kim_otcjOkay, I’ve got my latest album up:
http://kimotcj.bandcamp.com/album/carmine
It’s about half and half, with the first songs recorded in Podium 3.12 and the last songs in 3.2. I’m always pleased with an album if it sounds better than the albums that preceded it. I think I have good cause to be pleased with this one.
kim_otcjDoes EnergyXT actually work as a plugin? It never occurred to me to actually try this, because I thought it was just a DAW program and nothing to do with VST at all.
Does EnergyXT support ReWire? If it does, that would be the way to get it working with Podium.
kim_otcjWhat can you suggest?
Errm. Use midi notes to play the VSTi instead of the other way round?
and I might even like to have two VSTi’s together in some manner.
Load two VSTi’s on onto separate tracks then copy and paste the midi clip. Works the same as any other copy — editing one instance changes them all.
I’d like to be able to use FX on VSTi’s
Am I missing something here? I use VST effects on my midi tracks the same way I do on audio tracks.
can someone please post here any/all subhosts and/or sequencers that actually DO work inside Podium without causing it a fit, freeze or crash???
I tried out the Computer Music version of ADM the other day. That’s a drum machine with a built in sequencer. It worked fine.
Podium’s piano roll editor is also a sequencer — and a pretty good one at that. It works for me most of the time. Personally, I prefer it.
I think you’re getting frustrated because you’re trying to work against Podium rather than with it.
kim_otcjkim_otcjThat was just one example. I’m sure there are plenty of ways to exploit the nested group thing.
In a way, it’s kind of like object oriented programming in a DAW, complete with inheritance.
kim_otcjOkay, this is an old thread, but I thought I’d give everyone a heads-up on this topic. The last time I tried to get the lame library for use in Audacity off the internet, the installer was trying to mess me around — trying to install toolbars behind my back, and that sort of thing.
So I switched over to using Any Audio Converter, which can handle both mp3s and FLAC:
kim_otcjI do find that, aside from routing, Podium gives me a decent amount of control over VSTs.
Any parameter a VST makes visible can be assigned to an automation track and controlled with an automation curve. With some synths (the HG Fortune ones come immediately to mind), Podium will automatically create the automation lanes for some parameters.
If the VST assigns control change numbers to its parameters, then I can assign those to a knob on my controller and write the automation curve in real time. So I may be a “basic” user, but there is no shortage of sophisticated things I can do with Podium in my studio set-up.
Another example is Podium’s hierarchical routing — and that’s the thing that drew me to Podium in the first place. You can put tracks in groups, and nest groups within groups, and at every stage the direction of your signal flow remains visible and obvious right there in the track window.
Say I’ve got a guitar part that I’ve set up with an effects stack — an EQ curve, a compressor, a send to a reverb bus, and so on. But for the solo parts I want to add a univibe plugin, an extra distortion, and a second aux bus set up with a delay plugin. I don’t want that to be a separate effects stack, I want that stuff added on top of the first lot of effects. Well, in Podium I can convert the guitar track to a group and add a child track, on which I put that second set of effects. Then I’d just slice up the guitar soundclip and put the solo parts on the child track.
Easy! I’ve added effects to just the solos without having to set up multiple automation lanes. Now I’m sure you could do the same in Reaper — because Reaper has very flexible routing — but only Podium has the hierarchical nesting thing that lets you actually see how your signal is being routed through the project. I think this feature of Podium has a lot of possibilities, but because it’s not a feature that other DAWs have, it kind of gets overlooked.
Now imagine the possibilities when you combine those group tracks and hierarchies with Podium’s offline render bouncing. This is what makes me think Podium would be an excellent DAW for doing very large projects, with oodles of effects, VST instruments, and audio tracks. You could nest the whole lot in groups of tracks, and then groups of groups. You can then bounce groups to create sub-mixes, all the way up the hierarchy, so you need never run out of memory or processing power during the project. You could do projects with hundreds of tracks this way.
So, in short, I don’t feel like I’m the least bit limited by Podium. I don’t think I’ve even begun to exhaust its possibilities.
kim_otcjIt seems to me that Podium’s midi capabilities are aimed squarely at putting midi notes on a track to play a VST instrument loaded to that same track. That’s the way I use midi in Podium, and I’ve never had any problem doing just that.
I don’t use Podium because it has all the latest advanced features (it hasn’t). I use it because it does what it does very well.
kim_otcjkim_otcjkim_otcj@Cris17 wrote:
Tele, are you sure we are talking about the same Melda plugins? Because as far as I could tell their free stuff was very comprehensive and I did not get any advertisement that urged me to buy their products. What products for mastering are you using now?
I think this thing where Melda plugins would occasionally open up their website is something Melda used to do with earlier versions of the free plugin suite, but they’ve dropped it recently. But I still sometimes get the “this feature is only available in Pro” dialogue popping up when I press the wrong button on the interface. That is rather annoying.
Those plugins are being actively developed. I recently updated to version 7 of the Melda Free bundle, and there are quite a few differences — both in the range of plugins offered, and in their interfaces and features — from the older version I had been using.
kim_otcjLooks like I have a lot to learn – apparently the whole philosophy behind recording / editing music has changed from my generation
Absolutely — and I’ve lived through all of that.
Back in the analogue days, the emphasis was on printing tracks to tape. But these days they call that rendering and it’s the trivially easy final step in the process. Press the button, wait a few seconds, then it’s done. The emphasis now is on generating sounds, on editing, and on effects plugins. And the idea is that you can change anything in real time, so you can get everything just right before you commit to it.
I made my first ever multi-track recording with a mixer and two tape machines, so when I finally got around to using proper modern DAWs the possibilities were mind-blowing to me.
kim_otcjBy the way, when you’ve finished your song and want to save it as a .wav file, you do much the same thing on the master track:
Enable offline render bouncing, then press the bounce button. You can export the bounced audio using the bounce menu that appears in the effects stack.
kim_otcjThat’s the normal behaviour for midi tracks. Recording on a midi track creates a midi clip that you can edit with the piano-roll editor. That’s what anyone would want most of the time.
To convert a midi track into audio, you need to bounce it. To do that, you right click on the track header and choose bounce/offline render bouncing. That should put the B button on the track header that you can press when you want to create the audio clip.
Personally, I just put all my VSTi instruments in a group, then bounce the group track. I don’t have the most powerful computer in the world, and bouncing midi tracks frees up a lot of processing power.
kim_otcj1) To fade in and out, you grab the top left and right handles on your audio clip and drag them. You can right-click on the fade-in/out to change the kind of fade you want.
If that’s not good for you, you could also fade-in/out by using a automation lane set up for “level” (Right click on the track header to bring the menu up.)
2) Yes. You can copy and paste audio and midi clips to make loops. By default, Podium will paste things as a copy. You can tell when something’s copy because it will have a + sign next to its name. You can use the handles in the bottom left and right of the clip to crop the sound non-destructively. You can also convert a copy to a unique clip from the menu when you right-click on the clip.
3) There’s no horizontal scroll bar. You can scroll horizontally using the navigator panel, or by left-clicking on an empty space in the track window and dragging left or right.
Aaand, I’m answering all your question because I’m procrastinating instead of writing music like I should be…
Dammit. 😉