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Mozaic isn't a good choice for that. It would take a long time to explain the details of why, which I will do if asked, but trust me, it just isn't.
No, I don't need details, I will take your word for it. Glad I asked ...
Talking Raspberry Pi: Did you have a look at Zynthian ? You can build your own - no need for the special hardware. It comes with a sequencer and can host a plethora of Linux plugins. A Pi 3 with a touchscreen and a USB MIDI interface should work for a MIDI only device.
I will check this out, thank you. The kits at least are probably challenging to get into Mexico, as beyond just customs, electronics have to have a special certification to even be able to sell within the country, and so most one-offs or smaller brands just don't or can't. But I can dig into the functionality and specs and see if such a build can be purposed to what I want, and it's worth checking out.
Drambo has auto-grow in recording (can be disabled). And you can switch tracks while recording too.
That's exactly the philosophy in Drambo. No steps up front if you just want to sequence with it.
I had an MMT-8 myself and I liked it so much that I even built a custom keyboard with much better keys for it, placed on top of the menu area. I didn't like its rubber buttons but it was a nice simple sequencer.
Although they're still available second hand here, I wouldn't go back again though, there are so many better sequencers out there that I would prefer, including hardware.
That's a lot of good stuff to know. Do you feel like Drambo then is as immediate as an MMT-8 for that style of MIDI loop recording?
I would say it's more immediate for several reasons:
I really appreciate your insight here, as mentioned before it was difficult to get a good sense of the immediacy of Drambo, but your points cover a lot of great detail that has me highly interested in digging into it. The idea of being able to see all clips at once also seems to be one advantage over 4pockets Helium (which I did pick up as it's high on the list and was on sale).
I feel like I have the bits I needed to consider picking up Drambo and digging in at more depth to get a solid feel between it and Helium for how quickly I can get ideas down.
On a separate note, while I did pick up Qneo's Voice Synth for a vocoder, I've still been tossing around options including hardware if I could find something with sufficiently clarity in vocoder sounds that I like, since the hands on hardware would still be very nice ... and ... well ... someone got me looking more at the Novation MiniNova, and there are several nearby I'm asking about now.
They also got me thinking a bit more about my vocal chain, coming through the clean Babyface with an AKG C414 condenser and Coles 4038 ribbon. I've at least been considering adding a de-esser and gate to the chain, but that same person also mentioned they're using Art Pro VoiceChannel, which may fit the bill better than trying to insert several plugins in the iPad chain here, and keep things in hardware as most other things, which I like. That said, some professional singers have also indicated while some mid-grade vocal processing hardware like that made sense several years ago when a lot of interfaces didn't have low floor/clean preamps, the value of the colorization they add vs the availability of processing plugins with nice clean vocals (like I get with the Babyface Pro) becomes questionable.
Perhaps the latter would be better in a completely separate post, sort of went with my mind there
Thanks again for all the responses though, it helps immensely.
Welcome @EnergyCrush Cheers!
Thank you! People have been very tolerant of my verbose posts and questions, it's been immensely helpful!
You're welcome!
I have the Mininova and a MAM VF11 analog vocoder. Both sound good but I have to admit that since we have the DerVoco AUv3 vocoder and an analog vocoder emulation inside Drambo, created by my very self, I haven't used either of my hardware vocoders anymore.
Excellent choices!
All that can be built inside Drambo too. I have some experience with cloning effects and synths and I can help if you want. In fact it's more about what exactly you want than how to get there.
I've seen that MAM VF-11 come up several times on hardware vocoder forums, but it's unlikely I'll ever see one in México.
Oh! You wrote DeVoco?! It was on my list of top five iOS vocoders, but I think I only sert it aside because I thought I read it itself isn't an AUv3 app, as otherwise a lot of people highly recommend it. Ot maybe you meant a separate one inside of Drambo I haven't seen yet ... I admit I'm getting sleepy, so maybe comprehension is working against me.
