Fade out selection bug(?) in os 1.25h

Elektron Gear Octatrack
#1

EDIT: tl;dr version - just skip to the second half of post three and ignore most of the other stuff I said in the first half dozen or so posts (including everything in this one that comes after this sentence), because a lot of it is irrelevant and/or wrong.

When I’m recording loops from external hardware I usually use a one-shot recording trig on step one with the rlen set to the step length of the loop I want to record, start the OT playing and arm the record trig after the pattern I’m sampling has already played at least once (or after I’ve started playing it if it’s played live). I don’t use any recording fades and rarely have issues with clicking that can’t be fixed by setting an attack time of 1 or 2 in the amp menu when I’m playing it back. I was just trying to get rid of a click that was happening at the END point of a loop by adding a quick fade out in the audio editor and noticed that it didn’t actually do anything at all. I select a couple MS at the end of the audio, apply a fade out to the selection from the edit menu, and nothing actually happens, the audio itself is completely unchanged.

I also noticed that I can’t select a region smaller than 64 samples at the head of the audio file, although it’s possible everywhere else - another thing I don’t recall ever experiencing before. I can’t find any mention of a minimum selection size for applying fades in the manual or on the forum, but even if there are I’d expect 120+ samples to be enough, it’s enough to cover a few waveform cycles. I’ve never encountered it before and I swear I’ve successfully done quick fates at the head and tail of audio files before without issue but it’s not something that I typically need to do so I could be misremembering, maybe I’ve always cropped to zero crossings.

Is this a known bug in OS 1.25h, or should I submit a support ticket?

#2

Can’t go into it much but it may help to check your expectations against what may be happening in practice … perhaps a few ideas to look at from this thread, I can’t find an earlier one which is more generally about the fades iirc

anyway … food for thought … (there’s a few misunderstandings and I don’t follow what I was presenting tbh, but it may be worth browsing and considering how in practice the fade out can happen … keeping in mind that the process can’t fairly be expected after the recording has been ceased, sometimes dynamically stopped … see text later in )

whether any of this is helpful in regards to the audio editor is another matter and the practicality of creating silent loop-point transitions is covered in another thread iirc

#3

Thanks, I’m well aware of the pickup machines bug and have read that whole thread, but anyhow I’ve taken some more time messing with it and it looks like there IS an (undocumented as far as I can tell) minimum selection length before the editor will actually execute a fade, and it’s quite a bit longer than software editors so it took me by surprise. No micro-fades over a few waveform cycles, I guess.

EDIT: I spoke too soon, it looks like even when it executes a fade-out, it doesn’t actually fade all the way to zero, even without vertically zooming the waveform it’s still visibly above zero on the last sample of the fade. Strange, and now I wonder if this actually IS related to the PUM clicking bug under the hood. In both cases there’s a bit of low-level DC at the very end of a file where there should be digital black. Looks like I’ll be submitting a support ticket after all.

#4

64 samples chunks seems to be the minimum for trim page.
Maybe the reason is the sample can’t be smaller than 64 chunks.
When you use Playback Length, you can’t have smaller Length than 64 chunks.

#5

So about the minimum Fade time in Edit page, you think it’s 64 chuncks anywhere ?

#6

Yeah, that makes sense, I probably didn’t notice it before because I usually don’t need to zoom in that close in the trim page, and I just confirmed that it only happens there, in the edit page you can go below 64 samples. I must have been in the trim page when I noticed that and forgotten when I came here to post, because I was focusing on the problem with fades.

Anyhow, I’ve tried fade-outs from 80 samples long up to half of the entire 64-step/120bpm sample, and no matter what length they never quite hits zero. If I do it with a selection in the middle of the waveform, it hits zero on the next sample AFTER the end of the selection! I just confirmed that if I select to the last sample of the waveform and then back it off by one sample and apply the fade, it reaches zero on the sample after the selected region and eliminates the click, but if I select all the way to the end then the actual zero crossing is apparently happening on the nonexistent sample after the last sample in the recorded audio. Definitely not the way it should be working.

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#7

I don’t think there actually is, I jsut did a fade that was only 30 samples long. What DOES happen is that for really short selections it seems to be processing the fade so fast that the notification doesn’t actually appear, but I could see the waveform change a little. When I was trying to do a REALLY short fade before my first post, I just didn’t see an actual change in the waveform because it was so close to zero anyway, and the thing I described a second ago, where it’s actually crossing zero on the sample AFTER the end of the fade rather than the last sample of the fade so it was still clicking on the last sample of the recording, plus not seeing the notification when I executed the fade, plus not seeing the waveform change at all, made me think it wasn’t fading but it actually was. The problem is that the fade ends on the next sample after the fade, so if you select all the way to the last sample of the recording and fade out, it never actually reaches zero and you can still get a click.

Easy workaround, though.

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#8

OK so that’s the workaround, if I understood correctly?
Thanks for pointing out this.

