PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Off-Topic Another "What's your opinion" question

Eddie is broken. User error in a function of Real Band I had no idea existed.

Know when you look at the mixer panel? Over on the right where you have the effects rack? I not only never even noticed that, I also didn't know anything about what "A1" is all about because ALL the tracks say "A1". What I also didn't know was the difference between the top section and the bottom section of the right side of the screen (the right monitor for me), what was effects loop and what was the master summing mixer. That summing volume control was way down low and the unused effects bus up high, so while the recording was plenty hot, the playback was pulled down on the output side.

Rob spent some time with me and showed me several things. As he said in the first 30 seconds of our phone call, he knew from the thread that there was nothing wrong with my hardware, which I also knew since square 1, because this was an output level problem.

One thing he showed me how to us PG Peak Limiter, which I had no idea about, and how to apply it to all tracks across the board. I now know a lot better how to apply effects equally and correctly. I also created a lot of work for myself as I redo a bunch of stuff that I know now is done wrong. 4 day weekend at Thanksgiving, here I come.

I was thinking there was some minute, almost hidden little setting in prefs that set output level that was wrong. It turned out to be a more visible setting that I did not even know was there. I totally knew my hardware was absolutely fine, because Sonar works fine, Skype works, streaming music works..... and hardware, like drivers, are black and white. It works or it doesn't. Just like a driver isn't partially corrupt, hardware isn't partially broken. Remember the nerd I am. I will spend 5 hours fixing something that I know only appears to be broken rather than give up and spend an hour starting from scratch. That is letting the computer win. It's been said that I would bury myself alive to prove I know how to use a shovel, and that's true. I will never quit and take the easy way out. Format and reload a hard drive because of a bad virus? Never. Spend overnight finding and cleaning the virus? Always.

So it was indeed a setting in PG, one I didn't know was there and thus couldn't know how to use.

I also decided that when I create a new work and generate the tracks, I am going to start saving what I will dub "the breadcrumb copy", a copy in the pristine state before I start playing around and juggling gain structures so I can follow back to where I started. It has been a HUGE issue for me to add additional real tracks and get them at a level comparable to the existing tracks. Once I start adjusting levels it gets like cutting the leg off the coffee table to level it, and then you have to cut the other side to balance it. In this case though the leg cutting is the boosting levels, so I end up with everything extremely past the -3db I am shooting for by time it is all summed.

Eddie,
I don't know how the others feel but I'll tell you how I feel.You give contradictory info that leads us all down some path and then when you finally get it straight you call Rob and he figures out something simple us dumb F.... can't. If you had not mentioned the flatline recording this whole thing would have been done in 2 posts.
For me I'm done with your issues.

that's a trifle harsh. Eddie certainly is always willing to work hard at what he does. He just likes to go down rabbit holes -- we need folks like him in the world.

Eddie, glad Rob got it figured out. I still think you should leave the audio buddy out of the signal chain. Just try it.

-Scott

John, we all start somewhere. I will admit, I was a person led astray by the contradictory statements of flat-line waveforms - that points to hardware or something 'pre-encoded to visual waveform display'.

I like to help people solve tech issues. Sometimes I learn something in the end - like the lady at work who said she couldn't get her work done because the icon for a particular program (it was actually a folder shortcut) was no longer in the same place on the screen (a night shift employee that was very windows savvy had done some house-cleaning and re-arranging).

I thought she was pulling my chain. However, after a few minutes of discussion, it was clear that her understanding of how to get work done on the computer was entirely 'geographical', with no understanding or mental paradigm of disk drives, storage of files, etc. except a mapping to the location on the desktop. It was a sort of 'magic' to her.

Rather than ridicule her (which another tech person had done with bamboozling tech-speak), I drew out a block diagram of how the PC works, and how it is connected to disk server computers, and she 'got it'. It took about 5 minutes of effort.

All this is to say that our brains ARE wired differently. Our mental images and mappings of how to do home recording are all different. Many here nearly insist one has to use a mixer with their systems; my mental map and 15+ hears of home recording says that no mixer is necessary. Neither are 'right', if they both can work. Yes, Eddie led us astray with the graphic of the recorded levels - unless that particular slider did cause the recorded signal to be weak both in encoded .wav as well as visually, but I hope that it wasn't intentional - in fact, I would say it's pretty sure it wasn't.

