there. And the audio hardware is an M-Audio Pro Fire 610 that has never batted an eye at anything thrown at it.

So, I returned to the old stand-by that I’ve used on and off for years; Sonar.

So far, it’s running pretty solid. I had to do a few things to get the Cineform codec to work, but we’re all good now. As I’ve said before, Sonar has some quirks in the interface that bug me, but it’s a solid program that’s never choked on anything I’ve ever thrown at it.

I would’ve tried Samplitude, but they didn’t have any trials on their site that I could find.

Screw em, Sonar can do surround sound too.

Mmmmm surrounded.

I’ve used a lot of different software when it comes to audio. I’ve been in the “audio business” for over 25 years and have seen my share of hardware and software. Today, I tried something that I really didn’t have very high hopes for, a program called Reaper. The reason for even trying it in the first place is how most software programs out there are suffering from some serious bloat. Reaper was a 4 meg download.
I was a pro-tools guy for awhile (still using the hardware), but got tired of the constant crap with that dongle. It sticks out WAY too far and sucks to use it with a laptop!

Then I tried Ableton. Not too bad. It takes some getting used to, but I like it for the most part. Especially when I just want to throw down some ideas and see where they go. But when I tried to do my soundtrack/foley stuff, it just wasn’t cutting it.

Sonar, again, not a bad program. I did an entire album with it once. But some things that SHOULD be simple to do are just too cumbersome when you’re hitting it hard and trying to line up foley and dialog.

I haven’t tried Samplitude, but I’ve heard good things. In fact, checking out Samplitude is what led me around to Reaper. Something about this little program gave me the impression it was just some dude in a garage someplace (not that this is a bad thing, I’m just some dude in a garage someplace). The price was right so I gave it a whirl today.

So far, this program kicks some serious ass for what I need it for. I imported my Cineform 2k output of a scene. I was going to just use a proxy, but it took it and played, so why not use the real thing?
Then I imported all the tracks of foley I had in a directory. Boom! I had all the tracks in a line just-like-that.
Editing was smooth and quick. Overlapping blended the files like I remember from the old days of editing in Vegas — something about the smoothness  and ease of it.
The interface did everything I expected when I would move and click. Unlike Ableton et al. When I use the scrollwheel, it zooms, if I hit S, it splits etc…
There wasn’t anything in my way. It was just me and the audio files.

Man, freakin’ refreshing this is! It kinda reminds me of a program I used to use a LOOOONG time ago called SAW. I’ll always have fond memories of SAW. I believe it may still be around actually.

I found some surround sound plugins specially designed for Reaper that I plan to try pretty soon. I still have to get 2 more speakers and a sub first. My hardware has 10 outs so supporting it won’t be a problem.

If you’re a *real musician that can plug in and record and not *require virtual instruments, then I’d give this program a go. If you’re a pseudo musician that plays only VSTi stuff, then I’d give this program a go.

Surround sound plug-ins: http://acousmodules.free.fr

Reaper: http://www.reaper.fm/

In summary, this program is bad ass…

Photo by cloneofsnake