Great Product for Me

After spending some time on this board it seems that I may be in the minority in that most of my music I restore is in pretty good shape. About 95 percent of it is in the LP vinyl format and just has your typical (slight) problems associated with the format. My main problem is (was) that I have a countless quantity of vinyl to restore. I haven't counted my vinyl in a while but in numbers in the thousands of LP's. So, while DC6 cleaned up my music perfectly, when Mentor came along I thought that it may actually fit my needs a bit better, since I don't have too many pieces of music that have major problems.

I have now completed 3 projects with Mentor and I have to say that for most of my restoration work, it is a perfect solution. It's straightforward, easy and plenty powerful enough for most of my restorations. And even if a particular piece needs more work, I can easily shell out to DC6.

I probably don't use the product as it is intended, but after the 3rd Album I got to be pretty darn proficient with the program and found a mode of "attack" that worked for me.

After recording the album sides, fine tuning the markers that Mentor automatically senses, I ran the cleaning/enhancing tools fairly conservatively over the entire sides, to where they sounded pretty good on all cuts. Then I hit the "ready for CD" radio button to chop the marked file into pieces. I THEN took these "chopped" files and moved them back into Bin2, where I could "fine tune" each of the individual tracks. I could make the beginnings and endings perfect and run the cleaning/enhancing tools that I set up for each track as needed. Then, I hit the "ready for CD" a final time where I could position my tracks as desired and burn the CD.

What I like most about the product, is that it is deceptively simple. You can use it as simple or more robustly as the situation and your time allows. Sometimes I just want a "cleaned up" copy of a favorite album to play in the car for a while and I wouldn't go through all the bother to put the tracks back into bin2 for the perfect restoration. Other times, I want the recording near perfect.

I guess what I'm trying to say in all of this in a very long winded manner... "Mentor is a great product for me"....

Thank you

GB

[Craig Maier]

Thanks, GB for that wonderful testimonial. We really do appreciate that.

And - your mode of attack is interesting. I am going to have to try using it that way. Thanks for the tip.

[Geebster]

No, thank you Craig for a product that works so well for my applications.

I just tried putting the semi-restored files back into bin2 as a lark, as almost always just one or two cuts from an album need more work than the rest of the album, especially if it was one I used during my Radio Days. I always hate to over process files, so this way you can use a light touch on the album as a whole and use more robust processing only on the files that need it. And also by doing it this way, you can make the beginnings and endings perfect using the trim tool within Mentor for each cut.

Doing it in this manner, I can safely say that I got some restorations that are every bit as good as DC6.

GB

PS. The files do take an instant longer to load once you remove the original files and put the files that were in Bin3, so the peak files can be loaded... but that is just a one time thing. If you have to revisit the files again in Bin2 they load instantly.