I've recorded, mixed, mastered, and produced a few demos for local groups. They seem very pleased with the results. I've also recorded several live concerts on location direct to hard drive, edited, and burned the CDs with Vegas. I definately need a better sound card, but Noise Reduction pretty much cures the problems with the one i've got.

Agree 100% with SonyPCH!!!

I'm a reformed Protools user. I've been using Vegas and Sound Forge together for years now and have no desire at this point in ever turning back. Especially with some new audio features headed our way, there should be no reason to even consider Protools.

IMHO, one of the major features that Vegas has over every other DAW software out there, is that once you have your mixes all mastered, you can assemble them in Vegas and place CD track ID's anywhere you like along the timeline and make your master redbook compliant CD. All within a multitrack mixing environment. Comparing this feature to how Protools would do it, you would feel very limited in it's functionality.

The ONLY reason I could see for using Protools over Vegas/Sound Forge, is that in most cases of Protools it requires you to buy their hardware. That means they have total control of the hardware's drivers, which means they can make a more stable system. (Theorectically). If you're like me, I think this is actually a disservice to the customer, because that limits your choices of I/O selections, and Digidesign hardware is not cheap by any means if you go outside the Digi01/02 interface. You also might want to check out the differences between the Protools LE and Protools TDM systems, because the Digi02 comes with the LE version and you might find out down the road you've grown out of the LE system.

Of course this is a Vegas forum, so the opinions will tend to be one sided for advice. I'm sure you would get the exact opposite posting in the Digidesign forums. Just ask them how much I/O their hardware has, then ask them how much they paid for it? Then go compare the price of some professional products from Echo, M-audio, or RME, which all can be used in Vegas and see the thousands of dollars you'll save.

Another factor you should consider, is if you go with Vegas/Sound Forge, you can continue to come into these forums and ask questions and get regulary abused by me. And who couldn't use a swift kick in the a** every now and then? :-)

There's a mouthful of truth!

Reign - Vegas can produce very high quality recordings indeed. It's as good as ProTools or anything else, and quite easy to use. May not be as easy to get running as rednroll mentioned, b/c of proprietary hardware, but that's the only real difference in my opinion.

If you wanna HEAR what people in here are doing, see the thread "User Project Reviews". In that thread you'll find some of my stuff, one of Rednroll's and a few others. That'll show you what Vegas can do.

I will add to this a bit.

I personally like the Digi hardware. Their ASIO drivers are among the best and for me work great with Vegas and ACID. (Then again, I like the MOTU Firewire stuff also, and I _know_ how many hate the MOTU "experiance"<g>.)

While PToolsLE is limited a bit, it is a viable platform. I am becomming quite proficient in PTools myself. Why? Because I want to know why they have the market and what we can do to put our foot in that door farther.

They have one really strong point: They are a hard core replacement for a tape recorder. This is because they are a hardware vendor first, and a software vendor second. They give the software away with the hardware, just like Apple does. They have the advantage of knowing exactly what the hardware can or cannot do in all points. They can be exact in their metrics of how much they can do.

With the "native" approach that Vegas and ACID takes, this is far more difficult as there are soooo many things that come into play.

With native systems there are limits no matter how much code we throw at things. The more horse power the better, but just like most of us know better than to download or surf the web why buring a CD/DVD, there are just some hard limits we can't avoid. Vegas rides very close to the edge and when that edge is breached, it falls over a very steep cliff. This is by design : That is, push the hardware as hard as possible. (For those about to scream about SMP, hyperthreading, and mutliple CPUs : Don't: This is not an issue or a solution for such a situation.)

Sorry, I started to ramble here a bit.

My point is: Know your hardware and just because we let you, doesn't mean you should. Forcing things that can't be realistically maintained (20 copies of ANY Waves plugin) is a forumla for frustration.

As the cliche goes.

User : "It hurts when I do this."
Doctor: "Don't do that"

It is about the music IMHO. If you need 20 of any plugin, you need to look at the material first and decide if it really can be "fixed in the mix". At the very least, fix it off line so you can then focus on the mix vs the fix.

Peter

if the beatles were recording today they would definitely be in here asking for a vegas 5 release date

Yes, definitely.
B.

>What's everyone's opinion? Between these 2 programs, do you think it's >possible to make professional sounding music?
>
>I'm just debating picking up pro-tools...digi2

"Why? Because I want to know why they have the market and what we can do to put our foot in that door farther."

That one's pretty easy for me to see. Sorry to go here but the word, "Marketing" really comes to mind. "Focused" marketing at that. You can have the best tool in the world, but if the people who are interested in that tool are barely aware of it's existance then how will they know it's available to purchase? The sales guy at guitar center by chance recommends Vegas? Good luck with that one. Probably walk away with a response of, "Vegas? hmmmm...never heard of that, and these Guitar Center guys are always trying to sell me a bunch of crap anyways."

