News:

2box forum: accident-free since the last one.

Main Menu

DSDN repair

Started by welshsteve, May 03, 2023, 10:38:57 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

welshsteve

Hi all
Some sounds I have made of my acoustic kit have bad layers, need to properly trim Silences from sample start of a few of the layers. There was an app called DsdnTool before, does that still exist? Would be a lot easier to just inspect a bad sample than have to remake it.
Thanks in advance.
My Hovercraft is full of Eels!

kenjwright

Quote from: welshsteve on May 03, 2023, 10:38:57 AMThere was an app called DsdnTool before, does that still exist?
Is this the one you are looking for?
dsoundtool

Cheers!

Ken
Ludwig Acoustics, Paiste Cymbals, Drum Brothers Djun Djuns, ddrum3, ddrum4, 2BOX DrumIt Five, Pintech Cymbals, MegaDrum56, eDRUMin-4

welshsteve

Hi thanks for the message yeah that's the one.

Though I hear it's been integrated into sdse now.

I am on a Mac so will need crossover (an app designed to run low level windows apps on) to get it going.

I will report back with my progress.
My Hovercraft is full of Eels!

kenjwright

Quote from: welshsteve on May 04, 2023, 10:27:35 AMI am on a Mac so will need crossover
It is just a jar file so runs fine on a Mac.
Ludwig Acoustics, Paiste Cymbals, Drum Brothers Djun Djuns, ddrum3, ddrum4, 2BOX DrumIt Five, Pintech Cymbals, MegaDrum56, eDRUMin-4

welshsteve

Okay, so got a demo version of SDSE DSsoundTool and for the life of me couldn't figure out HOW to repair these bloody sounds.
If ANYONE has an idea of how to do it, I'd be eternally grateful. The last thing I want to do is start over, it was such an huge ordeal making these in the first place.

But that said, I do still intend to remake dry/direct versions for people in live situations. Think Efnote but for 2box. Most front of house engineers don't want stereo sounds with ambience, so this is for those situations.
My Hovercraft is full of Eels!

kenjwright

I don't find any of the 3 available tools (DrumIt Editor, DsoundTool, DSound Manager) particularly well suited to re-working existing files but some degree of manual wacking about in the file can be done depending on what you are after.

What are you wanting/needing to fix in your sounds?
Ludwig Acoustics, Paiste Cymbals, Drum Brothers Djun Djuns, ddrum3, ddrum4, 2BOX DrumIt Five, Pintech Cymbals, MegaDrum56, eDRUMin-4

welshsteve

I should have made a list of the sounds with issues, as there are a few. But off the top of my head, all layers on the processed 22 x 18" have a small silence on them. The unprocessed one seems fine.

One of the 12 x 8 toms has at least one bad layer. One of the hihats has a dead layer (just a silence)

On the good hihat, I should strip some of the layers away (as it was chock with them) on its own it good and I am happy with it. It's only when you start doing anything a little complex with hihat foot stomps do you hear latency with some snare notes. I feel this is because it's trying to play to many layers. Swap it for a "stock" 2 box hihat and it stops.

That aside, I do need to remix the ride and one of the crashes as they sound distinctively different than the rest. This is what happens when they're done at different times without a decent method to hear them, rookie error.

There may have been others but that's what I can remember.
My Hovercraft is full of Eels!

kenjwright

#7
Quote from: welshsteve on May 06, 2023, 08:40:08 AMBut off the top of my head, all layers on the processed 22 x 18" have a small silence on them. The unprocessed one seems fine.

Being the curious type I downloaded these and took a peek and yes there is silence at the head of some of the layers for that kick. For "kicks" I manually edited the layers to remove the silence at the start of each layer (adding it back to the end to maintain the layer boundary) and adjusted the layer length to the last non-zero sample. Here is the result; https://www.dropbox.com/s/zklw84d5nl0nt94/22%20x%2018%20SCM%20%28cleaned%29.dsnd?dl=0

I notice that with the unprocessed dsnd file the layers are each about 0.7sec long (reasonable but could be shorter, 0.5 is plenty) but that the processed wavs and dsnd layers are a full 2 seconds, leaving a lot of dead weight below -60db for the module to play out for each hit and undoubtedly affecting performance.

Have a look/listen.

Cheers!

Ken
Ludwig Acoustics, Paiste Cymbals, Drum Brothers Djun Djuns, ddrum3, ddrum4, 2BOX DrumIt Five, Pintech Cymbals, MegaDrum56, eDRUMin-4

welshsteve

hey thanks for checking it out. Yeah I really thought I was being thorough when I made these. But clearly I missed a few things. If I had a module to try these out for myself I wouldn't have missed a lot of these "over-sights" but there you go.

My Hovercraft is full of Eels!

kenjwright

Hi @welshsteve!

I updated the dropbox link above with the latest updates to the dsnd file. I was curious to establish a workflow to manually tinker with the layers without using any of the 3 GUI tools, but rather with just a hex editor (Hex Fiend on Mac in my case) and a wave editor (Audacity for this exercise as you can edit at the sample level). I used Audacity to trim each layer to a 0.50 second length (for r&d simplicity, 22050 sample tics) and removed all silence (or near silence) and then applied a 100ms fade out to each. Each layer had 478 samples of silence appended to maintain the required 8192 byte block alignment while retaining the sample length of 22050. Because Audacity does not retain the dsnd chunk in the wav file it was necessary create a new file in Hex Fiend and add the original dsnd chunk, followed by the new data chunk from the edited wav file. Last step was to update the velocity map with new start positions and sample tics length while keeping the original velocity mapping in place. And finally update the RIFF chunk length.

Tedious exercise to say the least but result is a nice tight version of the original with all of the dead weight removed. Approximately 60 seconds of total sound reduced to about 15 seconds. I loaded into a DrumIt Five (v1) and it sounds comparable to the original with good attack and a nice drop off.

Anyway, fun exercise (for me). Have a listen!

Cheers!

Ken
Ludwig Acoustics, Paiste Cymbals, Drum Brothers Djun Djuns, ddrum3, ddrum4, 2BOX DrumIt Five, Pintech Cymbals, MegaDrum56, eDRUMin-4

welshsteve

Hey Man.

Thanks for your effort on this. I have taken the "cleaned" file and put it on the samples folder, deleted the bad version and renamed it to "processed"

Not sure when I will get chance to try it myself, hopefully soon. So many thanks for this again.

I will be doing "dry" versions off all the kit very soon. I will let you know when I do. Hopefully they'll be useful to someone.

Steve
My Hovercraft is full of Eels!