Old 10-02-2018, 08:30 AM   #1
Jae.Thomas
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Default ARA 2 usage inquiries

Hello, we have a few threads about ARA, but I was wondering about a few things:

- how it use it

-- multitrack
-- as item fx
-- as track fx

- differences between ARA and non-ARA usage

- different applications

-- pitch/time adjustment
-- moving items
-- tempo mapping or manipulation (constant tempo?)

Any guides or posts on this already? Many of the posts icr regarding announcements, or bugs.
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Old 10-02-2018, 12:29 PM   #2
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can we trigger playback from melodyne?
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Old 10-02-2018, 12:55 PM   #3
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Originally Posted by Jason Brian Merrill View Post
can we trigger playback from melodyne?
Yeah, sure. When I'm working on Melodyne (Studio version) I rarely move, touch or see something in REAPER.
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Old 10-02-2018, 02:53 PM   #4
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What about making melodyne auto-scan everything? Just insert it as the first fx on every track? Does it always show up as the first fx?
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Old 10-02-2018, 02:57 PM   #5
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Yeah, sure. When I'm working on Melodyne (Studio version) I rarely move, touch or see something in REAPER.
nice!
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Old 10-02-2018, 02:58 PM   #6
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what about tracks with several takes? How does it choose what to represent in melodyne?
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Old 10-02-2018, 03:23 PM   #7
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Active ones get shown, obviously.
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Old 10-02-2018, 03:24 PM   #8
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Originally Posted by Jason Brian Merrill View Post
what about tracks with several takes? How does it choose what to represent in melodyne?
When changing takes in Reaper, the audio used by Melodyne changes too. (To show the active take in the item.)
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Old 10-02-2018, 03:24 PM   #9
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Active ones get shown, obviously.
excellent. Not obviously
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Old 10-02-2018, 03:24 PM   #10
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When changing takes in Reaper, the audio used by Melodyne changes too. (To show the active take in the item.)
awesome! obviously
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Old 10-02-2018, 03:27 PM   #11
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Active ones get shown, obviously.
Well not necessarily obviously, the Reaper developers could have missed implementing that... (It looks like propagating changes in the items into the ARA plugins are not done completely automatically in the code, for example reversing takes is not picked up in Melodyne at the moment.)
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Old 10-02-2018, 08:24 PM   #12
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Jason Brian Merrill View Post
What about making melodyne auto-scan everything? Just insert it as the first fx on every track? Does it always show up as the first fx?
Yes, Melodyne is always inserted as the first fx in the chain. No matter how many effects you have there in your track already, REAPER always moves it to the first slot.
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Old 10-03-2018, 04:44 AM   #13
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Originally Posted by Mercado_Negro View Post
Yes, Melodyne is always inserted as the first fx in the chain. No matter how many effects you have there in your track already, REAPER always moves it to the first slot.
thats awesome!
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Old 10-05-2018, 02:28 AM   #14
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thats awesome!
Not necessarily awesome, at times i had to clean up the vocals with an eq to give ReaTune a better signal. For example, i had a double bass recorded in the same room once and some notes triggered ReaTune. Highpassing the vocals before tuning worked fine.
I can imagine cases where some compression before tuning would make sense also...

But maybe melodyne has another way to deal with these cases, i didn't use it recently.
Of course there are workarounds, it wouldn't bother me badly.

edit: do i get it right that you can't move melodyne down the chain, or is it just inserted first by default but can be moved?
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Old 10-05-2018, 02:34 AM   #15
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you can't move melodyne down the chain, or is it just inserted first by default but can be moved?
You can move it, but it is not going to work like you'd expect...(I think the Reaper devs should prevent moving it from the first slot if they are not going to implement pre-ARA fx processing.)
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Old 10-05-2018, 04:40 AM   #16
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Default Using ARA on items actually seems to work.. what should I be wary off? :)

Hmm.

Using ARA on items actually seems to work.. what should I be wary off?

It seems to work in pretty much the same way except that to see the melodyne timeline update etc you have to have an instance of melodyne that is actually active under the timeline open and not one that is on an item a few bars away etc.

I know for CPU usage this might be bad but I far prefer being able to render items as takes and deal with it on an item basis rather than accidentally breaking things on a whole track with loads of items cut up.

I'm going to test things like time stretch and pitch shift. Im guessing they might not work like they do in track mode.. fingers crossed!

EDIT:

ok, timestretch works quite well, item based pitch shift doesn't and the melodyne audition doesn't work but I knew that from another thread as the audio is not active in an item unless it's under the play cursor. That's fine.
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Old 10-05-2018, 04:57 AM   #17
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One thing that would be nice is if for the people who have reaper set not to use CPU unless playing (via the preference "run FX when stopped" unticked) to not have to arm a track to hear ARA pitch change/edits when reaper is stopped.

There must be a way for reaper to intelligently go. Ah, you have melodyne on this track, we will make it act like a live track when melodyne is open.
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Old 10-05-2018, 09:05 AM   #18
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Not necessarily awesome, at times i had to clean up the vocals with an eq to give ReaTune a better signal. For example, i had a double bass recorded in the same room once and some notes triggered ReaTune. Highpassing the vocals before tuning worked fine.
I can imagine cases where some compression before tuning would make sense also...
Melodyne is not an FX. It is a waveform editor.
Ever modified some text file on disk while it was opened in a text editor? Here you will get the same problems.

Also normal FXes are not producing the result "at once", waveform editor (ARA) need access to the whole block. So REAPER will have to render any FX before passing the result to Melodyne.

REAPER developers are already quite optimistic and allow the source modification. Yes, ARA support that, but there is general unsolvable problem: let say you have modified a blob in Melodyne and then "EQ it out" in the source, what Melodyne should do with the edit?

In addition, I was really shocked the first time I have understood the following (the reason in PS), but many people are not aware at all that many plug-ins (especially synthes, but also FXes) produce "unstable" result. They use random components in processing, so every time you "play" the same audio file throw such FX the result is different. In most cases the difference is hardly audible, if at all. But the binary waveform is different.

PS. Random generators are actively used in science. But in science the results should be reproducible, so all such generators are explicitly initialized with particular seed for particular data. In such case every time you run the same program with the same input generated "random" sequence is exactly the same and so the program output.
Could it be used in music as well? Yes. F.e. during recording all generators could use current project time as the generator seed. The sound will not change as long as you do not modify item position/tempo.
But music is not science, the problem is completely overseen by plug-in developers. I was unable to find a single plug-in which does that
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Old 10-05-2018, 10:18 AM   #19
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I speak from experience when saying that ARA opened up Melodyne for abuse, overuse, etc, etc, from some people who just kinda go crazy with it because it's so much easier to get the audio into it. It's not uncommon to see Studio One users with 40+ instances of the Melodyne plugin loaded. (bad idea)

Moderation is good.
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Old 10-06-2018, 10:49 AM   #20
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Lawrence View Post
I speak from experience when saying that ARA opened up Melodyne for abuse, overuse, etc, etc, from some people who just kinda go crazy with it because it's so much easier to get the audio into it. It's not uncommon to see Studio One users with 40+ instances of the Melodyne plugin loaded. (bad idea)

Moderation is good.
I got bit by that in S1 when I couldn't figure out why my projects were suddenly bogged down and S1 became a click fest. When you have a s*** load of instances loaded, things get rough. I now edit and render whenever I use Melodyne and VocAlign.

tg
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Old 10-08-2018, 12:04 PM   #21
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Quote:
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Melodyne is not an FX. It is a waveform editor.
...
Thanks, i didn't know that. Makes sense then.
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