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Never ever trust influencers. But I like to read the comments on their videos because sometimes you'll find an honest opinion there.

This is a problem with convincing people that music / audio production is a science and not an artform. It ain't just music either. This is the problem in graphic design, animation, videography, photography, etc. as well. These industries are about selling you gear. Everything centers around this objective. I would love to see a video where a review for an overpriced or redundant piece of music / audio gear was "You don't need this. What you DO need is to go outside and have life experiences. Then you'll actually have something to say using the gear you already own."

The motivation for influencers is foundationally about money and free stuff--from YouTube and developers for this industry, as well as the ego aspects of it. They are solopreneurs. It's a business. It's not about charity or a mission to help others. I'd put in the realm of a grift. An influencer works to build up trust and confidence in their integrity with their followers for the specific purposes of selling that trust to brands for money and products. They're really just salespeople for hire pretending to be journalist reviewers to gain and then sell people's trust and confidence in them; some are fairly entertaining and, I think, as long as you understand that it's a grift, that they're not going to be honest about what they're doing that there can be a level of value to what they do. That is, we can hear them demonstrate plugins and sample libraries like a salesperson would do in a demonstration. That is, what they're really doing. A sales presentation, an infomercial disguised as an unbiased review. I think if they just followed regulatory bodies guidelines, like the FTC in the US, and gave an upfront full disclosure of their relationship with the companies making the products that they're discussing it would make things much better. That is, more honest. For example, imagine if a popular influencer started their video with, "Today, I'm going to be reviewing XYZ''s Smushtopia Compressor. XYZ provided me with a free license for this compressor and 2,500 USD worth of their plugins and $5,000 in cash compensation for making this review video." That is legally what American influencers are supposed to be doing. But virtually none of them do it. Why? Because they realize that if they tell the truth they'll lose credibility with their followers. So they pretend to be unbiased. It's unquestionably dishonest. But it's the norm. Even nano influencers are looking for both free products and cash and getting it. I don't want to say his name, I like the guy, but one of the most popular influencers in this space was asking around 5k USD to do review videos 5 years ago and now his rates are a multiple of that. Small ones generally will work for free product with the hopes of making cash for doing paid walkthough videos for devs of products they "review. " So there's an incredible amount of bias to the point where you can literally call influencers freelance product promoters. That is exactly what the business is about.

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I don't see any ads on YouTube thanks to uBlock Origin.

See the video below. It is rare when a plugintube YouTuber comes around and admits it's all bullshit, but he did it. I appreciate the honesty where he says it was just for the money and that he has quit the whole show. Also where he says the YouTube algorithm is **** for these things. It's all about pumping out as much content as you can. Retention is always bad, so the only way to mitigate that is more and more content. Weaver Beats says the same thing, he makes daily videos because views drop after 1-2 days. I notice this myself on my jams (only after typing this Paul mentions him as an example). It's a no brainer but great someone finally said it, that they intentionally leave obvious stuff out of of review so people will comment which will push the algorithm. It's a long one, but very ontopic for this part of the forum. Mods, please relocate if not appropriate.

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Dealio. One of the best devs around.

