Democracatic feature requests: a feature poll?

[bones]

Can someone give me an example of time-stretching that they think sounds good? It's not something I have ever found to be of usable quality.

Bones, I too would be loathe to have the core parts of the application meddled with, but features like Audio Track enhancements (takes management, better editing to cut, splice, trim, stretch audio clips) and Audio preview on Audio Track with live timestretch etc. are in a sense isolated from the rest of the application.

Sure, but not only do these things move Orion away from it's essential role as a virtual studio and more towards direct comparison with the big sequencers, they will just enable users to keep working the way they always have, rather than take the time to understand why Orion is the way it is and how much better it is for that. Your comment about DrumRack is the perfect example. Audio Tracks are there to allow us to do things we cannot do easily another way, mostly to bring in a full part from another source, like a guitar or vocal recording, rather than to add lots of little pieces of audio here and there and then work with them directly, as you would in one of the bug sequencers.
The essential difference at the end of the day is where you do your work. In most sequencers you do pretty much everything in the main time-line [Playlist in Orion] but what makes Orion different, and a lot easier to get your head around, is that it's workflow is mixer-centric. Anything that takes away from that will inevitably make the app less intuitive. I strongly believe that the only use for the Playlist should be to build an arrangement from patterns and audio parts. Everything else should be done somewhere else. So things like punch in/out make sense but the rest of it is at odds with the way Orion works and would only serve to make it more confusing for new users and somewhat convoluted for all of us.

Any improvements to this area will simply enhance the workflow for those who use it, and add to Orion's cool feature list. And for those who don't use it, like yourself, the original workflow stays untouched and unpolluted.

Which is nice for you but while all that work is being done, things that might be good for both you and me are being pushed back to a later release. I think that development should focus on things that offer advantages to everyone and that build on it's core of incredible sound quality and ease-of-use. Trying to make it more like the big sequencers or simply working to grow the feature list is not the best way forward.

And hey, if you do on occasion use the Audio Track, I'm sure you wouldn't complain about having these extra features.

I use audio tracks all the time but none of those features would benefit me in the slightest. e.g. Preview would be completely useless as most of my audio tracks have a minute or two of leading silence before any sound. Sometimes I'll cut a vocal into parts - verses and chorus or something - but if I do, I will load them into a DrumRack because it gives me a lot more flexibility and means I don't need to use the Playlist. using the Playlist for fiddly things is problematic because it means that you need to bee zooming in and out all the time or maximising/unmaximising it, which is messy compared to leaving it so that you can see the full arrangement and working with nice, easy to handle pattern blocks.

But the Audio Track is woefully underdeveloped now, and as it is cannot be used for regular recording and editing.

I think Audio Tracks are just about perfect as they are, if you work the way Orion is meant to work. The one and only improvement I can think of would be punch in/out.

It seems to be an afterthought. You have to admit that to do any kind of reasonable audio recording/manipulation, you usually have to go to an external application.

Of course but as it;s integrated into Orion it's the best possible solution. i.e. right-click on any audio file and choose "Edit with SoundForge" [or whatever audio editor you use. No sequencer/host is ever going to have a better toolset than a dedicated audio editor so it seems pointless to me to put any of those kinds of features in. SF or Wavelab or Audition or whatever essentially becomes just another window in Orion,like the Sampler's Keymap Editor or Grooveslicer, which to my way of thinking is perfect.

There's another important factor to adding such features: adding robust Audio manipulation and loop/time-stretch tools do not affect the core Orion workflow,

This just shows that you have no idea what the core Orion workflow is. It is a mixer-centric virtual studio. It is not an all-in-one solution to all your audio needs. Where other applications have started as simple MIDI sequencers and had all the other stuff tacked on - first audio then virtual instruments - Orion has approached the task from an entirely different angle, concentrating on virtual instruments. The result is that it does those things much better than any of the big sequencers so it makes sense to build on that strength rather than become a jack of all trades and master of none, which is the path you are suggesting. It's clear you have no concept of, or interest in, sound quality, which is Orion's other core strength.

ONE MAJOR thing for me is a wet/dry knob on every effect. Espesially on delays/compresor. (you can understand why bucause i work only with inserts)

Wouldn't the obvious solution be for you to start using the sends? Solves your problem without sucking up any dev time.

