Shotcut Notes

Making video content with the free open source Shotcut video editing software

This is a reminder to myself about tips and tricks I use while editing videos in Shotcut. Yet again another piece of software that is jammed packed with everything you could possibly need, and since I only use it every few months I forget how to do stuff...

• Portrait mode: when you have landscape video that was actually recorded as portrait, to get it into portrait, apply the filter "Size, Position & Rotate" and use parameters something like position -420,420 size 1920,1080 rotation 90.
• Envelope audio volume/amplitude adjustments: add the filter "Gain/Volume" to the clip, select the clip, then click the stopwatch icon to enable keyframes. You can now double click to add points. Note that you can later switch from Timeline to Keyframes in the bottom left to re-edit.
• If you want to do more than just a fade out, say a variable opacity, you will need to add a black layer, File->Open Other_>Colour Black. You can then add Opacity to your video, click the stopwatch and set keyframes to envelope your levels.

Restoration: Cassette

A mate of mine pulled out an old cassette of a recording from the late 70's that he played on, and ripped it to digital, handed it to me and said "if you feel like a challenge, see if you can clean this up." I do like a challenge.

The songs were really well done - great old Gospel hymns sung by a talented dude, backed with piano/guitar/bass/drums and a Gospel choir - I could hear through the bad quality that they were pros. But yikes, how do you recover that? Armed with my ability to use an AI model to do isolation, I set about trying to separate the instruments and vocals. Clearly the model was not made for such recordings, it couldn't separate out vocals/bass/drums/other, but it did a pretty reasonable job of separating vocals and other. I then had a chat to the Chatbots about what is going on a learnt a few new things.

My main issues were the usual hiss, boxiness and lack of sparkle, but the two other things that bothered me was the recording drifting from left pan to right pan, and the times the recording seemed to be out of tune. Some other minor things like vocals too loud at times and the drums were so mashed into the mix they were barely discernible.

So far, I have used the following approach and the initial results are quite satisfying:

• Separate vocals from everything else. The lead vocalist, not a problem, but the choir sometimes appeared in the lead vocals and sometimes in the other. Kinda makes sense, it was a dense choir, it wasn't too bad I found I could volume envelope my way around most of it.
• Collapse both tracks to mono, then re-expand them with:
• a hard left/right two tap delay which gives a mud-free perceived stereo effect. Depending on the difference in delays you can tweak how much expansion you want. My ears can detect even a 1ms left - 2ms right difference, it's subtle but it is there. At 5ms - 10ms it is quite clear. >50ms is starting to sound cavernous.
• Magic 7 is my favourite reverb at the moment which adds spatiality, but also adds muddiness for me, so I dial in a room sound and then adjust the wetness.
• EQ - lows and mids: I found the bass was booming annoyingly and the low mids were too prominent. I used a normal EQ to get this more like what I wanted to hear. I wanted to do a multiband EQ compressor but I find them hard to use - I need to practise more - so where there were sudden thumps I used a volume envelope to contain them. It's brutal, but if you don't push it too hard I don't hear it "everything suddenly ducked". Hmm, I really do need to practice using EQ compression.
• EQ - highs: Cassette seems to rob us of sparkle. When I tried to push it back in I was just increasing the hiss. So I used a little bit of EQ in the areas that didn't sound like his, and a saturator to create more high frequency overtones to "artificially" add more sparkle back. This seemed to work okay - what else can you do?
• Compression and limiting to help smooth out the dropouts and dips. And this might just be me, but I like smoothness and consistency in what I listen to. I like swells but I don't like to be jarred. Dynamics in music is great, maybe my ears are already too shot, but I like only subtle dynamics, I prefer a consistent balance. I don't want everything to be the same perceived loudness the entire time...well, maybe I do a little :-)

I noticed while trying to sweep the EQ listening for what annoyed me that "it seems to ring everywhere!" When I chatted to the bots about it, it's all artifacts from tape. Head misalignment, tape speed inaccuracies and just the nature of tape as a data storage medium. I found a compromise...these recordings are never going to sound crystal like they were recorded with modern gear, my main aim was to remove the panning warble, to balance the EQ, some re-producing/mixing to smooth out the dynamics, and I had to accept pitch drifts and out-of-tune sounds.

"Old school analogue vibe."

Steve Slate VSX Listening Routine

What to Listen For, What to Check, How Do You Use These Things Anyway?

This is a reminder to myself about how to do a mix translation test using VSX headphones through the VST plugin, after doing the bulk of mixing in Linear Mode.

