to start: my post is finally about point 4.B and 5.
looks to me as this “feature” was implemented to make the live easier for beginners.
there could have been other options like giving the visual feedback of the gain of the incoming Audio the weight it deserves, which IMO could solve beginners as well as the shitty auto normalisation does.
i have a real problem with this feature !
it makes my live with recording into the DT much harder.
i´m again under the impression that incoming audio is indeed normalised, means:
its not only making weak signals louder, which would be ok in most circumstances,
4.B ) but it also “normalisize down” too loud, thus clipping signals.
I could be wrong here as i´m totally dependend on the display of the DT which is not that conftable with its zoom, and i can´t anyway not load this samples into my audio editor to check.
But i´d say it is exactly like this: that the clipped parts of a recording will finally determine the 0db part.
But what if i want to record a jam and the bits i like to cut out is not the loudest part.
means i adjust the signals gain accordingly to the weaker part i want to record, thus clipping louder parts which would make nothing for my recording, but i end up in any way to get a “normalisized down” Signal.
your opinion please !
please comment on the specific points you like to.
i´d like to try here to get some weight together vs. Elektron
so that they might want to rethink this IMHO not very cleverly thought out feature
To me it seems part of a “let’s keep this simple” small box approach. I’m not too fond of the entire method of sampling on the DT as while it tries to make things easier by stepping you through the edit options and track placement and things, as a person interested in samplers for “sampling” this puts a road block between me and live sampling. Also the kit per pattern I find highly limiting but very beginner accessible, and there’s probably other features too. In my opinion they wanted to make things easy and approachable but it’s happened at the expense of flexibility. Things like how you can’t separate clock from transport and how since people were unintentionally soloing tracks by CC they straight up removed the cc, sort of reinforce this for me…
I just think they want it to be easy, less steps, less “distracting” options…
I think they enforce auto normalization to ensure a level playing ground (pun intended) for building tracks out of samples without any fuss…
Don’t get me wrong, if a DT appeared in front of me I’d probably have a shed load of fun with it, and want to keep it around. I think I’d even like it more than many of the people who intentionally have bought one, I would just have good times with it. However, I would still keep the OT around for the heavy lifting and flexibility that I’m now used to from Elektron…
I think they wanted to make it easy, and fundamentally that’s OK with me it being what it is, but that’s why I think it’s like that…
i totally agree, many small design decissions in the DT look like they were based on that approach.
just that the more mature users have a blast with the DT
and it might be to costly still for the kids.
while many of these design decissions have their pros, i dont see any “real ones” in regards to auto normalisation.
But i totally remember the fists days of the OT and all the critics that came in in regards to recordet samples having too little gain.
just, that the problem was not the unnormalised samples as such but another internal setting in the OT, which was changed later on.
smells like they just wanted to avoid any form of critics…
crying babys in the forums, haha
They did the same thing with Logic X and made it so that by default it is only a fraction as powerful and has the look, feel, and ease of use of GarageBand. You have to go into an “advanced settings” menu and enable a bunch of stuff just to get the full functionality back…
I vote for a “advanced options” check box in the small boxes menu, leave it disabled and it’s straight to the point and easy to use, but if your up for it check that box and get the flexible options back…
at least I can record properly now without even having read the corresponding passage in the manual. Wouldn‘t have been possible with the OT.
I suppose they wanted to take the hassle out of this process and I cannot see anything wrong there … „it just works“ - which also means there are drawbacks. You definately should get an OT when you want full control.
edit: kinda offtopic but what nags me even more that samples I record on the DT are not in any way adjustable (without changing the pitch) to the tempo of the song … or am I missing something?
DT has no timestretch, have to use an OT to get that, or just timestretch samples on your computer first and then transfer them over (although obvioulsy not as convenient)
Had forgotten about the trauma of first opening Logic X to discover so many features missing. Took me 10 minutes of flapping before realising what had happened (Logic user since v6).
+1, this’d be great!
It does indeed - normalisation sets the audio to a level where the absolute peak will be at a specific value (0dB, -0.3dB, -3dB & -6dB are common) without changing the dynamics.
Trigger a sample repeatedly while scrubbing the sample start point from beginning to end = time stretching
huh, you got me thinking. I think you are right, lol
unless its not normalizing to 0db.
i totally had the picture of a cliiping mix desk in my mind.
but something went several times very unexpected in my recordings.
need to check more then
i don´t think it would auto gainstage the input level which would be a explanation for what i get out.
or it has way more headroom than what the display tells me in regards to the incoming gain ?
Sorry, I’m not with you on this one. There are some flaws in Digtakt (poor MIDI implementation, lack of separate outs) but normalising the sampling is not one of these, not for me. Yes, it changes the level, phase and sometimes even the tone of the signal but it works fast and sounds really good and thats what I’m after.
Like already suggested, maybe Octatrack will suit your flow better.
When I layer 2 kick drums on two different tracks / parts, it sounds amazing. When I re-sample those two drums using the Digitakt internal sampling, it sounds soft / less dynamic. Is this the auto normalization at work? Is there a way to retain the levels / dynamics when re-sampling?
I think I noticed when sampling some quite dynamic sounds that it would raise the noisefloor a lot due to, I guess, the limiter that it puts on when normalising the samples. In all fairness it sounded quite cool, so I stuck with it, but it would be nice to be able to turn the function off for some sampling sessions.
It would be nice to set the option to auto normalise or not, also it would be cool to hear both normalise and non normalised to decide if to accept it, it can raise noise floor on some material as mentioned already.
I like the simplicity and immediacy of the DT but a few options in the audio editor would be welcomed, copy and paste being another.
