Showing posts with label Always Loud. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Always Loud. Show all posts

Friday, April 14, 2023

New Old Sennheiser RS 120 Wireless Headphone

     Got a little off track here, but the most amazing thing happened today, and needed to be shared.  I'm ... sort of... hard of hearing.  Hearing aids are beyond the family budget, so it's a matter doing the best you can with what you've got.  I tell my friends and coworkers, there's a 3-repeat limit.  I'll ask you to repeat something twice.  If it's still just garbled static, I pretend I heard and move on.  Yes, it causes problems, but asking for repeats gets old, and 3 times is my limit.

    With that in mind, I've struggled with my Hammer 88 and the audio volume on Ableton.  If it's  loud enough for me to hear, it pegs way over 0 decibels.  Lot of red zone, overpowers the speakers, sounds like static when I play it back as WAV.  You'll see on older posts, I've gone through a few hoops trying to find work-arounds.  The best solution so far was to play very loud while recording, save it as an Ableton set.  Then swap to a quieter instrument for export.  Usually MiniGrand x64 #16, Loud, then #01 Real Piano, for the softer tones.

    Also, last night I started using normalize when exporting audio.  It seems to do just as good a job, without jumping through the hoops.  That might sound simple, but I bought the M-Audio Hammer 88 just to have a digital piano. I play a song, record it live, and output Midi/Wav to share my music online.  The Hammer came with Ableton Live Lite 10.  That's sort of like asking for a match and getting a doomsday bomb.  Way over my head, and overpowered for my purposes.  So stuff like using normalize when exporting?  I don't know enough to even understand what question to ask, until something triggers an inspiration.  Then it's like Christmas!

    But... it came FREE with the keyboard.  I like free, and was willing to learn as needed to achieve the goal.  The Hammer 88 was about half the price of my broken Yamaha DG-640 Digital Grand.  Loved that Yamaha but it wore out, and repairing it was expensive. With no guarantees it would keep working.  So here I am, with the Hammer, learning how to do things as they come up.  At times I'd whine about "just wanting to play my piano..."  Ignore the whining.  I do the same thing about blogging.  There's a lot to learn about the modern blogging landscape.  (Like "consent cookies...")  At my age, learning isn't as easy as it used to be.

    Anyway - back to the hearing problem.  My old headphones were cheap, but nice enough.  But they're so old, the leatherette is falling off every time I pick them up.  And it doesn't just fall to the floor in pieces.  When I try to pick them up, they crumble into dust that leaves a mark like fireplace soot.  I have another old pair, still in the blister pack.  (Yes, it's another $20 headphone.)  Used them yesterday, and it was okay.  Just as good as the old ones, but without the disintegrating leatherette.  Monique saw me messing with them, and tinkering with ways to increase audio.  She's also seen me get the wires tangled, forget I was wearing them and walk away from the computer, and generally being a klutz.  She also remembered another pair of headphones.

    More than a decade ago, for a birthday gift, I gave her a wireless headphone set.  She liked watching tv while using the treadmill, and had expressed a desire for something wireless to listen on.  In those days, we were ridiculously extravagant, and the credit cards were like our own private printing press.  So I found some that had nice reviews.  Not sure if memory serves, but I THINK they were around $180.  They never worked quite right for her, maybe there was too much interference in that room, but they were put away and forgotten.  Monique found them again recently while doing a major cleanup in our storage room.  (Translation: eBay selling, model-building, upright freezer, and junk room.)

    She brought them out last night, tested them on her computer, then offered them to me.  The advantages were tremendous, but I live a cluttered life.  After years of building my "mission control" area, I couldn't figure out a place to put the base.  Seriously, no place left that wasn't stacked to the max.  I said "No thank you" regretfully.  This morning, I revised some priorities, got rid of a couple of things I don't really use any more, and... "appropriated" the headphones back.

    Here's the exciting part- after recharging them, and fine-tuning the channel, I tentatively played a song on the Hammer.  AND HEARD IT AS CLEAR AS A BELL!  Not only that, but there's a volume control on one side.  It was set somewhere in the middle.  When I cranked it up, it was actually much too loud.  Finally, finally, finally, I can hear what I'm playing, the way it should be heard, and not have to jump through hoops to correct the final output.  

    I also tested a YouTube video, and understood what they were saying... without subtitles!!  This decade-old Sennheiser RS 120 Wireless is not even available on Amazon any more.  They have an upgraded model now, and it's something like half the price I paid for these.  Don't care.  This is beyond amazing.  These are just fine, thank you very much.  Don't need an upgrade.  Did I mention I like FREE?  Maybe it wasn't free, but after so many years forgotten in a box, and "re-finding" it at a time I really needed the boost, it felt like a free gift.

    More than a gift, it was encouragement at a time I've been struggling.  I have a new song I want to record, and after two months of practicing, have only had 3 perfect practices.  None of them on video, of course.  It's been discouraging, to put it mildly. Being able to hear myself play is revitalizing.  It's brought joy back to my playing, and restored my hopes of being able to record this song soon.  

