I think the Waves Soundshifter pitch shift is incredible. Unlike Sony's pitch shift, it is smooth and clear with virtually no artifacts. Of course, for this kind of quality, its more cpu intensive and can't be used as a real time plug in.

drbam

I agree that the sound shifter doesn't sound good. I can't find a way to use it for actual broadcast worthy applications. As soon as I time compress or expand, it sounds phased and chorused. Much more so than any sony time compress algorithm

Easy-to-implement but powerful additions:

1. "Velocity" envelope on audio events: will accomplish:
- reverse on audio events
- pitch-shift/time-stretch envelope on audio events
- pitch bend/time bend

Or at least an option to reverse audio clips nondestructively if not the above. This graphical pitch/time control on clips will be unique to any multitracker.

2. "Since i can preview samples from the explorer in vegas then why not add the ability to add samples to the timeline in realtime, like using space bar to play the snare over a few bars and its added at the correct time to the timeline." (another user suggestion) also sounds great.. Multitrack recording with events instead of just audio. More on this:

3. While we're at it, maybe we can implement a very simple keyboard mode - mapped to the computer keyboard (or midi input) so Q is C, 2 is C#, W is D, 3 is D#, E is E, etc - and the realtime placement of clips go in with that pitch (well, include the usual option for preserve-duration or not, or preserve-pitch even, so the notes hit would be speed instead).

this keyboard mode can also be available any time a clip is selected and it jumps to the pitch of the key you press (depending on the "Time stretch / pitch shift" mode). then the active take name can also just have the note - as in C-4 (C in octave 4). believe it or not this really opens up a ton of composition possibilities, nearly eliminating trackers. and envelopes will be available to edit independently for each event, unlike in trackers and others! the pitch will need to be able to change more than +/- 24 semitones.

Each of these I believe are very simple additions - it is already possible in Veg 4 (except the pitch-bend) but the interface does not allow one to do it quickly (5+ clicks to change pitch). And it would not be any more CPU intensive than the current interface.

With regard to all but #1: (SonyMatt already repsonded to this on another thread.)

Vegas is an non-linear editor. It is has a virtual tape record, and a virtual mixer. It is not a softsynth or sampler, and never will be.

There are many tools that exist to create content for Veagas. Vegas is about tracking, editing, and mixing - not including the video aspects it has.

The idea of making the explorer a psuedo sampler with keyboard access for playing samples onto the time line: That is just not the point of Vegas. Vegas is far to "un-musical" - just like a tape record is not "musical" - for it to do something like this.

If any of our apps would get a feature like this, it would be ACID as it has a muscial time centric approach and would fit the paradigm that the program is exposing.

I am not saying that Vegas can't or wont be more musical in the future, but the type of thing you are asking for is just not what Vegas is about.

BTW: None of this would be trival. It may appear to be on the surface, but I assure you that it never is, especially when you are talking about a complex application like a DAW/NLE.

Peter

Disappointment is slowly setting in for me about Vegas 5. Not that I'd want any of these sampling-type features that have been suggested above, but with Peter saying Vegas isn't supposed to be 'musical', I think we can take it to mean pretty definitely that there are going to be no MIDI features in the new version. I'm gutted.

As I've said in a previous thread, I'm hard pressed to even think of a DAW that now doesn't include at least basic MIDI implemenation. Yet the video features will continue to grow. I'm wondering what the point of the 'Tell us what you want in Vegas 5' thread was now.

Ben

I hate to admit it, but some people jump too easily onto the anti-vegas bandwagon before it is even out.

Similarly, you can't expect Sony to combine vegas, SF and Acid into a single program.

I usually don't like to post anything negative, but I'm bothered by so much whinning when you know that all the complainers are going to stay with Vegas because they know there isn't anything all around better out there :(

Cheroxy - sorry you got the wrong end of the stick; I honestly don't mean to 'Vegas-bash'.

I <love> Vegas, and use it every day professionally, but I really do think the audio-side of things (I don't touch the video) lag behinds competing apps. I, and I think many on here, think it really does need at least basic MIDI implementation. For me, that would be worth the upgrade alone.

Ben

"Vegas is about tracking, editing, and mixing"

Amen to that!!! I wish more users would realize that simple fact. The fact that Vegas is about tracking, editing and mixing makes it a well focused app and makes it excel over every other app out there in those departments. I can open up a program like Cubase or Logic, which has midi and audio and the whole kitchen sink, but I can't do nearly as much of the powerful editing that I can with Vegas. I started using Vegas for the tracking, editing and mixing aspect. If I want a sampler program, then I'll go out and buy Giga-Sampler/Studio, because i'm sure it's well focused in that department. If I want a midi/Loop production tool, I'll buy Acid. If I want a virtual studio I'll buy Reason and if I want a word processor, I'll buy Microsoft Word. Get my point? I use the tool that is specialized for the task at hand. I don't want a swiss army knife to do brain surgery, I want a scalpel.