I go to these AES conventions and see Protools demoing their product infront of thousands of potential customers. Doing real work, with external hardware control systems, music gear, recording music right there on the spot, then editing, and mixing. All the while, showing all their latest and greatest features, and creating excitement, by demonstrating the amazing things you can do. So those thousands of people leave excited and go on to spread that word onto a hundred of their closest audio recording friends. The whole, time I'm sitting there watching the show and saying to myself, "Damn, I've been able to do that with Vegas for the past three years, what's the big tudo about?"

Then after leaving those shows, I've got Digidesign calling me directly on my work phone every 3 to 4 months. How? I'm sure they got that information through my AES membership or some other drawing slip I might have filled out. They call me up and say, "hey we're having a Protools clinic in your area in 2 weeks, and we'ld like you to come on by for a free clinic. We'll be demoing the latest Protools TDM system and then having a Q and A session, where we'll be sharing tips and tricks and showing you how to easily accomplish things you've never even thought possible. We're going to have a guest speaker "Johan Twiddleknob", who just finished scoring the music and sound FX's for Terminator 10, using Pro Tools.


That's my rant from my own personal experience.

I mean I figured it was. I need to post a track or 2 and see what you guys think needs to be done with it. They sound ok but when I compare them to commercial releases there is a big difference....I do hiphop/rap music btw...

"I compare them to commercial releases there is a big difference"

Not all commercial releases are done on Pro Tools and similar as SonicPCH outlined, it's not the tool that is the limiting factor, it's the person and the experience they have in using that tool. Anyone can buy a canvas, paint brushes and some paints, but the end result of what goes on that canvas will drastically vary.

Another big difference that you may be hearing between your mixes and commercial releases is "mastering".

"I do hiphop/rap music btw..."
The track that Cosmo posted for me is a Rap artist track, tell me what you think in how it compares to a commercial release.
Track

Well I think I have mixing down pretty well. I can pan sounds and instruments as well as add reverb and all that for depth, and the mix sounds good, at least I think. But I need to learn more about EQ'ing the vocals and the music track, and then combining them for a finished track, and making it sound professional...most people who have heard my music think it sounds prefessional, but I don't because I have KRK monitors and I listen to the songs on them and pick out every little thing that annoys me...especially when I compare my tracks to a commercial release on them, it just sounds so different...

Red where is that track I can't find it? NM I see the link now...did u put in work on this track?

"did u put in work on this track?"

Record, Mix, and Mastered. Didn't create the music. I used Eminem's "Lose Yourself" as a reference when mastering it, because I thought it had similar musical content, especially with the kick. It's not as loud as the Eminem track, because I really think that track is a bit overcompressed and I can hear that in some parts. I also realize this probably wasn't the mastering engineers fault. In a lot of commercial releases the record company dictates on how they want it mastered to compete in the market, so the mastering engineer sometimes has his hands tied. I obviously didn't have that limitation, so I tried to make it very comparitive levels without overly compressing it. When I first started mastering, I thought the louder the better. Then later, I started to tune into more of the bad side effects of that.

Do you use a song for reference each time you mix/master ? And were you saying you compressed the entire track or just the kick?

"Do you use a song for reference each time you mix/master ? And were you saying you compressed the entire track or just the kick?"

Absolutely. You need to keep refreshing your memory of how your monitors sound by playing commercially released CD's. So when I'm mixing, I will use reference CD's of how loud each part sounds in relativity to one another along with tonal qualities. When I'm just about done with the mix, I put the CD's in and listen some more and do A/B comparisons. You need to make sure you turn the volume down on the reference track, to the same perceived volume of your mix, since your mix has not been mastered yet and will lack in volume. Of course every song is different and you want to emphasize some parts more than others, you just want to make sure you're at least in the same ball park. I do the same thing when mastering. I look at the RMS levels using the VU meter of a reference track in Sound Forge, and also look at the spectral curve and then proceed to do my mastering to put my song into the same ball park.


"And were you saying you compressed the entire track or just the kick?"

Actually both. Kick during mixing, entire track during mastering.

So, when you did that track, did u mix/master like this:

-- Take finished voice and music tracks (after EQ'ing ,etc) and combine them....adjust dB levels accordingly

-- compare your mix to reference cd and spectal curve of reference song

-- attempt to make your curve and song sound/look similar to the reference song ?

BTW that last reply you added might have been the best advice I've gotten so far! that makes sense to me!

Mastering is indeed the second half of making a recording...some mastering engineers might say more than half! Search on mastering in these forums and you'll find a lot of great information. Sounds to me like your stuff is probably tracked well and needs mastering. Is it somewhere we can have a listen?

Pretty much along those lines.

"-- compare your mix to reference cd and spectal curve of reference song"
I don't look at the spectral curve while mixing, although I might try that someday just as a reference. I mainly use the reference CD's for that. The other part of mixing though that you might be missing is that, adjusting levels is just part of being able to hear each part. Sometimes, instruments fight against each other spectrally. So sometimes you might try to raise the level of one instrument, to find that you can't hear another, then you raise that one, and you can't hear the one you previously raised. So a better idea is to boast or cut using eq of each of the instruments so that they occupy their own space spectrally within the mix. You can also do this same type of thing by panning each instrument so it occupies it's own place spacially. It's basically one instrument masking another and a few ways to overcome it.