NOTE: I deliberately didn't add links to Amazon. I'm not trying to sell anything here.  You want to look for yourself, you'll have to Google it on your own.  I found mine on Amazon, but am sure you can find hundreds of retailers selling much the same thing.  I just wanted to express my happiness in being able to hear the music while playing.  :^)

Wednesday, January 25, 2023

Learning on the Hammer 88 and Ableton Live Lite 10: Ableton Compatibility Problems

   After a couple of years away from using the Ableton and the Hammer 88, I'm having to learn pretty much from scratch... and never understood that much in the first place.

  All I really want to do is record my piano playing to computer, at the same time as recording a video of my hands playing the song.  I can't just record the song to video and upload to Youtube because our home has 3 dogs, and all the associated noises and distractions most homes have.

  The plan is to record MIDI via Ableton, then export it as music to a WAV file.  WAV, because it's uncompressed and can play without the inconsistencies you get in mp3.  While editing the original video, I'll overlay the WAV, sync it to the original audio, then delete the original audio track.  The finished product gives me a nice "studio" rendition of the music, removing all the 'live' household noises.  (I've done this in the past, with a Yamaha keyboard providing both MIDI, and actual Audio.)

  My problem is that Ableton Live Lite 10 is over my head, and overpowered for me.  It has a steep learning curve.  On the other hand, it came free with the Hammer 88, and can definitely do the job.  There's just so many little bits to figure out.  It took a lot of time way back when, learning all the little details of setting it up, getting actual audio to come out of the computer; making the MIDI input work, learning to record... a whole bunch of time spent just setting things up.  My desktop computer is a good one, but trying to use Ableton, edit video, play games, and "do it all on one computer", it was struggling to keep compatibility with everything.  

    And EVERY SINGLE TIME  Microsoft updated my computer, it force-switched my audio device to either produce NO audio at all, or it changed the output to a second monitor that wasn't even powered on!! 
In most cases, my games had great audio, YouTube and other audio sources had NO audio, and Ableton/Hammer88 did not work AT ALL.  I'd try to change things back, and the settings kept reverting back to the NON-working mode.

  Then it would take weeks getting all the audio on the computer to work together again, and usually Ableton was the hardest part to fix.  I only know a couple of curse-words, but I was using them both on Microsoft non-stop.

  After months of anger management issues, Monique bought me a small laptop, dedicated to ONLY running Ableton.  That solved all the audio driver issues.  I don't remember all the steps it took, nor the audio drivers and add-ons that were tried.  Eventually it all worked again.  I saved the settings as an auto-booting default every time the computer powered up.  One thing that really helped was getting an external audio driver, the M-Audio Air/Hub.  It was a reasonable price, and fixed most of the problems.

  Finding a nice "Piano" setting that I like has been difficult.  Some are great, some not, but they all struggle to reach the volume I need to hear.  I'm losing my hearing, so the volume needs to be loud.  But when it's loud enough for me to hear, the audio "redzones".  Tonight I discovered a solution.  Might not be the correct solution, but it works, and I'm satisfied.

  First, choose a piano that's naturally loud - the MiniGrand x64, with setting 16: Always Loud works for me.  It's kind of tinny, but with all the volume settings maxed, I can hear it just fine.  And yes, Ableton Master Output volume does peak over 0 decibels.  Quite often, but it doesn't bother me.  Because tonight I realized I'm not recording actual finished audio output.  I'm recording midi instructions for Ableton to store.  A simple, basic realization, but to me it was an exhilarating breakthrough.

  When the midi is finished and saved, change the piano to one that plays 'more normally'.  Something softer, with lower volume, and the output volume can be reduced until none of the loudest parts redline.
  For this, I currently like MiniGrand x64, but using setting 01: Real Piano.

  Now the audio can be exported as music (a .WAV file in my case), and won't have clipping.  I might be mistaken, but it seems like this particular piano package came with the Hammer/Ableton.  The pictures below show both the main screen and the MiniGrand x64 toolbox screen, with the MiniGrand x64 being found under "Plug-Ins".  There are some other pianos under Plug-Ins, and some more under "Instruments".  Some probably came with Ableton, others were free ones found by Googling.  Even more got deleted, because many of the free ones I found online weren't very good.

One final tip, for screen-grabbing on my HP laptop...  Hold Windows key+Shift+S to copy an image into memory.  Open a graphic program like IfranView, and paste the image onto the page (or hit Ctrl+V).  The resulting image can be saved to your hard drive.  From there, I copy the files onto a USB drive then transfer them to my main computer.  Since the laptop is ONLY for Ableton, this is a simple low-resource way to get screenshots from one computer to the other.
(I could have used Drop Box, Google Drive, email, or other online tricks, but the laptop struggles to keep up with Ableton already.  Trying to run more software just bogs it down.)
    NOTE:  I've since learned how to use Google Drive, in it's simplest browser version.  It's made transferring files a lot easier.)

This is a pretty boring post, but it's exciting news to me.  It has the added advantage of acting as a guide for myself in the future.  Just in case I forget.  :^)

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