Aural Relics of Operating Systems past

i still use cool edit religiously. my fave audio editor hands down.

  On 4/14/2011 at 2:35 PM, soundwave said:

I still prefer the FM7's retro UI than the FM8 and its one of those synths that works better as software.

agree!

tho there's a certain thuwnk and horrible interface can provide unexpected results i miss from the tx802

Native Instruments are so fucking guilty when it comes to unnecessary dumbed down UI changes. I have to say i absolutely despise this whole idea of meta tagging or categorizing presets. I miss the days when it was very straight forward, the and plugin creators would just sub categorize them in actual folders in the main list.

I still prefer Reaktor 4, FM7 and the original Battery GUI wise. I think they finally changed this, but for some reason after Reaktor 3 NI forced the user to put any low level structure items inside of an instrument or macro box. You used to be able to just put shit whever you wanted, drop an oscillator straight onto the main screen if you wanted. That type of stuff is infuriating to me, why would you as a programmer want to cripple an 'update' of your own program? I really dont understand it.

Speaking of UI changes. Audition 3 could've been awesome. But........

  On 4/17/2011 at 12:11 AM, Awepittance said:

Native Instruments are so fucking guilty when it comes to unnecessary dumbed down UI changes. I have to say i absolutely despise this whole idea of meta tagging or categorizing presets. I miss the days when it was very straight forward, the and plugin creators would just sub categorize them in actual folders in the main list.

 

I still prefer Reaktor 4, FM7 and the original Battery GUI wise. I think they finally changed this, but for some reason after Reaktor 3 NI forced the user to put any low level structure items inside of an instrument or macro box. You used to be able to just put shit whever you wanted, drop an oscillator straight onto the main screen if you wanted. That type of stuff is infuriating to me, why would you as a programmer want to cripple an 'update' of your own program? I really dont understand it.

NI is just desperate to innovate, while also striving to make everything uber userfriendly... that shit doesn't mix very well I think.

  On 4/17/2011 at 1:43 AM, Jonas said:

 

I'm currently using it to investigate and create metamorphosing percepts between different sounds, gradually shifting from one sound into the other inspired by Trevor Wishart's book Audible Design, and music ( Red Bird: A Political Prisoner's Dream (1978, LP, York Electronic Studios) ).

 

Maybe your friend can hook you up / transfer the license?

that sounds very similar to my own obsession with spectral morphing. I still haven't found anything that does it the way i'd like, not even really the Kyma. You have to be extremely selective and careful while spectrally analyzing the sound in kyma to get anything usable.

so you would say CDP is good for creating a perceptive morph between 2 sounds? That's what i remember Richard Devine saying years ago when he came to UC sc.

it would really cool if you could show us some screenshots and audio examples of some of it's most unique processing features

  On 4/17/2011 at 4:00 PM, Jonas said:

  On 4/17/2011 at 3:24 AM, Awepittance said:

that sounds very similar to my own obsession with spectral morphing. I still haven't found anything that does it the way i'd like, not even really the Kyma. You have to be extremely selective and careful while spectrally analyzing the sound in kyma to get anything usable.

so you would say CDP is good for creating a perceptive morph between 2 sounds? That's what i remember Richard Devine saying years ago when he came to UC sc.

 

it would really cool if you could show us some screenshots and audio examples of some of it's most unique processing features

 

As I've really just started diving into it, I'm not the best person to provide a balanced opinion on all the processing features, there still is a lot for me to explore, especially in the spectral department. I'll post a stereo mixdown of a multi channel piece I'm working on now in a month or so (hopefully), but it is not like you can take 2 arbitrary sounds and apply spectral morphing to create a successful transformation just like that.

 

Our ears are very sensitive to pitch changes and recognizing physicality in a sound. For a morph to be successful it helps if you can emphasize similarities or differences between the sounds and create some kind of intermediate stage first (a lot of pre-sculpting work). It depends on the source material, what settings will be most useful keeping in mind the trade of between time and frequency resolution using different phase-vocoding settings, so I guess it is similar to Kyma. Our ears just aren't fooled as easy as our eyes.

 

What I found useful is not choosing two completely different sounding material beforehand, but have the first transformed sound determine the next choice. For example I've transformed a fireworks recording by randomly transposing it in pitch, creating a dense water stream like percept over time, than this noisy, nature-like material is transformed into a recording of the sea (for possibly applying an amplitude envelope on extracted from speaking voice).

