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Does anybody make their own samples to bring into koala? I’ve been doing that a lot lately because I’ll know what I want and not want to go searching for it but I think I’m recording things too quietly and bringing out the noise floor when I’m mixing the stems in a DAW. What’s a good level to have the audio recorded to bring into koala and then eventually export to a daw for a mix and a “master”?
Follow the same guidelines as if you were recording in a DAW. Are you talking about recording external audio with a microphone or an instrument input or line in or are you recording the output of soft synths?
A bit of both but line in/instrument a lot more lately since I’ve been acquiring some hardware. I think I might have been trying to overcompensate since I thought I may need it a little lower since I’m going through another step but yeah it was definitely not working
When you record analog sources, you should always record to maximize signal to noise ratio. Once the noise is in the signal it’s there. Gain staging one would do in an all analog flow doesn’t apply to digital. Digital gain change does not add noise or distortion unless one is using tools intended to do that.
I’ve been doing exactly this and here’s a practice to consider: normalize all sample source (you can also do this within Koala) first to get clean strong signals then when composing use your ears to verify there’s no clipping happening when gain staging all the elements in Koala.
Ahh, I see what you’re saying. I was actually adding some noise with Reelbus on some of these older recordings I was looking back on and noticing it on. I’ll have to read more about gain staging as well, I thought I understood it but was definitely not getting it at first. Appreciate the knowledge, that cleared up a lot for me
Be cautious I what you read about gain-staging. There is a lot of bad info out there (advising people to use techniques that don’t apply anymore)
IMHO, the basic rules of thumb for "gain staging" in a digital environment:
Yeah, gain staging or "gain structure" doesn't really apply in the same way in a purely digital system as it does in analog. Normalizing can sort of be your enemy - a lot of people ask for me to auto-normalize recordings to pads, but my argument against it is that it doesn't give you a sense of whether you're recording too loud or too quiet. I've even received bad reviews citing the fact that Flip sampler does it, but I have to stand my ground, because a lack of auto-normalization leads to you paying more attention to your signal path which is a good thing
Most audio in the digital domain has a very low noise floor, way beyond human perception I think (it's 32 or 64 bit float, which is even much better than 32 bit fixed point). But it does (at least in the case of auv3 and IAA) have quite a strict headroom/upper limit of 0dB - it's not enforced but if you go over that the results can have unexpected behaviour. On iOS it's sometimes fine to go over, but on android, going over 0dB can basically switch off the audio hardware, so koala has a hard clipping limiter at 0dB, and if you have the compressor engaged even slightly it's got a soft clipper in there that will ensure you never go above 0dB.
Long story short, it's ok to have most of your samples quite quiet until you need to turn them up, and wherever possible, use your ears
Ah sorry, @wim - I spent too long composing my post that I overlapped you. I agree with everything you said with the caveat that #2 - some auv3s and IAA's are not expecting a sound louder than 0dB, so they may act in unusual way if given an input signal higher than that. It's fine for the most part but it has been known to cause problems.
The reason it matters what your external input levels are is because that is in the analog domain, and that's where the noise is. That's the only real place you have to worry about gain structure.
I think koala attenuates everything by 6dB in order to give enough headroom for lots of samples playing at the same time - when you use ableton's sampler, its default gain is -12dB, which is maybe a bit overkill for koala's main use cases.
@elf_audio Regarding the 'Vol' knob, since you mention there's clipper in the signal chain...
...what about adding more 'range' to the Volume knob? (I mean like +30db or so for 'creative purposes'?).
This would make it easier to 'check the noise floor' of a recording or boost the crap out of sounds.
Naturally I'd bounce the sound after extreme volume changes.
I vote NO to auto-normalise. It's a feature in Flip that drives me nuts.
Since when is a whisper as loud as a scream or dripping water as loud as a gunshot?
The sense of dynamic differences in sounds gets lost when everything gets normalized...
Cheers!
Great advice, thanks everyone. It also saved me from going down a massive gain staging rabbit hole, I was going a little crazy cos it seemed like every source would say something different about it
absolutely...stick to yr guns.... no auto-normalisation... it’s there in the edit tools if people need it...
and even if some kind of mass herd delusion forced you to add it , it would have to be optional with a switch in settings.
I've been using the samples view with HOLD and LOOP to generate ambient textures and
it's really hard to see which samples are currently active.
