Does Buzz add it's own sound to a mix?

[80#080]

I'm about to record a CD-single for a small electro label. I brought my tracks to the studio, installed Buzz on their soundman's machine (he's using Cubase under win2k) and set everything up.

From the start, he was a little reluctant about using buzz. He said i should "render single tracks and mix them in cubase". But the tracks contain a lot of compressors, sidechain and whatnot, and when i render in groups, the track loses the solid groove and sounds itchy.

The soundman says he's not sure about Buzz master, how does it process the sound, does it add color or something.

Yeah, i've made some stuff in cubase and it clearly has a very crisp and clear sound. But what about Buzz? Is it impossible (even theoretically) to reach those heights in Buzz using pro vst eq's and stuff?

Now i'm also thinkin', what could be the polite way to tell the guy to bugger off and start mixing?
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[Fuzzpilz]

[80#080]

Thanks, that's reassuring. But still i've heard some stuff from "wise guru guys" who spend years in the studio and, that, for example, "mastering\mixing is better in Nuendo than in Cubase because it doesnt color sound... " and stuff like that. They talk about DSP core engine or something.

And also one related question: when a program like Aero says it uses 64 bit internal sample processing, Aodix says 32 bit, what says Buzz?
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[Fuzzpilz]

"Wise guru guys" who spent years in the studio sometimes know less than they let on. Don't believe everything they tell you - though I expect it's not impossible that some apps have hidden built-in limiters or something of the sort (this is obviously highly undesirable). I think I recall hearing something similar about Logic. This is a valid concern. Nonsense about "DSP core engines" isn't. Adding numbers is adding numbers.

Buzz uses single precision (32 bit) floating point numbers. This is less precise than double precision (64 bit), of course, but I very much doubt that this causes anywhere near audible problems in realistic circumstances.

[Xenobioz]

I think 32

Edit: oops I was a little bit late
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[Paul Eye]

One thing to remember: always, ALWAYS keep the Buzz master fader fully open (all the way to the right). This way you can be sure that your mix is added up exactly as it's supposed to be added up, without any further divisions to trim the levels down (it's all about mathematics anyway...). I seem to recall that back in the days there was some discussion about whether the master fader controls some kind of an internal limiter/compressor or something or not, but simple logic says that an ordinary digital limiter/compressor with the threshold set at 0.0dB equals no limiter at all, right?

Anyone disagree?
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[80#080]

Thanks again for enlightening.

The simple thing one of those guys is telling me right now:

even adding numbers a program can do different ways, depending on the algorithm. Program like Cubase has a very elaborate and sophisticated algorithm, hence the sound quality. A simplier algorithm can result in "soapy" sound, where subtleties are lost and mangled.

But in case of Buzz that can be true only if I let master mix the sounds, right? If i run all channels, say, through Vintage Warmer, then Buzz itself doesn't actually mix anything, right?
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[usr]

cubase and similar apps tend to have their own primitive EQ sections in the mixer, once that is activated it's not just "adding of numbers" anymore.

buzz otoh does not have anything like that built in, the only thing inside buzz that has anthing to do with how it sounds are the built in osc tables that some generators use, others don't.

Having a rather advanced infrastructure for antialiased oscs available in the host used to give buzz generators quite an advantage over primitive vsts, but i guess nowadays, after years of experience with softsynths, most plugins (buzz or vst) come with their own advanced osc implementations, so that advantage is gone.

about that "keep slider at max": i'd clearly recommend recording everything to 32 bit float before offline processing, if you do that _no_ amp setting can harm your sound. (no i don't want to explain floating point numbers right now). 32 bit float has a fixed precision of 24 bit ^ exponent, so there is always enough precision for cd quality + 1 byte "overhead" for all those rounding errors etc.
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[btd]

Here's a thought for you: Cubase etc use values between -1.0f and +1.0f (or is it +/- 0.5f?) internally. Buzz uses -32768.0f to +32768.0f (give or take). So, since Buzz is using "more" of the available range for 32-bit IEEE floats, it is inherently better quality. Hah!

I'd like to see an "elaborate and sophisticated" algorithm for adding 32-bit floats... maybe the algorithms implemented in Intel and AMD FPUs just aren't audiophile quality. (sorry, sorry, couldn't resist)

I think it's safe to assume that Cubase is doing a lot more than simply adding and multiplying numbers. Think of it from a marketing standpoint, and factor in the bad workman blaming his tools... if your software doesn't compensate for an engineer's ineptitude (as Buzz makes no attempt to whatsoever), he will instantly claim it "sounds bad". I'm not calling you or your soundman inept, but hopefully you see what I'm saying.

