I’ve recently bought a Tascam DR-40x and I’m trying to figure out the most efficient workflow for importing, splitting, cleaning and exporting my field recording clips. I tried Wavelab initially, but it doesn’t seem to offer much that Cubase Pro 10.5 can’t already do. I’ve searched online for relevant guides but I haven’t found anything yet. If there are any handy tutorials, can anyone point me in the right direction?
So far, my trial-and-error approach has been the below. Let’s say for example that I tapped on the window twenty times and now I want to turn the recording into percussion clips:
- Import the raw WAV from the field recorder
- Run any overall processing, such as background noise reduction
- Use “Detect Silence” to split the WAV into individual events (would hitpoints and slices work better for this?)
- Review and delete any unwanted events
- Select all remaining events and normalize to around -12db for consistency
- Apply any other desired processing (I use iZotope RX7 for anything Cubase can’t do natively)
- Use “render in place” to convert the events to individual WAV files
- Move those WAV files from my pool to my sample folder
- Tag the files in Media Bay
I would be grateful for any advice you could give on making this process more efficient. Thanks!
Hi,
What about Nuendo 10 with its Field Recorder Audio Import feature?
I do a lot of this. Often recording 12-16 or more tracks. I think your work flow is fine. Here are a few little things.
I generally do the noise reduction before importing the tracks, but either way is fine.
Before splitting out songs, I group all the tracks so that my fade-in/out will hit all tracks equally.
I haven’t tried the “Detect Silence”. I just cut the parts based on what I see. For the stuff I record, it is pretty obvious where the songs begin and end.
The main thing I do that is not in your list is adding a Marker Track. Once I have done the fades for a given song, I press “P” to set the locators to the beginning and end of the song, then Add Cycle Marker and label it with the song name. If you do that, then the mixdown will have all your songs nicely labeled.
Also, I generally normalize the whole program rather than the individual songs so that the intensity varies more naturally from one song to the next. That doesn’t always work because there can be spikes that throw off the normalization. Some combination of compression and normalizing usually works pretty well for me.
I assume you are processing a stereo input. With more tracks, there are many other mixing possibilities, of course.
That’s helpful advice - thanks.
I’ve just started using cycle markers for my compositions and I’m kicking myself for not realizing how useful they are until now.