I buy a high-end digital synthesizer which can imitate an entire orchestra of instruments.
A really nice microphone.
And a Midi-to-USB cable.
What connects to the USB connector to replace the entire studio?
Are we there yet? Can I take an arrangement and lay in tracks one at a time, mix, equalize, etc. with nothing more than what would fit on a PC or MAC?
I put my music on the web with “pay what it’s worth to you” pricing, and eventually ship a master CD to China with artwork from Photoshop and order a container full of pressed CDs?
What is in the box between the synthesizer and the CD burner?
Well, for traditionalists, I’s like some music to have vocal tracks (I’m going for at least top 100 on the Pop chart here).
So yeah, add 1 or more vocalists to the shopping list.
I was looking for a keyboard at pawn shops and noticed some really nice mixers.
Then I went to Google and found SoundForge and such - and thought the hardware was going to very shortly be antiquated.
To expand on point 2.:
Let’s build the computer -
What software do I want? That will drive the hardware selection.
There are a numbers of computers built specifically for music production. Here’s one maker.
As to software – at the low end, you can start for free with Audacity, which I have for recording and processing old records and … other musical sources. You can add track after track and do various processes on individual tracks. I really haven’t pushed it to its limits, though, so I can’t say as to what those limits are. Still, for the price it’s unbeatable. You can start screwing around with it by just taking different pieces of already-existing music and try putting them together. It’s certainly more than enough for my completely amateur needs.
Here is an article describing what it claims are the 5 best recording production software packages, I can’t vouch for any of them.
Are you going to be leader of a band, or alone in a basement somewhere working solo? You need a mixer if you have a group of people playing together. You don’t if you are creating and adding track after track one at a time. Well, you do kinda, but your audio software will probably serve.
Looks like a talented musician (I’m not, and am too old and sick to become one) is about $500 for software and $800 in computer to replace the studio.
And the “record companies”.
I know this is a real editing system if it recognizes which formats? WAV was not that great, but MP3 makes it sound wonderful - certainly someone has a format which can at least reproduce sound at the level of vinyl. What are they?
I’ve always been an amateur hack musician (almost went into music as a career but went into engineering instead). Back in the old days I would record things onto an old reel to reel tape recorder. I switched over to using a computer a long time ago.
The only external thing you really need is a cheap mixing board, and technically you could do without it. It just gives you a lot more flexibility and a bit more control over the sound. Plug that into your sound card and you’re done. You can get software pretty cheap, sometimes even free if you are willing to have it nag you periodically (often some of the fancier features are disabled in the free version). I use an old free version of N-track for example. There are plenty of others out there.
MP3 is a lossy format. Record everything in WAV format and do a final conversion to MP3 when you are done.
Audacity can do a lot of compression, filtering, and other effects on your WAV files.
I’ve been doing this since the Windows 98 days. A cheap used PC for about $100 and some free software is the bare bones of what you need to make this work. You don’t need to spend $500 in software and $800 on a computer. A better computer/sound card will of course sound better, and fancier software does make your life easier. Also, the faster and more powerful your computer the more tracks you will be able to lay down before things start going wonky.
About Audacity…legendary music producer Todd Rundgren used it on his album Liars. He lives in Hawaii, overlooking the ocean. While the view is amazing, the salt air is hell on electronics, and killed his Pro Tools rig. So he did the whole album on a Mac laptop with a USB mic, Propellerhead’s Reason and Audacity.
So it worked for the guy who produced Bat Out of Hell.
Why on earth (or the entire galaxy, for that matter) would I ever want to touch MP3?
The idea here is for sound equaling or surpassing that of vinyl at its best (not on a $100 turntable).
What impressed me about Audition was its claim of being able to process in real time - just like hardware. How much horsepower it would need to pull that off is probably a bit more than what Adobe lists as required.
I still have my old reel-to-reel (never unpacked since last move) sitting in its original box and foam. My tapes were worthless, but it was a cool toy back in the day.
I bought a top line sound card when it came time to cut the vinyl and cassettes (I bought Steppenwolf’s Greatest on vinyl, 8-track, and cassette - I was not going to buy it again) to CD.
