Topic: Non-Linear Techniques For Non-Linear Audio Editing

[morst]

I'll get to my point in a bit... let me set this up first:

I will admit to being at the far end of the continuum of these two endpoints:
One one hand; folks who work on one project at a time, start-to-finish
On my hand; - folks who work on many projects in an overlapping fashion

While working in my scattershot timeline, I've found that I can get stuff done more quickly than I would if I tried to focus on doing only one thing at a time.

For instance, some days I am in the mood and/or have the proper time frame for tracking projects and finding song titles.
Other times, not so much, maybe I'm more in a mood to make mixing decisions regarding things like time-offset and relative loudness levels.

Another big bunch of time spent processing audio for me is in regards to the metadata, and file preparation end of things.
I especially take a lot of time tracking down recording and transfer details, and compiling the meta data.

By keeping a number of projects "in progress" I find that I'm able to do more of what I want, when I feel like it.

I'll be anti-clickbait here, and bury the lede of the whole reason I bring it up today!
When I'm going through new projects, sometimes I'll just want to give them a listen while I'm working on (some potentially-unrelated) audio processing (on a different computer maybe, since I do my plugin work on an older mac running Sony Sound Forge from 2015) or I might be browsing this board, or news websites...

While I'm listening in Audacity on my left, in between moves on the right side Sound Forge machine, I can drop in approximate track points and song labels as I listen.

When I put in a tentative track break, I describe in the label whether it's unknown song, imprecise location or both by using a combination of "?><" where the ? means I need the song title, and where the angle-brackets indicate that the track point itself has not been fine-tuned and still remains in need of precise adjustment.

One other dynamic of this is that I've turned off the feature where the display scrolls along with the play-head while I am playing back audio.
This separation allows me to scroll (or use the "elevator controls" to move) more or less where I want to, without interrupting the playback.
This is found under Preferences > Tracks > (uncheck) Auto-Scroll If Head Unpinned

When I hear a song break, I can scroll back to while I listen, and drop in a "Command-B" break point command while it plays (Control-B on the PC version)
I can also type in the title of the new break point, my preferred combo of "?><"
Another way I use this is for bands which take breaks between songs. I can run through a new project and just drop break points where they look like they go at the end of a pause in the songs.. I often do this for an entire show, then hold down backspace and alternate between the TAB key, and between typing "?><" repeatedly.
This runs the cursor backwards from the last track break towards the front alternating adding my "?><" string and jumping to the previous point.

Command-B, Command-B, Command-B, Command-B, Command-B, Command-B...
?><, TAB KEY, ?><, TAB KEY, ?><, TAB KEY, ?><, TAB KEY, ?><, TAB KEY, ?><, TAB KEY...

(note also that to me, >< and <> mean the same thing so I can slop it in however is easiest at the moment, lol)

[Gutbucket]

Digging this.  Keeping it real.  Good strategies.

And following surreptitiously. I hope to get back to where you are now at some point, better sooner than later.  I'm currently without any editing machine and its been difficult.  For instance a month back I needed to relatively quickly get a concert I recorded over the holidays mixed and out to the artist (this project residing firmly in the start-to-finish camp).  He'd commissioned a multicam video shoot of the performance, yet none of the board-feed audio recordings intended for it worked, so it fell back on my on-stage audio rig to relatively quickly provide a few snippets he could use to "shop the show around", prior to making a proper mix down the road.  Problem then revolved around my onstage recording not being a straight 2ch stereo recording, but rather an 8ch array pointed in all directions capturing the extreme dynamics and wide placement of musicians employed at this performance, which in turn really requires proper mixdown to translate correctly.  I first pulled out a few old retired laptops and was able to get XP booted on a Compaq with an old version of Samplitude, but in the end reverted to doing a good old-fashioned "real time transfer mix".  Or rather, a complex multiple stage version of one. The 8 channels were mixed down to 4 using the main + sub analog bus line-outs from Zoom F8 > OCM R44, followed by a few processing passes back and forth from R44 > SPDIF > DR-680 > SPDIF > R44, using digital effects built into the R44. At one point that included making a duplicate copy of the resulting DR680 file after a SPDIF transfer so as to achieve a parallel comp pass using the R44's bult in compressor effect on one of the two stereo copies (R44 comp effect lacks a wet/dry control).  In that way I achieved a passible mix which included the needed limiting, EQ, M/S > L/R conversion, parallel comp, final EQ, and track markers.

Not the way I'd suggest working! But thinking it all through to achieve what needed to be done, and the actual manual doing of it it ended up being rewarding.  I'll revisit it properly at some point with automation and better mixdown tools which is what the full performance requires and deserves (among other things it really needs about another 10dB of overall gain reduction for the quiet bass-clarinet positioned far left to sit comfortably audible in the face of the twin drummers and twin bassists positioned center and playing forte in a few parts) yet doing it this way worked well enough to provide what was needed now, and made for a good challenge.  Plus those multiple real-time transfers provided lots of time to tidy up the notes and file info.  [roll eyes]

Looking forward to the return to sanity. Keep up the good work.