Topic: Tracktion user taking a look see…

@Max wrote:

Hello darcyb62.
I hope, you’ll like Podium, it’s very powerful sequencer.

I need to say that I can’t recommend you to buy 0404. I have EMU 0404 soundcard on my system, and I think to sell it. Podium has really good driver information window, and it shows a lot of little ASIO dropouts and silent ASIO driver restarts (with ANY buffer size). It’s not a Podium fault, because I’ve tried to test my system with other soundcards (like M-Audio for example) and the other ASIO soundcards work with Pod without any problems. And every time I install new EMU drivers 0404 works better and better (less ASIO dropouts and restarts since I get 0404), but there’s still a lot of troubles. It’s not only ASIO. Sometimes I play music with foobar (WDM drivres), and suddenly sound becomes noisy and I hear huge dropouts. It’s not a big problem, because I only need to restart song to solve this, but…
So, you can use DSP FX, but if you try to record parameters automation of it, you’ll hear a lot of dropouts (again!). I’ve tried to do that in Tracktion 1 (i’m an owner of NFR version), in enegyXT demo, FLS demo, but no luck for me. Dropouts, droputs, dropouts.

Buy used creamware scope home, if you want DSP FX. Scope Home is not very powerful on DSPs (but there’s no less DSP power than EMU), but it works well.

Thanks for the feedback Max… I’m not so interested in the on-board dsp effects but what I really need is a card with optical SPDIF in/out. Most cards that offer sp/dif in this price range only provide coax, which won’t do. For audio I am currently using a Tascam us122 while adequate it has an annoying cross talk problem (sound from the outputs bleeds back into the inputs which really takes away my ability to use a click track in quieter sections).

So what am I looking for. A card that will provide me with optical spdif in/out, a minimum of 2 ins and 2 outs, ability to handle both mic and instrument, a good preamp (maybe), midi capability, low cost. Any ideas?

Darcy

Okay… I’m liing this more and more… Once you understand the hierarchy approach the “steep learning curve” is behind you.

I have a couple more questions…

When setting up a new arrangement you have the option of setting up musical or linear. I understand so not a problem. When the arrangement has been created do I have the ability to switch from linear to musical and vice versa. With Tracktion I find myself jumping between the two (to be honest I’m not really sure but i do so this may not be all that big an issue).

One thing that really caught me off the guitar was adding temp changes to the song. Easy enough to do, but it didn’t look like anything was happening. In Tracktion if I put a tempo change in you can actually see the difference in the bar/beat setup. With Podium nothing… I spent a bit of time with before I finally imported a drum loop, played it and saw what it was doing. When I added a tempo change the position bar actually went through the speeded up section faster. I can see Podium’s approach and I am kind of undecided on it. I can see benefits to but Tracktion’s approach just seems to be more logical but maybe not.

And I’m also a bit concerned with stability. This may have something to do with this being a demo but it seems that depending on what I am doing at the time (or not doing) various components of Podium will fail or lockup. For example, it just locked up as I was typing this. I had Podium up and running and I have been checking things as I type this just to make sure I am celar on terminology. I went to open a new arrangement so I could be sure I had the musical and linear terms correct. I typed here for awhile and went back, had the demo reminder popup on the screen closed it and found I could do nothing with the new arrangement window. To get rid of it I had to close Podium. I have also had Podium up, left it, came back an hour later to find that it had closed due to an unexpected error of some sort. Again, I have heard nothing but good regarding the stability of the program so it might just something unique to the demo and my setup…

Finally… I get this rather annoying silence every so often. If I can only fina a way of getting rid of that. 😉 😉

Darcy

I am getting closer to flipping over that $90 but not quite there yet.

I think that the crash is related to the pop up reminder but I can’t say for sure. It happened twice yesterday and I’m not exactly sure what might have caused it.

I don’t have anything special set up on my machine (i.e. no powersave, it wasn’t sleeping, not even screensaver enabled), so I’ll fire it up and see if it happens again. I guess the other thing is that I’m trying this out on my general purpose computer (notebook) and not on the pc I have set up as a daw only machine.

Cheers…

I think I’m getting this….

Just to make sure I am here I wanted to simulat a rack I hav set up in tracktion. Basically what I want to is split an incoming signal (guitar) into a left and right stereo track. I keep the left signal relatively clean, maybe add a bit of eq or compression. On the right track I usually add a bit of delay, some crunch and again a bit of eq and compression. I then bring this out to a stereo track.

What I did with Podium is set up my audio in. I then wrapped this up in a group. I do this so I can set volume of that track to 0 as I just want to use the effected sounds. I then drag a “bus 1 send” onto the “audio in” track.

From there I drag the “bus 1 return” twice. I pan 1 fully to the left and 1 fully to the right. On the left I drag a compression vst, wrap it in a group then add eq. On the right, I do do much the same adding delay, compression, eq, ampsim.

That’s it… It does what I want it to. Is there a better way or is this it?

Another question…

I am trying to use Jamstix witin Podium. Jamstix is drum synth but I can’t seem to be able to pull up the drum editor on the Jamstix track. I do get the piano roll but that’s not what I want. I’ve clcked as much as I can and I can’t seem to find a setting that will switch the piano roll editor to the drum editor. What am I doing wrong?