For start it would be nice more than 9 live sets. They could show in the control bar (maybe optional) as a global pattern selector, you know ABCDEFGH, 12345678, that would be 64 live sets. And we could assign each live set to a CC or note, to trigger them with our controllers.

How the hell would you remember what was in 64 live sets when you are on stage? I have a better memory than anyone I know and I couldn't do it for a whole set [64 x 10 songs] without months of rehearsal.

Then, if you press the record button, you could even override the song playlist with the live performance, for a quick sketch of a song.

You can do that now - just press the F11 key to write the current patterns to the Playlist.

[grymmjack]

unassign midi would be gr8

You mean unlink MIDI controller? That would be very simple to implement.

[bones]

incommunicado, maybe you will better understand my position if I give you some background as to how I got to where I am. I started using synths in 1981. My first live show was in 1985 using analogue gear because I couldn't afford any MIDI stuff.
Over the years my set-up got slicker and slicker but the basic procedure remained the same. I had a mixer, a sequencer [or two], a bunch of instruments and some effects - just like Orion has. On top of that, I had a microphone. If I wanted to record, I would simply put a cassette into my cassette deck and record what came out of the mixer [it all used to run through my home stereo]. In 1995 I released a CD where half the tracks were recorded exactly that way, on a TDK SA90 cassette. You can hear some of it at www.myspace.com/deathlyquiet.
When I went into a studio, for something like $500 a day, I would record each part to a separate track, mostly all in one go, add vocals and then mix it all down using the studio's desk, instead of my shitty mixer. Overall though, the process in the studio was the same as it was for me at home.
Throughout, everything I wanted to do had to be done in an instrument. If I wanted to edit audio, I did it in my sampler. Even in the studio you couldn't do much. e.g. If I wanted a reverse reverb, we had to spool the tape through, turn it around and physically play it backwards with a reverb applied. It was painful because if you miscalculated your inverted track order, the reverb might go onto the wrong track.
The one thing that the studio did that I really grew to appreciate was to put the mixer front and centre - everything was connected to it and by it. The better the mixer, the better the mix, pure and simple. Not just in terms of the sound quality of the mixer itsself but because the mixer showed you everything that was happening, which made it easy to fix problems and get it right quickly. Time was important in a studio because it cost money. It wasn't enough to just do a good job, you had to be able to do it efficiently. I became a big fan of the studio and its process and over the years I probably spent 10 grand or more of my own money on studio time.
When I started looking into using my PC for music, it seemed that the big players like Cakewalk and Cubase, both of which I bought, were far more like a sampler on steroids than an actual studio. Maybe they worked better for other musicians, guitarists and the like, but for a synth player they seemed a bit esoteric.
Fruityloops was fun but it was more like my first live set-up; a couple of TB303's and a drum-machine. I didn't see how any of them coud be suitable replacements for my current hardware set-up, which consisted of a Trinity, ASR-X, K5000 and CS1x, all attached to a Samson 1502 mixer.
Orion OTOH, made sense from the minute I installed it. It had a much better mixer than my Samson, better than a $500 a day studio in many ways, and it's instruments and effects were more than decent, even way back at v1.5. In 3 months I got more work done in Orion than I had done in the previous 3 years using either my hardware or any of the other software I had tried to work with. It was everything a good studio was without any of the hassles.
There was no audio track at all back then, but with the amount of RAM in my PC I could do all that stuff with either a sampler or drum machine so it was a total non-issue, as that was how I'd always done that stuff. I had already been using Cool Edit to do all my audio [sample] editing for a few years, so it seemed like the two things together could do everything. And they could.
In the last 10 years or so, none of that has changed. In fact it has become even more true. The big sequencers continue to be as inspiring as Microsoft Excel, FL still feels like a bunch of separate things cobbled together and Orion is still the only thing that feels like a real, honest-to-goodness studio, with the significantly more powerful mixer as the centre-piece of its workflow.
What your suggestions seek to do is to take that away, in favour of the approach of the spreadsheet sequencers, which is to make the Playlist the focus of the workflow. The problem with that is that unlike the big sequencers, Orion would then be split between two different approaches, neither of which would work by themselves. The main use of the playlist is, and should remain as, a timetable. You look at it and you can se what is going to happen when. Punch in/out works within that context but adding any other functionality to the Playlist would be to give Orion a split-personality and, as we all know, one of those personalities is invariably evil and gets the other one into big trouble.
It's not that I don't understand or appreciate all the cool stuff you are talking about, I just don't believe they are needed in Orion, nor do they make the same sense they woudl in another, more audio-focussed host. OK, the audio stuff in Orion is nowhere near as good as it is in Sonar or Cubase or even FL but the point is that it doesn't need to be, because that is not what Orion is about. For that reason it makes perfect sense to use a DrumRack or a Sampler to do those things, not the Playlist. If I was a guitarist or a pianist or a basoon player, I might see it otherwise but if I were one of those people, I probably wouldn't understand why anyone would use Orion. Unlike other hosts/sequencers, Orion is very much set-up for synth players. Where those applications have had all that stuff bolted on as an afterthought, Orion has it front and centre. What you suggest, that Orion should do both the synth thing it does now, as well as doing audio as well as the big hosts do, seems impossible. If the big hosts can't manage it with total re-writes and dozens of developers, how do you expect Rich and Jouni to? What you'll end up with is an audio system that's as severely compromised as the way the big hosts do the whole softsynth thing. Much better to keep it simple and elegant than try to reinvent the wheel.

