Have You Tried Remixing Software?

[Graham_Start]

Originally Posted by normvork

Giving up on that for now, I tried to see if Popcorn by Hot Butter (1972) could get beatmapped okay. I figured it's done with synthesizers and all so it must have a steady rhythm. WRONG!

It was done with synths, but not sequencers, so the tempo is only as steady as the person playing it.

[canadiantire]

I sadly admit that I've wasted a lot of time, and polluted my hard drive with trying a lot of the available editing/mixing software.

Here is my verdict:

For beat mapping / matching, the aces are:
- Ableton Live and Acid (from SONY)

For Multi-Track Recording:
- The pricey Sound Forge 8 does a good job. I also like CoolEdit (now Audition)...and the surprisingly efficient Wave Editor/Track Editor (from the NERO 7 ultra edition package)!
This version of NERO has everything to achieve most of the tasks that the expensive packages do.

Unfortunately, if someone is looking into doing a montage or remix, none of the above can be used as "one-fits-all" tool.

I mean by this that more than one product may usually be required, as they each have their strengths.


- Marcus

[canadiantire]

Originally Posted by canadiantire

I sadly admit that I've wasted a lot of time, and polluted my hard drive with trying a lot of the available editing/mixing software.

Here is my verdict:

For beat mapping / matching, the aces are:
- Ableton Live and Acid (from SONY)

For Multi-Track Recording:
- The pricey Sound Forge 8 does a good job. I also like CoolEdit (now Audition)...and the surprisingly efficient Wave Editor/Track Editor (from the NERO 7 ultra edition package)!
This version of NERO has everything to achieve most of the tasks that the expensive packages do.

Unfortunately, if someone is looking into doing a montage or remix, none of the above can be used as "one-fits-all" tool.

I mean by this that more than one product may usually be required, as they each have their strengths.


- Marcus

Here is a rather simplistic example of what can be done with the above products:


---->> Putfile - Clip from Mix



.

[normvork]

I just wanted to give a little update to this thread to make a few comments. I managed to get a newer computer and have been getting more experienced using Audacity and Acid.
My first comment is that taking your time and being patient is the most important thing about working with these programs. Experimenting is very rewarding but is not as often successful as after you work with a few projects.

I tried adding percussion to the Pinup's song "City Life" (1980) and found it frustrating and never got it to work. The problem for me as a rookie was that the original had so little visible beat in the sound wave that I could not chart the beats either with the Acid beatmapper tool or by using a manual beat marking process. I spent at least 10 hours on the project before giving up.
Then I tried to beatmap "I've Had It" (1974) by Fanny with equally horrible results, never getting the Acid beats to line up with the drummer. Same exact trouble with Samantha Fox "Touch Me" (1986). I pretty much gave up for a long while after these failures.
Thanks to pure luck, I was downloading some of my vinyl one day and opened Vivien Vee's "Heartbeat" in Acid, and out of curiousity just let the beatmapper tool do its job. For the first time, it worked nearly perfectly through the whole song.
Then I tried Taka Boom's "Ride Like The Wind" and the beatmapper worked again. I actually had a great time reworking the Taka Boom song into something way better IMO than the original! I beefed up the bass beat by adding another drum loop, added a synthy bassline loop, sampled a spacy sound effect and reused it repeatedly to make the song much more 1979-ish. I'm thinking of posting it on youtube as an example of what a beginner can do with this software.
I'm looking forward to winter so I can spend more time playing with this stuff!
Another comment I want to make is that the warnings about vocal removal software is all completely true. The best result I could ever get was to have the song sound like it was being played in a gymnasium down the hall: vocals weakened but still there, only a little echo-like. Big waste.

Another fun project I just started to dabble in is mining my own loops and samples. Sound effects records can have some really cool and useful material for embellishing songs. Rhythm breaks and intros from classic disco songs are often fantasticly easy to turn into loops.

So at this point my advice to anyone reading this who is thinking about getting started in this hobby is to start with their early projects with a good solid disco song with a steady beat, rather than to start with a project of turning a non-disco song into a disco song. I'm still determined to achive the latter, but will wait until I get more practice at the former.

Hope this helps somebody out there.

[originalbigm]

Here is a free program that seems to work reasonably well

Mixxx | Free Digital DJ Software

[QUINNY]

posted in error