Having issues with tracks that begin with the drop.

storkus · Post by **storkus** » Thu Apr 03, 2008 2:39 pm

I've been having a problem playing tracks that have the first beat I want to play as the very first sound in the track. It seems to skip and stutter on the first beat. Songs with an intro are fine.

What I'm thinking is this:

The timecode starts at 0:00. Before that, there is no code on the vinyl, so when I'm trying to cue up, say, a kick drum at 0:00, it doesn't have any code before that time, to allow me to rub the vinyl over that kick. It goes from nothing to 0:00, and I need a couple seconds of silence before the kick to cue it up. When I try to drop it in, Ms. Pinky takes a half-second or so to catch up, and stutters to a start. This obviously throws the track off-beat and makes mixing difficult.

Here's my setup:
Vestax PMC-06 PRO
2x Vestax PDX2300
Maya 44USB (working great, despite others problems)
2x Generic phono preamps
Win XP Laptop, running 2 instances of Pinky Pluggo in a vst host.

I was able to make it work without phono preamps at first, so I didn't buy any. After I noticed this problem, I assumed that it was signal level issue, so I bought two, and it didn't seem to have any affect.

Please let me know if anyone is experiencing similar problems, or if there is already a thread on this topic. Any help is greatly appreciated.

storkus · Post by **storkus** » Wed Apr 09, 2008 2:33 pm

Really? No one?

Post by **dlpinkstah** » Wed Apr 09, 2008 9:57 pm

Yes, I know the issue and am looking into it. The observed problem is not caused by there not being enough control signal to "scratch over" at the very start of the track. We use the control signal in such a way that the first full turn of the vinyl is a buffer zone so that you have plenty of control signal to scratch over the very first part of a loaded track.

The problem is actually caused by an MP3 frame indexing bug. Until I fix this bug, there are several other choices for a solution:

1) Re-save the problem MP3 files in new MP3 files which have inserted a small snippet of silence at the beginning.

2) Save the problem tracks as .wav files and scratch those instead.

3) Make sure that you don't have the "file loop" check-enabled in the little drop-down menu in the file player region. For some reason, having "file loop" on will make this problem worse.

storkus · Post by **storkus** » Thu Apr 10, 2008 2:29 pm

Ahh, thanks so much for the info. Is it a pinky pluggo problem, or does it affect ms. pinky software across the board?

Do you have any recommendations for free software that can either:

A: Add a few seconds of silence without having to reencode the mp3. (I've found ones that can CLIP time off of the track, but not ones that can add to it.)

B: Losslessly convert batches of mp3s to wav.

Thanks again, and I look forward to seeing the fix!

storkus · Post by **storkus** » Sun May 04, 2008 10:29 pm

Dlpinkstah: Any progress on getting this fixed? It's holding me back from using your great software, and I'm starting to become disenchanted. I just can't justify having to convert my entire music library to wav.

Please please please make this a development priority. I will donate if I need to, just let me know.

Having issues with tracks that begin with the drop.

Turn off "file loop"