* * *

1. Linear (Flat / Microscope View)

Play 20–30 sec of chorus.

• Vocal loudness relative to snare/kick.
• EQ balance — no harsh spikes, no dull blanket.
• Bass vs kick separation.
• Sibilance / hi-hats harshness.
• Mono check (quick flip: does vocal stay centred? Does low end collapse?).

2. Mix Room – Nearfield (Producer’s Laptop Monitors)

Play the same section.

• Vocal placement — sits in the mix, not on top or buried.
• Snare/guitar/keys clarity in the mids.
• Kick vs bass relationship in 80–120 Hz.
• Reverb/delay tails — natural or sticking out?
• Small level tweaks (1–2 dB) often shine here.

3. Mix Room – Midfield (Full Mix Perspective)

Play verse -> chorus.

• Low-end body — kick + bass feel solid, not flabby.
• Stereo field — panning/reverb balance, no phasey wideners.
• Automation / arrangement flow — do transitions lift the energy?
• Overall size — not too thin, not boxy.

4. SUV (Car Test)

Play full chorus/bridge at a higher level.

• Vocals still audible? (cars bury them if too low).
• Kick + bass groove — too much boom or just right?
• Sub-bass control — does anything rattle or overwhelm?
• Harshness at loud playback — does the mix stay smooth?
• Does the song feel exciting/hyped?

5. SA-Pods (Earbud Reality Check)

Play chorus at low–moderate volume.

• Vocals cut clearly (lyrics understandable).
• Snare/guitar mids provide drive even if bass vanishes.
• Quiet-volume test — does the mix still feel compelling whisper-quiet?
• If it works here, it works anywhere.

What's happening Sep 2025

I have spent a number of weeks compiling an album. Nah, not an album from me, it is a live album, a production of originals showcased at my local church. There are 19 songs/poems, and many have introductions so the file count is actually 31. That's quite a lot of work. The styles were eclectic! From ballads to singer songwriter pianist to grunge to rock band. Each one I painstakingly reworked from the multi-channel recording from a trusty old M32 deck with SD card module added.

I had to think about stuff I don't normally have to think about - how will the songs all cohere together so they all sound like they belonged to the same event. I think some of that naturally happens because it is me mixing each one, and unknowingly I will already have a style that will carry through. But I considered how some of the quieter ones should sound quieter compared to the loud ones, but at the same time be just fine standalone. Some sort of album cohesion.

It's all but finished, which is great, because I've run out of steam for it... would be at least 50 hours invested to date.

To make my life harder while mixing all that, because of course you'd make life harder, I bought a set of Steven Slate VSX headphones. The ones which emulate a room, so you can say "this is what it would sound like sitting in a recording studio close to the monitor speakers. Or far away from the speakers. Or in a car. Or with earbuds." My youngest daughter kept stealing my Sennheiser HD280s...so I gave up and bought a set of VSX as my headphone replacements. They aren't as easy as they sound, it takes getting used to. Initially it just sounded like different EQ and different reverb. Which I guess it kinda is in a simplified sort of a way. Which is why it made my mixing more difficult, because I was now listening for other things.

I'm still getting used to them, I find I leave then in flat frequency response mode most of the time and only switch to a room as I'm finishing off a mix to see how it translates. It's interesting, well worth the effort. The sales pitch says "best mixes you've every made in your life" but I don't think it is that easy, it's not a silver bullet, I can see that they make a useful difference though. I just need to think differently, listen differently. Listen. Know what to listen for.

Meanwhile I play "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" twice or thrice a week. It would be around 7 minutes long at the moment - hmm, I should time it - okay, done, 8 minutes. It covers parts i-iv and end at the start of v, there are a few elements not included, but it's quite nice and definitely passes the pub test. There are a few more things I'd like to put in there, but history has shown the harder I make a piece the more likely it is to later fall out of my head and I stop playing it regularly. The song is already complicated, so I think if I'm going to do anything more to it - keep it simple! Well, "simple" is a relative term.

I've played it several times on my Friday work lunchtime hangout, there's one lady who stops past for a chat quite often, she doesn't recognise many of my songs because all she listens to is heavy metal and rap! The other week I played a few Metallica riffs, which she knew, I said I've work out something for her. "Enter Sandman" is a great Metallica song, I think we all know the intro, but I was sure I could do more than that. And you know what - I did - and not only is it relatively easy, but it sounds great! It is based on a listen through from Josephine Alexandra's cover, greatly simplified but still super cool. I even played it for my youngest daughter and she had a crack at it. I think that might be the highest compliment I can get - she hears it and wants to try it for herself :-)

Vibin' Reaper with The 'Bots

I still mix multi track recordings from my local church, I find it relaxing and therapeutic. The more I do it, the more I appreciate everything that is going on - music production, sound engineering, what to play, what not to play.

