kim_otcjFrom what I see on the video, it’s aiming for the same sort of market as Garage Band, with some preloaded hardware drivers for a controller.
kim_otcjWell, now I’ve listened to my album a bit more, I’ve realized it would translate to smaller speakers better if I EQed more upper-midrange into the snares and toms.
I guess it just goes to show, there’s always plenty of room to improve.
kim_otcjI’ve just finished an album. I recorded the entire thing on an Acer laptop running Podium 3.12.
http://kimotcj.bandcamp.com/album/scream-fish
I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.
kim_otcjI often problems with Antress Modern plugins, but I’m pretty sure the problem is not with Podium.
kim_otcjPerhaps it’s just that you’re using presets in Zebra that have very long release times set?
I have a few plugins that continuously pump out sound even when I’ve stopped the transport and no midi notes are being sent to them. It’s a pain in the neck, so what I usually do is bounce the track. That way, I’m not dealing directly with the plugin — just a .wav file recorded from it.
kim_otcjI guess I can’t really relate, because I mostly do survive using Podium as my only DAW.
On a few rare occasions in the past, I’ve fired up Sony Acid to edit a loop I wanted to use. But I’m getting away from doing even that, because all the time stretching and pitch-shifting ruins the quality of a sample and leaves weird artefacts behind.
kim_otcjI find I’m using them less these days, because I’m gradually finding newer plugins that sound better.
But it’s still a pretty good place to start, because the collection is quite comprehensive. I’ll still use stuff like Classic Chorus and Classic Phaser if I want those effects.
kim_otcjYes. The only time I ever use multiband compression on an entire track is when I do live recordings of my band. And I only use it then because the music isn’t multi-tracked.
If I have to use compression, I’ll do it on individual tracks while I’m mixing. That way, at least, I’m not killing all the dynamics on the song.
kim_otcjI got my Classic plugins from the Computer Music Magazine cover-disk — which is also where I got the first version of Zynewave Podium that I used.
kim_otcjIt’s not so long since I upgraded to a modern computer and ditched my old Windows XP box. So I’ve made a few tracks in Podium using only a Pentium IV and 1 gigabyte of RAM.
I would suggest, if you’re working up to the limits of your computer, to create group tracks and set them up for offline render bouncing. Your synths go on child tracks of the group track, in which ever way you want to organize them (maybe two or three to a group).
You work on one group at a time, and when you’re done, bounce the group track to free up the memory they’re using. Then move on to the next group. Once you’ve bounced a group, Podium will disable all the child tracks of that group, including all the plugins, and just read the bounced audio file. And while it might not be able to handle a dozen tracks of heavy soft-synths, it can easily play back a dozen tracks of bounced audio files.
If you have to go back and edit some stuff in one of the groups, it’s no big deal. You can disable the bounce, go in and make all the changes you want then just bounce it again. No problem. It’s one of Podium’s best features (in other DAWs, bouncing/freezing tracks can be a pain in the neck).
You could make the biggest most complex song in the history of the world, if you’re clever about nesting and bouncing group tracks.
kim_otcjI do two online songwriting challenges every year. I do 50/90, where the idea is to write 50 songs in 90 days. I also do FAWM ( http://fawm.org/fawmers/kimotcj ), or February Album Writing Month, where the idea is to do 14 songs in the month of February.
This year I did my FAWM demos entirely in Podium 3.1. And the recordings turned out well enough that I’ve decided to post the whole thing on bandcamp:
http://kimotcj.bandcamp.com/album/monument
On the computer side, it’s pretty much all just Podium and free plugins. The only commercial plugin I used was my Lexicon Pantheon II reverb. I used Antress Modern plugins quite a lot — particularly Modern Black Dragon on the vocals and guitars, Modern Amplifier as a bass compressor, and Modern Console EQ for equalizing the drums.
For mastering, I used Ferric TDS and Melda Limiter (from the Melda free plugin bundle). I used a couple of H.G. Fortune’s synths for ambient noise on some tracks. Arptron_2 gets onto one track where I wanted to do synth arppegios, and DVS Saxophone on another where I wanted to bring the funk. They’re all great plugins for no money.
kim_otcjI personally have absolutely no interest in owning or using a tablet PC. But so long as Podium retains its backwards compatibility, I absolutely approve of Fritz’s efforts to keep it up to date with the latest OS releases.
kim_otcj@pbattersby wrote:
That’s what I was looking for. I didn’t realize I could independently adjust the volume of a sound event through the sound event properties.
Actually, I just do it by grabbing the top border of the sound event in the arrangement window and pushing it up or down.
kim_otcjAs for Reaper… it looks great. It’s got all the features you could want. It’s also very popular, and people get passionate about it.
When I go to use it, however, I don’t get very far in before all the little niggles start to add up. Podium’s spoiled Reaper for me.
kim_otcjI tried a bunch of different limiter plugins for mastering, and Melda Limiter was by far the most transparent sounding. I think I’ve mentioned the Melda Free plugin bundle here before.
I used to master all my tracks with Audacity. That’s got all the dithering options that aren’t in Podium, and some useful stuff for controlling volume and dynamics. But these days I don’t even bother. I just master straight from Podium with some EQ (mainly just a high-pass filter), Ferric TDS, and Melda Limiter on my 2-bus.
If there’s any nasty artefacts from downsampling from 32 bit to 16 bit, I’m not hearing them. And if it really mattered that much, then I know a professional mastering engineer locally who masters tracks for not very much money.