If you have a wav editor that creates named regions (is there one that doesn’t?) and FL Studio with the Beat Slicer plug-in then you may not realize just what a powerful, customizable beat-slicer you have at your disposal.

If you start with a beat (or voice track) or anything that has easily isolated snippets of sounds, you can mark them off in your wav editor, name them something meaningful to you and load them in FL Studio’s Beat Slicer to assign those names to MIDI keys.

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As a follow up the previous conversation, Eugene from RarLab sent us an email that sets the record very, very straight:

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I’ve been working on a big 30+ minute mix, developing it in several tools. So far I’ve been dragging the final mixdown wav into Sound Forge, splitting the regions into separate files and then burning all the files separately. This seemed slightly more labor intensive than it needed to be. (I reached for the “burn region to track feature” in Sound Forge, but it’s not there — presumably because that would obsolesce CD Architect.)

The better way to do it comes from Nero [via the Sony Pictures forums]:

I use MusicMatch for burning but I couldn’t find this “Split at Index positions” feature. It may be time to switch.

I know it’s a little snobby but it’s a little surprising when I run into musicians who don’t know about RAR.

It gets phenomenal compression rates on WAV and other uncompressed sound files. I often get to 60% of original size without any loss of data. (Compared with 95% with Zip.)

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The image to the right is a man saying “That’s scary.” In the middle is a big black bump where the t’s and sc all run together to make a big loud white noise in around the 3-6 KHz range.

If you EQ that range down you will be filtering out all sounds in that frequency, like hi-hats, finger snaps, the shimmer on the Rhodes, not to mention ruining that trippy reverb on the sample. What you really want is to dampen the range down but only when it gets above a certain volume — which is the definition of compression.

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Sound Forge 7.0 has been available for a month from Sony Pictures but it’s not obvious if this should be an automatic upgrade — especially compared to 6.0.

While many of the changes seem to be cosmetic and hardly worthy of a whole number upgrade, one in particular is very welcome indeed: it is hard to ignore how wonderful it is to have ACID’s file explorer now in the tool.