I'd like to trigger a looping sample and see that it's set visually. There's a very slight offset of
the sample icon and it blinks on the re-start of the loop.
I'd like to see a more effective indicator of the active sample(s) and a button to turn them all off.
Does anyone else use this approach or have advice on a better way to use the Koala interactively treating the samples page as "pad" controls?
Does the current "keyboard" page drive anyone else crazy?
What I really should've said: if your samples are too quiet, normalize them then balance mix levels by ear. I had to get fancy and mention 'gain staging'.
Just gotta shout out, the timestretch is so well implemented, especially now that I found out you can adjust the pitch manually while maintaining the set length and bpm. Honestly koala had become my go to sample processor because of this and ease of use. It's added a huge palette of sounds to my workflow.
One of my favorite things to do is grab a few random loops, breakbeats, and even just random noises like machine sounds from youtube or something and build a 16 piece kit in one loop on koala, timestretch it with some dirty distortion and a filter, and throw it into Abu Dhabi in Gadget with the arp on to cycle through the pads at 1/8 or 1/16 intervals.
Koala kinda brought Gadget back to life inspiration wise for me. Continually impressed by this thing.
I’m one of the ones who requested this as a convenience feature — reason being the Allen&Heath analogue desks (ZEDi ones) that I use as digital interfaces have an unbelievably low input into the digital inputs. The waveform comes in looking and sounding like silence, however after normalisation the audio will be fine with no noise floor issues at all. Have chatted to A&H and it just seems to be how that desk works. Talk about headroom! You get about 60db worth at max volume! Literally can’t get it any higher. Having an arbitrary 5 extra taps to boost and prep .. every .. single .. sample .. was totally killing the spontaneous vibe of Koala for me.
However — instead of that arduous process, I’ve now got my AudioBus input channel set to +24db (or whatever AudioBus max is) then in line before Koala on the same input strip I have Amazing Noises Limiter adding another +24db and adding some limiting safety (which is never really hit but nice to have).
This is actually preferable to me, as the audio is boosted enough to not have to maintain the nonstop normalisation dance and the samples coming in from the desk maintain their analogue mix proportions, so fall into the mix nicely without much tweaking. The only downside is the cpu hit from the limiter (upgrading a device is hard with no concerts so I’m behind the times), but for the first new live concerts I’ll probably not sample live anyway so just prep my audio ahead of time and eject the limiter for extra cpu overhead.
So yeah, I can agree with the rest of the gang on that point now as I’ve found an alternative workaround myself, but thought it might be useful to document the use case here in case there are other people out there who are getting bogged down by the same hardware limitation that I was.
I couldn't agree with this more. Regardless of whether people even want a sampling app like Koala (I can't relate to those who don't, but let's not get into it!) there is genuinely no better timestretching facility on anything I know of. It's truly incredible!
I am really enjoying the fact that I can screen record samples and I am using fruity loops mobile which makes great sounds and then bring them to koala. That is genius.
I guess I should go looking or a video of this in action. Do you have one that you think is a good starting place?
Yes please!
I've not seen one I'd recommend (which isn't the same as saying there isn't one...) but I'm happy to make one when I get a chance
That would be most excellent!
There will be cake!
What problem do you have with Cubasis 3? Does it not let you select Koala (IAA) as a source?
Koala works fine with Cubasis 2. Perhaps you could do a screen recording showing how you are doing things. There have reports elsewhere of Cubasis 3 having problems with some IAA apps, but no demonstrations of the issues.
One way is to create an empty midi-event on the track with Koala in Cubasis and use track freeze...
...another one is to host Koala in AudioBus and create and audio-track in Cubasis and use AudioBus as the input.
Koala is an IAA instrument so it can output midi and 'freeze audio'.
When Koala is loaded in AudioBus Audiobus it's effectively an 'IAA Generator' and outputs audio to Cubasis.
Who knows, maybe Cubasis will some day give us a bit more flexibility when it comes to audio routing.
This way we could easily create an audio-track and use the midi track hosting koala as the input...
For me personally I just create the patterns in Koala as stand-alone and export as stems or mix-downs when needed.
I know not optimal solution for everyone but that's the current situation as far as I know.
In Cubasis 2, one can record Koala’s audio output without problem. No tricks or workarounds needed.
Ok, loading it to an Audio Track fixes it, loading it to a Midi track requires freeze.
Works fine in Cubasis 3 as well!
So @ehehehe Create an audio track and select Koala under IAA/Routing.