smart mixing on a PC

[tekki]

I am currently setting up a Vista PC myself. So will come back to you if the sidechain compressor VST is compatible with Vista or not.
(My prediction is not. )

[BentoSan]

hey guys.

ive been trying now to do the smart mixing just as bentos guide suggest.

the only thing different is im using maple instead of midi-yoke cuz i am on a vista machine...and it seems to be working fine.

im following the guide to a tee...but i run into problems during:

a) when my ableton tries to access the side chain compressor in the folder...it causes ableton to crash...im not sure how crucial it is...so i removed the vst compressor from the folder...and restarted belvarios smart mixer and just let it go without the compressor and continue on the guide.

[is there something wrong with the compressor? or my ableton?]

b) following along i get to routing abletons input and outputs...and im stumped again. i set pretty much every input and output on and nothing comes out when i press play in traktor.

[is there another way of finding out which inputs and outputs VAC is using?]

can someone let me know what im doing wrong?

-clearly not smart enough

a) I could have sworn i tested it on both XP and Vista, the side chain compressor is crucial to the smartmixing template but not crucial to the audio routing. Just load up a empty file and route the audio like shown in the tutorial if you don't want to use the smart-mixer.

b) Read and go though the sections of the tutorial that go though audio routing - other people have managed to get this working.

[Screwtape]

ok sweet...i finally got sound to come out of my system... its by no means perfect -- its got cracks...latency and sometimes even reverb/delay...but i got sound!!

it might be useful to some...that if the configurations are correct ableton will highlight the inputs in orange in the midi sync panel in 'preferences' .. yesterday mine weren't orange.

also i tried the side chain compressor on a different version of ableton and it still crashed. so i dunno whats up there.

[BentoSan]

ok sweet...i finally got sound to come out of my system... its by no means perfect -- its got cracks...latency and sometimes even reverb/delay...but i got sound!!

it might be useful to some...that if the configurations are correct ableton will highlight the inputs in orange in the midi sync panel in 'preferences' .. yesterday mine weren't orange.

also i tried the side chain compressor on a different version of ableton and it still crashed. so i dunno whats up there.

It took me a while playing with the latency settings to get my setup stable, i can tell you it was a pain in the butt. Try running your soundcard in hardware buffer mode, i found that made the audio stable on my setup. When i got my smartcard firewire card though i couldnt overcome the hissing and cracking, which is rather odd. So ive personally changed over to JackDmp for windows, its not as easy to setup but its working for me, if you cant get VAC running stable your only option might be Jackdmp and if you thought VAC was a pain in the butt to setup Audio jack is more of a pain in the butt !

Congrats on getting this working too

[Screwtape]

you can say that again... huge-er pain in the butt... i dunno why its not simpler... right now there is really only 2 settings im playing with... the Asio buffer and the Hardware Buffer offset. (latency compensation set at 0)

and im finding that the higher my asio buffer the higher my hardware buffer has to be so that it runs without jogging and cracking... and because of that my latency is avg. 50 ms when its finally piping out of ableton.

is this a soundcard problem (im using a M-Audio Fast Track Pro) or is it a problem with the 3rd party connection softwares? when you guys say you get latency down to under 5ms...is that in traktor or the combined latency in ableton?

[BentoSan]

you can say that again... huge-er pain in the butt... i dunno why its not simpler... right now there is really only 2 settings im playing with... the Asio buffer and the Hardware Buffer offset. (latency compensation set at 0)

and im finding that the higher my asio buffer the higher my hardware buffer has to be so that it runs without jogging and cracking... and because of that my latency is avg. 50 ms when its finally piping out of ableton.

is this a soundcard problem (im using a M-Audio Fast Track Pro) or is it a problem with the 3rd party connection softwares? when you guys say you get latency down to under 5ms...is that in traktor or the combined latency in ableton?

Yup thats the combined latency, keep tweaking the settings to work out whats best for you i cant really offer much advice on this i have only ran it on a couple systems that both needed rather different settings - i found it best having Traktors and Ableton asio4all windows open at the same time side by side to work out what worked

If all else fails use JackDmp which is working for me really well