 

If you want to hear CDP at work now I suggest you check out Trevor Wishart's work.

virsyn cube?

  On 4/17/2011 at 4:00 PM, Jonas said:

 

If you want to hear CDP at work now I suggest you check out Trevor Wishart's work.

thanks for the breakdown Jonas, looking forward to hearing some of your CDP output. I've heard most of Wishart's works but to be honest i never really heard anything that resembled a Kyma spectral morph. The closest it got to that was turning vocal sounds into some kind of percussion beat.

re: soundwave

Virsyn Cube, Prosqoniq Moprh, Camel Audio Alchemy attempt to recreate some of the Kyma/CDP like algorithms but they don't really hit the mark. Maybe in a few years they will get there

  On 4/17/2011 at 1:09 AM, a missing sense said:

  On 4/17/2011 at 12:11 AM, Awepittance said:

Native Instruments are so fucking guilty when it comes to unnecessary dumbed down UI changes. I have to say i absolutely despise this whole idea of meta tagging or categorizing presets. I miss the days when it was very straight forward, the and plugin creators would just sub categorize them in actual folders in the main list.

 

I still prefer Reaktor 4, FM7 and the original Battery GUI wise. I think they finally changed this, but for some reason after Reaktor 3 NI forced the user to put any low level structure items inside of an instrument or macro box. You used to be able to just put shit whever you wanted, drop an oscillator straight onto the main screen if you wanted. That type of stuff is infuriating to me, why would you as a programmer want to cripple an 'update' of your own program? I really dont understand it.

NI is just desperate to innovate, while also striving to make everything uber userfriendly... that shit doesn't mix very well I think.

I'd argue they were done focusing on innovating 5 or so years ago

  On 4/15/2011 at 11:14 PM, Awepittance said:

  On 4/15/2011 at 9:15 PM, Bubba69 said:

http://www.composersdesktop.com/index.html

 

I've always been intrigued by this software, although apparently they are still developing it but it has a long history and unique in that it is non plugin based. aphex was rumored to have used it, and i think richard devine as well?

richard devine used to speak quite highly about it. I had a friend who bought it and promised to tell me all about it and how good it was, unfortunately he wasn't able to tell me much because he found it quite unusable.

 

id love to be able to try a trial version of it or to test it out but there is no demo

From what I've been able to determine, Aphex used Composer's Desktop on an Atari Falcon to make (at least in part) the Hangable Auto Bulb EPs.

My choice for relic software would be Seer Systems' Reality, a standalone 4-osc VA co-developed by Dave Smith of Sequential Circuits. It had some very musical synthesis modes like modal/bell, combined with a great resampler. It was a fantastic instrument to use at the time (1997?) but is incompatible with anything after Win98. I used it to do lots of stuff back then.

Cool Edit Pro, what an amazing programme. I've been using a Mac mostly for the past while but kept my PC just for running CEP on, unfortunately the PC died recently and I'm considering buying another PC just for CEP. It's the best audio editing software I've ever used. I tried Peak on the Mac and didn't like it.

Adobe did make it worse when they turned it into Audition. There's currently a beta version of Adobe Audition for OSX which I've tried, also not as good as CEP.

Cool edit pro seems to not work so well with windows 7 :((((((

audition 2 works fine for me on 7

i got cooledit pro 2.0 working fine on my Windows 7 parallels/bootcamp partition on my mac. What's it acting like sneaksta?

  On 4/19/2011 at 7:57 AM, Rbrmyofr said:

Cool Edit Pro, what an amazing programme. I've been using a Mac mostly for the past while but kept my PC just for running CEP on, unfortunately the PC died recently and I'm considering buying another PC just for CEP. It's the best audio editing software I've ever used. I tried Peak on the Mac and didn't like it.

 

Adobe did make it worse when they turned it into Audition. There's currently a beta version of Adobe Audition for OSX which I've tried, also not as good as CEP.

if you're willing to run parallels for OSX Cooledit Pro 2.0 runs great on it , this is what i do. I only resort to Adobe Audition 4.0 beta (osx) for quick edits and stuff, but i absolutely hate most of the changes in it. The algorithms are all crippled versions of their former selves. Clearly whoever programmed the original Cooledit algorithms is a much more accomplished DSP programmer than the entire pool of Izotope employees (Audition 4 uses a bunch of their algorithms to replace older ones)

wait, what. There's an audition 4 already? *searches*

edit: oh (beta).

