Karaoke Forums

http://shup.com/Shup/424656/7baudiorouting.png

That's a big picture of it. Too big to post as an image.

The red lines are physical I/O. Anything plugging into a speaker/cd player, etc.

The blue lines are patchmix IO. Patchmix is a mixing application included with the EMU line of sound cards.

Purple lines are Reaper IO. I do a lot of routing internally on reaper.

Green is output to speakers.

Nice Toqer, of course following all those lines I started to see double. Are you using any type of control surface with Reaper or just mixing "on screen" so to speak?

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DJ Tony
Let It Rip Karaoke

I use a cheapo m-audio mixlab to control stuff in reaper.

http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/TorqMixLab.html

Sometimes I'll use Midi Yoke and fingerplay on my android phone.

http://thesundancekid.net/blog/fingerplay-midi/
http://www.midiox.com/index.htm?http:// ... /myoke.htm

this is beyond sick. cant wait to see what they come up with next. just out of curiosity, do you know what your latency is from in to out? i'm assuming it is not audible. very cool

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Paradigm Karaoke, The New Standard.......Shift Happens

0 latency across the EMU 1820. If it goes through the PC (Reaper) there's a 10ms delay. So all music and music devices are connected on the back of the emu1820, muted from the monitor, and an ASIO send shoots them into Reaper as tracks (10ms delay). The vocals aren't muted, but there's still an ASIO send to control effects levels(10ms).

There's also what I would call virtual musical devices (Virtual Vinyl, Foobar2000,Winamp) These are all brought into reaper as well, before being outputted to a strip (master music)

Since the vocals aren't muted from the monitor, there is 0 latency between the time it comes in and is played over the speakers. The most efficient way to use effects is to use as much hardware acceleration as possible and where, and and this is best done by creating an output strip for the effect on patchmix called "Reverb".

Bring that vocal send into Reaper as a track. Set the tracks output to a patchmix strip called "Reverb" Drop a reverb effect on that strip. Now you can control the amount of reverb that goes into into the monitor mix.

letitRip you got an Emu right? Give it a try. This is all running on a core2duo with 2 gigs of ram.

I think it would be much easier to just use hardware. The whole setup just doesn't make any sense to me. It's like everything is made more complicted than needed.

It would be easier to just use a nice mixer.

Cam that's like saying the Yamaha 01V96VCM isn't worth learning because it's too hard. I would argue learning how to turn a PC into a mixer is no harder if folks put in the effort.

Have you ever seen my Don't stop the Rock Video? This was a result of software mixing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJc8czJKTjo

The effects world is your oyster by learning this. I wouldn't dismiss it if I were you.

I'm with Toqer on this one. As someone who had to make the transition from the analog to digital realm, I'll admit that on the surface (especially when looking at routing like this) it seems very confusing and just too complex. However, once you get the concept you realize how simple it all really is. When you get really good with dealing with it, there are so many advantages in the digital space that you'll find you probably don't ever want to go back.

Now granted, my day job is in computers and I've owned them since I was 12, so maybe that's an advantage for me, I don't know. All I can say is that it took me some time to figure out how to do all the cool tricks I know in the analog world when I'm working on a digital desk or digital recording workstation.

Of course, for Karaoke, Toqer's rig is probably a bit overkill. But the fact is its a lot of fun for him to play around with this stuff (I know the feeling). So I don't begrudge him at all for doing so.

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DJ Tony
Let It Rip Karaoke

My voiceworks in my rack can do that without all the extra work.

I agree software based effect and such is the way to go for recording, I just don't trust the reliabillty for a live karaoke show.

It would take one nice $5000+ mac for me to trust running a show mixed through a computer. The DJ software I use takes up most of my resources, I couldn't imagine it not shutting down if anything else was used.

I couldn't do the on screen mix I would need a Digi002 or something, so then again it's just easier, cheaper, and more reliable to use a good mixer.

I can wax poetically against your quips on it being less reliable. I don't do onscreen mixing either, as I have several midi controllers (including my touch screen android phone) that I can use as a control surfaces.