It was about $150 at the discounter in 1995 and came with basic editing s/w - but even cutting a “pop” from a scratch on a record required a few seconds to process - if Audition really handle mixing multiple tracks in real time, I’m impressed.
Live music is almost dead - the piano player Billy Joel sang about is nearly extinct; bars don’t have live music as they frequently as in days of old.
Replaced by tinny crap from speakers that fit in one’s ears…
The technology is amazing and now, according to wikipedia there are the formats audiophiles had hoped CD’s would learn - lossless compression (FLAC, M4P are 2 listed). These would seem to offer the quality that would make the die-hard vinyl players go digital.
Will there be enough of a demand that portable players will learn one or more of these formats?
Fewer bars have bands as background music, but I have plenty of opportunity to see live music any night of the week.
Most audiophiles are fetishists. A well-produced CD (i.e. one not compressed to death to be “louder”) is indistinguishable from any higher quality formats. The link is from Mix magazine, and they took higher bitrate recordings and ran it through an A/B/X Comparator, a device for double-blind testing of audio devices. The result? Indistinguishable from flipping a coin.
Then we might have the classic definition problem - a “well produced” CD is one which passes an A/B/X Comparator (don’t even want to know).
I’ve been looking at the equipment that is being replaced by silicone chips - there are recording microphones that cost $10,000 (they actually have a vacuum tube in them).
I find it amazing that people go to such extremes to get a perfect recording, just to flatten and mangle it into WAV and even worse, MP3.
I have an old mic that I bought for $20 in 1969 as a giggle because the tape deck had microphone jacks on it. That thing would probably produce a sound good enough for MP3.
On the plus side, the greedy record companies will either get a lot more generous to the musicians or will go belly-up.
An “A/B/X Comparator” is a piece of audio test equipment with two stereo inputs and one stereo output. It also has a remote control that the test subject presses. When pressed, a random number generator decides to select either the “A” input, the “B” input, or to not change the currently selected input at all. The test subject then presses their own “A” or “B” buttons to indicate which one they think they are listening to. It also has the ability to log the button presses and results and calculates the percentage of correct identifications the test subject made.
As noted in the linked article, virtually nobody was able to tell the difference between the output of a SuperAudio-CD player and the same source fed through the 16-bit processing of a well-respected CD recorder. These tests were done with a large number of test subjects, in a variety of locations. Professional audio engineers did slightly better than random chance at 52.7% correct.
This is entirely different than the damage done to the audio listening experience by the Loudness Wars. A well-produced CD is one that has not had all the dynamics crushed from it.
As for MP3, as long as you use a high enough bitrate, and a careful listener compares the compressed file to the original uncompressed master, the resulting file is one that can sound perfectly fine.
Or, alternatively, you could buy any number of Windows laptops for much less than $500, and get a nice display, keyboard and mouse as well (which you would have to buy separately for the Mac). Oh, and a CD burner, and DVD player which Apple decided you don’t need any more. Oh, and as it’s a laptop, you can carry it with you! But, in Apple’s defense, Garageband is free. Although it is nowhere near as powerful as Sony’s Acid Pro, which also has a free version called Acid Xpress.
It is not necessary to pay the Apple Tax to produce music on a computer.
For anyone wanting to find out about building a serious music studio around a computer, see Gearslutz
Here’s an interesting starting point (the mixer is $6800, the analog-to-digital box (I would have used a nice sound card) is $3800. Both prices are from BH Photo - a huce (used to be just photo, now including prosumer A/V gear.
I recommended him a machine that has a very, VERY, good entry level DAW. I even mentioned a non-Apple product as a possible upgrade path.
Stop being a tit. If there’s one thing worse than Apple fanboys it is Apple anti-fanboys that just can’t stop themselves shitting all over a thread just because someone dared mention Apple. For fuck’s sake, get a grip and get over yourself.
You and people like you are worse than those you are, somewhat pathetically and childishly, “rebelling” against.
Garageband is an imitation of Acid, which has been in development much longer. The free version also has an excellent upgrade path to the pro version that will allow you to keep the same files, adding more tracks. Garageband has no actual upgrade path that allows you to continue working on the file you started in the free product, other then rendering out to an audio file.
I do tech support of both PC and Apple, and am familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of both. And, specifically in this case, the Apple product is vastly overpriced and limited.