plug in effects vs. external effects

S

sessep_2002

New member
hey people...i'm using cakewalk9 with a delta 66/omni station for recording and purchased the waves renaissance collection plug ins (eq, comp., rvb.)...i have a pentium III p.c. with only 319 mb of ram and have noticed it really sucks up the power....any suggestions?...get a new computer probably...lol

i also am wanting to purchase and external rack mounted unit to warm up the digital sounding tracks...i was told the mindprint en-voice was amazing....anyone heard of it?.....any other suggestions?

thanks guys!

sessep
 
As for using externals: if your soundcard has enough outs to run a stereo pair out and another stereo pair to bring it back in, and if it can real time record this way, you can do it. It is time consuming, as you have to have the entire piece or wav play to get it tracked. I don't know if SONAR will support real time, though, so you may have to do some post time syncing...

As for the EnVoice, I have one. It gets a lot of use here, mostly for DI instruments, although it seems to do very well on high female voices, too...don't care much for the tube saturation, but it seems to work for what it does.

The only thing I caution about the EnVoice: it is mono, so you would need 2 of them to get stereo mixdown capability. They are going pretty cheap these days (bought mine used on the net for 175 I think plus shipping...) so it may be a better bargain than most other stuff out there!
 
thanks for the input midland....i didn't realize it was a mono unit...

where did you buy yours for 175??...i know they're 699 new and i haven't seen any on ebay...
 
Actually got it from someone who had advertised he had one for sale but it never sold..I ran a search for 'Envoice' and 'MindPrint' and found all the posts made within the past six months...then read thru them to see if there were any out there for sale.

There is a definite chronology to the Envoice...when they were released, seems everyone was raving about them, so used ones were not there and dealers could keep selling at retail. Then some of the 'upper end' guys starting posting that they weren't that good, and the keep-up-with-the-Jones mentality displayed by a lot of folks in this industry kicked in, resulting in a small flood of used ones, with dealers selling them at radically reduced prices.

Seems to have stabilized a bit, as its no secret that replacing the stock tube with a quality JAN 12AX7 or 6072 can make a HUGE difference in the sound.

Sometimes you have to do some tracking down and direct asking "will you sell it" stuff to get what you are after. I will say that given the opportunity, I would buy another Envoice for a reasonable price. (wow...I guess that's some kind of endorsement...maybe I like mine better than I thought!)
 
I have a MindPrint too and it's a very nice unit and they are mono. If you're contemplating picking one up, be aware that the digital I/O is an option and not stock on all units. I paid $175 for mine too about a year ago at a Guitar Center but I'm not sure if they have new units any more or not.
For what it's worth, I don't use it in that fashion (running mixes through). I record to a HD24, tweak tracks in a computer with either Cakewalk or Vegas, back through the HD24 to be mixed through an analog console so for the most part, I use hardware outboard effects and dynamics control. Personally, I have a low opinion of most plug in verbs, although some of the software compressors are quite good. I'm especially fond of the Waves compressors and the Timeworks stuff is good too.
 
Hey Track...do you have the digital option? Seems to me that putting the S/PDIF on there would convert the the thing to a quasi-stereo piece, since digital is stereo....and if it did, I wonder how discreet it would be in channel separation...
 
The S/PDIF is mono unfortunately with the two sides of the signal being in and out rather than left and right.
 
That's just about right...you know its that cost cutting mentality that keeps a lot of 'decent' stuff from become 'great' stuff. If that thing had a 'real' digital option, I'd be all over it like ugly on a pit bull....

But there again, a new EnVoice digital card costs more than I paid for the entire unit...so maybe I'm the not-so-smart one here...

BTW: Since I'm on my soapbox about internal vs external effects, has anyone ever seen a little mixer that deals with 6-8 stereo s/pdif signals, and turns them into a stereo pair? Seems most goodies have digital these days, and it may be kinda cool to have an mixer that could process more than one digital pair...but that would probably cost a fortune!
 
they seem to be coming out with new options on stuff pretty regularly so maybe we'll see a spdif oriented mixer soon...i haven't heard of one personally...

thanks for all the input guys on the en-voice...i may keep looking
or waiting rather for the right thing to come around...
 
The MOTU 308 isn't a mixer as such but it accepts four pairs of either S/PDIF or AES/EBU. You could sum it in a computer.
 
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