Well. . . I've got a whole bunch of stuff around here that I thought I would edit with. I even bought a Roland VS880 8 track digital workstation (which was one of my not so intelligent ideas). (By the way, it's for sale to the lowest bidder. . .) I've got Pro Audio 9 and a bunch of other software that I hardly ever use. You go right ahead and use that stuff and do your editing. I do what little editing I need at the keyboard sequencer and go directly to CD format with the little Phillips recorder. I don't see any need for editing at the PC unless you are a vocalist and need to edit vocal parts. I want to hear my stuff just the way I played it at the keyboard.

Quote:
(By the way, it's for sale to the lowest bidder. . .)
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Well, I start at -(minus) 5 million, guess it
is not low enought??
Have to be a good deal if we can get the stuff
and a bag of money too!
Well, I'm on the way to the basement to be low
enough for the next bid.
GJ

You live too high on the planet to get low enough, GJ

[This message has been edited by Bob Hendershot (edited 02-11-2002).]

Yeah, I guess it did not help even if I
crawled on the basement floor
GJ

seriously Bob, why do you say the vs880 was a mistake? I seriously considered a hard disk recording system to ditch pc soundcards, but decided that with a GigaHz/40GB laptop already, the usb soundcard route was more cost effective since most if not all of the external effects processing can now be achieved in software. I'm interested because I nearly took that route myself.

Alec, I remember many times getting impatient with young engineers when they presented a design plan that was obviously overkill. I would say, “Keep the basic objective in mind” or “Don’t try to install a thumb tack with a sledgehammer.” “There is no need to impress people with what we know or with a lot of neat equipment. They want to see the results of what we do.” Well, I forgot some of those basic rules with the VS880. The objective, for me, was to get something that I had recorded into the keyboard sequencer onto a CD. The CD needed two tracks for stereo and the keyboard had two outputs, one for each stereo channel. The question is, “What can external equipment do that can’t be done with the keyboard itself?” After giving that some thought, there wasn’t any editing that I could think of that I couldn’t do with the sequencer. But, I didn’t ask myself that question until I already had the VS880. Frank Bez was smarter. He talked to some of the pro’s and found that they had difficulty mastering the VS880 command structure. And, he went with the simple approach that I finally used. Much of the stuff that you find in the studio of a pro is there not because it is needed, but because they just “want it” or it’s the latest fad.

The VS880 stores recordings in a proprietary Roland format and the data has to be converted to .wav format with special software. The display is almost impossible to read on the model that I have (I have the VExpanded version with a 2 gig hard drive.) Later versions improved the display but it is still too small. In order to get a recording to a CD with my PC I had to first transfer my sequence to the VS880 from the keyboard. Then I after any editing that had been done with the VS880, I copied the file from the VS880 hard disk to a zip disk on a scsi zip drive that attached to the VS880. Then I loaded the file from the zip disk into the PC. Then the file was converted from Roland format to .wav. Then the .wav file was converted to CD. All of this has to be done for each song. The files are so large that you can only get three or four songs on a 100 meg zip disk. It would be better to have a direct scsi or usb2 interconnect to move data from the digital recorder to the PC. We Tennessee folks are pretty good at making music and money but the instructions for using the VS880 almost need a rocket scientist. When you compare all of that to recording directly to a CD with the Phillips, you can quickly see which way is better.

I guess I should emphasize that none of this is true if you are trying to record a vocal on top of, or with, the keyboard sequence. You just about have to have some sort of a vocal effects processor and digital mixing to get good results for a CD with a vocal.

That's very interesting about the vs880 operating structure. In the end I did not see the point of duplicating hardware that was already there in my laptops. As you, I did not see myself doing much wave multitracking, and if I wanted to record vocals, a digitech is probably as good as I need. So the usb route was the most cost effective because you just record a 44.1 wavefile direct to the laptop ready for manipulation and burning, no analogue degradations to worry about. It is easy to put a vocal wave on top, if you want to, and put it together in Cool Edit or Sound Forge. And I already had the dat machines, so S/PDIF conversion was a bonus.

The only area that concerned me about the straight sound from the 6500 was that it was not always possible to emulate the 'punch' of a retail cd, since keeping the dynamics away from distortion sometimes kept the mean levels low. This was down to compression more than anything, so very subtle manipulation of the peak/mean ratios in parts of a song could improve things to sound quite good. But most of everything else can be achieved in the 6500 mixer, with only slight tweaking needed externally for my ears.

Maybe no-one does a simple stereo hard disk recorder where you just cable the result to pc digitally because of this route, and because you can buy audio cd burners, dat, or a variation thereon. Certainly your experiences with editing on the vs880 are similar to the prospect of putting wave editing etc on a keyboard. It will be difficult to get the ease of use and flexibilty of doing it in windows with a mouse!