Early on, when I'd just started having a crack at Reaper DAW, waaay back in late '23, I realised that there are a number of processes that I was doing every single mix, so I created some scripting to get them done quickly. It served me well for nearly two years, but I still found myself doing other same things every mix, and while I put together some additional scripts, I still wanted to improve my workflow - the mixes I want to process are stacking up on my disk waiting for me. I want to spend more time on the creative process rather than the mechanical grind.

These days we have the LLMs - the ChatBots - and they code like absolute guru maniacs, I use them at work. When I started coding was a ChatBot wasn't a thing. Now it is.

So the first script I wanted created was the ability to look at a mix I had coming in, all the people involved, and apply my usual effects to each. In Reaper you can save an fx chain and then load it back up again on a different track. Pretty standard fare. Since there are around 20 people in the music team, each recording was a combination of fx...and I wasn't leveraging hard enough. I could come up with a baseline fx for each vocalist, guitarist, pianist, automatically load them, and tweak them from there rater than from scratch or manually copied from a previous mix. Especially the drumkit! Yikes, so many mics (never enough mics!)

I fired up ChatGPT5, and we got somewhere fast. It's one of those things, it has scraped enough of Stack Exchange and reddit to know about Reaper, and it understands Lua, the scripting language, so it has a good crack. But it's not instant. Oh no no no, you have to iterate and iterate and iterate some more. You get 80% of the work done in 20% of the time. A pretty standard rule in engineering I have found.

I ran out of Chatbot freebies, and firstly because I was being cheap, but secondly because I wanted to try other LLMs - I switched to Grok 4. Which Chatbot would do better?

I sent the code so far to Grok, and it changed some stuff, and improved it a bit more. Unfortunately, there was a lack of understanding by me, ChatGPT, and Grok, about a certain bit of functionality. None of us could fix it. Humans are still better than Chatbots - I can vouch. I forced it to rethink an approach to a section of functionality that no matter how many times it tried to fix it, just didn't work. I remembered having a similar issue when it was just me by myself. With Grok's help, we sorted it out. And then Grok ran out of freebies.

Again, being cheap but also wanting to see how the other side lives, I switched to Gemini 2.5 Flash. Not as good, but I didn't need much more, I was basically done. What I got it to do was remove fluff and tidy up the code, which it did admirably. "Clean up this code, simplify it, and I will test it and make sure it still works." "Okay, good one, still works, now simplify it even more, don't be afraid, we'll keep testing it." I was actually surprised how small the resulting code became.

I then passed it my old made-by-human script; I wanted a few enhancements. I gave me a "Very cute, nice try, I can see it works but it is full of bugs and poor coding techniques." Sure, it said it a bit nicer than that, kinda "good effort! here's a gold star!" and then ripped it to pieces.

But Humans for the win again! Even though it added in my enhancements and the code looked far nicer, it introduced an error, another "This Reaper API call is supposed to work like this, it doesn't, maybe this time. Maybe this time. Maybe this time." And I ran out of credits.

So, I gave Claude Sonnet 4 a crack. Quite different to the others, well, still a Chatbot, but it had a less-chatty more-codey style of operation. It wasn't fooled by the Reaper API - I did help it "Really, you need to think differently about this call, I'm pretty sure it's not going to work like you think, let's do some test scripts to understand the core functionality together AND THEN we'll put it into the main product". Claude surprised me, it felt like a coding buddy, and we came up with a great final solution. And when I said "TIGHTEN IT UP MORE!" it said:

  Looking at the cleaned-up code, there are a few potential improvements
  I could suggest, but I'd want to be careful not to over-engineer it since it's 
  working well now. But honestly, the code is in a really good state now. It's 
  clean, functional, and does exactly what you need. The improvements 
  [I suggested] would add complexity without much practical benefit. My 
  philosophy is: if it's working reliably and you're not planning major 
  changes, leave it alone! Sometimes the best improvement is knowing when to 
  stop improving.

That was good advice. I stopped, and my vibe coding for the day was done, and it will save me 10-15 minutes every mix.