So Nuendo "doesn't colour sound", eh? in that case I'd be willing to bet it colours the sound even more than Cubase does

[intoxicat]

I suppose if you (anyone) insist that Cubase or whathaveyou sounds better than buzz it should be safe to mixdown as normal in buzz, import the stereo mix into cubaselogicprotoolsinuendowhatever and re-render the mix to get some of that glossy magic these 'advanced' numbercrunchers apparently do to your poor ones and zeores.

Oh, I wish the wise studio guy could come over and save my mixes using overpriced commercial musicsoftware
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[80#080]

Thanks, guys. I get the point. Anyway, i'm too lazy to export music, especially to Cubase.

Cheers.
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[Hamst3r]

Buzz sounds ok to me.

send us your buzz tracks. We'll mix and master the tracks. It's up to you how it's done. Can mix and master all in Buzz or can export it all and mix it on a protools HD system... in surround. It's up to you. We can do it...for a reasonable price. :]
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[Farq]

You know...

I was kinda thinking about that "buzz sound." It used to be a "tracker sound" and now it's a "buzz sound."

I can only think of a few factors (aside from internal eq, limiter, etc.) that might affect the sound, but these are pretty general:

- Media level sound quality: sample rate, bit depth.
- Internal Buzz stuff: sample size. frequency response (if not entirely determined by sample rate and sample size.)

There's also FFT size, but that's essentially machine dependant. There are a lot of machines written in a certain kind of way that make a novice make certain sounds...

On a side note, WTF is up with VSTs and pops/clicks? Is that a Buzz/interface problem, or do people like to write screwy VSTs?
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roksteady

[hyena]

maybe im just fuckd up but very often i find my buzz songs louder than my cubase songs and with less mastering...
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[tinga]

i've worked 15 years on cubase, and buzz was a liberation for me!
cubase is for expansive home studio with a 2000 euros soundcard and many hardware, of course great software but not very innovative, (just the logical edit and the groove ediitor are great tools) .

sound quality?
in buzz, just depend of your talent, (and not your money) you have all you want and more!
just try to understand what is really buzz...

BTDsys peerlfo..... Joachims Tethys.....KodreamImprov.....

[white butttaaahh]

you should definitely talk to hamst3r about letting him mix and master your tracks, he has skills. from hearing your story with the soundguy, its pretty clear whatever you he or the team of you do is going to come out relatively shitty. why would you want to do that if its music you want to release?.....unless the music is shitty also, then its understandable.

[80#080]

The music is a total flinch of idiocy, as you can easily hear from these examples which still can be found here http://users.i.com.ua/~glyph/ before i delete them once and for all (along with bmx originals on my harddrive).

Actually, all music done in buzz should (on the finishing stage) undergo an OSKARITUAL - which is mashing and mangling the files into a totally unrecognizable mess of pathetic data chunks.

Now, what could be the most ultimate and uncompromissing way of performing that action?

ps Oh, yes. That "CD single" shtick was just a hoax allright.
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[nool]

dont listen to white buttttah

he just posts randumb shit to piss people off

the other advice in this thread seems quite useful on the contrary ...
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[white butttaaahh]

i'm pinned!

now for one, as far as whats been said about mixing in buzz, you got people throwing out totally random information comparing buzz's wordlength with cubase or other programs or whatever....oh and i bet the -really- insightful information was to throw a limiter at the end of the audio chain...yeah...thanks for that one, i think now i have a leg up on guys like tony maserati and spike stent. what? who? oh nevermind since everything i say is randumb

now on top of that you got this dude who doesnt even seem too familiar with overloader's multitrack record and people want to tell him about vst oscillators and retarded nonsense...all he wants to do is get his creation sounding good so he can present it as a finished work of art...but i mean, this is a moot point, since completely irrelevant, esoteric arguments are the stuff of message boards.

alright, for point #2, it may theoretically be possible to mix amazingly in buzz, but i've rarely, if ever heard it. and the small minority of guys i've heard make amazing sounding music with buzz dont do their final mixing in buzz. if you think you can be an innovator yourself go right ahead, but just hope that advice to stick in eqs and compressors randumbly works out for you.

and yeah, like you really want to hire an engineer who's specialty is cubase to learn the entire buzz program, learn all the effects (which are almost entirely not as good as vsts/rtas/dx) and how everything sounds, and then produce a mix that will sound better than this dude's native program to which he knows (hopefully) exactly how every compressor and eq and effect he touches will behave.

come on now nool, i thought you knew me better than that.

[white butttaaahh]

By the way, the moral of the story, the definitive summary to which there should be no debate...is...

