Mixdown question
Hi all, am I missing a setting somewhere that would allow my mixdowns to include a little half a second silence or something before the track starts? It seems like Soundcloud (and other services) always seem to chop a bit off the very front of my tracks when I upload the audio files. Does anyone else have this happen?
If there is not a setting for this, is then the simplest solution to put in an empty bar or beat, at the beginning of every song I make?
Thanks in advance for any suggestions/observations 
Comments
You're right, soundcloud etc tend to skip the very beginning of a printed track for sure - by a few hundred MS.
There is no option to do so mixing down, however as you said you can put an empty bar at the beginning of your track. That's how i've done it for a while, but for different reasons - i'd record an initial timestamp or whatever in my voice to get the compressor primed and avoid squashing the first kickdrum with it, and then later on i'd just trim out all the nonsense.
Even Lumafusion cuts the beginning off of sound files.
You can add a time signature change, so you can add, for instance a 1/4 bar in front of your track. Or you can just drag the whole arrangement by any increment by setting the grid size if you don’t care about aligning the bars perfectly.
I just love adding those 2/4 bar fills so I use time signatures for everything.
Other than that, you can load the mixdown into the sample editor and copy paste a silent part into the start.
Back in “the day” running (the then midi-only) Cubase on the Atari ST it was common practice to leave a number of blank bars at the beginning of an arrangement - the urban legend being that it allowed the midi clock to stabilise before the arrangement actually began.
Force of habit means I’ve continued to do it to this day. Likewise I also always place my kick drum midi track as the first track.
Ah! Those were the days - producing electronic music using a sequencer from the mighty Steinberg that was just midi and had no audio tracks - and nobody complained about it! We just marvelled that we no longer had to compromise our creativity by bouncing our drum-machines and synths to audio thus allowing us to rearrange the arrangements, change melodies on the fly, even the sounds being used. Pure Creative freedom. Bliss!
Halcyon days, to quote the Hartnoll brothers 😁
Just in case you add empty time at beginning of track (*) - don't forget to disable option Trim start silence on mixdown page, otherwise Nanostudio will remove your created ampty space rom beginning of mixdown audio
(*) most easy way is double tap on empty area and then move all selected clips to let - just don't forget to move manually also track automations, unfortunatelly at the moment track automation is not following movements of clips automatically
Limitations can be pretty inspirative, if you look at them in correct way. Recently purchased Digitakt/Digitone and having a HUGE amount of inspiration with them. Digitakt - just 8 mono tracks but WHAT you can do with them ? Incredible. Pure magic, inspiration flows through me like river.
Thanks everyone for your great suggestions! I'm glad to hear it is a real thing and I'm not going crazy ;-)
I also grew up on MIDI sequencer + real synth, without anything more than a 32-character LED screen and a scroll-wheel to find all your MIDI events.... I don't mind not having to do that anymore, though... ;-)
and I definitely agree, that a limitation can be a fantastic provocation for creative inspiration.
In fact, I find myself often a little bit overwhelmed by too many choices when I open up NS ( or any DAW). Just finding a nice sound to begin with can derail my momentum sometimes! Perhaps that's why I often come back to the same few sounds when starting up a new project.
Thanks again for everyone who responded. It is really appreciated!
What a wonderful community here, I am always learning so much and I hope to contribute something back as I learn more and more about NS.
(I found that image on the internet, mine went to the digital graveyard many years ago...)
Still got mine 😀 and the tiny little monitor.
I doubt it will ever get fired up again, but I don’t think I could ever part with it. I learnt so much in that stage.
Mine’s long gone unfortunately. The ST had piggybacked memory if I remember as that was the only way to expand it. Yeah, having to learn the hard way to use ghost clips otherwise Cubase would run out of memory when my techno tunes got to the 6 minute mark...
Previous to Cubase/Atari we were using an Alesis hardware sequencer that in hindsight was a pain to program but - again - was a revelation when we got it which - again - suddenly provided a wonderful creative break away from the restrictions of having to manually commit everything to audio.
😊👍
Sounds like you’ve been at it a long time 😀
I piddled about with a 4 track, bouncing drum breaks from vinyl along with a little Yamaha synth sequencer and my sample one shots from a DJ mixer. Crude, but got me int this whole world.
Ha ha! Yeah - before the Alesis (and an Akai S950) we had a Fostex 4 track, a Boss Drm110 drum machine & a little Roland/Boss (I think) sampler pedal that could sample only 1 sample up to 2 seconds & you triggered the sample by stepping on the pedal. We had a lot of fun and experimentation with that pedal and 4 track, including manually triggering breakbeats to tape through entire sections of tracks (painful if you got to the very last bar & screwed the timing of th trigger up). Lots of happy accidents too!
In fact we toured the UK with both PWEI and Meat Beat Manifesto using those hand created backing tracks (no way we could play live with that gear at that time - just not possible so best we could do was play guitars, bass and vox live over those backing tracks bounced to a Sony ADAT we got imported from Japan!)
I remember chatting to Jack Dangers in the green room after our 1st gig supporting Meat Beat and he couldn’t get over the lengths we were going to to to accomplish wha we were doing back then! As a hero of mine I must have had a grin on my face the rest of the year 😁
Sounds like you had a great time back then. Still got my Babylon/Helter Skelter 12”
@TakkAtakk just out of curiosity, are you behind some well known project from '90s ?? Sounds like you have some experience and history :-))