https://bedroomproducersblog.com/2024/03/04/lotus-sound-mixharmony

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Lets hear one that involved an encounter with a professional musician and the comments they made . After my friend Brad and I picked up Joe Pass from the mid town hotel where he was staying and brought him to his Gig . I noticed Joe seemed to be acting a little strange . Normally Joe liked to enjoy a good glass of wine and a top quality cigar before a GIG backstage before his show but on this night he seemed noticeably off. I asked him what was going on and he told me his guitar didn't feel or sound right . So I opened up his guitar case , took a look inside and said "what the heck is this "? Joe looked at me with that look only a puppy dog would give you after he chewed up all the trash and redecorated the leather of you favorite pair of shoes and said " I tried a little experiment ! I wanted to see if cello strings would sound better than the brand of guitar strings I had been using on my guitar" .... I noodled around a little bit on his guitar and came to the conclusion these cello strings are not gonna work at all so I grabbed a set of his back up guitar strings and restrung his guitar as fast as I could backstage . It's a good thing that I did because when I got done he had about 10 or 15 min's free time left before he had to perform his show . So then Joe asks me to warm up and play his guitar and make sure they truly sound OK. So I launch into all my favorite imitations of what Joe Pass would sound like if he had no talent , was blindfolded , had one arm behind his back and had too much to drink 😆 After butchering a number of my interpretations of Solo Guitar Jazz Standards in the style of Joe , Joe told me he thought I sounded pretty good 😛 I knew he was shining me on but what he said next I was not prepared for or expecting ...He said "Kenny I don't feel good and you need to help me out . I'm not able to play or perform tonight ! Can you go out and play my GIG for me "? Right then and there my heart started pounding as it jumped up clear past my throat. I started shaking like a leaf in a tropical tornado . Then I looked down at my shoes with the tears starting to well up in my eyes and sheepishly proclaimed in a raspy whisper " I'm too young to Die .... The audience paid good money to see and hear you play . Not one of them even knows who I am and I might not make it out of here in one piece if I end up trying to do your show for you " The next thing I know Joe and his friend John were laughing their heads off ....They had set me up and pulled a whooper of a practical joke on me . Once the revelation set in I grabbed Joe , forced him into the bathroom stall he had back stage and tied him up with his own neck tie and left him there for the few mins he had left before he performed his show .... Oh man those were good times ...anyway the picture I have enclosed in this post has one of the two bottom shots from that GIG .. Bottom left Joe performing at another one of his Gig's . Bottom right backstage with Joe ..at the GIG from this story .His friend John on the left was a great guitar player and that's little ole me on the right ... Brad who took the lower 2 photo's is in the top photo . We are having a private diner with Joe before one of his Gigs. Whew !!! all the best Kenny

Update: Went back to Splat and ran a VST Scan; no issues, none! t

I just opened Home Studio and it has everything working. But then I won't touch a 32 bit plug in with a ten foot pole these days. For that I have an old W7 laptop and it's only to play one old project that used Warp Delay. Open that project in W10 ( or 11? ) and Cakewalk will crash. You should edit your title because I would not be pointing the finger at CbB just so quickly.

@sjoens Sounds like a "system issue" on your end. Hold on to your sphincters children, SPLAT is working fine here! (and to answer your question, CbB is up to date here) that is all... t

Well I wont change the subject to solved just yet, but after re-running the redistributables in Noels post, then I got a reply from addictive drums with instructions to turn off defender, uncheck a box called controlled folder access in security settings, delete certain addictive drums files, and then download the installer again with defender off, then I reinstalled addictive drums and it worked normally. 😁 I think I had downloaded melodyne last night and reinstalled it, but it didnt work right, but today after the addictive drums changes it did. Beyond me. So now melodic algo works right, I can edit/cut notes, they are where they should be instead of all in one long blob, I can enter note assignment mode normally. All seems well. My internet is currently at 40 kb sec which is crazy. Anyways, I will be seeing how this goes, and learning from the helpful posts. Thanks to everyone for the informative comments !

I've pushed a fix for this issue, but I can't give any time-frame as to when an update with the fix will be available (hopefully soon, but it's not my call). In the meantime, the old Insert->Soft Synth synth dialog will allow you to pick this option.

