DAW frustrations...

[thercman]

Well I am finally starting to work with DAWs on a serious level. I have downloaded the trial versions of Pro Tools HD11, FL Studio, Reaper and I own Calkwalk's Sonar LE and of course Audacity. Currently I am applying for the local college's audio engineering program and they teach Pro Tools so I have been concentrating on that. I must say this program is pissing me off. As a beginner I cannot even get it to record a decent quality vocal track for podcasting. First, I have had all kinds of issues getting the damn audio set up. It took two hours of filtering through YouTube videos to find the problems... With that taken care of I turn off my monitors, un-mute the mic and record a short vocal track. I mute the mic turn the monitors back on and play the recording. Beside the vocal you can here a definitive tick, tick, tick through the whole track. WTF?!? $699 for this crap? Then then next most expensive program, FL Studios also has audio interfacing issues. Audio set up is a royal pain just get it to record a vocal. However this program has other issues even worse than Pro Tools. In order to get the audio to play back through the mixer I have to push the stereo switch on and off for the USB channel depending on whether I am recording or playing back. Then when I do play the audio track it sounds like it was recorded in a large empty room (reverb) and if I up the volume it sounds like there is a serious feedback issue. It is unusable. (my studio is sound treated) I have no idea what the issue is. Since I am working on my podcasting I don't even use either of these two programs because it's impossible to record just a simple track.... With that said I have no issues with the other three programs. Using the same gear I simply launch the software, set up a track, record the vocal, do some noise reduction and its done. No audio interface issues, no weird artifacts or feedback in the audio, nothing. They work flawlessly. The set up am using is fairly straight forward. I am using an Allen & Heath ZED 14 mixer. I simply run the mic into channel 1 and the USB runs from the board into the computer. The computer is a recently built liquid cooled PC with solid state hard drives and top of the line video card and an Intel i7 processor. So the power is there.

Sorry for the rant but I have been wanting to throw my computer out the window, seriously. Does anybody have any recommendations the for Pro Tools or FL studios issues?

 

[Anders Erisian]

Hey rcman, haven't had much to do with PT so cant help you there. I have used FLStudio to track audio over the years, and while hardly my first choice of platform for recording audio, it does its job fine. It's a pretty fiddly interface for recording and mixing audio, but once you get used to it pretty capable. I've never had any real issues with hardware setup, it was pretty straightforward setting up audio and midi options in the menus for me, but our setups are most likely entirely different so that would be different too.

As far as the reverb and feedback issue goes, when recording to a mixer channel, after selecting the audio input for that channel, did you disable the send to the master channel? On the mixer panel, with your input channel selected, if you look at the bottom of the master channel strip(far left of mixer) there is an 'arrow in' icon which will be lit if enabled. Click it to turn it off. If enabled your post fx monitor signal from your input channel will be returning to your input channel, via the master, creating a feedback loop. Alternatively if you select no input for that channel when playing back audio you will have broken the loop too.

Not quite sure what you meant by having to push the stereo switch on and off, are you monitoring your input directly from the mixer or from the return from the daw? If the Zed only has 2-channel main mix out routing via usb, your input from channel 1 as well as the stereo mix will be recorded, as you cannot select individual channels inputs via usb in the DAW, just the main mix channels. I don't have that mixer but there are surely a number of simple workarounds for routing your monitoring to avoid the problem. Hope that makes sense - oh and off-hand i'd just stick to reaper for recording audio. FL's strengths are definitely in its MIDI, step sequencing beatslicing and sampling. It's a great environment for composing stuff quickly. For recording it's pretty idiosynchratic and fiddly, but i'm used to it. I just use it because it's easier to for me to track live instruments on top of projects in FL than export all the FL project contents as .wavs into another DAW.

 

[polarity]

When i was trying PT initially and trying to do monitoring i was hearing clicks and it had to do with buffer size and my machine basically being too crappy to do what PT was asking. When I upgraded my machine I upgraded every component so I can't really tell you exactly what was cause it.

What type of system specs do you have. Are you running PT in one of their preferred setups? I'm not overly familiar with PT but I know they like something like PT on one drive, sessions and plugins on another or something similar. Have you checked some of the "optimize your PC for Pro Tools" FAQs?

I know both of those programs work fine, so the problem is going to be hardware or configuration. We just have to figure out which