Useful Noise

Hey Guys,

Have any of you heard of a program/sound collection called Useful Noise?

www.usefulnoise.com

It's apparently a collection of sounds by Keith Hildebrandt, who did stuff for NIN. Now, I'm new to digital music, but would like to create soundtracks for film. Is this over my head? I don't have a mac, but I have access to Soundforge. I'm not looking to do anything super complicated, just mainly connect sounds to make "noise"... Is anyone familiar with this program or with music production in general? Thanks a lot!
 
I'm not familar with Useful Noise, but I can tell you that Soundforge alone will be insufficient to use to create music. I'm not sure what you mean by "noise" - if you mean little sound effects or whole musical compositions - but you need a decent multitrack audio package if you mean the latter.

N-Track is quite a good shareware package for this sort of thing, but the big players generally tend to use Logic Audio, Cubase VST or the horrendously expensive ProTools hardware/software combination for digital audio work.

If you give me a clearer picture of what you want to create, I can probably help you a bit more since digital audio (any audio really) is a hobby of mine.
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EDIT: Just checked out the Useful Noise site - the Useful Noise collection is just a whole bunch of samples that have been tweaked to hell. Again, if you wanted to make music with these, you normally wouldn't use these sort of things exclusively - you typically need some kind of live element (somebody hammering out a guitar riff, or a piano line, or a vocalist). If you want to make these kind of samples, you need a whole bunch of expensive microphones, a lot of know-how and some expensive software. For editing the samples once you've recorded them, Soundforge will probably do, but you'll need to milk it for all it's worth to get some good results.
 
Originally posted by Curtis@May 7, 2003 @ 11:34 AM

I'm not familar with Useful Noise, but I can tell you that Soundforge alone will be insufficient to use to create music. I'm not sure what you mean by "noise" - if you mean little sound effects or whole musical compositions - but you need a decent multitrack audio package if you mean the latter.

N-Track is quite a good shareware package for this sort of thing, but the big players generally tend to use Logic Audio, Cubase VST or the horrendously expensive ProTools hardware/software combination for digital audio work.

If you give me a clearer picture of what you want to create, I can probably help you a bit more since digital audio (any audio really) is a hobby of mine.
smile.gif


EDIT: Just checked out the Useful Noise site - the Useful Noise collection is just a whole bunch of samples that have been tweaked to hell. Again, if you wanted to make music with these, you normally wouldn't use these sort of things exclusively - you typically need some kind of live element (somebody hammering out a guitar riff, or a piano line, or a vocalist). If you want to make these kind of samples, you need a whole bunch of expensive microphones, a lot of know-how and some expensive software. For editing the samples once you've recorded them, Soundforge will probably do, but you'll need to milk it for all it's worth to get some good results.

Thanks for the advice, though I think I can make songs with just the samples. Did you check out the songs on the website? If I just wanted to make songs by combining samples, can I do that with soundforge, or perhaps an even easier prog?
 
I think what you wanna do is use a "tracker" which is a kind of music editor that harkens from the days of the Commodore Amiga which started the "mod" scene. MOD files, and later S3M, IT, XM, MED and many other formats, are sequenced music arranged in blocks and patterns which uses samples to play the notes and provides realtime effects as well.

Two that come to mind for the Windows platform are the ModPlug tracker which is free, and MED Soundstudio which is the commercial Windows version of the famous OctaMED on the Amiga (itself a much-enhanced Soundtracker clone). It'll cost ya
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but you ACTUALLY could use WinUAE to emulate an Amiga on your PC and run OctaMED Soundstudio V1.06 on the Amiga which was made freeware due to excessive piracy. Given a fast PC, sound playback wouldn't be a problem, plus OctaMED on the virtual Amiga can of course render WAV files which you can use outside of the emulator.
 
Originally posted by tsumake@May 8, 2003 @ 01:12 AM

If I just wanted to make songs by combining samples, can I do that with soundforge, or perhaps an even easier prog?

The problem with sound forge is that is only does mono or stereo editing*.

To do any serious music 'composition' using samples, you really need to use a multitrack (4,8,16 or more) program. It would probably drive you insane if you tried doing it on just 2 tracks.
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I used to use Deck II, but that's on a mac...

(*the one I have has only stereo or mono)
 
sound forge is more than suffiecient to produce music

it's just not easy and it's very time consuming

i've put together songs using nothing but soud forge in the past

back in my macintosh days in the early 90's i put things together using nothing but sound edit pro.

of course if you have sound forge and vegas it's much easier

i'm not all that keen on midi and i think cubase if the audio equivalent of m.s. word as far as needless overhead and useless features go
 
I have cakewalk because I like the simplicity of sound fonts on my Audigy system.

I also have Cubase but I never use it. Is it really better? why?
 
Originally posted by jeff-20@May 8, 2003 @ 09:39 PM

I have cakewalk because I like the simplicity of sound fonts on my Audigy system.

I also have Cubase but I never use it. Is it really better? why?

VST Instruments. Soundfonts are great for things like piano, bass, drums etc, but if you want some great synths and pads, there are some truely awesome free VST instuments out there.

Look out for Free Alpha, ZR-3(Hammond synth), Crazy Diamonds and Crystal.
 
Old-ish thread, but I thought I'd bring this to some people's attention. The free project Ardour has been running for ages, and it is beginning to look like a release date is finally on the table. I'm excited.
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Ardour is a free linux-based multitrack digital recording package - if you have the know-how (which I don't) you can get a pre-release version running now. You do have to have a good knowledge of linux to get this app working.

It certainly looks amazing and I can't wait.
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