Hello.
I'm a music composer and theorist and I'm also very much interested in things related to musical acoustics. Not sure if this is the right place to ask but I hope my question can possibly be forwarded if necessary.
Just because I'm blind, my current life is getting difficult. Back in the '90s, my former composition teacher bought me a 4-track tape recorder and later a minidisc recorder. The absolutely great advantage of these machines was that just by touching the panel, I knew everything I wanted to (the levels and gains of the inputs, the panning for each track, the tracks currently selected for recording, the effect send levels, etc.). Also, since it was possible to record the same signal as the one coming from the stereo mixdown, bouncing tracks was very intuitive.
Unfortunately, analog tapes introduce audible noise while minidiscs use lossy compression (which is often surprisingly audible as well). So I was thinking about buying a new piece of equipment. I'm not so much concerned about portability but rather about having faders or rotary knobs for levels and panning and about doing all the necessary things even if I don't know what's on the display. And I'm definitely comfortable with 8 tracks played back simultaneously (I never needed more). But I'm getting stuck for several reasons. That's why I would highly appreciate your advice here.
#1. Tascam DP-32SD can allegedly convert individual tracks from its internal format to Wav format but I have no idea whether the internal format uses any data compression on the sound (which may degrade the quality) and I haven't found any web resource discussing this.
#2. Zoom R16 seems to use some "not-so-intuitive" method for panning mono tracks or for re-recording parts of a track (for fixing mistakes, for example). Since I don't know anyone who has this particular unit, I can't find out whether I might possibly learn to do it by heart even if I can't look at what the display says. This is crucial information for me since I've already come across one seemingly simple stereo recorder which even made it impossible for me to set the recording level without someone else helping me (goodness, such a basic task being inaccessible to a blind user).
#3. Instead of having a possibility to record the "Stereo out" while playing back, both aforementioned models seem to use a special procedure for bouncing tracks and, again, I can't verify if this could possibly be learnt step-by-step without having an idea what the display says.
#4. Only a few models (of those I've read about so far) seem to offer higher recording sampling rates than 44.1kHz. The CD sample rate may be suitable for playback but not necessarily for post-processing in a sound editor, especially for sounds like cymbals or vocals or instruments with sharp timbres. Even 48kHz can sometimes be a good improvement over 44.1.
#5. When I think about a completely different approach involving a laptop and some dedicated software, I run into two serious issues:
--- None of the programs I've read about (which run under 64-bit Win7) seem to manage all the "basic" tasks entirely from the PC keyboard (i.e. without one single mouse click), which renders them almost inaccessible for someone who uses speech synthesizers to read everything (similarly to the inaccessible hardware recorder, these programs often allow to change track panning or volumes or "rec on/off" with the mouse only). Even worse, some programs only label their buttons with pictures instead of text labels, which is an absolute disaster for a screen-reader user because the speech engine can't then be customized appropriately to pronounce what it's supposed to and when it's supposed to.
--- If one is unlucky enough to get tiny segments of sound being cut out or repeated while recording (which seems to happen to many people who use external soundcards with their laptops), this is often unexpectedly hard to fix, especially when one doesn't have a clue which sound cards or sound card drivers are more reliable than others.
For these reasons, I'd still prefer a standalone single-purpose machine for my multitracking rather than having hundreds of needless things running in the background for purposes completely unrelated to that. But I have absolutely no idea which particular piece of equipment could be usable for me (the accessibility seems to be the main issue here). If someone thinks that many blind people are good musicians, then I'd expect someone else could offer them accessible pieces of hardware. And I still believe this kind of "someone else" must be out there somewhere (just extremely hard to find).
Thank you very very much for any suggestions. I've been trying to deal with this for something like 5 years and I still haven't found anyone who could answer my question.
I'm a music composer and theorist and I'm also very much interested in things related to musical acoustics. Not sure if this is the right place to ask but I hope my question can possibly be forwarded if necessary.