My next tackle is considering the vocal chain processors from a few more common hardware vocal channel strips to get a handle on which ones I think I need and in what order. I had a sort of template mapped out and a few selected choices in iZotopes Vocal Synth 2, Nectar, and Waves Morphoder ... maybe something from Melda as well.
I know I'll want a de-esser in there, a gate, an eq (need to watch some examples of tuning this for my voice as well with my given Mics to get the best out of them), and then a compressor. While a limiter at the end might be good, sometimes a clipper is a preferred effect, but I need to consider what I'm going after this time. As an example, I love what Battle Tapes does for vox processing, and they like to go a little hot. Not sure if they've got some saturation in there somewhere too.
And I'd love to pick up FabFilters bundle for a good deal of that, as they're some of my most commonly used processors on the PC and I'm already familiar with them, but am seeing what I can get by with until a sale comes along. It's worth the price, I'm just being frugal atm ...
And I appreciate the offer, I may take you up on that shortly, and pick up Drambo as well
OK!
And yes, DerVoco is an AUv3 plugin that integrates well with Drambo.
Mmm ... so, I came across iSequencer HD again today, and noticed one of the feedback comments mentioned that it was a precursor to Drambo. And somewhere in there another sentenced called it a tracker.
Now, there are no wrong answers here, but ...
...
...
... is Drambo a tracker?!
No but the developer does have a tracker heritage
That is very cool to know by itself, we share blood in that ...
I've been itching to insert SunVox into this conversation. It was too far afield. But you just gave me an excuse. 😉
Lol, I'm good with any and all tracker conversation. I think I never dug into SunVox only because I was very focused on VST and VST3 for ... well, I think I started using Renoise around ... a very long time, I'm going with a very long time ago for now.
Every now and then I'd look to see where trackers and DAWs in general were and see SunVox pop up again, and it would always look enticing and awesome. But they've never integrated VST of any form up to the time I last checked, and I just didn't have a use case for it in regular production.
I still recall tearing apart all the xm songs a friend burned to a CD for me one at a time, pulling out samples to work from through a command line, floppy disks, and my very small hard drive to build songs from. While it is amazing what can be done with just a handful of samples and and track step modifier commands ...
That was weird. Suddenly my mind crossed paths between FT2 and a really large and random selection of samples spanning many years I picked up at one point and was going through using Resonic Pro, finding some pretty amazing things, including several saw wav samples at various notes and filter settings, and it sparked something. I wonder what it would be like to go through all of it and a computer that had only SunVox and that giant library, where distractions from plugin installs couldn't be a factor.
It would have to be a better experience than the horrible Polyend Tracker, I don't think I'd have to install anything else at all or even look away from the screen. Hm.
Maybe it's time for the fresh OS install of the studio box I've had at the back of my head ...
That was unexpected.
@EnergyCrush I thought about this too. A vast sample library, maybe categorized in some way, with a good random sample picker. XLN XO and Algonaut Atlas come to mind.
I have both XO and Algonaut, and they are perhaps okay starting points for at least drum-oriented sounds.
But I also know I have over 465,000 samples, and I don't think there is a tool that will really help me sort through all of that, lol.
But, I was specifically think of the Prodyon Shortnoise I & II sample libraries. The Kontakt instruments themselves can be completely ignored, but there is a really diverse set of samples between them. It feels like they were pulled off of someones old hard drives, as there are some duplicates between them, and even within the libraries themselves. They aren't sorted super cleanly, but I don't know that I'd need them to be either.
I could still load up Resonic Pro on the box as well and just start poking through things and come up with ideas to work from on the fly, knowing I'm just limited to the samples themselves, not having any specific goal or think I need to go load a kick plugin or find a specific sounding snare. Feel like it would keep the required fun element I would need.
As a sort of weird twist of fate, though completely normal to how my life normally works, I've got a new boxed WD_BLACK SN850X just sitting next to me with no purpose. I could just swap it out with the fanless studio pc drives to leave them intact, reload Win 10 Enterprise LTSC, then SunVox and Resonic Player. All the samples (well .... I mean, all the samples, 465,000+) are already sitting on the second drive, so I wouldn't even need to move anything over, would just limit myself to that folder for now I think.
