The Pool V5 in Cubase 12

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The Pool V5 in Cubase 12

hello everybody andrew blake from thedigitalaudiomanual.com today we move on to our fifth video as we discuss the pool in cubase 12. but before we start i want to remind you that there's a link below to the free content navigation guide which is an easy to navigate webpage with links to all the content on this channel and besides that in the near future i'm going to begin adding tips and other bits of information that will only be available there you know things like simple steps that will get you started and up and running quick things that are in the videos but are written down in simple steps that serve as quick reminders when you need information down the road if you're working with programs like wavelab or cubase plugins or the cable guys shaperbox2 and many many other projects that are in the works then i know you're going to find just like i have that this is an invaluable study aid and the other thing i want to make sure you understand is that this is not a simple pdf this is a constantly updated page that has any information that is new or anytime videos are changed really anything updated and once you have it you will always have the latest information constantly updated so if you haven't gotten it already go to the link below click on it and save it to your favorites it's my gift to you and it's absolutely free okay so let's get started so continuing on with our discussion of the pool we've been talking about it for a while now previous videos are all in the navigation guide in the link below but we're going to lead off today talking about import options dialog and the concept here is that when you're importing files something happens when you have different file sample rates now if you know what sample rates are then nothing to say but if you don't know this is the kind of stuff that may drive you completely insane especially in the early days so let me give you a couple examples and then i want to go into a little bit more explaining it as we've been saying in the pool when you're looking at it you have these pictures over here on the right that actually allow you to play the file so if i click on one of these pictures the file begins to play and it's playing the way it should it sounds right basically and you'll see what i mean by right in a minute if i click any of these what i mean by right is it's uh in tune and it matches what you would think it's going to be as opposed to let me demonstrate something here let's go ahead and bring another file in i'm going to go up to this button that says import click on it it's opening up a file on my computer somewhere and has more audio files so i'm just going to take a song out of this bunch and i'm going to double click on it and i'm hit with a dialog that's basically telling me okay you can bring this in but there may be some changes you want to make to it for now i'm not going to make any changes i'm not going to make any of these selections that they've offered me here i'm just going to hit ok and it imports the file in this case it's highlighted in the pool here and if i go over to the picture and i click on the picture it basically sounds like you know a cartoon character singing the song because it came in at a different sample rate than the project and this is what will happen when you start bringing in files that are at different sample rates so that begins the discussion you know what does that mean different sample rates let me show you a couple things number wise when we look at this list if i go in the middle here and i look down this list most of all the files here show a number 48 000 hertz 4800 hertz this new file that i brought in says 44 100 hertz so the numbers are different if you know again about this kind of stuff then you'll just obviously know what this means if you don't just understand that the numbers are different one says 48 000 one says 44. if your sample rates of your audio are different they call that mismatched sample rates you get that you know in projects when you do this when you bring in audio from different places than maybe where you started or sample packs or any number of things you get audio that sounds one way that's in the project and another way from a mismatched sample and that is basically a problem because you can't use it you know i mean or at least you got to go through a lot of hoops to convert this and change it so let's back up and talk about the roadblocks and the signs that lead us to this so we know what we're doing the first thing i want to call your attention to and go up to the top of your project and there's a actual menu that says project i'm going to click on that guy and i'm going to scroll all the way down to the bottom and there's an option that says the project setup when i click on that this now shows the things that either have been set up by default or things that i have set up that apply to every project that gets made in cubase and in this case if you look down at my particular stuff down in this record file format i have the sample rate set at 48 000 hertz and if i have a drop down list here that i can change it to any number of things depending on what i want and everybody kind of does their own thing here depending on what kind of quality they want or what they think is going to make a difference mine i have set at 48 000. so what that means is now every audio file that i create from here on out in this project is going to have that number of 48 000 hertz associated with it in other words it's going to create all the audio files at 48 000 hertz if you've never looked at your project setup window this is something you may want to take a minute to investigate so that you understand how your projects are being created stored and saved as you make projects in cubase just go to again the project and then the project setup and investigate those options make sure they're the way you want them to be so i'm going to close that screen out now i'm going to remove