[epilogue]

Can someone give me an example of time-stretching that they think sounds good?

Been holding my tongue for a while, but I may as well jump in. I've found that Torq's real-time timestretching sounds perfectly passable in most situations. There are some exceptions of course, depending on what you're feeding into the stretcher, but the ability to change the tempo without changing pitch (and vice versa) and still have it sound decent with very little CPU overhead is amazing and definitely handy. You can stretch anywhere from .1-50% bpm and +/- 12 semitones.

Does it sound good? It sounded good enough stretching your Demonizer vocals to make it onto your upcoming cd

/.e

[bones]

Yeah but the original vocals were hardly pristine to start with. But I do think that it is probably good enough for a lot of applications. Trouble is, most people would want to be stretching drum-loops and I can't see/hear the high-hats, cymbals or snares faring as well as my yelping.
Interestingly, the first result I got when I googled up Torq contained this quote:
'The only let down is the timestretching algorithms. Even the higest quality one available in the system creates artifacts."
That's for a $900 system.

[incommunicado]

incommunicado, maybe you will better understand my position if I give you some background as to how I got to where I am....

Well, that's quite some history there, and it certainly does explain your fierce insistence on keeping Orion the way it is and your appreciation of the way it works.

In my own case, when our band first recorded in an actual studio in '94, I hated the paradigm and found it limiting. That's because I'd worked with computers since back in '89, so I'd started with Trackers and Audio editors. I put together my first complete track using a primitive version of SoundForge, pasting all my guitar takes and bits on top of each other destructively. (Incredibly, that's exactly how the dub'step producer Burial composes to this day). When I first found multitracking software (Multiquence then Vegas) it was like a light went off. I did a lot of stuff (mostly metal/experimental) in Vegas but then I discovered softsynths and another light went off, because I saw a whole new territory opening before me. i tried reason, fruity, and lots of other stuff besides before falling in love with Orion. I then built loops in Orion and exported them into Vegas to layer my guitars on top off. But after a time I found myself working the other way: ie, importing my riffs and loops into Orion from Vegas. This was because I loved the sound quality in Orion and the workflow and the mixer etc.. But I kept thinking: damn, if this only had the features of Vegas already in it, it would be like the best damn app on the planet...

So you see, we're coming exactly from the opposite ends of the production spectrum. You can perhaps see why I crave for mature Audio tracks in Orion, because it would then be for me the ultimate all in one DAW.

At the same time, I'm not denying the points you raised; Orion may not have even ended being Orion if the devs had instead tried to shove everything into it. It may have careened off into failure-ware. Also, i'm aware that focusing on one thing will take away focus from the other. [edit: And although your split personality argument may have some validity, I still feel developing Audio is isolated from the rest of the app because the Audio track is already a separate entity.]

To be honest, I don't see an easy answer; music producers are always formed by their personal paths through the treacherous terrain that is creativity, and therefore form habits that are etched deeply into their synapses (no pun intended).. To try and please everyone would be self-defeating. The trick is, I think, for the devs to find the right balance and to still make sure their product is commercially viable and steadily improving. No easy task.

