Hey everyone
How many of you wished that you could save all mixer settings…plugs used/fader levels/eq/comp and all that stuff and apply it to another song? It would really make my life easier and save me a ton of time. I have been working on a project for 18 months now that started out in cubase vst32 went to sam 6 and is now an N project. I miss the feature of saving all mixer settings. This is helpful to me because I have 9 channels of drums/2 for bass/4 for gtrs and 9 left for voc and misc overdubs and have meticulously kept my tracks consistent level and eq wise from my source. I have dropped a line to Flavio several times with no avail. I know he is really busy working out bugs but I feel this would be a great addition to N. Lets hear it if you agree or am I asking for something that is useless to others. Please let me know.
Thanks
Jeromee
A saved song file is a saving of all the mixer settings. The only extra things it includes is the wave references for the tracks.
To save just the mixer settings remove all wave parts from the tracks – that will remove the wave file references. Then save that as another song.
Open that song file and imediatelly save it to the file name for you new song. Import any waves you want to include and use the Move tool to drag the wave parts in the imported tracks into the tracks you want, then delete the blank tracks left over from the wave file import. There is a key shortcut to keep offsets when dragging but I don’t remember what it is. Anyway, imported waves usually don’t have any offsets. You can record new tracks into this song and move them as well, or simple arm the existing tracks to record directly into them. (I never do this because I always want to record to a new track, but it should work.)
There are other variations on this that will work, such as copying the whole song directory to a new directory (the original song directory is used a template) and always using files that have the same filenames, like NewSong_kick.wav or MySong_snare.wave. What ever you use, do you recording then move the files into the copy of the template song, renaming them into whatever your template song expects. When the song is opened it will automatically open the files with the expected filenames. This could be confusing, but this is something I’ve found myself doing recently when updating submixes.
No need to keep the the npk files around. They are for displaying the wave data in the track window, and get rewritten if missing or if n-Tracks detects a change.
Jeromee–
Just to clarify, what would happen if you opened a “mixer/plugin configuration” saved for say, 15 tracks, but only had 6 tracks loaded? Ignore the settings for tracks 7-15, I suppose? Settings for non-existant plugins would probably be ignored as well, I imagine. Just wondering what kinds of issues might crop up in designing this kind of feature.
I do see your point if you have the same arrangement for several songs–I haven’t been in that situation myself, but I imagine I would do what phoo was suggesting; make a “template” song file with the mixer, plugin, and device settings in it, and I’d probably save it as read-only just to protect it from myself 
But if Flavio throws this feature in, I don’t see any harm in it, either…
Tony
Thanks guys
I have been creating a temlpate and re-importing those wav files into it and it has worked well. With cubase you can select certain tracks to save settings or save all mixer settings. I would be happy saving all mixer settings. As for the number of tracks, you would have to keep this consistent. If you have a 10 trk project and you tried to load a 16 trk mixer settings then it wont load. That is the way it is with cubase and sam. I ordered sam8 a couple of weeks ago because I really like that feature but I have a gut feeling that I will have wasted my money because it won’t sound or perform as well as N. I have all of my projects setup for 24 trks. These are files that I dump from my alesis hd24 and bring into N. After I do mixes and listen for a day or two I am forever changing a couple things and making a new template and re-importing the files. With 14 songs this gets time consuming. Some of the files I have to render because I have done cuts to them(headphone bleed into the voc mics) and things like that. So saving mixer settings for me would be a huge improvement in my workflow. Thanks again for the suggestions.
Jeromee
| Quote (jeromee @ Nov. 19 2004,04:34) |
| After I do mixes and listen for a day or two I am forever changing a couple things and making a new template and re-importing the files. With 14 songs this gets time consuming. Some of the files I have to render because I have done cuts to them(headphone bleed into the voc mics) and things like that. So saving mixer settings for me would be a huge improvement in my workflow. |
Ah...I understand better now. I kinda figured you already tried the "template" idea. My own problem is I haven't used N-track enough to run up against something like this, but I can see it happening to me in the future.
I think it would be a sensible feature to have, and technically speaking, I don't think it would be too difficult to implement since mixer settings are being saved in the .sng files already.
Tony
Jeromee, so you use a cookie cutter approach to mixing, IE, you get one mix done for one song o a record and the apply exact same formula to all your mixes? Not to sound crusty, but you gotta treat each song individually. (Okay, I sound crusty.) As for SAM8, not sound as good? If you can tell much of a difference I would be very surprised. There is such an absolutely minute difference in sound form DAW to DAW, I wouldn’t worry about it. Everything I have heard is that folks who have Samplitude love Samplitude.
Hey Guys
Believe it or not N sounds better than my sam6( I didn’t go for 7) The only thing I can figure is that the internal processing algorithms are obviously different(N being better). The dithering and sample rate conversion are really great with N. I’m going from 24/48k and getting better results with N than sam6. This version of sam doesn’t have powR dithering but the v8 will. The mixer settings give me a base of consistency that I tweak on each individual song but the drums are my main use of mixer settings. Luckily my drummer plays consistently each session. Maybe I am going about this all wrong bubba? I just like records with songs that flow and right now this is the way I achieve that for my own stuff. I’ll post two mixes of the same song mixed almost identical using the two apps and see what everyone thinks. It could be I have been messing with these blasted tunes waaayyyy tooooo loooonngg
Jeromee
boy, its hard to argue with sam 6 tho…
its all ive used the past couple years.