pro tools and kontakt session management

[joeymusicguy]

in the past, with cubase... if i had a project that was programmed drums only, i would work all the way through the drums until finished, and then render / export the result into audio tracks. this was very important because the real time playback of kontakt would often be buggy and full of pops and clicks here and there. so cubase having the ability to offline render was great, it meant nice clean drums for import back into the session

in pro tools, everything is kinda "real time" and there really is no offline rendering of audio files. so you if you want an audio track of kontakt, you've gotta record it... everytime i attempt to record, im getting a random pop or click here or there. it might even go as long as 2 minutes, and then one little pop... not cool!

i haven't actually tried "bouncing" which is where pro tools plays back the mix (as opposed to recording the mix) into a stereo file somewhere on the hard drive

does anyone know if this will work better when in this mode?

the second part of my question is, are there any tips to keeping everything real time? as in, always running the VI so that changes can be made at any time, to the drum programming, even after recording vocals...

does anyone mess with doing it this way?

thanks!

 

[Zombietakeover]

in the past, with cubase... if i had a project that was programmed drums only, i would work all the way through the drums until finished, and then render / export the result into audio tracks. this was very important because the real time playback of kontakt would often be buggy and full of pops and clicks here and there. so cubase having the ability to offline render was great, it meant nice clean drums for import back into the session

I don't really have an answer for you but i'm interested in what you said here....What if you freeze Kontakt? Do you trust that?......I use Kontakt alot and i never heard these pop and clicks you speak of.....So your saying by exporting down to audio tracks...i could get a cleaner sound?

 

[joeymusicguy]

i figured out a few things, thus far

kontakt just won't play back reliably enough to record at 64 samples buffer

running snow leopard in true 64 bit mode will cause pops and clicks no matter what buffer setting

kontakt will record just fine at 128 samples buffer (32 bit mode) with a pretty heavy load (blast beats and 32nd note kicks with half a gig drum set loaded into memory)

 

[joeymusicguy]

I don't really have an answer for you but i'm interested in what you said here....What if you freeze Kontakt? Do you trust that?......I use Kontakt alot and i never heard these pop and clicks you speak of.....So your saying by exporting down to audio tracks...i could get a cleaner sound?

pro tools doesnt have a freeze function

im using pro tools if i didnt make that clear enough

 

[joeymusicguy]

I don't really have an answer for you but i'm interested in what you said here....What if you freeze Kontakt? Do you trust that?......I use Kontakt alot and i never heard these pop and clicks you speak of.....So your saying by exporting down to audio tracks...i could get a cleaner sound?

but to answer your question, bouncing offline is better (actually perfect quality)

in fact, there's an option in kontakt for setting what sampling quality it will use during offline bounce, and its set to perfect by default

this only applies to VST as far as i know. the option is still there in the rtas version, but there's no such thing as offline bouncing in pro tools, unless it somehow switches into a special mode when you MIX down, which is done in real time.

 

[amarshism]

One of the most annoying things to me about protools is the no offline bouncing.

 

[Zombietakeover]

pro tools doesnt have a freeze function

im using pro tools if i didnt make that clear enough

lol yeah i totally understand that but something you said ignited another question....so sorry for derailing

 

[joeymusicguy]

Blah, no one?

This is lame

 

[dani]

yea that's because offline mix downs don't sound as good, duh!

easy now, i'm kidding! however, thought about writing drum track in cubase and then exporting each channel as a separate wav file, then import into pro-tools? not the answer you're looking for, i know..

 

[joeymusicguy]

yea that's because offline mix downs don't sound as good, duh!

easy now, i'm kidding! however, thought about writing drum track in cubase and then exporting each channel as a separate wav file, then import into pro-tools? not the answer you're looking for, i know..

offline bounces sound better, in this case
because the cpu can be setup to render the sampler only
which is what happens in the case of cubase

in pro tools, you have to figure out how to get your computer to not be interrupted by anything (including OS operations) long enough to record the drum tracks and hope there's not a click or a pop in there

at any rate, yes i've thought of that, and could easily do that
but it doesnt solve the problem, nor make me feel like this pt rig is worth its cost

i thought i was going to have more power, yet im still having to bounce shit

 

[amarshism]

Does rendering them down one drum component at a time still produce pops and clicks?