1. Break apart all of your buzz tracks into individual tracks. If you have effects, create SEPARATE soundfiles for the wet and dry signals. this is important. then you may give the soundfiles to your engineer. if you don't know how to do this i'm sure some dummy will be more than happy to tell you how to do halfway, and then start rambling about something totally off topic and create a long chain of posts. At least this will get you halfway, hopefully you'll be able to figure out the rest yourself. Then your engineer should be able to do the best possible for you in whatever mixing format he's most comfortable with.

if you're too lazy to do that, like you said,
the other option is, like i mentioned:

2. Give your music to hamst3r. He's good and he's for hire. Maybe too good. So you can take advantage of that. By the way, I have nothing to do with him, and you can't consider what I'm saying advertising...maybe quite the opposite since most people are inclined to hate me for what I say.

[nool]

heh i was just posting to get a rise out of you i guess i succeeded, i know you know your stuff so does hamst3r so do alot of people on this board ... just wanted to point out ... sometimes attitude, being condescending is a bit boring, there is so much of it out there and here

anyways, your later posts here are very insightful so i apologize ....

peace pipe homie ;P
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[white butttaaahh]

i guess you got me. yeah, you're right, acting condescending is boring, and i definitely plead guilty to being a snooze...not that i have any basis for looking down, none of this music and quality shit matters, its all about fun as far as im concerned, and its also fun for me to act like an asshole sometimes....ok most of the time

[btd]

The guy didn't ask about how to master his tracks in Buzz, he asked about Buzz's sound quality compared to Cubase. In our irrelevant and esoteric way, we tried to answer that question rather than tackling a completely different one.

OK, I kind of agree with everything else you say. But resize your damn avatar

[mute]

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[Paul Eye]

[80#080]

Gosh, people, even my keyboard sounds muffled after your sparkling brilliance.
The thing is (and i guess i mentioned that b4) i would gladly mix individual trax or even subgroups. But i like the soundman to see the whole picture and be able to EDIT and TWEAK it on the fly. The scheme is built on sidechaining and lots of layers which depend on each other. On the other hand, if you have rendered parts, you have to fit them as they are, or redo them which might as well be boring as fitting a dog turd into a squashed toadstool.

And besides i managed to make a routing scheme in buzz versatile and clear enough so that the soundman finally liked it and admitted it actually IS masterable without side programs. I tried to choose only among machines which don't mess up samples, don't (hopefully) add many artifacts to sound and are good at resampling. And mostly VST effects.

So anyway, i'm deeply thankful to all of you guys for useful insights and info. No kidding.

P.S. I wonder, has any of you benevolent minds actually listen to any of the track previews i posted on that there url?
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[e-client]

you can avoid problems, avoiding cubase...

"master in cubase"... bwaaahahahahahahahaha...

tell him he's an ignorant idiot...



none of my tracks have had ever any external processing outside buzz... (check the few bmx's on buzzmusic or on my site, will put them up soon for you to check)
so external mixing for "mastering" is stupid... unless you put together a cd, but then again, you can approach the same with buzz only, by using a similar mixing technique in each track that will go on the cd... lately i use a "basicMixerSetup.bmx" i made... it consists of compressors going into champ's and into the ld mixer. not that i really need the mixer, its just for clean view purposes, and if i need one, there it is already... =) screw it, all the routing can bedone before... and if you need it, you can always bypass the mixer for stuff... yeah, i made this out of lazyness... and so i have better control over the instrument chains and dont have to care much about the mixing, except for changing the indivitual compression parameters of each chain ending into the mixer... some have stronger compression, some less to none... depends...

cubase for mastering? heh... you know my opinion...

greetings to your soundman/guru/studio idiot
and greetings and fun to you

rb

edit:

answering your question: no, buzz doesnt "add stuff/things/magic to your mix/sound/whatever"... it does exactly what you tell it to do... plus random crashes if you're still using buggy machines...
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[Farq]

A note on mastering in Buzz. It's not like mastering with anything else that I've used. After about a year of trying to produce some well-balanced tracks (you know, paying respect to concepts like "dynamic range", etc.) I've developed a set of habits that are pretty good for sound quality. I don't really know what I do, though, I just do it. (That's about as satisfying as your average compressor tutorial, I know: just play with it.)

So my tracks are sounding a lot better than they did. When I load up the hd-recorded files, I just normalize and maybe do some EQ. Then it's off to the encoder. I remember being in the habit of spending hours with Audacity or something, now I wouldn't even consider wasting drive space on recording multiple tracks. You can get a perfect mix with Buzz.

The one thing I can point out is this: don't ever fix anything "later" unless you simply can't fix it "now." I used to be in the habit of rectifying the mix "later"... bad idea. It's easy to fix one instrument. It's not easy to fix 12, and you might destroy your original sound in the process (I've got dozens of otherwise decent tracks, ruined b/c there's just no mixing them right.)
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[80#080]

[cetranlien]

Buzz is program that you have almost all liberty, to make you own vst for example, becase you can organize in many differents way of conection, this include the way to mastering your sound and music. Cubase and the others have many things pre-done(i think is this) and it has some limits, i think this limits is good for mastering.

