Your Vinyl Transfer Workflow (sharing best needledrop practices)*

Interesting. My experience has been the opposite.

 

depends on particular stylus. for example, vm540ml will pick up all the dust and hairs because it's a nude shank, and 33ptg won't because the shank is hidden in a round blob of cement.

 

That blob of cement can't be good. I carefully brush my stylus before all plays.

 

it's the glue holding the diamond on the boron cantilever to spare the laser cutting and still having to use the glue.

 

Indeed. I've seen some pics of styli attached to cantilevers with big blobs of glue like that and it makes you wonder how they end up sounding so good.

 

Exactly. At least iZotope gives people the option. Plus there are some really good sales from time to time such as right now with the Black Friday stuff. I have to admit that Adobe's subscription model is great for getting a lot of really cool new stuff on the graphics side. I hardly ever use Audition now as I prefer RX , plus I had a lot of problems with Audition when I used it all the time (3.0 was really unstable on both my PCs). when I use Audition now it seems a lot better than it used to be but for needledropping, I just feel much more at home with my workflow combining RX and Cockos Reaper.

I get the impression from his previous comments that the member in question has some sort of undefined beef with anything to do with iZotope. That's certainly his right but as you, I and lots of others on here have found, iZotope makes some pretty cool software that comes in very handy for our needledropping hobby.

 

Audition CS5.5 is very stable on my Windows 10 machine, but I just can't get it to record. I'm thinking about dropping some money on Ozone 9 Advanced with the loyalty sale. It doesn't have too much that I don't already have now, but I want the bass enhancement, or whatever it is. I also understand they improved a few of the modules.

I think some people may have issues with iZotope just because of the professional-tier pricing. Sometimes the price of admission is all it takes for some people to bash a product. People want Audacity. Even they are stepping that up with new features which means they will probably start charging for that software, too. Or, they'll just make a basic free version and charge for the better stuff.

 

1) I can't advise on RX use except for interpreting manuals (I hope it comes with a better manual than online resources), as I don't have it;
2) Look at their twitter feed, marketing marketing. "No skills and you too can be an EDM producer or mastering engineer", a turn-off. Functions seem over-simplified and compartmentalized with inaccurate nomenclature. There's certainly worse, like Pro Tools (was just thinking I haven't turned on the Pro Tools PC, carefully configured so it doesn't self-destruct from updates, in over a year), UAD, a paid-plugin hamster wheel, or Sony, which is an evilcorp.

 

Ozone Advanced is quite nice. The automated mastering and tonal balance stuff can be fun to play around with. I tried remastering some old early 80's CDs with it awhile back and really liked the results. The files are around here somewhere (Yet another reason I want to retire so I'll have time to play). I've also been getting some cool results using the master rebalance in Ozone 9 to boost percussion by a couple of dB and also using Waves C4 plugin with a toned down version of their Uncompression preset to process brickwalled modern releases. It can produce some surprisingly good results.

 

After the Maximizer, the Music Rebalance is my favorite feature of RX/Ozone. Just doing something like boosting the drums by even a half a decibel can do wonders. And, with contemporary music, vocals, IMO, are too loud anyway, so I like to take them down a notch if the need arises. I know it's sacrilege to ever use limiting on anything around here, but this tool is quite useful if you want to get your music in the ballpark of what's out there today. I usually shoot for LUFS of -14.

If Ozone 9 Advanced has the feature that allows you to restore mp3s, the company just made another sale.

I really haven't looked at Waves products in a couple of decades. I'll check that out.

 

Yeah, there are some zealots around who are almost compressionphobes. I don't like overly compressed music either but a lot of it needs some form of compression for punch. I listen to a lot of Spotify on my daily commutes and I'm quite pleased with the sound of a lot of new music on the weekly Release Radar playlist that's generated based on what I listen to. Occasionally something comes along that's obviously over squashed but for the most part when the music is properly mixed, it sounds great. Plus, I've experimented with Ozone's maximizer and found that you can actually get up around LUFS -10 or so and it's as loud as everything else these days but not distorted to the extent that some of the worst and famous loudness war cases were done. It's really a shame that a lot of good music was mangled when they could have easily gotten loud enough without the damage (if that statement gets me excommunicated here, so bit it).

