Mozart: Symphony No. 35 "Haffner" / Abbado · Berliner Philharmoniker

Are you hard on your hard disk? Is the way you record damaging your system?

 An RP reader asks whether freezing tracks that use plug-ins is bad for your hard disk? Would it be better to bounce them?

By David Mellor, Course Director of Audio Masterclass

 

Here's a question from an RP reader...

"Actually, this is a response to your article about using as many plug-ins as you like. I'd heard about using this function in Logic. Experienced producers have said to me that this technique is extremely bad for the internal hard drive. The drive has to work that much harder that it won't last very long. I think that Ableton also has a freeze function. I have been advised to actually bounce the tracks instead of freezing them. Does anyone agree?"

Thanks, John, Amsterdam, Holland.

First let's recap on the freezing technique...

Imagine you have a song that uses loads of software instruments and plug-ins. You try to add another plug-in, but your computer is already working to its maximum so everything grinds to a halt. Some DAWs have a function where you can 'freeze' a track, which records the audio on that track to disk, complete with all effects, so that the system doesn't have to run the instrument or plug-ins on that track. You can unfreeze if you need to later on.

Freezing can allow you to get more from your system, but apparently it's bad for the hard disk. Can this be true?

Well we would have to say that only a well-conducted test would give a reliable answer to this. But we can certainly speculate what the outcome would be.

Let's think about what the hard disk is doing when you play your song...

Your song consists of a number of audio files playing simultaneously. Each file could be a continuous string of binary digits on the disk. However since all the files have to play at the same time, the heads of the disk drive have to skip about to pick up a bit of one track, a bit of another etc.

This is absolutely normal behavior for a hard disk. It's what you bought it for.

If you are playing by the rules and reserve a separate disk for audio, then software instruments and plug-ins don't affect that disk at all. They run from the system disk, and in fact hardly make any demands on that since they are loaded into the computer's memory.

But what if you freeze a track, what difference does that make to your audio disk?

Well, since freezing a track means recording it to disk complete with instrument and/or plug-ins, there's another track on the disk that needs to be played.

In theory, this should mean that the original track does not now need to be played, but you will find that in some DAWs even muted tracks consume system resources. Still, it's only one more track and this will hardly make any difference unless you really have a lot of tracks in your song.

So freezing shouldn't give the hard disk much more work to do, if any. What about bouncing?

Well bouncing is what you would have to do if your DAW didn't have a freeze function. And once you had bounced a track complete with instrument and/or plug-ins, it wouldn't be any different to if you had frozen it.

So our opinion is that neither freezing nor bouncing will affect the disk in any significant way.

What will affect your disk however is editing...

When you edit a track, you create a discontinuity in the data and the heads of the disk will have to skip about more than they did previously.

If you edit many tracks into a lot of short segments and shuffle them about, then the disk will have much more work to do.

Even so, that's what a hard disk is designed for. It is difficult to overload a hard disk with work because the manufacturer would have to be pretty stupid to allow that to happen. The disk will simply reach its maximum work rate then go no faster.

All that skipping about of the heads could shorten the life of the disk, but disks are cheap these days and as long as you have a backup or your data, it doesn't really matter if you have the occasional failure, say once every few months or so.

But...

Different people have different experiences. It is quite possible that we have overlooked something that is affecting the disk in an unexpected way.

We would love to hear your thoughts on whether the way you use your DAW can stress or damage the hard disk. Discussion below...

 

Publication date: Friday January 29, 2010
Author: David Mellor, Course Director of Audio Masterclass

Dvořák: Symphony No. 7 / Netopil · Berliner Philharmoniker

Famous concert pianist plays a wrong note!

 There are so many notes in a sonata or a concerto. Should we expect them all to be played correctly? Or is the occasional wrong note acceptable in the context of a performance of wonderful musicality?

By David Mellor, Course Director of Audio Masterclass

It never ceases to amaze me that concert pianists can play such amazingly difficult music without ever hitting a wrong note. As an amateur pianist myself, I really do admire this almost incredible skill. I say 'almost incredible' because I understand how people such as these practise anything from six to ten hours a day, and sometimes even more. Practice clearly does make perfect.

