Problem to Attach Audio File

[Jan]

Hi,
I am rather new to Notion, and I am trying to synchronize tempo of the composition with an external wav recording. But when I go to the TOOLS to Attach the audio file to staff, there is no such option in menu. Am I doing a mistake somewhere? Could anyone help me with this problem?
thanks
Jan

[Surfwhammy]

Hi,
I am rather new to Notion, and I am trying to synchronize tempo of the composition with an external wav recording. But when I go to the TOOLS to Attach the audio file to staff, there is no such option in menu. Am I doing a mistake somewhere? Could anyone help me with this problem?
thanks
Jan

I did a quick test of the current version of Notion 3 (Build 281) on a 2.8-GHz 8-core Mac Pro with 8GB memory (8X1GB) and 5TB of hard drive space running Mac OS X 10.6.6 (Snow Leopard), and doing the external WAV file technique works nicely . . .

As best as I can determine, there are a few very specific requirements:

(1) The external WAV file must be 16-bits and 44.1-kHz, which for reference is standard CD music quality and is what most of the VSTi sample sound libraries are, as well . . .

(2) It tends to work best to use a Notion 3 "Basic Staff" for the external WAV file . . .

(3) Apparently, some types of external WAV files have a bit of silence at the start, so if the particular external WAV file has some of this silence, then the Notion 3 help file suggests that there are special editing tools that can be used to remove this "silence", although I have not encountered any of this "silence" and have no idea what types of special editing software one might use to remove it . . .

I did a quick video that shows how to attach an audio file to a Notion 3 project on the Mac, and it works nicely with no problems . . .

[NOTE: This is the video overview, and it is a Windows Media Video format video (WMV, 11MB) that runs for approximately 9 minutes. The screen resolution is compressed to make the file smaller, but there is a voice-over that I did what the new BLUE "Snowball" USB microphone that I got last week for doing voice-overs, so it should be easy to follow with respect to the various steps . . . ]

http://www.surfwhammys.com/Notion3-Add-Audio-File-Overview-Mac.wmv

I did another video overview in different topic in this FORUM that shows Notion 3 being controlled by Digital Performer in ReWire mode for what I call the "basic rhythm section" for my parody of "Bad Romance" (Lady Gaga), but it was done before I got the BLUE "Snowball" USB microphone, so there is no voice-over, which maps to the first two minutes of the video having no sound, but so what . . .

[NOTE: This is the YouTube music video for "Bad Romance" (Lady Gaga), which has a virtual festival of "sparkles". The link for the Surf Whammys parody appears a bit later in this post, and it has been an excellent project for discovering how Notion 3 works with Digital Performer, since for some unknown reason it is very easy for me to do DISCO songs . . . ]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrO4YZeyl0I

So what!

I suppose that there is a way to do this stuff entirely with real synthesizers in an advanced state-of-the-art recording studio, but I have no idea how to operate a real synthesizer, so it is easier for me to do this stuff with Notion 3 and VSTi synthesizers, even though it currently takes approximately 250 to 500 hours to do an elaborate DISCO song, which is fine with me, since it would take a lot longer to do it with real instruments, and a good bit of the time is devoted to composing and doing all the elaborate "sparkling", so I expect that once I have done a few songs like this, it will take less time, since another key reality here in the sound isolation studio is that I only realized a few months ago in an immediately conscious way that I have known enough about music theory and music notation for a bit over half a century to be able to do this stuff essentially in real-time on the fly, especially when I consume huge quantities of Massimo Zanetti Master Chef coffee made in the ratio of 1/2 cup of ground coffee to 12 ounces of water at the ideal brewing temperature of 200 degrees Fahrenheit, which basically mapped to being able to compose pretty much whatever I desire after installing Notion 3 and working with it for an hour or two without reading the owner's manual, which is a bit mind-boggling . . .

Mind-boggling!

Over the past few months, I have run Notion 3 through a virtual festival of experiments to determine its limits and peculiarities, and I am very happy with the results . . .

Every computer program has peculiarities, but from my perspective the important thing is that when there is an odd behavior there also is a workaround or alternative way to achieve the same computing goal, which has been the case in every instance with Notion 3, and as you can see in the first video I did, I am pushing the limits of what both Notion 3 and Digital Performer (MOTU) are able to do with the available resources of the Mac Pro (see above), which other than adding more memory and a superfast multimedia hard drive already is maxed for all practical purposes, since 8GB is plenty of memory for high-quality audio . . .

