Studio One 3 Announced!

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ULAS wrote:Is there any difference between Studio One's "arranger track" and Reaper's "regions" ?
Nope - both are pretty much useless because they are implemented in the same dumb way as they work based on a mere time-selection without even just a hint of intelligence behind it.

All these DAW-developers keep bragging about how they are musicians themselves yet evidence paints a very different picture so I for one am not buying it.

The proper way of implementing this feature would of course be based on heuristics (i.e. in a way which would require actual intelligence on the coding side) - I'm not carefully editing fade outs on multiple tracks in order to achieve a smooth transition into the next song-section only to have it then completely f**ked up by a stoopid wannabe feature like this.
"Preamps have literally one job: when you turn up the gain, it gets louder." Jamcat, talking about presmp-emulation plugins.

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multiple posts
"Preamps have literally one job: when you turn up the gain, it gets louder." Jamcat, talking about presmp-emulation plugins.

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InLight-Tone wrote:I like the Arranger function. Sure Cubase has a more complicated Arranger track, but most of the time in the heat of composing you may lay down the chorus before the verse and just want to shuffle the sections around while composing which Studio One does perfectly allowing you to drag the whole section and the others move accordingly. In Cubase you have to lay out sections, then schedule them and then flatten whilst in Studio One you just drag at will and you're done. Am I missing something?
If S1v3 really made it so you can arrange using a list of brick placeholders for each region - and also rearrange timeline at the same time - it's clearly improved on Cubase implementation.

I think I saw that list of placeholders to the left on launch broadcast, a vertical list of colored bricks, but they never went there. They were so focused on timeline and scratchpad - maybe they just forgot...don't know.

If you have to work - dragging in the timeline, I prefer Cubase implementation still.
More like a playlist that plays regions in different order - and when you like what you have you save a preset of that version and/or flatten it by generating a new project.

And in the end, things that matter are also how you split regions. When drums come in, I usually have a few hits on toms before vers starts - this means going strictly by a split point - this is lost - and the whole idea breaks in functionality.

But if you have proper rules, and you will be asked for confirm the splits - keep clip from left, split at region spot and similar questions doing the split - then it's well done and very usable.

How S1v3 demoed it - it was clear silence between regions they moved around - and nothing that complicates matters. Having an intro going into verse it starts getting comlicated how to split.

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I've not had much time to mess around with the new features, but while we are on the subject of the new arranger function...

How does S1 V3 deal with overlapping events between sections? I assume it just slices straight through. If I have an audio track that has a reverb tail, or just a long release pad say, that continues into the next section, does it just get abruptly cut off? I guess it's ok if you are using the section containing the tail part straight after it, but doesn't that defeat the purpose?

I've never used this kind of system before, but it looks fun and creative, but it seems I may have to adjust the way I usually work in order to make the most out of it.

For instance, I tend to make long improvised pad/soundscape beds for my tracks to build on, usually involving slow attack/long release pads/sounds that evolve over many bars. Unless I'm mistaken, the arranger function will be problematic in this case.

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i don't know if it was alredy mentioned but Export steams features has been improve: In v2 export steams took ages because exporting track to track, now all the track are exported at the same time like other daws like Live or Fl studio.

And it's now possible select some channels and drop the same effects at the same time (i'm not sure that's include busses)

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SolarRainUK wrote: How does S1 V3 deal with overlapping events between sections? I assume it just slices straight through. If I have an audio track that has a reverb tail, or just a long release pad say, that continues into the next section, does it just get abruptly cut off? I guess it's ok if you are using the section containing the tail part straight after it, but doesn't that defeat the purpose?
Yes, exactly that is the problem and is exactly what I meant - it just cuts it off - and if you carefully edited that tail then all of that is lost so you have to manually check it for every copied item and replace these wrongfully cut itmes - which renders the whole feature moot as at that point it's not a time-saver but rather the exact opposite. You would think any serious musician would grasp this and deal with it accordingly when implementing the feature. It's not exactly rocket-science after all.
"Preamps have literally one job: when you turn up the gain, it gets louder." Jamcat, talking about presmp-emulation plugins.