Just because I'm blind, my current life is getting difficult. Back in the '90s, my former composition teacher bought me a 4-track tape recorder and later a minidisc recorder. The absolutely great advantage of these machines was that just by touching the panel, I knew everything I wanted to (the levels and gains of the inputs, the panning for each track, the tracks currently selected for recording, the effect send levels, etc.). Also, since it was possible to record the same signal as the one coming from the stereo mixdown, bouncing tracks was very intuitive.
Unfortunately, analog tapes introduce audible noise while minidiscs use lossy compression (which is often surprisingly audible as well). So I was thinking about buying a new piece of equipment. I'm not so much concerned about portability but rather about having faders or rotary knobs for levels and panning and about doing all the necessary things even if I don't know what's on the display. And I'm definitely comfortable with 8 tracks played back simultaneously (I never needed more). But I'm getting stuck for several reasons. That's why I would highly appreciate your advice here.
#1. Tascam DP-32SD can allegedly convert individual tracks from its internal format to Wav format but I have no idea whether the internal format uses any data compression on the sound (which may degrade the quality) and I haven't found any web resource discussing this.
#2. Zoom R16 seems to use some "not-so-intuitive" method for panning mono tracks or for re-recording parts of a track (for fixing mistakes, for example). Since I don't know anyone who has this particular unit, I can't find out whether I might possibly learn to do it by heart even if I can't look at what the display says. This is crucial information for me since I've already come across one seemingly simple stereo recorder which even made it impossible for me to set the recording level without someone else helping me (goodness, such a basic task being inaccessible to a blind user).
#3. Instead of having a possibility to record the "Stereo out" while playing back, both aforementioned models seem to use a special procedure for bouncing tracks and, again, I can't verify if this could possibly be learnt step-by-step without having an idea what the display says.
#4. Only a few models (of those I've read about so far) seem to offer higher recording sampling rates than 44.1kHz. The CD sample rate may be suitable for playback but not necessarily for post-processing in a sound editor, especially for sounds like cymbals or vocals or instruments with sharp timbres. Even 48kHz can sometimes be a good improvement over 44.1.
#5. When I think about a completely different approach involving a laptop and some dedicated software, I run into two serious issues:
--- None of the programs I've read about (which run under 64-bit Win7) seem to manage all the "basic" tasks entirely from the PC keyboard (i.e. without one single mouse click), which renders them almost inaccessible for someone who uses speech synthesizers to read everything (similarly to the inaccessible hardware recorder, these programs often allow to change track panning or volumes or "rec on/off" with the mouse only). Even worse, some programs only label their buttons with pictures instead of text labels, which is an absolute disaster for a screen-reader user because the speech engine can't then be customized appropriately to pronounce what it's supposed to and when it's supposed to.
--- If one is unlucky enough to get tiny segments of sound being cut out or repeated while recording (which seems to happen to many people who use external soundcards with their laptops), this is often unexpectedly hard to fix, especially when one doesn't have a clue which sound cards or sound card drivers are more reliable than others.
For these reasons, I'd still prefer a standalone single-purpose machine for my multitracking rather than having hundreds of needless things running in the background for purposes completely unrelated to that. But I have absolutely no idea which particular piece of equipment could be usable for me (the accessibility seems to be the main issue here). If someone thinks that many blind people are good musicians, then I'd expect someone else could offer them accessible pieces of hardware. And I still believe this kind of "someone else" must be out there somewhere (just extremely hard to find).
Thank you very very much for any suggestions. I've been trying to deal with this for something like 5 years and I still haven't found anyone who could answer my question.
-D), I may buy a powerful effect unit but I'm afraid that the particular effect that I admired back on my (no longer working) SB Live 1024 is so rare that no recent hardware effect unit will have that (I'm talking about the so-called "frequency shifter" or "single-sideband modulation" which shifts the entire frequency range linearly rather than exponentially, resulting in changing the perceived intervals between the audible pitches).