Hello people
I just watched a Youtube tutorial of a guy assuring that every DAW can't handle more than 8 or 9 tracks without losing audio quality ( talking about working in the box of course, no extra equipment)
So his suggestion was to export the less important tracks to stems, f.e. percussion, fx, some pads...and leave the main ones ( kick, lead vocal, guitar. etc) no more than 3 or 4, so you will have 4 main and 4 stems to do the final mix. He also said that this has to be done in the last moment of your mix, when everything is ready to be printed as the master track...Opinions?

 

Last edited: May 24, 2020

not every daw, it depends of your harware.
a protools HD multicore enable to choose the CPU usage. one or more Core by instrument, fx, anything.

a poor PC station using only 1 core will not sound the same way, because of calculation speed artefact. the synchro is disrupted and it give a small sound over few tracks playing together.

the optimum way is one PC by instrument with small machines.

 

Oh, yeah, sure. If you don't have the skills to handle more than 8 tracks at the same time and everything sounds thin like shit in the end, then it's the DAW's fault! Totally understandable... Especially for engineers and composers who work with way much more than 160 tracks.

 

yes, this is the way i do it. it takes a large room to hold the 100+ computers i need to do a 64-track mix.

 

This should have been posted in the "humor" section.

 

agree!

 

Damn, I glad I saw this! Here I've had projects with 30, 40 tracks and I thought they sounded fine. Good to know my ears are deficient and I better find a new way to work. Who knows what kind of horrible crap I've flung out there due to my ignorance.

 

Link, please!

 

Sounds like that youtube guy have buffer size issues with clicks and pops. Nothing to do with audio quality

 

Yes, but never keep your project under 7 tracks or you'll lose out on the digital warmth that comes from a higher track count.
I usually add 10-15 empty tracks at the end of the session to smooth out the highs.

 

That's a bizarre claim, I'm just assuming they've doing gain staging way wrong.

Most mainstream DAWs do internal summing using 64-bit floats so you can stack a whole lot of them without any loss of resolution (given no other processing, that is).

 

This just happens when your tracks are too close together, don't have enough room, and thus sound thin. Stems could help, but even better, there's a free plug-in from Boz called Rack Spacer that helps to separate your tracks and make audio great again.
Place it after the fader on your (wooden) busses, since only the audio signal itself is the truth and this one needs to be post-truth.

 

Last edited: May 24, 2020

he probably meant audio glitches like clicks and pops, nothing mixing related, in that case just freeze or bounce and temporarily deactivate your midi tracks

 

The tutorial is in Spanish for sorry but this is the link

And the tittle says MORE QUALITY IN 5 MINUTES, maybe with that tittle I should have guessed there was shit inside

 

Last edited: May 31, 2020

What you need is more ears to hear the deficiencies, just having two is so limited

 

Maybe he is right, Beatles had 4-track tape machine and became very famous

 

Did I miss the final proof, the comparison 1:1?

Who cares, I made one myself:

1 stereo file (already phase inverted) + EQ https://drive.google.com/open?id=1YBP4v4TkkLhb5kr3RV9jhxGIV8epgIkf
128 times this file (level adjusted, ofc) https://drive.google.com/open?id=12saC1rzIeYRB6XgggygKzD-Dl74MmzfK
Nil test result https://drive.google.com/open?id=1fBDO1_PHZC0VWPG4DtDFyLcVimd19LR8

As you can hear there is something remaing, but changing the level by +-0,01 already alters the result. Sadly I didn't find a tool with which I could adjust the level in the 0,00x range.
Nonetheless, the difference is below -70dB, means way below perception and no sound alterations added.

So, what ever this guy's problem (with his DAW) is, I couldn't reproduce it.

 

Shit sounds shit when is shit.

 

We don't need more ears but rather larger earlobes with which to triangulate the sound to a higher degree of accuracy.

 

The Beatles were exasperated by EMI Abbey Road's slow adoption of new technology. They basically forced them to begin using 8-track for The White Album before the EMI engineers had deemed it fully tested (a process lasting the better part of a year); prior to that they help push Geoff Emerick to help invent striped tape sync lock to slave 2 4-tracks together for some parts of Sgt. Pepper (the most famous being A Day In The Life), and EMI was so slow to get a 16-track the Beatles basically said f**k it and started recording at newer facilities such as Olympic. Having limitations to overcome can help spur creativity but in many cases it's just a pain in the ass, no more, no less.