My current strategy is to begin a new song with what I call a Notion 3 "basic rhythm section" rather than a track of reference tones and a "click" track in Digital Performer, which is what I was doing before I discovered Notion 3 . . .

The advantage of beginning with a Notion 3 "basic rhythm section" is that it provides a synchronizing point for everything, such that it becomes the foundation for the Digital Performer stuff, which then makes it possible easily to switch back-and-forth from recording real instruments and voices in Digital Performer to adding orchestration in Notion 3, so even when I might not expect a song to need orchestration, if I start it with a Notion 3 "basic rhythm section" comprising a set of reference tones for tuning real instruments and a simple kick drum "click" track, then I have the option later to switch to Notion 3, where I can do orchestration . . .

It tends to work better if the chords are developed first in the Notion 3 "basic rhythm section", but there are several ways to work with everything, although the more advance planning one does, the easier it is to do everything . . .

And for reference, I use ReWire to get the Notion 3 tracks into Digital Performer, where they are recorded as what Digital Performer calls "soundbites" . . .

The ReWire stuff works nicely, but it took me a while to make sense of it, even though I have a Computer Science degree and decades of experience working with computers . . .

On the Mac, the way it works is that you assign a stereo pair of channels to each track in the Notion 3 project, which also requires that the "Enable ReWire" option is checked in the Notion 3 "Preferences" . . .

The drawback is that once you set the output of a Notion 3 track to a stereo pair of channels, then you do not hear the track when you use Notion 3 for playback, which is a bit of a hassle, but I solve this problem by having two copies of the project--one that has channels assigned for ReWire and one that has all the outputs set to "Master" . . .

Also, most of the time I need to start Notion 3 and uncheck the "Enable ReWire" option, followed by saving the Notion 3 project file and closing Notion 3, followed by restarting Notion 3 and checking the "Enable ReWire" option, followed by saving the Notion 3 project file and then closing Notion 3 yet another time, which I suppose could be required based on the way ReWire works on the Mac and might not be a "bug" in Notion 3, per se . . .

Digital Performer is a bit picky about reusing ReWire channels, but I am beginning to identify the pattern, where the general workaround is to try different stereo channel pairs until one of them makes new ReWire tracks "happy" or whatever . . .

Whatever!

The reality is that in an Utopian universe using ReWire would not require doing all this extra stuff, but (a) it works and (b) once you do it a few times it becomes very easy to do, which is very important, because the entire system is superb with respect to what it makes possible and practical . . .

At present, I am studying the European Single for "Who Owns My Heart" (Miley Cyrus), which has fantastic vocal production that I think probably maps at least to 200 hours of work by a vocal producer and some audio engineers, and I am doing a parody of it, since I am having a lot of FUN with DISCO songs as way to refine my Notion 3 skills . . .

And I am especially intrigued by what I call "sparkles", which are apparently random bursts of instruments and voices that appear every once in a while in different locations within what I call the "Spherical Sonic Landscape™", which is most easily heard when you listen to songs with studio-quality headphones like the SONY MDR-7506 (a personal favorite) . . .

[NOTE: My avatar for this forum is one vector plane of the Spherical Sonic Landscape . . . ]

I like stuff to move around from far-left to far-right in different patterns and tempos, and there is a way to control this very precisely in Notion 3, which basically is a matter of spreading notes for "one instrument" over a set of "instrument clones" that are panned to different locations, where you cause a note to be heard in a specific location by playing that note on the corresponding "cloned instrument" while the note on the other "cloned instruments" is replaced with an equal-valued rest, so it mostly is a copy and paste type of activity, as is most of the orchestrating work in general . . .

This takes about two hours or so to do for one instrument on a typical length song, which includes creating the "cloned instruments", doing the panning, replacing notes with equal-valued rests, and recording the Notion 3 output channels for the specific instrument tracks in Digital Performer as soundbites via having Digital Performer control Notion 3 via ReWire, but it would take a lot longer to do it with real instruments, so two or so hours is fine with me, and it is very precise, which is all the more important . . .