 

[dani]

ok, you seem pretty set on staying at 64 samples latency all the time, and i guess at the mac pro + HD3 set up costs.. you kind of should be able to!

i don't really know how it all works in protools, but from what i understand, it records the output of the VI in real time on real audio tracks, no? if that's the case, then where you get a click or pop, just stop the recording, move back a few seconds, record again, and crossfade?

i know you wouldn't ship a recording like that, but for the initial stages of recording, it's good enough. then when you want to mix down for real, set samples to 128 and re-record?

if you're desperate, try downgrading to leopard?

if all else fails.. come back to cubase sell the HD3 stuff, keep the mac and use cubase on that.. it runs pretty nice, i find! aha

thanks,

 

[Trevoire520]

Forgive me if I'm missing something obvious here Joey. But why don't you just turn up the buffer size if that makes Kontact more stable?

If you're in the process of editing and mixing you should have the buffer size at it's highest anyway.

If you're in the middle of recording other things at this stage then you could just put the buffer up, bounce down a stereo drum track as a guide to work to while tracking guitars/vocals etc, and then turn the buffer back down to continue with recording. Then later you can put the buffer up again to either bounce out your drum elements for mixing or just run directly from the Kontact player (assuming it's stable at higher buffer settings)

One of the most annoying things to me about protools is the no offline bouncing.

As long as you're not bouncing down a 3 hour post production session I don't see why it causes a problem?
Listening to the mix as it's being bounced should really be the last stage in quality control anyway imo. Just sit back and listen to the song from start to finish to make sure it's perfect. Not twiddling knobs/moiving faders/clicking around the screen. Just listening.

If you want to use any analogue outboard then offline bouncing is useless anyway (though I understand there are few here that do)

 

[dontletmedrown]

Crank the buffer to the highest, print the stems, lower the buffer and deactivate the track with Kontakt, continue recording.

 

[joeymusicguy]

good points here

i guess what was really making me angry is i cranked the buffer up to 2048 and was still experiencing clicks and pops
but i forgot that i was booted into true 64 bit mode, which apparently doesn't play nice with pro tools

rebooted in 32 bit mode and moved the buffer up and recorded just fine.

i guess my real complaint, at this point, is that with the amount of money i spent, i feel i should be able to record guitars to an open ended midi -> VI running at 64 samples, but i guess currently technology doesnt allow that yet. i have my whole drum set sampled and running in external memory mode (so not even using pro tools memory buffer) so it doesnt have to stream from the disk, and there are still clicks and pops in 64 samples buffer setting

kind of annoying. but i have guitar players here that can hear the difference between 128 sample buffer and 64 sample buffer on my ADAM's, so we need to be able to track to 64 samples buffer mode (neither of us can hear that amount of latency) (and for wise cracks who get in here and plan to explain it takes a millisecond for the sound to come from the monitors and reach our ears, trust me i know, but you're not computing the amount of latency involved with using a plugin to track the guitars ON TOP of the original 64 samples of latency. round trip latency is actually around 300 or so samples, guestimate).

its just a bit of a pain as the band and i want to be able to make changes to the drums later in the production, and it would suck to have to re-record the VI output

not that big of a hassle, but still... its 2010 and 20 grand later, and im still limited by my fucking hardware / software

 

[JeffTD]

Would this work running the same cpu/plugins/VI but in Cubase?

 

[joeymusicguy]

Would this work running the same cpu/plugins/VI but in Cubase?

i dunno

running the 192 i/o core-audio in cubase doesn't go lower than 256 samples

and i dont have another interface hooked up to my mac pro

i should also mention that i never tried to do this on my windows machine, i just always bounced offline and usually never had a drum change at the end

all im saying here is, for the amount of money i spent, i feel like i should have this capability

 

[DeclanWhite]

so joey, was pthd worth it or not? or no conclusion yet?

 

[joeymusicguy]

so joey, was pthd worth it or not? or no conclusion yet?

no conclusion yet

haven't tracked guitars

so far i've messed with making session templates and i recorded cymbal samples in pro tools, and mixed a few songs (stems from cubase session)

all of that has gone fairly well

i hope it improves my work flow for tracking / editing guitars tho
same for vocals

thats really the only thing that i need it to do, cuz mixing in pro tools is great and easy, and being able to run the vi live would also be great

it definitely has a lot more power than my older system. i usually had to "bake" process the vocal tracks (comps and de-essers bounced into the takes) even at high buffer settings, but with pro tools i had 30 - 40 vocal tracks with eq, compressor, de-esser, eq, and then doubler's, reverbs, and delays on every channel with low buffer setting.... no problem!

 

[DeclanWhite]

as long as it's worth it, then thats great. im a fanboy of your work haha