They make some cool stuff and they often have some good sales. They frequently put individual plugins on for $29.99. My biggest problem with them is their stupid shell format in that the individual plugins are not installed as single entities but are all housed in one giant shell file. Plus this brings up my only really criticism of iZotope in that they don't support the Waves plugins in shells. There are a couple of utilities around the net called shell2vst and shell2vst64 that will create individual VST plugins out of the Waves shells and I have gotten those to work in RX and Ozone but not always. So for the process I mentioned above, I have a Favourite recorded in Audition and then I just load files into the Batch processor. I'm also thinking of doing something similar with Cockos Reaper since it has a very robust batch mode as well. I just wish I could find a plugin that would analyze and target LUFS values in a batch processor. I can use the Audition Loudness match or the RX Loudness module but not all in the same single batch.

Anyway, we're getting way off the topic of needle dropping. I'm really focused on all this stuff as I gradually install everything I can on my Mac. It kinda feels like what it must be like to try driving in the UK for the first time on the opposite side!

 

It's definitely not your father's digital limiter! I'm very impressed at how loud you can get things and have it sound so transparent. As far as contemporary music sounding better these days, mastering engineers could very well be using Ozone.

I'll have to investigate shells. They are quite popular in the pro world.

As much as I loathe Apple, it's always a good idea to be knowledgeable about other platforms. I jokes with my Apple fan sister that I would be open to getting a Mac...if I had the money to burn.

 

Here's a video you can fast-forward through to get into the turntable and clean and oil and check for faults:



1. strobe disc and rubber ring peeling off and rubbing
2. idler wheel quality and its bearing
3. center bearing
4. mechanism and grease
5. motor bearings, by disassembly

I was looking for places underneath where one could dynamat or clay-pack the platter, but the opportunities and spacing seem limited.

 

Yeah, I remember calling Barry Diament a Mac Snob once (he took it as it was intended, just a friendly joke but of course his fanboys felt I should be immediately banned from the forum). I don't think I'll ever turn into one, but I do see how Macs can be appealing. I actually find it stimulating to try and learn a new way of approaching computers after 30 years of Windows use. It`s a good mental exercise to try and develop the reflex to change based on whichever computer I'm using. I actually have four computers all going through the same monitor and sharing the same keyboard and mouse pair (three Windows PCs and one Mac) plus I'm using a Windows keyboard so it takes getting used to, but I'm slowly getting the hang of it.

 

I have never been a Apple fan. As with most things when the rest of the world loves it I tend to not care for it. Mac computers have always cost to much for me too. Now all my software is PC and the hardware is much cheaper so I will probably never go Mac.

Been gone for a while retired and moved to Bentonville AR (NWA) system in boxes and I have to completely rebuild my setup by modifying my current entertainment center. Don't know when I will get it figured out.

 

And, less than 15% or so of the world uses Macs. Fewer than that use Linux.

 

But run each other over for a new iPhone

 

Actually I was surprised to read recently that in North America iphones now have a majority of the market. I'm sticking with my Samsung for now.

 

Well I have Windows, Mac and Linux Ubuntu and I run RX on Windows 10. My Mac Mini is 9 years old and Apple decided to stop OS updates five years ago or so, so I decided to stop buying Apple stuff. So much for programmed obsolescence. I have enough RX licenses to run it on the Mac and on Windows so I can choose whichever platform I like best. Lucky me.
Back to the topic now. I haven't worked on a needledrop for 3-4 months but I have listened to my work and I like it. When I play random songs on my phone I can't tell the difference between the CD stuff and the needledrops.

 

I've only done one needledrop in the last six months. It was a jazz album and I can't even remember what it was.

 

We had a baby with a tough pregnancy for my wife preceeding that so I've not had the time to do any needledrops. I do have a small stack of LPs I want to do whenever I can find the time.

 

Congrats on the addition to your family.

 

Here's something I recently discovered about cleaning up sibilance. I was working a needledrop of Janice Ian's "At Seventeen" and every other word seem to start with the letter "S" and it was full of simbilance. I tried deesser in RX7 and it was less than acceptable results. So on a whim I tried declicker. I just selected the SSSS and started raising the declick value and the frequency of the click. In short order the SSSS became a clear S. It's now a new tool.

 

If I remember right way back in the day Stefan shared that trick or a similar variation. I have done that but using M/S on the spot before hitting it with a hard declick, less damage in M/S.

 

I went through the site and found where Grant talked of clearing sibilance using declicker. This 5 1/2 years ago. A tip of the hat to Grant.