Hm. Wouldn't take much at all to get there, would be nice to have another focused tool to sit down at periodically, have a chance to finally look at SunVox a bit.
How does Resonic Pro help you in categorizing 465k samples? I've seen it only reads metadata which is usually worthless in sound samples, isn't it?
Eliminating distractions can be quite liberating indeed - and I do enjoy limiting myself to Drambo only regularly.
How about organizing the 465k samples into folders of clustered similarity based on raw audio content, not on metadata? Here is the first python setup for doing that that came up in a search, there are surely more out there.
https://github.com/TylerMclaughlin/wav_clustering_workflow
Once you have all those sounds in different folders, you could for instance use Playbeat 4 to let each track randomly pick from a selected folder when randomizing sounds and patterns.
I don't really want to go through all 465,000+ samples right now, and really don't need to I think. The Prodyon libraries are only a fraction of that, and I think diverse enough for the moment. While there are some fantastic 8DIO and Spitfire samples in the whole of it, I can decide later if I want to tackle any of those based on what I'm coming up with and if I want to keep anything I put together to actually complete, mix, and master.
While I've already organized a fair chunk of things, starting by whether samples are melodic or not (excluding things like toms part of drum libraries), I certainly haven't come close to touching every file. Maybe some current AI tools would help further organize a fair chunk of those files by signature into different folder structures, which could provide a different starting point, but at some point I'd still have to touch at least the melodic ones one at a time to figure out if they are interesting or not.
When it comes to listening to wav files, Resonic Pro is just the fastest wav file reader and player I've ever seen in my life. Walking through a folder of samples by pressing the arrow keys with auto-play on has nearly zero latency between files of different sizes - which is what should be possible with every wave playe, given the way the wav format is structured, as long as your not reading in the entire sample file in just to process the wave header data - got a sense of that when I wrote up some Python to quickly eval every wav file on my drive and determine which of my samples were 16-bit 44.1Hz when I was coming up with things to load onto the Polyend Tracker, which was most, and then made converted versions of nearly every other file using some handy batch processors out there.
I figured while not perfect, the Prodyon stuff is at least broken down in a way that I'd be able to just start dipping my toes in between drum samples, short melodic one-shots, and longer loop melodics and playing with them in Prodyon.
Lol, no matter how I put the words down, it feels more daunting by the minute, but ... am thinking.
Thanks for finding and sharing that, it looks interesting. I've written Python to read wav file metadata, but not done anything with machine learning or AI to actually evaluate them.
It might be something interesting to play with and further organize at least a subset of what I've got for a different entry point.
I figured for the moment it would be reasonable if I just stuck with the one subset of Prodyon libraries rather than all 465,000+ samples for now. While not all the samples are nearly as clean as things from 8DIO or Spitfire, there are certainly a lot of things to explore.
Hmmm, if you're already in touch with Python (and I hesitated mentioning it 😅), there's a number of nice libraries available for audio classification.
Lol, would be interesting to know. It's been a while since my Machine Learning and Neural Network courses in college, but recently switching to uv (which is incorporating rye but not all the way there yet), makes it easy to spin up new isolated projects for any current CPython release and make the more difficult AI libraries easier to get up and running.
I keep thinking I need a motivating reason to dig back into AI, especially now, so yeah, if you've got recommendations to check out, I'm all ears.
You don't necessarily have to use AI, there's a multitude of classic DSP mechanisms for audio classification out there.
AI might improve the hit rate though.
It might if I could establish a reasonable training methodology for it, lol. Especially when it comes to snare-like waveforms, most tools AI or not can't always make the right choice.
But either way it could save time, and maybe produce interesting results as well.
I agree 100%. My own AI classification experiments were stuck at maybe 70..80% hit rate, not the least because even for humans, for classifying a sound as snare vs clap vs percussive hit, there isn't always a distinct/correct answer.
Even systems that claim to have a higher hit rate often fail when throwing a wide spectrum of percussive sounds at them.
But hey, better than nothing 😅