-Scott

Glad you got it sorted Eddie, sometimes I do or don't notice the silliest things and need some help on the forum, so nothing wrong in that, part of getting older I guess.

I think that you draw some people emotionally in to your problem and so they feel hurt when its a simple thing that you missed (I do that too but I dont want to get people so involved in my problem that when its my fault they get mad and are pis**d off at me?)

"I will never quit and take the easy way out. Format and reload a hard drive because of a bad virus? Never. Spend overnight finding and cleaning the virus? Always"


Well I would disagree completely with above, if you do online banking on your computer or want to get your system up and running asap its always prudent to use image backup software. To do online banking on a computer and not 100% sure if a virus or remains of a virus is still there is a crazy thing to do in my opinion.

Just wondering when you stated the above does that mean that you would never use disk imaging software so as to do a recovery when your computer goes wrong?

Musiclover

I will use it to recover only after many (many!) hours of trying to find out what caused the problem. With 7 computers I never have an urgent need and have the option to continue to fight the good fight. I do use my computer for banking, just to use your example, but again, I can always move to another computer. I also NEVER use "restore". (Can you say for sure what broke your computer came in after the retore point you are restoring from?)

The geek in me wants to fix things. I have, in the past, spent overnight trying to fix a computer that has contracted a new virus for which there have not yet been countermeasures created, going through the registry line by line to find the bad entries. That's just my nature.

If others want to get "emotionally drawn", that I can't control, but to constantly tell me to reload drivers and reinstall BIAB, that is not nly not going to help, it is also the easy way "band-aid" fix, like those losers at Best Buy who immediately tell customers "You have a virus" and prey on people who don't know any better than to question them. This was not even remotely possible a driver issue. Not a chance. I was getting sound into the computer. I was getting sound out of the computer. The equipment in question works with Sonar. After years of computer and network level troubleshooting, that immediately eliminates hardware. The sound just wasn't coming out at the right level. That could not possibly have anything to do with the small piece of software that handshakes the OS to the hardware, called the driver. A term, by the way, that has become too common and is used offhandedly. Drivers never need to be updated unless your related device stops functioning. Never. A driver is good or bad, not partially bad. If anything, when suddenly you have a problem with the related device that worked yesterday, you roll BACK the driver, not update it. That tells you if it is a driver problem or not. Driver updates are released to fix specific bugs, and if you don't have the bug (When I play Defcon 4 my character has a shadow behind him, etc), don't fix what isn't broken. That is why I dismiss any "update drivers" advice. Because of that, people perceive me as snooty, or in this case I was called "stupid", but I have had thicker skin than this requries for years. No problem.

Time to move on to the next one.

Eddie,
I'm not emotionally drawn in it's just your cocky attitude. Do you think we don't know what drivers are?Do you actually believe that driver files never get corrupted? Do you think HW never semi fails? Do you think we're all stupid here? You sure act it.I could go on & on but won't waste my time.Maybe someday you'll see the light.
Your pool of helpers is dwindling.

Eddie,

For the record, not a single piece of advice in this entire thread suggested updating drivers - why you are dwelling on that evades me. Nobody was suggesting the lazy PC tech support type of help of 'reboot, reinstall program, etc.'

The suggestions rendered in this thread WERE the right suggestions based on your technical description of the low-level recording problem at hand - particularly the one where you drew the max/min limits of your recorded waveforms and talked about the contradiction of that with where the interface was clipping. Later on you contradicted that diagram with the statement that you could record fine at only -3dB down. Well, -3dB down does not yield flat-line graphic waveforms. They would look nearly full-scale.

If one asks for help in asynchronous communications, one has to supply stable and accurate descriptions of the problem statement. In my opinion, that didn't happen. The continued insistence that you can record fine, but actually you can't record fine with the flatline waveforms is what continued to perplex me, and likely others. Something was not adding up. Never did we say anything about 'reinstall drivers/update drivers, etc.' What didn't add up was the contradiction - not that poor advice was given to resolve the issue. Everyone here was trying to help with that big contradiction staring us in the face and we're all thinking: What could cause this?

Anyways, It gave my brain a work-out - which I enjoy. I still think your system is overly complex in that you likely don't need the Audio Buddy pre-amp. IMO, it's just a source of additional noise sitting there; likely no cleaner than the built-in Fast Track Pro pre-amps.

-Scott