In cubase and other you have an internal eq as someone said, so you have to add a eq for each sound you make if you want a cubase similar structure in buzz.

The problem for me is that the eq machines doesnt look so good in buzz. I gave up. I prefer vsts.

Eq is a import thing in the music because you can separate the sound in specific frequency and this is important to master.

One thing you have to be carefull in buzz is the volume.

I like the cubase and logic structure, but is not good for me to make a music in speed of light as in buzz. This is bad to obtain the feeling in the music for me. The music become more technical, black and white(no prejudice), little improve. In buzz you can do many things in real time, also a good thing: change paramets, very fast.

I hate to change parameters with buttons, i prefer the sliders that in buzz is very comon.

Im download cubase, logic, nuendo and reason and im think that is a waste of time but its good to make differents music.



Sorry bad english.
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[kibibu]

[quote="btd"]Here's a thought for you: Cubase etc use values between -1.0f and +1.0f (or is it +/- 0.5f?) internally. Buzz uses -32768.0f to +32768.0f (give or take). So, since Buzz is using "more" of the available range for 32-bit IEEE floats, it is inherently better quality. Hah![/quote]

Hehe, while I'm inclined to think that was a joke, I'm not sure if other people will get it (i hope it was a joke...)

Due to the way that floating point works (the mantissa/exponent representation), its *relative* accuracy is the same for low or high ranges. So there is no fundamental accuracy difference between the two ranges. As far as I can tell, the reason for the +-32768 thing is to make conversion to a 16 bit signed integer as easy as possible.

That probably made no sense, but what I mean is the error from adding something like 1.0 + 1.0 is about 1/32000 of the error from adding 32000 + 32000. Don't read this to mean that the first one is better! They are equal! Although I wonder if the -1.0/1.0 representation is more prone to denormalisation problems...

Things that MIGHT have an effect on sound quality:
- Converting all inputs to master to integer before mixing (i don't think buzz does this)
- Multiple gain stages (if Cubase represents in 1.0 range, it has to do a final scaling step to convert to short. Uh oh! Quality loss!)
- Dithering in the output. I think this is up to the sound driver, as it is responsible for the conversion from float - but I'm not sure if the HDD recorder does anything
- As previously mentioned, filters/EQ on the output. These will colour the sound, but buzz doesn't do it.
- The bundled effects will sound different in each package - unless you are using the same VST compressor in every host then there will be differences. Also, the per-track eqs will have different cut-offs, different slopes etc.

Don't listen to anybody who says Nuendo is "truer" than Cubase - they have shared the same "DSP core" since Cubase SX

[wayfinder]

[btd]

[usr]

what an incredible chart for penis comparison

dithering is indeed technically a way to induce difference, but fuck those least significant bit counters, that has definitely nothing to do with making a track punch through the dancefloor (which otoh is not my business)
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[Zephod]

about dithering: I did some hearing tests and could not really hear anything more than 13 bits of resolution (with fast differences.. when your ears get more time to adjust you get a lot more dynamic range) this kindof implies that with a slow limiter, 16 bit audio always has 3 bits overhead for me (letting the audio level adjust instead of my ears)

32 bit float has way more bits than I'll ever hear.. dithering or not

btw: 1 thing cubase -could- be doing is just drop the entire exponent from the float (assume 0-1 range 0.22 fixed point) and add the floats as 32bit ints in the end.. this avoids masking of small values by big values.. (10000 + 1 = 10000 stuff..) some care should have to be taken to shift the exponent back in to the int if its below 0 of course...

[spiritcatcher]

before i discovered buzz, i used Oktalyzer. (8 track Amiga tracker). Then i got a PC, grabbed a copy of CuBase and it took me an hour to hack in a 4 bars bassline. ( *click* eigth note. *click* damn, wrong row... *click* eraser. *click* eigth note. ...)

Never used CuBase since.

[kibibu]

[parasympathomimetikum]

I don't know if this topic is still active, but I am going to post anyway.

I did a few tests in order to compare the sound of free buzz with expensive "professional" software: I loaded the same plugins and played the same melody/pattern with buzz and Cakewalk Sonar and there was absolutely no difference!

I also talked to a lot of sound engineers and producers and most of them said, that the input signal is the most important. "If shit comes in, shit comes out!" is an old wisdom of producers.

The true art of producing/mastering is the fact, that you have to LISTEN in order to achieve a well-balanced track. The true masters can achieve a perfect sounding track without their 100,000 euro equipment, it only is easier with expensive hardware.

There are always people, who say that nothing tops a hardware synth, but I disagree. I am making music with soft synths for nearly 10 years and with the right plugins and a few sound tweaking it sounds as good as the whole britney-spears-professional-produced-thingy. Of course there are a few tricks, which I discovered over the years, but that is a natural learning process.
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[rymix]

[parasympathomimetikum]