Reviews and questions about the entry-level MPC500
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By carbono Mon Mar 29, 2010 9:00 am
@Avene I thought of getting one of those...but then i guessed it would be a stable or 100% working solution...do you work with these midi-2-usb things?

I guess that manually lining up is more acurate ..do you think that with MIDI I will have to always line up the tracks as I do now?
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By Avene Thu Apr 01, 2010 12:34 pm
carbono wrote:@Avene I thought of getting one of those...but then i guessed it would be a stable or 100% working solution...do you work with these midi-2-usb things?

I guess that manually lining up is more acurate ..do you think that with MIDI I will have to always line up the tracks as I do now?


Yeah, I've got one of those here which I used to use on another computer. It worked fine.

MIDI can be a millisecond or two off at times. It's pretty random.

Actually, here's an idea for easily lining up parts without editing a waveform or using MIDI, but requires a program like Soundforge or any program that can auto crop a samples start time. Firstly have a click sample or something similar play one bar before the music on every take you record to the computer. Make sure the volume stays the same for every take you record - this is important!

Then once you have all your takes, if you have Soundforge or something similar, there should be an auto trim/crop function. In Soundforge you can use it's Batch Converter. Load up all the clips. Load up the auto trim crop plugin and set it to trim the start at a threshold of around -28db. Run the script and it will automatically trim the empty space up to the click on each take. Providing all the takes were recorded at the same level with click at the same level at the start of each, then trimmed start points should be the same for all. So they can then be loaded into a DAW and easily lined up accurately.

I hope that makes sense! Basically, it would save you manually trimming the start point of each take. Of course once they're all lined up in the DAW, it would be an idea to edit out the click at the start.
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By carbono Thu Apr 01, 2010 1:18 pm
Humm I think I got it, maybe I'll try that when I get home! The method I'm using at the moment is using that click sound on the patterns that don't have any sample at the 01.01.01, then align them and finally silence that click sound on the begining of the track.

I've ordered one of those usb2midi, they're cheap enough to try! =) I'll then leave a feedback here telling how it went

Thanks!
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By Avene Sat Apr 03, 2010 1:12 pm
carbono wrote:The method I'm using at the moment is using that click sound on the patterns that don't have any sample at the 01.01.01, then align them and finally silence that click sound on the begining of the track.


Yeah, sounds like what I was thinking :) But put the click at the start of all the tracks and use an auto trim to remove the silence at the start before the click so they all line up perfectly with minimum effort.
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By carbono Mon Apr 12, 2010 10:34 am
Turns out I can't figure how to auto-trim clips on Ableton Live (I'm using mainly Live right now..), so I can't test that method....Anyone know how to auto-trim on Live? Auto-trimming on another Software and then puting the trimmed tracks on Live would waste the time that I could save by auto-trimming, lol..
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By carbono Thu Apr 22, 2010 5:20 pm
Well...I bought one of those midi2usb things and it doesn't work very well..it has a smal but fundamental delay, so when I'm recording 4 bars of each track i got the tempo all wrong if I "trust" on what's beeing recorded....I have to trim the firt ms of the track, returning to my initial problem =(...

Any thoughts?