Why was why I thought a poll would be a good idea

[edit: BTW, Before settling on Vegas, I used the Ensoniq PARIS DAW, a now defunct DAW system which I still believe has the warmest (yet colored) sound of any DAW ever, including the much overrated ProTools. i still have the Paris to this day, takes up a lot of room in my storage space]

[epilogue]

Yeah but the original vocals were hardly pristine to start with...
Interestingly, the first result I got when I googled up Torq contained this quote:
'The only let down is the timestretching algorithms. Even the higest quality one available in the system creates artifacts."
That's for a $900 system.

Fair enough. Beethoven's Ninth it isn't And to be honest, I'd use it pretty much just for warping the sounds I've already made or recorded, not loops/drums. And since I already have Torq and the Xponent, I'm not pulling very hard for it in OP; is that what the $900 tag was on, btw? Got mine new for $650, and it's killer bang for the buck at that.

[DaZoid]

bones,

Some of your posts are way too long these days . I stopped reading them even that I find your comments always interesting...

And here's an example of a timestreched sample. I did go way over 10% which was recommended but it's still good. It's done with Wavelab 6. The DIRAC function is one of the best on the market IMHO.

Song with 112 bpm
http://www.gabrielknight.de/Music/Cloud112.mp3


Song with 131 bpm
http://www.gabrielknight.de/Music/Cloud131.mp3

[banda NOVA]

totally agree with bones. never used audio features of Orion at all. simply putttin samples in drum rack. Mixer centered workflow - that what makes Orion simple and intuitively understandable to almost everybody, even me, with zero experience in everything:midi, synths, sequencers, hosts, vst etc. I tried Sonar, Nuendo, Cakewalk, Cubase and others - they are too complicated, with whole lotta useless features making them software dinosaurs, huge and clumsy, while Orion was easy to operate from the begginning, without any kind of teacher. And that snapshot, i mean F11, is awesome. So, Orion, to my opinion, doesn't need global changes, rather needing some minor improvement/

[DaZoid]

Yeah! Same opinion here, banda.
I prefer the sampler for audio material. Everything works very well...

[Lance]

Song automation overhaul would be the most important to me. Automation clips with the ability to automate absolutely everything(ex. the mixer) ala Reason would be great.

Overhaul? What everything? I can automate everything already. "Ex. the mixer"? Excluding or what? You can automate the mixer too. Automation clips? And do you want to edit there at their tiny size or in full window?

Seriously, Reason's automation is nothing better, it's worse than Orion's, because stoles space from its playlist, unhideable. Seriously people have no clue, that's my opinion.

I know many users don't even know they can automate VSTis, VSTs too, (and those voted too) just because those can't have right click menu for it (that's the limitation of VST). Also automation clips = pattern automation.

Automation should be done by recording most of the time, because that way it will be musical and good. You can't do any faster and better work with those freaking splines and curves on those freaking automation clips.

[JavierRubio]

How the hell would you remember what was in 64 live sets when you are on stage? I have a better memory than anyone I know and I couldn't do it for a whole set [64 x 10 songs] without months of rehearsal.

the same way you remember 64x10 songs x 10 generator patterns. You don't have to use them all. It was more oriented to be coherent with the buttons in each generator. Being organised would be the key as always, A for verse, variations 1, 2, 3, B for bridge, and so on, whatever you like.

Anyway, we're talking about including this to the poll, not implementing it right now.

[Kriminal]

totally agree with bones. never used audio features of Orion at all.

strange that, cos for years users beggd Rich to put Audio Tracks in, then they didnt use it....

[suneel]

audio tracks is useful if you use external synths. i have some external synths that i trigger from midi from orion, i hit the record button on audio tracks and it gets into the workflow. you dont spend extra time cutting it and importing it into the sampler.

[Richard]

Some of your posts are way too long these days . I stopped reading them even that I find your comments always interesting...

And here's an example of a timestreched sample. I did go way over 10% which was recommended but it's still good. It's done with Wavelab 6. The DIRAC function is one of the best on the market IMHO.

yup, but it's not realtime, and the license is rather pricey.

In Wavelab, or any audio editor, a non-realtime stretch is certainly handy.