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lfm wrote:And in the end, things that matter are also how you split regions. When drums come in, I usually have a few hits on toms before vers starts - this means going strictly by a split point - this is lost - and the whole idea breaks in functionality.

But if you have proper rules, and you will be asked for confirm the splits - keep clip from left, split at region spot and similar questions doing the split - then it's well done and very usable.
That's pretty tricky stuff -- in this block, these two tracks need a 1/4-note's worth of pickup from the bar before, these tracks need 1/16th, these tracks nothing, this one needs that 1/2 note fragment attached to its end, this one needs the note that starts on the last 1/8th of the last bar to sustain across the entire next bar, etc.. Then it has to glue the sections together in a new order, making all the bars come out to sensible lengths, in spite of all those different attached fragments at the beginning and/or end. In a high track count project, it'd have to ask a lot of questions, ideally in some way where you could set the splits for all tracks quickly.

Clearly this is a case where it's easy for a human to know intuitively what they want, but pretty much impossible for a program to guess beyond super-simple situations. It's also not obvious to me how you'd let the user control it without a ton of detailed specs for what to do, which runs counter to the whole "just put this section before the chorus" idea. Not rocket science maybe, but not so trivially simple either.

Can S1v3 do anything like this? Cubase? Any program?

I haven't used any DAW besides S1 for a long time, and I'm by no means an expert in even v2, much less v3 (not even installed yet), but I never expected a program to be that smart. Drag stuff around to get the basics in place, then manually fix up the stuff that requires human intervention, that's Just How It Is, AFAIK, with or without an arranger track. Like quantizing, pitch correction, velocity scaling, any bulk operation, you may well have to tweak the details, depending on the original sources and your desired result.

If any program has a super elegant approach to rearranging song segments, I'd love to know.

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dwozzle wrote:
lfm wrote:And in the end, things that matter are also how you split regions. When drums come in, I usually have a few hits on toms before vers starts - this means going strictly by a split point - this is lost - and the whole idea breaks in functionality.

But if you have proper rules, and you will be asked for confirm the splits - keep clip from left, split at region spot and similar questions doing the split - then it's well done and very usable.
That's pretty tricky stuff -- in this block, these two tracks need a 1/4-note's worth of pickup from the bar before, these tracks need 1/16th, these tracks nothing, this one needs that 1/2 note fragment attached to its end, this one needs the note that starts on the last 1/8th of the last bar to sustain across the entire next bar, etc.. Then it has to glue the sections together in a new order, making all the bars come out to sensible lengths, in spite of all those different attached fragments at the beginning and/or end. In a high track count project, it'd have to ask a lot of questions, ideally in some way where you could set the splits for all tracks quickly.

Clearly this is a case where it's easy for a human to know intuitively what they want, but pretty much impossible for a program to guess beyond super-simple situations. It's also not obvious to me how you'd let the user control it without a ton of detailed specs for what to do, which runs counter to the whole "just put this section before the chorus" idea. Not rocket science maybe, but not so trivially simple either.

Can S1v3 do anything like this? Cubase? Any program?

I haven't used any DAW besides S1 for a long time, and I'm by no means an expert in even v2, much less v3 (not even installed yet), but I never expected a program to be that smart. Drag stuff around to get the basics in place, then manually fix up the stuff that requires human intervention, that's Just How It Is, AFAIK, with or without an arranger track. Like quantizing, pitch correction, velocity scaling, any bulk operation, you may well have to tweak the details, depending on the original sources and your desired result.

If any program has a super elegant approach to rearranging song segments, I'd love to know.

I seems to me you must have misunderstood the actual problem here - we are talking about individual independent clips/items aren't we?

I.e. a situation where for (say) a chorus e.g. a guitar may come in half a bar before the actual chorus starts and/or may have a reverb that that spills into the following song section - let's name this clip "rhythm guitar chorus" - let's say the chorus itself starts a bar 33 and ends at bar 49 yet "rhythm guitar chorus" starts at 32.3 and ends at 49.2

So the great majority of that clip/item sits within the section's boundaries and only a minor part of it outside. In such a case it will be super-easy for anyone with even the just slightest musical knowledge to savely predict that THE ENTIRE CLIP actually belongs to the chorus and not just those parts of it that actually reside within the chorus' boundaries. So why on earth would in the year 2015 we expect a programmer to come up with a new feature that in NO EFFING WAY is even just aware of this issue?