Basically my knobs are wherever I want them. Even in my pocket.

Here's another thing.. I can load up a voiceworks VST
http://www.tc-helicon.com/harmony4.asp

and I've just added your effects to my system.

With a decent amount of inputs(emu) and soft effects, I suddenly have the same vocal engineering you have, but contained within a PC without a rats nest of wires running out the back of my booth.

That is the advantage.

My system isn't even an I7 (oh I would love one) It's Intel's first dual core chip. Here's a quick screenie of everything running on the system.

Well I will say to that end I agree with you sort of. I don't like mixing on the computer (which is why even our pro-tools rig in the recording studio still has a complete C|24 control surface). However, I still prefer the digital capabilities to that of analog. This is why I use a digital console for my Karaoke and small club band rigs (and whenever possible larger gigs). It gives me the immediacy, control and stability of regular analog gear with the flexibility and capability of the digital world. I'm a complete convert at this point. For Karaoke and Small clubs, the attraction is the ability to replace a 300 lbs equipment rack with a combined 83 lbs mixer and case that gives me more capability than the heavy rack. For large gigs, it's all about capability and flexibility. Being able to setup multiple bands using separate scenes and instantly recall each, having compression, parametric EQ's and super flexible routing for each channel makes all the difference.

I do know one guy up in this area that mixes full time for a regional band and uses his pro-tools rig at every show. Even in that case, he brings along a full control surface rather than try to mix with mouse and monitor. Personally, I would hate the idea of having to drag a computer into every show (except in Karaoke where a laptop is standard equipment anyway of course, but that's different).

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DJ Tony
Let It Rip Karaoke

Oh yah... My old dual core not only has enough cajones to mix audio, it's got enough to play video games while doing it. You can see minecraft running up above..


Here I am playing diablo II while running karaoke and mixing sound.

http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak- ... 5259_n.jpg

I like stressing the systems sometimes. The only real trick I use is I change the process priority of my DAW to be above normal, that seems to cut out all the audio glitches that can occur when your DAW mixer doesn't have enough CPU.

Hmm

One thing I wanted to do for (@$%&#!) and giggles was turn one of my ELO touch screens into a karaoke monitor/control surface, and leave a spot on the screen where singers could adjust the audio themselves (within reason)

It's not to hard to do this using Reaper, puredata, and midi yoke.

Here I have a blank PD canvas.



First thing I do is set the midi output to midi yoke.

Now I drop a few objects on the canvas and use these object names. Connect things up.


I fire up reaper, and have it monitor the midi yoke input.



Now from here I can do something really awesome... Minds will be blown.

Reaper has a plugin called Reastream. It allows you to send audio and midi over IP.



By using a dedicated PC for the karaoke screen, you can isolate the singers inputs from your local desktop, while still receiving midi data.

An alternative way to do this would be to set PD's midi output to a real midi output, then run a midi cord over to your mixing PC's midi input.

Hey Toger, do you mind flying to Montreal and help me learn my equipment

Are you familiar with the TC-Helicon Voiceworks and if yes, what would be the best preset for live vocals?

If I could afford it I would. You'd buy me a beer right?

Avoid the pitch correction and chorus/harmony crap all together. Especially on the Voice Works they just sound faked. I'd look at either the Subtle Lead preset or the Bright Hall. The latter would be my preference as it gives you a nice verb with a touch of delay, no goofy stuff.

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DJ Tony
Let It Rip Karaoke

If you want to test your system.

Run Virtual DJ beat mixing 2 vob music videos. With another resource intensive program running. I don't think audio will hold up.

We barely get by with a quad core, 8 gig of ram and a 1 gig video card.

Virtual DJ on any video sucks.

http://shup.com/Shup/427371/110918151619-VirtualDJ.png

Why does it do that? I just tried it myself, and that's a VDJ issue.

I recommend a much better video mixer. www.mxwendler.net

Keep your VDJ for the boom chikka waa waa scratching.