[NOTE: If you have devoted a bit of attention the Joseph Schillinger's System of Musical Composition (SoMC), then the copying and pasting aspects with respect to mathematical formulas and geometric patterns makes it considerably easier to transform a few measures into a complete song, but that is another discussion, with this being yet another reason for getting Notion 3, since strange as it might be I can compose music with music notation but I cannot play it on real instruments, although I can sight-sing treble clef classical music, hence I needed a way to hear some of the music notation examples in the various SoMC chapters, although I mostly made sense of SoMC by looking at the graphs, since nearly none of the words made a lot of sense, and the mathematical formulas are done in a quite non-standard way, where traditional operators have non-traditional uses, where in particular this is one of the unique aspects of SoMC, which to be specific is that there are a lot of ways to make sense of it, so if you primarily are focused on "playing by ear", as I am, then you can make sense of SoMC from this perspective if you map everything visually to patterns and geometric shapes . . . ]

This is the YouTube music video for the European Single of "Who Owns My Heart" (Miley Cyrus), and it is a stellar example of elaborate vocal production and "sparkling", where there also are a lot of instrumental "sparkles" . . .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVbQxC2c3-8

My best guess is that most people do not hear all the elaborate vocal production and "sparkling" in an immediately conscious way for a while, since it took me a while really to begin hearing everything, which mapped to needing to listen to the song 50 to 100 times, and I have very keen hearing abilities that specifically are attuned to hearing this type of stuff . . .

I can do "sparkling" with Notion 3, and I can do it very precisely in a reasonable amount of time, which makes it practical . . .

This is the current "basic rhythm section" for the "Who Owns My Heart" parody, which is called "Feel Me", and it has the prototype of the basic melody played by an electric piano with a lot of tremolo, although when I actually sing the song I probably will change a few of the notes and some of the timing of phrases, although for doing a lot of the more elaborate vocal production it tends to work best when the original singing is as simple as possible, since I can move notes around with the Melodyne Editor (Celemony) plug-in, which is considerably more sophisticated than Auto-Tune, although it also does the "Cher Effect", except that you have to do it manually rather than automatically . . .

[NOTE: This is a Windows Media Video file (WMV), and it is 5.4MB and runs for approximately 3 minutes and 30 seconds, where mostly all you see is the top part of the music score where the melody notes are located, and some of the other instruments are not actually heard, since I cloned a lot of it from another song that I did in Notion 3, which is another way to work faster in Notion 3. The electric piano is a bit louder so that it will be easier to hear when I record the singing, and it is a headphone mix, which is the way I do everything when I am working on a song, although when I switch to mixing and mastering I work with loudspeakers rather than headphones . . . ]

http://www.surfwhammys.com/Feel-Me-Melody.wmv

And the "parody" aspect is subtle, but it is there somewhere, so while I call these types of songs "parodies", it is more of an "inspired by" type of thing, where this is the current version of the "Bad Romance" parody, which is called "I'm Going Goo-Goo Over Ga-Ga" (The Surf Whammys), where The Surf Whammys are my pretend Rock and Roll band, which is fabulous . . .

[NOTE: This is MP3 file (285-kbps [VBR], 10MB, approximately 4 minutes and 30 seconds, where at present all the instruments are done with Notion 3, although I will add real electric guitar in a while. There are a lot of "sparkles" in this song, which is nearer to being finished than the other song but also is a headphone mix at present . . . ]

http://www.surfwhammys.com/Im-Going-Goo-Goo-Over-Ga-Ga-11-20-2010-DP7.mp3

Fabulous!

[Jan]

I suppose it is neither the hardware problem (I’ve got PC version of NOTION SLE for Miroslav Philharmonik 3.1.277.0, running on Intel Core i5, Win7), nor the problem of incompatibility of wav file. All other things work nice, only the option Attach audio file in the menu Tools is missing. I followed the manual
Jan

[Surfwhammy]

I suppose it is neither the hardware problem (I’ve got PC version of NOTION SLE for Miroslav Philharmonik 3.1.277.0, running on Intel Core i5, Win7), nor the problem of incompatibility of wav file. All other things work nice, only the option Attach audio file in the menu Tools is missing. I followed the manual
Jan

I did another quick test, since I also have Notion SLE for Miroslav Philharmonik, and there is no Attach Audio File option in the Tools menu, even though the user manual for Notion SLE for Miroslav Philharmonik suggests there should be, so I think that this option is not available in Notion SLE for Miroslav Philharmonik . . .