I think only a programmer who does not have the slightest cue about serious music production would do so. So that's the problem. They should spend half of their working time actually making music with their own programm instead of coding nonsense and the outcome would be so much more useable and enjoyable.
"Preamps have literally one job: when you turn up the gain, it gets louder." Jamcat, talking about presmp-emulation plugins.

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FWIW, chunks in DP deals with this 'problem' just fine since they can overlap. Tracktion's edits inside of edits thing also has the potential to alleviate this issue when used as an arrangement method. (since someone asked if other DAWs handle it correctly)

And with that, back to playing with S1v3...
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Well then, it seems the arranger is pretty useless to me at least, unless I completely change the way I work and I don't think I want to do that. I mean does anyone really make music where entire sections are completely self-contained, where you have no overlapping or build-ups from previous sections? No tails or long releases/transitions that continue from one section into the next?

A long time ago, I used to purposely constrain myself to sections, making sure pads or keys etc are neatly quantised and started or finished inside sections, never overlapping. Mostly to keep things neat and tidy, and to make moving entire sections around a breeze (which is supposedly what the arranger tool is for). I ditched that method of working a long time ago, because frankly, it sounds crap.

The only way I can see being able to work with this new feature is by utilising the scratch pad to do all the creative editing/arranging, and carefully moving only parts of sections back into the main timeline, so as not to break/split individual tracks. Well, that's pretty much what I was doing before in V2..only I used to do this at the end of the track.

At the least the scratch pad will be fairly handy then! Only it crashed my entire system last time I attempted to use it. :x

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SolarRainUK wrote:Well then, it seems the arranger is pretty useless to me at least, unless I completely change the way I work and I don't think I want to do that. I mean does anyone really make music where entire sections are completely self-contained, where you have no overlapping or build-ups from previous sections? No tails or long releases/transitions that continue from one section into the next?

A long time ago, I used to purposely constrain myself to sections, making sure pads or keys etc are neatly quantised and started or finished inside sections, never overlapping. Mostly to keep things neat and tidy, and to make moving entire sections around a breeze (which is supposedly what the arranger tool is for). I ditched that method of working a long time ago, because frankly, it sounds crap.
Exactly that!

The only way I can see being able to work with this new feature is by utilising the scratch pad to do all the creative editing/arranging, and carefully moving only parts of sections back into the main timeline, so as not to break/split individual tracks. Well, that's pretty much what I was doing before in V2..only I used to do this at the end of the track.

At the least the scratch pad will be fairly handy then! Only it crashed my entire system last time I attempted to use it. :x

The scratch pad is indeed quite handy I think - since you can save any number of them you can also use it store currently unused recordings/ideas/clips
"Preamps have literally one job: when you turn up the gain, it gets louder." Jamcat, talking about presmp-emulation plugins.

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I get what you're saying, sorry.

I was thinking about MIDI, where pickup and holdover notes aren't part of the same clip (clips aren't involved), but should be handled as if they were, like they're glued to the main section they belong to. That's a somewhat harder problem I think, but very relevant to people who work in MIDI-land and want to rearrange the sections of a song. As I said, I've just assumed no program was smart enough to cope, and fixed things up by hand. Not great, but necessary AFAIK.

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Interesting. jens' observation seems certainly true... All tracks can't be divided at a certain point. Several elements are overlapping at every transition.

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would be cool an option in the Inspector section, a sort of little scrool menù

Arrange track:
-slice
-select all the sample
-nothing

slice: just slice the sample, as it is now
select all the sample: if you have a sample between 2 regions moving one of the regions will duplicate and move the full sample
nothing: don't move when moving section

this would be the best scenario

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It's really no different from what people did years go, spliced tape section together to make edits. I've tried it with audio stems here. Works fine. It's not magic though, you may have to slide a few crossover points in your final edited version.

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