Quite often I record classical music in churches and for that I bring my Zoom -F8.
The memory cards seems to be formatted in FAT32, which makes blocks of 2Gb or so.
Depending on the number of tracks, this will give me a good chunk of time before the recorder starts a new block.
I usually import the tracks in bulk in Harrison Mixbus 32C. (88,1Ks/24 bits)
This works flawlessly but is a bit of a pain to import the tracks and 'stitch' them (merge) end to end.
So I found that Acoustica makes this real easy! with no glitch whatsoever, I simply open a new session, import the tracks and voilà! Then import this aggregate in Mixbus and hop I go!
Now I found that on the last project, I recorded the performance on 5 tracks (52 musicians and 35 voice choir in a nice old church). So I imported the tracks and my options for such is 5 tracks surround.
My track list was named after the placement of the microphones.
In this case we had to compromise the placement of the choir vs the orchestra, and the shape of the church. So the orchestra ended up front with a rather large spread, and the singers were a bit crammed together at the back.
In the room, live, it sounded fantastic!
But for recording I had to place an ORTF pair behind the conductor, as usual for me, and a microphone on each side but aimed at the choir.
There was also a mic in the middle for a violin soloist, which actually added a nice warmth to the whole thing.
So my tracks were named Left (side mic), CenterLeft (ORTF), CenterRight(ORTF), Right(Side), Solo (Middle)
By playing with the pan pots on the F8 I was able to construct a very good stereo image.
Now here is a question, I don't mix to surround, so in what order the imports place the tracks in the multi-tracks session?
Somehow once transferred, the stereo image is there but very confusing. This is hard to explain but I was expecting the brass on the left, the woodwinds on the right, they are there all right but now it is quite difficult to pinpoint their localisation. A problem I don't have while listening to a stereo output from the Zoom in my monitor system, not headphones...
I tried the tool that widens the stereo image but I found it was making 'phase funnies' and rejected this option.
Any comment?
Thanks, Luc
