>Tracks vs. Voices? help!

[DJ Insomaniac]

ok, i pulled this out of Electronic Musician's review of 6.1 LE.

"The program can now handle 32 tracks of audio. Audio tracks can be made inactive, allowing 128 audio tracks to exist in a session, with 32 of them active at one time."

It seems that the "voices" are the number of simultaneous tracks.

could be wrong, but i didn't write the review.

[Rail Jon Rogut]

For explanations of how the voices work in LE, then read these previous threads:

thread 1

thread 2

thread 3

Rail

[megahurt]

I went and read through those, and from what I can tell, it does what I wanted in the TDM/HD systems, but not in LE. Honestly I don't see the point in having extra tracks of audio that you can't hear. Imagine the final product... "yah I recorded this great solo on the 33rd track. It's inactive but just imagine how cool it is!"

[DesertDude]

Sounds like the number 32 is hard for you to grasp ?

sorry I could not resist

[audioeric]

Older mix systems work in the way you gave an example for.. If your voice max was 64, it just meant 64 tracks playing at one time, but you could have 128 active tracks, as long as you only had 64 actual things happening at one time.. Now, to get around that, you could do some creative editing, so if you have a guitar solo in the beginning, and one at the end, then you could just put them both on the same track.. and if you want them to sound different, then just automate EQ's and things like that.. while the 32 track limit does suck, you can do a lot with 32 tracks, sometimes you just have to be creative..

eric

[Rail Jon Rogut]

The reason for 128 tracks is to make it:

a) easier to share sessions between a TDM system and LE (which is the plan)

and

b) Let you enable and disable tracks easily to create submixes.

That's it - end of story.

Rail

[AverageJoe]

I went and read through those, and from what I can tell, it does what I wanted in the TDM/HD systems, but not in LE. Honestly I don't see the point in having extra tracks of audio that you can't hear. Imagine the final product... "yah I recorded this great solo on the 33rd track. It's inactive but just imagine how cool it is!"

Well look at it this way- you've got 11 tracks of drums that you submix to 2 tracks to free up 9 new tracks... maybe one to put your solo on! Instead of having to delete the unused original drums tracks or save them in another session, you can now keep them in your session and so if you have to re-submix them, you just de-activate 11 tracks, re-activate your drums, do the new submix and keep working.

Before this, it meant going back and opening an older session file to get the original drums back, submixing them again, exporting the new submix, importing it to your new session. Took a long time.

That's just one example of why this is actually a very usable feature. Sure, voice sharing would be much much much cooler but this has uses too.

[Cliffy_Boy]

I would personnaly be happy if we could actually assign voices like on TDM. This way I could comp a vocal with, say, 20 takes ( I don't sing that well) and comp while seeing all the tracks. Instead, I have to use playlists which is much more cumbersome.

It would be a nice feature - one I miss from Logic.

[brinaddison]

OK so Rail................how do I?

Let's just say I have a 38 track session but the 6 tracks over 32 are only in the Chorus. However when the Chorus comes the 6 Guitar tracks do not play.

1: Can I make the 6 Gtr tracks "inactive" and "activate" the 6 Chorus tracks thru automation?

2: If so, when making a Foley soundtrack, could I keep adding sounds 'till I reach my 128 track limit but only activate the tracks needed for a particular scene?

ie: the "thunder sound" tracks do not happen in the "love" scene but I need the heavy breathing to come in for that scene only.

3: If possible, How do I automate the active/inactive tracks?

Thanks.

[soundboy69]

That is a good question...I'm not sure you can automate this in LE (might be TDM only- is this what is called Dynamic Voice Allocation?)...although in LE, it's still true that the higher a track is in your edit window, or the farther to the left it is in the mix window, the higher priority it has when those 32 voices are allocated by the software. To give a track higher priority, just drag it farther up in the edit window, or further to the left in the mix window. Don't know how you'd automate this, though...Rail, is there a way to do this in LE?
TIA...