So it was quite a surprise to hear virtuoso pianist Lang Lang hit a wrong note in a section of Gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue, in the Diamond Jubilee concert of June 2012. And here it is...



You could say that it could happen to anyone. Well it could happen to me, it could perhaps happen to you. But this is Lang Lang. I don't actually know why this happened, but I can guess. My first feeling is that there was a little edginess in general among some of the early performers in the concert. Perhaps the monitoring wasn't quite right. Maybe there was some kerfuffle going on that viewers and spectators were not otherwise aware of. Perhaps Lang Lang hadn't prepared to his normal concert standard.

But...

Perhaps we have come to expect too much of our performers. In an earlier era of musical performance, wrong notes were commonplace, even among the very best pianists. Listen to recordings by Schnabel, Cortot, Horowitz - their performances are unimpeachable in terms of musicality, expressiveness and communication with the audience. And the occasion slip, in those days, didn't seem to matter.

But then recording took over from concert performance as the primary output for performers' talents. And although a few slips during a live performance matter little, no-one wants to hear the same wrong note over and over on repeated listening. Since the late 1940s it has been easily possible to edit several takes together into a 'perfect' performance. Indeed, even in the days of tape a typical classical recording would very likely have one or two edits in every minute of audio.

So perhaps we have become too fussy over fine details and we are forgetting about musicality. Lang Lang's trademark in performance is his exuberance, and anyone hearing him play comes away from the concert a happier person. For that, I'll forgive the odd note that went wrong, in favor of the many thousands that he plays so wonderfully right!

Publication date: Monday June 11, 2012
Author: David Mellor, Course Director of Audio Masterclass

Mendelssohn: The Hebrides / Heras-Casado · Berliner Philharmoniker

Can you sing and hula hoop at the same time? Grace Jones can!

I never thought I'd see synchronized singing and hula hooping, but I have now. And it demonstrates an interesting scientific principle that relates closely to audio.

By David Mellor, Course Director of Audio Masterclass


I would like to present this as an interesting demonstration of resonance. Resonance, as you may know, is a key concept in the theory of sound and it affects many of the processes we use every day in music production and sound engineering, both live and in the studio.

Please watch the video. You don't need to watch it all, you can skip through it quickly if you like..


I watched this live on TV as part of the Diamond Jubilee concert of June 2012, and I was fully expecting Grace Jones to put down the hula hoop after a few seconds, or certainly by the end of the first verse of her song Slave To The Rhythm. But she kept it up the whole way. Wow, I don't think I could do even a single full turn. Of course, her costume helps. But now the science...

The hula hoop works on the principle of resonance. Put a little bit of energy into the hoop every so often, and the hoop will gyrate easily. Get the timing wrong and the hoop will fall to the ground. And you will look an idiot.

So all Grace has to do, considering that clearly she has had a lot of experience in hula hooping, is give the hoop a little push with her hips every time it goes round, and the hoop will spin with very little effort.

But...

The hoop will only spin at the rate it wants to. The diameter of the hoop dictates its resonant frequency. So a small hoop will want to spin faster than a large one.

So how does Grace manage not only to keep the hoop spinning at the correct rate, and also sing in time with the music? The answer is that the hoop has been selected so that the rate of spin matches the tempo of the song. Clever. Well it almost matches, but the Q factor of the resonance isn't so high that Grace's rhythmic hip movements are too far off the required pace.

OK, so it's a novelty performance. But its an interesting novelty. Whoever thought of the idea perhaps doesn't wholly deserve a knighthood from the Queen, but I'd buy them a drink and hear their story about how it all came together.

By the way, if you want to learn more about the mathematics of the hula hoop, you might start here (if you have time on your hands)...

Coordination Modes in Multi-Segmented Rhythmic Behavior: The Dynamics of Hula Hooping by Ramesh. Balasubramaniam and Michael T. Turvey.

They won a Nobel Prize for that. (Er, actually an Ig Nobel prize.)

P.S. I said that the resonant frequency of the hoop was determined by its diameter. If you read the paper you will see that it's rather more complicated than that :-)

Publication date: Saturday June 09, 2012
Author: David Mellor, Course Director of Audio Masterclass

Dvořák: Symphony No. 9 "From the New World" / Abbado · Berliner Philharmoniker