What is everyone working on these days?

[Matt Kern]

I am finishing up a big Golden Tee Golf update. Anna is helping me wrangle 5,000 lines of speech and is doing an awesome job.

We also have a new wii game coming out soon where I am the voice talent so I am looking forward to that. I am not doing much for it actually since this is a game we did 7 years ago and are just re-purposing it for the wii.

What's everyone else up to?

[Curtis Marolt]

Cool!

Wrapping up a bunch of Disney and Sesame Street electronic books at work.

On the freelance side...I've been doing some new music and sound design for "Ice Age 3" Happy Meal "micro-site" games as well as some other "Happymeal.com" music production. Also found out that my track "No Happy Ending" got picked up for an Ubisoft game trailer "Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood". It hasn't posted yet, but as soon as it does I'll let you know.

In addition, Mike Dicillo and I are continuing to produce more pop tracks for some music libraries.

Fortunately, things are busy.

Curtis

[Matt Kern]

Thats good things are busy. I like the track in the video. How long do you think it takes to finish a game like that?

Probably 2 years for me. If I have the cheat book.

Can't wait to hear more Marolt/Dicillo jams.

[Matt Kern]

As an aside, I am batch processing these files and they are sounding not quite as warm as before. I have 2 ways to batch them:

1) sonic foundry batch converter 5: I can only use sony plugins with this version (I upgraded my waves so they don't work with this version anymore).

2) sound forge 9 built in batch converter: they took everything good from version 5 and took it out. I can use my waves plugins here but that batch times are thru the roof - hours and hours compared to 20 minutes with version 5.

Last go around 5 years ago I used mostly waves for the batch stuff so this time I am thinking it sounds less "warm" because I am not using waves?

I either need to find a single waves warmer upper setting that I run everything thru at the last minute, or I give up and use SF9.

Any thoughts?

[Curtis Marolt]

What batch processing are doing? I assume it's EQ, limiting, etc...

You can use Waves within Pro Tools and batch via audiosuite. The only bummer is that protools will add it's naming to the end and then you'll need to use a renaming app to remove it. But at least you can use waves.

I have added a new Pop/R&B track to my Sonicville page called "Come on" (Timberlake/Beyonce sort of thing). It's getting accepted into a few libraries right now. We have three more tracks in production right now. We'll let you know when they're finished.


Find more music like this on SonicVille

[Jeff Powell]

I know I'm a month too late here. I'll bet you better understand now why I was bitching at Sony on the users forum two summers ago. A few of us were back at it again recently, as Sony has not updated or fixed anything all year. They really stripped out some of the really useful little functions from earlier versions of Sound Forge. And, yes, the batch processor in SF9 sucks in comparison to the past. (But I've put up with it).

Have you tried anything in the Izotope line of processors? It seems Sony has gotten cozy with those folks. I've grown to rely on their multiband processor before turning to EQ (except on my radio VO stuff). Also, I don't know how fast it can batch through a few thousands speech files. Nor do I know if it'll give you the warmer sound you're after.

Whenever I've processed Dan Peters guitar tracks, I've turned to T-racks (I have the full suite now) before any of my Wave's plug-ins. I haven't tried it for speech yet. It's just a thought, as I find some of their compressors to be fairly amazing.

[Matt Kern]

Hey Jeff

hows things. I think I still owe you one fixed web form, a vacation photo, and a relied to email at this point. I am way in the hole....

SF9 does suck. I only upgraded because when I upgraded to waves 6 with my new mac, I lost my waves 5 license and SF batch converter 5.0 only works with 5 it turns out. A big ugly mess...

So yea, I gave in and started using the batch in SF9. There are 5k files total so when I have to do a full re-process it takes hours with SF9. Usually not a big deal but of course it always seems to happen @ 4:30pm ("You are going to get me the new build before you go home, right?")

So between batching and building it is a 3 hour process.

GT2010 is almost out the door (although I do still have a few sound crash bugs) but I am still working on getting the ( here is my best Powell impersonating Python) "Jeff, you've got to shake the cabinet.." effect.

Anything you can enlighten me on?

( For anyone reading this and wondering what the hell I am talking about... Jeff is the low end master - but he has yet to share his secrets with me... )

[Jeff Powell]

You crack me up, Matt!! Yep, for anyone just tuning in, I love to play with bombs, guns and fire...sonically speaking, of course.

I began my quest for low-end supremacy when I had just started working on Capcom's Big Bang Bar pinball game. It was in 1995, just as Williams rolled out their Attack From Mars pin game. As I was playing the Williams game, I was nearly mortified by the huge blast effect that occurs at the start of one of the big multiball modes. I spent the whole next weeking figuring out how to make better blasts.

One of the things I learned? Layer sounds. Sometimes I'll layer 3 or 4 sounds together. For the low end, I'll take a stock low end effect...something with a really good low-freq component...re-shape the envelope (especially the attack and decay) to make it fit with the primary effect...then paste 'em together.

Don't worry about being in-the-red. I constantly bend the rules of good audio engineering to get the attack "punch" I'm after. If it doesn't audibly snap, and your PPM (peak program meter) is showing +15, that's OK. Just run it through a compressor (the L1 or L3 are really good at this) to shave a smidge off the top of the final. I have other secret ingredients, but Matt, your box is telling me I'm out of room here.

[Jeff Powell]

P.S. -- I'm beginning to think the problem with that web form actually lay in IE7. While IE8 causes a lot of complaints about things, I noticed that with IE8 my search box is consistantly behaving itself.

As long as we're talking cryptically (from an outsider's perspective), I want to pass along to any WordPress users a really useful plugin for saving database space (for WP 2.6 and up):

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-cms-post-control/

OK, so you've switched off post revisions to save space (especially with all those photos, audio and video files), here are two sites that explain how to clean old revisions out of your DB:

http://blog.andreineculau.com/2008/07/delete-wordpress-26-revisions/

http://lesterchan.net/wordpress/2008/07/17/how-to-turn-off-post-rev...

Hope this helps someone out there.

[Matt Kern]

Wow, Jeff with the good wordpress info. Good job. I hate those revisions. I don't like the way it is implemented and it is a huge space hog when trying to move the db.

(FYI - photos, audio and videos aren't in the DB, they are typically in the uploads folder)

[Matt Kern]

Oh yea, I did start using the Izotype plugins for speech this time and like them a lot. I am going to use them again, definitely. Wish I had them on the mac.

[Curtis Marolt]

Guys,

I've been using Ozone for the last 3 months and let me tell you...That plug is like crack! It starts with the master bus and then it creeps onto the lead vocal track, then the drum bus, then the backing vox bus, and then..... you get the picture.

It has replaced the Waves "L"series of processors for master bus processing. They have a 10 day trial that got me hooked.

[Matt Kern]

Is ozone an Isotype plugin?

I will have to check it out.