Mixing Quality

(sorry for offtop, your can move this post to whatever thread you find proper)

I can’t pose as a ‘quality tester’, you know. It’s just that when I was only doing purely sampled music, without much adding of VST’s and effects, everything seemed totally fine to me.
But lately I mostly do stuff with recorded bass and guitar, and as I add realtime fx to those recorded tracks, and double\triple them, the mix balance just seems to… you know, lose consistency. It’s just like it’s not stable, or I hear changes in overall sound that shouldn’t be there.

I know what you think right now, and yes, I used to blame it on my ears first, but the thing is, when I build exactly the same setup and track the exact same thing in, say, Tracktion or Aodix - everything is rock solid and I can hear clearly what I’m adding, and how the mix is working with it, every minute. (although building complex arrangements in Tracktion is like playing ping-pong with elephants. Only Aodix allows real effective tracking\routing.)

Again, I don’t wanna claim authority here, mainly because I come from tracking\sampled\lo-fi environment, and my ears always WELCOME the flaws of sound before they ever begin to JUDGE them :)
But still. I meant what I said.

Don’t get me wront, I am a great admirer of Renoise, and I’ve been a registered user since 1.5 and I’m pretty darn going to stay that way, no matter what. Renoise is about the ONLY thing going on in the computer world, in the midst of all this overproduced ‘user-friendly-insanity’ crap out there.
Take a look around: Aodix is, - although very much polished - but nevertheless abandoned (and its genious creator is greatly missed). buzz is dead despite all the reviving efforts (shouldn’t put a double ‘z’ in a name IMHO, attracts wrong things B) ). Aero studio? Obviously abandoned too, which is a damn shame.
Renoise is our only hope. "Our’ - stands, probably, for computer musicians who still want to retain their individuality and creative integrity in this shallow ‘pushbutton music’ consumerism.

I don’t actually know how Aodix records your input or what it applies to the mix.

Maybe the dithering adds singularity to the audio, i don’t know about that.

If you miss warmth or clearity, you know that you can adjust the EQ frequency since 1.9? Double click on the frequency value and change it to your likings. I know that bass and guitar samples require different hz ranges to mix them out. This was the actual reason (being able to alter the 103hz band rate for the base instead of 100hz) i wished for the EQ frequency ranges to be adjustable. So now they are.

Making sure, of course, to record the same sample at the same time in both hosts ;)

Yeah, you should record the bass and guitar in an external software, mix the recordings within Renoise & other hosts and then compare the resulting files.

Well to be fair, one should also record input directly into Renoise and another host, as it may be the recording process that’s altering the sound

Right, haven’t thought about that as I never used it :)

“Mixing” quality for me is pretty damn good.

Issues which may be perceived as mixing issues:
• EQ has been discussed to death, we know it needs precision work.
• Reverb and mpReverb need to be merged, and a real HQ reverb must become an option. Impulse convolution-based reverbs sound very good.
• Chorus needs to have a “# of voices” control to add depth.
• Renoise needs to allow you to pitch samples up or down while preserving speed, and optionally preserving formants.

This is not the first time this “issue”(if there is any) has been brought up. By independant sources.

I think we should get to the bottom of this.

So use the same exact samples and record them both in Renoise and your other program, and let us hear the examples.