this file that i just imported in because i don't want it anymore i'm going to hit the backspace button i'm just going to hit the option that says remove from pool which is typically the only option you want to use most of the time and now we're going to do it again i'm going to go back up to the import i'm going to click on it i'm going to bring that same file in again double click on it and now i'm going to look at these options that i'm hit with before i do anything and the first option up here says copy the file to the project folder well that's obvious you want to leave that because you want it to show up in the pool and you want it to be here that's the whole reason you're doing it but now these next options are the ones that make the difference the first one says the sample rate and it's telling me that my file is at 44 1 but because my project is at 48 do i want to convert it from 441 to 48 i'm going to say yes but again this also begins the discussion of when you up sample files you know when you go from 44 up to 48 are you potentially affecting the sound quality of your file this is goes beyond the scope of this video that's something we're going to have to address at another time but for simplicity's sake and for the sake of bringing them into the pool and being able to use them we're just going to go ahead and go this way so i'm going to check the sample rate and say yeah i want to change it to that the next option gives me the bit depth which is also different we didn't discuss it but in this case it's going from 32-bit to 64-bit i'm going to say yeah go ahead and change that you have an option if you want to split the stereo into two mono files for whatever reason and now i'm going to say okay and do it it imports the file now i'm going to go to the picture of the file click on it and now it's playing correctly in other words the voice is the way it was recorded and everything is the same so now i've been able to successfully import the file into my pool and i can use it in my project and everything plays together the thing to notice now as we look at the info again all these numbers were 48 000 and if i look at my new file it also says 48 000. so cubase when it brought this file in changed these sample resolutions automatically for me and now everything is the same as it needs to be so now brings up the question do you want to go through that every time you bring in a file or would you prefer to just have this stuff happen automatically i can tell you for me 99 of the time i just have it happen automatically i know that when i'm bringing in a file i'm going to want to use it i'm going to want everything to convert so you have two options let me show you very quickly the first one if we go back again and do the same thing we did import the file pick the file in this case it remembered all the different checks that i made so i don't have to recheck them but there's an option at the bottom that says do not ask again and if i check that now when i say okay everything is going to import and the next time i do it i won't get this dialogue it just is going to assume that that's what i want to do and that's what i would normally do i just pick that now another place you want to be aware of this and how you can change these decisions that you make when we go up to this menu at the top that says edit and we move on down to preferences as we look through this list of stuff at the very top you have an option that says editing and right below that it says audio if you highlight the editing to audio and then you move over on the right you basically have that option to turn that that kind of stuff on and off in the preferences so if you look down here it says on import audio files open the options dialog box so the way it's set right now it's telling me it's going to open those options up again if it's that one or a different one or any of these other ones so so if i hit this down arrow and i go down i say use settings so i click on that guy then i have those same options that came up copy the files to the project folder convert to the project settings and i leave those checked and i go down here i hit apply and i hit ok forever after now when i go up and i hit import and i pick my any song out of here and i double click on it it automatically is going to import with no fuss and really not ask me anything and do all the conversions everything necessary change it to the in my case the 48 000 hertz and we're done another thing i want to show you and helps for your organization purposes you can create folders and import your files into those folders a lot of times you can see we have a long list of stuff and if i keep bringing in files maybe sound effects or other files pretty soon i have lists and lists and lists of stuff it's very hard to you know see what i have and and get to it on the other hand if i right click in this area somewhere and write down in the middle somewhere i have an option to create a folder i click on that i can call the folder something if i want when you click on these folders when they're first created you can't open them or they won't open like you would expect them but you can highlight them and that's what you want to do is highlight it now when i go back and i do the import which i'm going to do let's say i take you know 10 of these songs i can click one hold shift and go down to some other number so i have this huge amount of you know songs that i'm going to bring in in this case i'm going to go down to this option that says open in the bottom right hit it and all those songs are being imported as individual files now and then ultimately they all get put into that folder organized for me so i don't have to like fool around or wonder where they are now i can click that folder to open it and shut it so this whole subject of regions i would say i'm not going out on a limb too much by saying most people most cubase users probably probably do not utilize this feature and the concept of this feature is where you can take an existing piece of audio or loop of