  On 4/19/2011 at 9:34 PM, Awepittance said:

i got cooledit pro 2.0 working fine on my Windows 7 parallels/bootcamp partition on my mac. What's it acting like sneaksta?

every time i apply an effect, afterward, I cant play it. I have to save it and reopen it to hear what I did. Most frustrating. It gives me an "unknown error" msg, which I googled, but couldn't find help :/

Both DX fx AND the built in ones. Sometimes I can apply 2 before it happens, but most times it's immediate. Also, it plays fine when I first open files.

I've been using Audition 1.5 for ages. I think it's just as good as CEP 2. I've tried Audition 2 and 3 and I didn't like them one bit.

Re: sneaksta i'd try out one of the Adobe Audition versions. Anything before 3.5 or 4 operates pretty much the same as cooledit. Although aces seems to prefer 1.5. I haven't used any of the Auditions enough to know the specific differences. I just know on version 4 (at least for mac) they threw the baby out with the bath water

yeah, im using 3 instead, at least in the short run. :(

  On 4/19/2011 at 9:34 PM, Awepittance said:

I only resort to Adobe Audition 4.0 beta (osx) for quick edits and stuff, but i absolutely hate most of the changes in it. The algorithms are all crippled versions of their former selves. Clearly whoever programmed the original Cooledit algorithms is a much more accomplished DSP programmer than the entire pool of Izotope employees (Audition 4 uses a bunch of their algorithms to replace older ones)

  On 4/20/2011 at 2:12 AM, Awepittance said:

just know on version 4 (at least for mac) they threw the baby out with the bath water

Hmm I was a little bit excited about (what I think they're now calling) Adobe Audition CS5.5 until I read this. It's the integration with Premiere which interests me the most now though. I'll probably be able to test it out myself in a few days, but what have they done? Taken out half the options for the effects?

on the Mac version this is what they have done. On the PC version i don't know, let's hope not.

unfortunately even say Adobe Audition 3.0 for the PC has different algorithms ,for example the time stretching algorithm is completely different so none of the cool psychedelic sound design tricks with the old one can be done on 3.0

http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/895/cpsid_89588.html

They've removed the tone generator?

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/838570

I should really just figure out Nuendo, but I wonder if Adobe have made Reaper any offers.

wow that's quite horrifying, thanks Adobe. You sat on a beautiful program for many years only skinning it, then you decide to just gut it so it's useless to me

Adobe Audition 3.0 features replaced or not implemented in CS5.5

* Effects panel (in Adobe Audition CS5.5, use the Effects Rack and Effects menu)

* DirectX plug-in support

* Binaural Auto-Panner

* Convolution

* Dynamic Delay

* Dynamic EQ

* Doppler Shifter

* Echo Chamber

* Envelope Follower

* Frequency Band Splitter

* Graphic Panner

* Graphic Phase Shifter

* Multitap Delay

* Pan/Expand

* Pitch Bender

* Pitch Correction

* Pitch Shifter

* Quick Filter

* Scientific Filters

* Stereo Expander

* Stereo Field Rotate

* Vocoder

wtf???

ANALOG BOX

The most underrated, under exposed piece of music freeware I know. HUGE shame it's Windows only, though I managed to get ABox 1 to run under Darwine on OSX. ABox 2 doesn't unfortunately. Andy's totally shelved the project too, it's been archived online, though it is now open source which means there MAY be a port to Mac or upgrades/mods, I dunno.

But even so, it does this kind of shit so well:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzzTohjefCs

that looks really cool, i'm going to try that tonight, have you tried running this program in VMware or Parallels Windows Xp installations? I've gotten pretty much every old Windows software to work under OSX using Parallels.

my 3rd post on Gravity Halo on anarchy FX is here - http://gravityhalo-rotations.blogspot.com/2011/05/aural-relics-anarchy-fx.html

lots of nice looking pics of his plugins on there

stay tuned for the next installment, Hyperprism stand-alone