poor man's mixdown EQing trick

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Alright, now understand that this is mainly for those who use only programs like Cool Edit Pro or NTrack or something
to record their songs / mix down. Personally, I have a few key constraints, money being the prime one. You don't even wanna know what I use to capture my instruments and vocals. But there's another reason I do things the way I do, and that is because I believe in being unconventional, learning for myself, and making the most of CRAP. cause when you can make crap sound the best possible crap can be, you've accomplished more than some sucker with a half-million in gear and no idea what to do with it to make good music.

Now that we have that out of the way, ;) ..
Most of you I'm sure use WINAMP to play MP3's of your favorite artists, or your own material. I've found it can be much more of an all-around audio tool than that.

The thing that annoys me about Cool Edit is I can't EQ while using the spectrum analyzer, and although the ears are the most important indicator, sometimes they're not the best, if they're fatigued or whatnot. so I save the mix as a wave, encode it at 320kbps archival quality, and open it up in winamp. this lets me twiddle with the EQ while looking at the analyzer. So I make fine changes while I listen, and crank up the gain to match other songs in my playlist. Then I use the disk writer plugin to rip a wave again, voila, audio ready for cd, the "poor man's" way.
 
Damn, if this works, I'm going to be really impressed.
 
yea

just make sure when you rip the final wave that you have the winamp EQ ON, and so that you don't lose your settings, play another track on the playlist and make sure the dials don't move back to default.

and of course, after you rip it switch back to the audio mapper in output prefs so it doesn't keep ripping waves when you're trying to LISTEN to em! ;)
 
The trick here is to make a scratch conversion of the .wav file, because Winamp won't register .wav files on the spectrum analyzer the same way it does with .mp3 files.

May I also suggest trying to use PaceMaker when listening to your files, say one or two hours after EQ-ing? Many songs that "drag" to everyone else's ears sound fine in ours until the tempo/speed/pitch are screwed with REALTIME.

PaceMaker is a plugin, a "DSP/Effect" plugin. If you stretch songs at all, this is a must-have.
 
naw, you misunderstood, it's not the wave file you work with in winamp.

1. save the mixdown from whatever program you work with as a wave.

2. convert to 320 kbps mp3

3. open the mp3 in winamp.

4. EQ it

5. go to output preferences and choose disk writer.

6. hit play on the file and it will rip the new EQ'd wave, with excellent quality still, cause the mp3 was encoded at the highest setting.

7. rinse, repeat.

8. smile and burn yerself a cd.
 
well if this particular trick DID work with wave files, that would be such a bonus, cause it would save time and there would be ZERO quality loss, not that there is any noticeable to the human ear this way..

but anyways sure, you CAN eq it via winamp, but you wouldn't be able to output it to disk, because the diskwriter plugin only works with MP3's.. that's why ya gotta do it.
 
Where can we get DiskWriter? Is it a standard plug-in (already on WinAmp?) That's cool as shit!

Hey, how fast is it? Use Bladeenc right now, is it faster (or does it just change a couple of codes and it's done?)

I'm still on the wrong page, aren't I...
 
pretty sure it comes standard with new versions of winamp. at least, when I heard about it for the first time, I checked and sure enough, there it was in my prefs. I just had to double click it and it became the active output device. then you just hit play on the song and it does its thing. be careful though cuz it will also convert every mp3 after it in the playlist, so it's wise to make sure it's the last track in the list, or only.

If I understand you correctly, it converts mp3 to wave very quickly, roughly 20 seconds for a 4 minute song.

on a side note, I found a useful little program which is a REAL TIME spectrum analyzer. meaning, if you have your amp miked and feeding into your soundcard input, it will show you the frequencies when you play a riff on the guitar. this is neat because it helps me tweak my hi's and mids to perfection on my processor.. actually seeing a visual representation of it.
 
YOUR A GENIUS!!!

I know what it's like not to have thousands o bucks worth of gear.
 
Just wanted to point out that there are many WITH the gear that know how to use it also!!!

You cut your teeth on the CRAP gear, get the technique down; then make enough good sounds out of it that enough people like that gives you more money to buy the NON-CRAP so that even MORE people like the sounds even more so you make MORE money to buy EVEN MORE gear and... aw heck - you get the picture....

You can see the vicious cycle to being a gear-slut.... :)

But hey... bottom line is to make the most out of your resources, small or large... there's nothing like the feeling of creatively finding a way to get just THAT SOUND you're looking for.

"...if it sounds good, then it is good..."

Bruce Valeriani
Blue Bear Sound
 
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