some kind and extract various sections of it as regions and then you can use those however you want with the pool you have some options to access these regions that lead you to want to use them a little bit more let me give you an example so if i over in my media browser if i drag a loop onto the project and then i have this typical tribal loop that we've used before if i solo it you hear it so now if i double click on this piece of audio loop which now opens up in the sampler editor and if we take this option of regions and make use of it and the option of region is when we take a little piece of this audio let's say we take this piece here and we go over and we create in the right area this region area create a region and then maybe we take another little piece of audio from another section and then hit this create region option if i close this sampler editor down and then i go back to the pool and i locate that piece of audio loop right next to it is a plus button which now shows those two little regions and these regions allow you to now use these smaller subsections of the loop however you want which in itself is is just a really great option like if i pick this first region that i created i can now drag that into this project and now i have that little piece of audio that can now be played on its own which is great i mean fulfills any number of things you could use this but the thing is because it's a region when i double click on this it remains referenced from the original file so here's this loop that it came out of and it still shows this region so that's kind of like a double-edged sword in some ways that's great because it's less audio and you can just use this little piece in other ways you may want to do some more severe processing to this little piece of audio and you don't want to mess up the original loop that it came from so that's where this pool has other features that that aren't so obvious but you can use for example if i go to that region that we just created and it's still highlighted here if i right click on it there's an option in this list down where it says audio and again there's a bunch of options from that but at the bottom of that there's an option that says bounce the selection and if i hit that it prompts me to put it in some kind of folder i could just say the audio folder select it and now it has created an audio file separate from that original region which now i can use to do whatever i want to with for example if i go to the new file that it just created i can now drag that up into the project and now i have this little piece of audio but when i double click on this it's its own little file it's not associated with any previous loop so i've been able to now basically extract this small piece of audio from the loop so i can do whatever i want with it going further let's say i take this second region and i drag this into the project so now i have these two pieces of audio which i can arrange however i want and then maybe bounce them together ultimately coming up with a completely new piece of audio from the original loop and maybe if i add a little bit of effect to that i wind up with something like this but it all stems from the fact that you can take an existing loop or piece of audio create regions which are little pieces inside that loop or audio and then in the pool you can manipulate those regions into separate audio files and take them even further all the audio that gets recorded into the pool gets recorded into the audio file of your project and that's marked up here in the pool it says audio and there's a red mark next to it to kind of designate it if you would rather make some kind of sub folder just to organize stuff if you right click anywhere go down to where it says create a folder give it a name if you want and then to make that folder become the recording folder if you go over there's a column here that says status in mind it's a couple of over unless you've changed the order if you go down into the status and just click in that column it puts the word record in there and then it puts a red mark on that folder now that folder is where the audio is going to get recorded if you want to change it back it's as simple as going back up to the main audio folder going over to the status hit the status and it says record again we talked about importing you know external files into folders but you can also make folders inside the pool and use them to organize if you want i created a folder down here that says drum folder at that point i can just select multiple other files click them and drag them down into that folder and then i have an organized folder of whatever i want there and last thing we'll talk about today is you can actually add uh offline processing to sounds so let's say i take this clap here and i want some reverb on it so while i'm in the pool i can right click on it i can go down to the audio and write to direct offline processing at that point i can figure out whatever effect let me add a room works to it so there i go and then i can change the settings on the reverb right there if i want and that takes up like hardly any processing power and it's applied right to the clip all right so there we go moving along pretty good here on all the different options in the pool in cubase as always if you haven't grabbed your navigation guide be sure to grab that before you go has links to all this content ever growing free to use and it's there for study and it's there to review so the region option in the pool is definitely something to investigate and you might want to try putting a couple clips in there open your sample editor create a few regions and see what you can do that's a skill that could come in very handy on making fills and various other things and the whole point always being that you know when you're going to create stuff you don't want to have to be wondering how to do it you want to already know how to do it and just let your creative self take over as always great to have you guys here i'll see you on the next video