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#9

Yeah, that’s it. As far as I can tell, if you select a region and apply a fade out (didn’t test it on fade in) the actual zero crossing is on the next sample AFTER the last one in your selection, so if you are putting a fade on the end of a recording you have to zoom all the way in and move the end point of your selection back one sample, otherwise the fade doesn’t quite reach zero and you might get a click. I’ve had really good luck with not getting clicks when I’m using record trigs to grab loops (the opposite of pickup machines, which almost always click or me) so I hadn’t stumbled on this before. I like to record without any fout or fin and then manualy add a really short fade to zero on the last waveform cycle of the recording so that it’s too fast to be noticable but the recording won’t click at the end, and then if I have a click at the beginning I just turn up the attack time in the amp page (not usually necessary since clicks at the start usually sound like a sharp transient rather than an actual click and are actually kind of nice on some things, like the old MPC trick of deliberately cutting off a few samples at the beginning of a kick to make it sound snappier)

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#10

Thanks. I do usually like this too : rec trigs, no fin/fout, amp atk, rel.
I even did overdub with Flex.
I’ll give Pickups another chance, had better overdub results sometimes, but with Flex you have direct full control of the recorded sample with one track.

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#11

The one thing that I really like about pickup machines is being able to record a loop of some arbitrary length and have the OT’s tempo automatically set itself to match the loop (or try to anyway), which is something that none of the other hardware loopers I’ve encountered can do and something I always wanted. Right now they’re just too clicky for me to use much but if they fix that I’ll definitely get a footswitch and start doing some live guitar looping with the OT, maybe with my old 2880 slaved to it for longer loops.

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#12

I had a Boss RC 505, working very well with OT, master or slave. Up to 3 hours recording (2 Go) on a micro sd card. I sold it because I wanted to concentrate on OT + A4, but it’s the best looper I had. Guitarist too.
Talking about fades, it works perfectly without clics on that machine.

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#13

Will it do the “match MIDI tempo to loop length” thing that pickup machines do? Overall I really like the one-control-per-function approach of the 2880 and that it’s more or less like a portastudio + mixdown deck, except that it’s digital and loops, but it would be really nice to be able to grab a loop while you’re playing and have MIDI devices automatically match the tempo of your playing, rather than having to set a tempo in advance and then play to that.

Honestly, as limited as it is my favorite looper is still kind of the old, silver Headrush I got for $40 years ago - something about how the sound gets grittier the more layers you overdub really sounds good to me (although the dry signal passing through it sounds kind of bad).

#14

Yep. RC 202 is almost the same, smaller, 2 tracks vs 5.

#15

Oh cool, I didn’t know that. I haven’t looked at new loopers in a long time. Back when I was doing a lot of looping, that was always the thing I thought was missing and nothing seemed to offer it at the time, at least not in my price range (I ended up getting the 2880 at a huge discount through a friend back before EHX tightened up its industry accommodation pricing scheme, so it was more like Line 6 DL4 price range, I think there was a Boss looper that would do it back then but it was like $500 and the size of a full pedalboard).

#16

Looks like @Supercolor_T-120 explained it, but my procedure for every recorded sample in the OT is to go into the audio editor, scroll to the front of the waveform, zoom in, function+move knob to first zero point, then I do the fade in a few times, sometimes maybe func+encoder to the next zero point and do the same. Then do the same for end of the sample.

Performing the fades a few times usually takes care of any clicking, and when I still hear it I move to the next closest zero point and do the fade from there.

#17

Must be the Rc 300 I had too. Quite good, no sync slave. Has to be master.

Maybe you should try what @Supercolor_T-120 suggested, move the selection one sample after/before…

#18

I do that, but find it’s not always necessary so I go with the lowest amount of fade first :slight_smile:

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#19

What I was after was a looper that would be the master, but would calculate its actual tempo on the fly based on the length of the first loop you recorded, which is exactly what pickup machines can do but they were the first thing I found that worked like that.

It’s funny, that was what finally made me get an OT (other than price, I was always kind of put off by only having two pairs of outputs instead of direct outs like the old MPC I was using as my main sampler and sequencer, but when I learned about that specific feature of pickup machines it tipped the scales for me. And now that I have one I haven’t even used a pickup machine since the first weekend I had it and that doesn’t even bother me, there’s so much you can do that they feel like just a nice bonus, but on paper they sounded like they’d be the defining feature of the thing for me. Lately I’m not even using it as a sampler much, I’m using it mostly for live MIDI step sequencing and effects.

#20

Just to be clear, I didn’t do any testing at all with fade ins, just fade outs, so I have no idea if this is an issue with fade ins. But it definitely made a difference with fade outs. If the selection I applied the fade to went all the way to the end then I was getting a loud click and you could see in the waveform display that the fade wasn’t quite hitting zero, but if the selection went to one sample before the end, it hit zero and I got a perfectly seamless loop.

I bet that applying multiple fades pushes the end of the fade down to zero eventually and achieves a similar thing.

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