>>...but with Peter saying Vegas isn't supposed to be 'musical'...
Peter didn't say this. Peter said

Sorry but you are so utterly wrong when you say that Vegas isn´t musical.
I find that amazing that you dont realize exactly how musical it is.
I do ALL my music on vegas from start to finish, no other applications used at all!
I record everything and mess with it in vegas and it´s far THE most musical application there is.
I find it sad that you should say that as that made me finally realise that this program will never go where i had hoped for.
I love vegas and i´ll probably stay with it forever but im tempted to tell you guys to get with the times as the borders between recording and creation are disappearing.
It just seems like old school mentality to me....

"im tempted to tell you guys to get with the times as the borders between recording and creation are disappearing."

They are with the times. What do you think Acid is? In another comparison Cubase is much more music oriented than Nuendo. Nuendo was developed because it was more oriented towards audio production houses. I think you need to get with the times Arnar and realize there's a whole film, TV and advertising industries out there, that need a powerful recording, editing, and mixing environment that can sync to picture and don't need any music production tools to get in the way of that. So as far as any borders disappearing, yes they may be disappearing on the music creation side, but you need to realize there's a lot of us out here that just strictly work on "audio" and could care less if there are things like rewire support, so we can record a virtual synth, or midi tracks so we can add in musical parts. I don't want to worry about, that I pressed a keyboard key by mistake and now my "audio" is playing back wrong because I accidentally dropped a tempo marker. You know how many times I've went into the Vegas properties and set a project tempo, or changed the timeline to "beats and measures"? Probably 2 tmes, 3 at the most since I started using Vegas v1.0. I do create and record music, but when I do, that mindset works well, all within Acid for me. I also do post production for video, and edit advertising spots and Vegas works perfect for that without all the music garbage to get in the way.

I am glad you disagree with me. Really. Being a musician, I find that sometimes I want a more "musical environment" than Vegas provides.

For me, musical means tempo and tempo based creation. While Vegas has a tempo format ruler available, it is static. When I record in Vegas I am doing mostly live recording, so I treat it like I would my ADAT. I rely on the performance to be musical.

When I get into the editing phase, I feel the limitations of the non-musical timeline. For project == song work, this is not a big deal. However, when working with longer "multimedia" projects - i.e. multiple "songs" against a single Video, I find the single tempo limiting.

Again, I am not implying or stating that Vegas will not progress musically. I merely stated my opinion on where it stands today. I believe we can do more to make Vegas more musical in its approach to creating/editing/mixing music based projects.

I would love to hear others opinions on Vegas' music creation ability - both negative and positive.

Peter

Now youre asking for it

The lack of tempo changes can hamper musical creativeness, at least in a mix where I would use it, as I dont create any music. Its not an impossibility, but requires some scary select all, and move around parts and hope you move them all at once, and no matter how careful you are, accidents happen.. Having the tempo change so that you always have the correct gridlines to work with would be a godsend.

And while we are talking about gridlines, a HUGE help would be being able to see the gridlines CLEARLY without haveing snap to on. Thru endless splitting and moving, in most cases the part that would snap is NOT where you would want it to hit the gridlen, but a little before. Yeah I know we can move the snap to point, but that would be inconvenient for about a zillion drum edits. I end up using the snap to line of an event as a REALLY handy reference marker to line up with other parts

And still on tempo, how bout a really nice nifty modulation plug that lets you enter in tempo, so that your flangers and phasers sweep musically with the project? I mean there are ways, using analog x's calculators and such to make it work but JEEZ let the PC do what its good at!

yes! More tempo based effects!!!

"yes! More tempo based effects!!!"

Yes!!! Absolutely and make it have a "tap tempo" key, so you can easily figure out the original tempo of the song by tapping along. I use to have a TC reverb, that had this tap tempo feature and used it all the time, even when not using that device for an FX. I just ran into this problem today, remixing Cosmo's song. I was using the simple delay and didn't know the tempo, and also didn't have a tempo to delay calculator. Had to do it the old fashion way, and play around with the delay time setting until it sounded right.

Definitely more tempo-based effects. I think the effects generally could do with a bit of an update; they're a little long in the tooth and don't all sound that great.

Saying that though Red, you probably forgot that you could have easy found the tempo of the song in Sound Forge by using the Acid Tools. Either that, or just by doing the simple calculation of 60 / length of bar x 4.

Red said:

"I don't want to worry about, that I pressed a keyboard key by mistake and now my "audio" is playing back wrong because I accidentally dropped a tempo marker".

With SoFo's pedigree, I really don't think problems like that need to be an issue. You don't accidently start video editing in the middle of a music tracking session at the moment. I just think that there are <so> many ways Vegas could move forward without things such as MIDI with hampering its existing functionality. At the moment, you start with a blank project and you have the choice to insert a video or an audio track. Once you've done that, both have their seperate set of features. Well, how about being able to insert a MIDI track?