After using Notion SLE for Miroslav Philharmonik for a few days, I decided to upgrade to Notion 3 (full version), since it was obvious that I needed more VSTi instruments . . .

Upgrading to Notion 3 maps to ordering the upgrade from Notion Music and having it shipped, since it has 10GB of sampled sound libraries on DVD, including the London Symphony Orchestra, which I like better than Miroslav Philharmonik, since it is louder, which works better for DISCO songs and other genres that have electric guitars . . .

I am guessing on this, but I think that the microphones were nearer to the instruments in the London Symphony Orchestra recording sessions, since (a) it was recorded at Abbey Road Studios and (b) I read somewhere recently that the audio engineers for the Beatles were a bit radical with respect to positioning microphones very close to instruments to get stronger recorded signals, where in some instances they would put microphones just a few inches from a violin, which apparently was a bit unusual at the time but later became common practice . . .

The strings for "Eleanor Rigby" (Beatles) were done that way, which is the reason they are so prominent, and while I have no idea how the London Symphony Orchestra sample sounds were recorded, they sound louder to me, and it is logical to make the inference that recording techniques at Abbey Road Studios would reflect the techniques developed there over the years . . .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beatles%27_recording_technology#Close_miking_of_acoustic_instruments

So, back to the question, it appears the problem is that Notion SLE does not support attaching audio files, although the full version does . . .

This is the link to the Notion 3 Upgrade page at the Notion Music website, which is fabulous . . .

http://www.notionmusic.com/support/upgrade_home.html

Fabulous!

[Jan]

Thanks a lot! I will consider the upgrade to Notion 3.
Jan

[Surfwhammy]

Thanks a lot! I will consider the upgrade to Notion 3.
Jan

Glad to help!

The upgrade is priced reasonably, and it has the great advantage of working with a virtual festival of VSTi sampled sound libraries, including all the VSTi sample sound libraries from IK Multimedia (a personal favorite), as well as VST plug-ins . . .

This is an example of a DISCO song I am developing as a bit of a parody of "Bad Romance" (Lady Gaga), which is called "I'm Going Goo-Goo Over Ga-Ga" (The Surf Whammys), and at present all the instruments are done with Notion 3, where the strings are done with the London Symphony Orchestra sampled sound library that comes with Notion 3 but the other instruments are done with the sampled sound libraries for Sample Tank 2.5 and some of the add-ons for Sample Tank XT, since I like the IK Multimedia studio drumkits and synthesizers, which is fabulous . . .

http://www.surfwhammys.com/Im-Going-Goo ... -2-DP7.mp3

Fabulous!

This is a headphone mix, which is what I do when I am working on a song, but in a while I will switch to doing loudspeaker mixing once I record the real guitars and perhaps some backup harmony vocals . . .

If you did not know that the instruments were done in Notion 3 with music notation and VSTi technology, then I think it would be difficult to guess, since it sounds very realistic, for sure . . .

For sure!

With the Notion SLE versions, you have one box of Crayola crayons for your entire musical palette, but with Notion 3 you can have a virtual festival of Crayola crayons for your musical palette, and the more instruments you have, the more you can do . . .

I like Classical music, and I usually include a string section and perhaps a brass section in songs, but at present I am having a bit of FUN exploring DISCO music, which in some respects is easier to do, hence I can focus more on discovering how to use Notion 3, which as an ongoing project is coming along nicely, where as noted in other posts to this FORUM I have done a lot of experiments with Notion 3 and Digital Performer (MOTU) over the past few months with the result that I now use Notion 3 to create what I call a "basic rhythm section" which becomes the foundation for the song that I record, mix, and master in Digital Performer, along with whatever real instruments and singing I decide to add . . .

It works wonderfully, and it has transformed the way I create songs, since while I am very proficient with electric bass and electric guitar, I am a bit limited in my current abilities to play drums and keyboards, but there are no limitations on what I can do with drums and keyboards via music notation in Notion 3, so it mostly is a matter of getting VSTi sounds that fit whatever I want to do . . .

And once you discover how music notation works, you can compose instrumental parts mostly by ear, since you can hear the notes when you move them upward or downward on the staff, which is the primary way I do everything, although I know enough about music theory to do a few things without needing to hear the actual notes at first, since I learned basic music notation over half a century ago but never did anything with it until a few months ago, because I was more focused on "playing by ear", which is fabulous . . .

Fabulous!