@sezare56: Thanks for your experiments!
I use the OT to create & manipulate drone-based music, so I am as well affected by the clicks and the missing crossfade. I think I deal with 2 separate issues.
Issue (1): Fade implementation
My understanding is that
(a) the OT applies the fades in realtime, i.e. during the actual recording
(b) first the fade out is applied, followed by the fade in.
As a proof of (b), I made a drone recording of 64 bars, set FIN
and FOUT
to 32, no overdub, this is the resulting recording:
This means that the OT fades by principle can not help with fixing clicks that might occur at the transition (or loop cycle jump, whatever you might call it) from the end of the loop recording back to the start of the recording.
I drew up a little diagram illustrating my issue with the current fade implementation, I already posted it in a different thread, so I am sorry if I bore folks who have already seen this. Based on the OT screenshot above I think this diagram gives a simplified yet correct explanation why the current fades can’t solve the click issue (and in fact produce more trouble than good in a ping-pong loop situation).
Issue (2): How to avoid clicks
Alas, I have yet to find a 100% reliable way to avoid clicks when creating drones (continuous sounds) with the Pickup machines. But most of the time I do get along pretty well with a combination of
(a) manually created crossfades, and
(b) recording over the “loop” point of a pickup machine
The manual crossfade requires a volume control (e.g. via an external mixer, or via a THRU
machine) to manually control the level of the signal I record with a Pickup machine. I start the Pickup recording with the level control turned completely down, then gradually increase the level, until I reach maximum level shortly before the end of the pickup loop. When the pickup machine loops back, it automatically enters overdub mode, and after it did that I gradually turn down the level until it is completely gone. With a bit of practice, I am able to align the turning up and turning down of the level in a way that it somewhat resembles a crossfade.
Recording over the “loop” point of a pickup machine is a bit hard to explain. This is – at least in my experience – the point at which clicks normally happen. In my understanding these clicks happen if the signal at the beginning of the loop is not a direct continuation of the signal at the end of the loop. As the fades don’t help to avoid them, I intentionally record over the loop point to ensure that the signal at the beginning of the loop is really an actual continuation of the signal at the end of the loop point.
Most of the time, the combination of both gives me relatively clickless drone loops. Unfortunately I have not yet found out why it doesn’t work all the time – I guess that’s kind of similiar to the issues sezare56 has been reporting in his experiments: sometimes he does and sometimes he didn’t get clicks.
While this frustrates me big time, I will still react very unfriendly if someone tries to take my OT away from me
Hope this helps, thanks for reading so far.