"You know how many times I've went into the Vegas properties and set a project tempo, or changed the timeline to "beats and measures"? Probably 2 tmes"

We all have our own different ways of working; I do that all the time. I'm not advocating Vegas to be all things to all people (the bung it all in and hope some of it sticks philosophy), but I do think it could move forward in many ways, some of them 'musically'. Which reminds me, when are we going to be able to see both 'measures and beats' and 'time' at the same time, as in Acid? Very useful.

While we're all debating whether Acid or Vegas are more 'musical', etc, consider this - Vegas is the software with a metronome. Acid doesn't have one.

Ben

i simply want to be able to export all my edited tracks to individual files with the push of only one button. i dont have time to solo, render, solo, render, solo, etc. i know acid had this feature a while back. not sure if it still does..

that would be handy!

I tend to want to be very musical in my use of Vegas. I suppose that many of the things that (occasionally) frustrate me about the program are related to its ‘non musicality’.

Some of the things are very simple and are more about access than anything else. I need to regularly do stuff like change the grid spacing, and tweak the tempo, but both of those basic things are buried two layers deep in menus...There is an icon for the metronome but you have to know to make it visible on the toolbar, otherwise you are up to your elbows in menus again.

In addition I really feel the lack of a swing control. Most of the songs I work on seem to be swung. The grid is stubbornly unaware of this.

Often a song wants to pick up the tempo a little going into the chorus or slow down a touch into the middle eight. Yes, it’d be a godsend if Vegas could follow.

Obviously tempo based effects would be extremely practical and useful to someone who works the way I do.

Those kind of basic musical tweaks would hugely enhance my work with the program.

The import/export stuff is another big issue for me. I work in a very demanding multi user, multi platform environment. I want ([grovelling on hands and knees] please I need) to be able to do this sort of stuff very quickly and efficiently.

I’ve said it before but I always wish the explorer window was much more fully utilised in this regard. It’s such a great ‘natural’ windows element; it could be both extremely powerful and extremely straightforward and intuitive.

To render a bunch of tracks you could just grab them and drop them onto the explorer window. A dialogue would pop up with your different rendering options and you would be away.

I think that type of functionality could be extended across a huge range of different aspects of the program. It could all be extremely flexible and powerful but at the same time I reckon it would all make perfect sense to any windows-literate first time user.

...Come on PH, it’s getting boring around here. We need some blood sport...bung out a public beta so all us monkeys can go on the rampage. All we wanna do is jump up and down, rattle our cages and scream at the top of our lungs about how you guys have totally destroyed the whole program, and how you are going to bring all of Sony down because of it. :-)

What a great opportunity to put my $0.02 in! I feel vegas can't do music creation at all, except like you said, live recording (through a mic only). My wife uses cakewalk/sonar home version for all our music creation. My MAC friends now use Garageband. I would love to use a sony program, but ACID is way too expensive for me. The lower version of ACID doesn't have midi so it is useless for us and our digital piano.

In other words, if Sony had a music creation program that would allow for midi instrument control and be consumer priced (like sonar home version or garageband) that would be the BOMB!

Until then, I will have to use the non-user-friendly sonar and import into vegas to sync up with our video. I said in a previous post that vegas, acid and sound forge all have their respective parts and I can understand why they don't combine all three programs into one, but considering the market, it would be nice if the screenblast acid had midi control.

thanks,
Carson Calderwood

weevil, I too need to constantly CONSTANTLY change the grid spacing and whats more I need to have grids without snapping going on, yeah I know I can defeat snapping as long as I hold down shift but it shouldnt even be that hard

"In addition I really feel the lack of a swing control. Most of the songs I work on seem to be swung. The grid is stubbornly unaware of this."

Hmmmmm.....Just curious, but isn't the "swing" part in the performance and not the timeline? How does a grid or timeline prevent you from performing edits on music with swing? Are you relying on the timeline and the grid to do your edits for you? Doesn't anybody have ears? The only thing I can think of with a swing function would be my midi sequencing, and I only use that because I'm not talented enough to play the swing performance myself. So I'm not sure what kind of swing functions I would need when I'm recording, editing and mixing. The only time I turn the snap to grid on, is when I'm doing nobrainer spacing of events. I find myself always turning the grid and snapping off, because it's getting in the way of my edits. I guess I just record and edit by ear and not be a grid?

"In other words, if Sony had a music creation program that would allow for midi instrument control and be consumer priced (like sonar home version or garageband) that would be the BOMB!"

Yeah....uhhhmmm..great. Just what we need a bunch of no talented, non audio proficient, consumer idiots trying to make music and clutering these forums with questions on "how can I remove vocals". Yep, definately da bomb.