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I recently wrote a couple of articles on AI and its impact on marketing jobs. More than two thirds of marketing professionals at companies are using it and 89% of them are worried about their jobs. I couldn't help but connect that with a major study of heads of marketing who late last year 25% said they plan on layoffs in 2024 because of AI. It's impact is huge for online content. Everyone is at least using it to optimize content for rankings, some are using it to create content, or at least use AI as a co-writer. I've found it incredibly helpful to my own business. It's sped up the time it takes to produce content at least 10x and content is a major part of my business. It also has resulted in increasing the competition we have in search results by 10x. AI use has resulted in a proliferation of content -- much of it, not great. Youtubers are using AI in a variety of ways, including to help them gain greater visibility and revenue on YouTube by using AI tools for script writing, topic ideas, and trying to optimizing for YouTube's recommendation algorithm -- the reason Paul's video was more than 50 minutes and he urged people to stay through all of it (believe it or not, just saying that can improve results with viewers). From my knowledge of the plugin and sample library space, I find AI is largely beneficial to us as consumers. I think we're only beginning to see it impact content in this space. The quality of content is not necessarily improving. To give you an example of what's going on in the non video space, more and more, content is not only being produced with the aid of AI. I use AI for research. But then I also use it for analysis to determine how content is likely to rank. Last week I wrote an article I was thought would likely rank well in Google for targeted terms (keywords). Why? Google looks at the Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (EEAT) of the author/website/source and we've earned high marks, so our reputation with Google, our site's authority and the reputation of the author in the space (after that, there's a bunch of simpler technical things to nail down). Google's algorithm is smart enough to consider the reputation of the source, not just the article alone. I used AI to analyze the top 10 Google search results and tell me what was missing from my article. It came back with an analysis. I made some tweaks and within a short while, my article was number one to three on target keywords, the featured snippet on Google and the result in Google's GenAI for a targeted keyword search. Although, unlike YouTube, the reward at Google isn't instant cash, it's awareness of your website and visits. YouTubers use lengthy videos and techniques that get comments to get more attention, time, presence and finally more cash from the platform. Both YouTube and Google are incredibly competitive, but YouTube rewards the winners with cash. Consider that a popular YouTuber in this space will pull in 6 figures or more from YouTube and can easily command 4-5 figures from a developer for their "reviews" as well as lots of free products. Why? It's more effective and less costly than advertising to get that same impact. I can tell you -- to a certain point, because I have NDAs -- that I'm personally aware of influencer relationships for reviews that brands have paid upwards of 50k USD for and were viewed by most of the public as legitimate, unbiased reviews. You can probably discern that I'm not in love with influencer marketing and see it as an ethically problematic industry. But the unfortunate reality is that it's a part of business. Thankfully, my business doesn't use influencers as part of our promotional strategies.

The Fall - Oh! Brother

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Not a good deal. I think historical low is 3 for 199 and fifty percent off for individual.

I couldn't repro a problem rescanning in SONAR X3. It sounds like you might have a particular plugin that was causing the scanner to fail.

Deep Purple - Stormbringer

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have you tried removing that "module"? (i assume it's a 32bit VST) eta, it's a synthedit module, i'd highly recommend finding modern (ie, 64bit) alternatives for any synthedit plugins you're using /goodluck

Great instruments but still spensif.

Only for the crossgrade from Physion. Also, I jumped on this on release and thought it was amazing, but I have since not once found a need or desire for it.

I remember that feeling....still haven't reached any kind of destination though. Some days I sit in wonder at the world of possibilities contained in that small box in front of me, other days I could cheerfully chuck it out the window. That's just how it is. Some days you're the dog, others you're the lamppost. FYI in case you haven't figured it out yet the coffee house section is mostly just a stuff and nonsense area, so don't go expecting too much in the way of intellectual stimulus and you won't be disappointed. 😀

VX64 (and PX64) were both hidden/excluded due to instability issues. This may be resoved when the new Sonar is released.

Iron Maiden - Stranger In A Strange Land *2

Did you try safe mode? The empty project template may have a 32-bit plugin trying to load by way of BitBridge.

Why in God's name did you do that? Hopefully you didn't empty the recycle bin.

It's what allows it to do time stretching. Pro tip: don't go deleting DLL's that aren't in your VST folder.

Cakewalk by Bandlab is Sonar Platinum! Didn’t you ever realize that? And the new Sonar is just the latest version of Cakewalk by Bandlab. And paid or not, we all got free updates up until now. You didn’t if you ignored what was going on and stayed with Splat. The vocal strip is found in plug in manager under Excluded. I think they chose this because it’s old so is use at own risk. Seems to work fine last time I tried it.

Far as I can tell software works on all OS up to a point. When was W7 discontinued? I have the exact same version of Cakewalk on W7, W10 and W11. There’s absolutely no difference in the way it works. The only difference is every computer is obviously a newer faster more powerful computer. operating systems are the most boring part of all things computer wise. I’d even be oblivious if my computer was a Mac. I just don’t like the mouse.

I hear you. Frankly, I like Windows 10 better than Windows 11. Windows 11 messed with the explorer menu and I thought Windows 10 was better. Sometimes it seems like MS just makes changes for the purpose of making changes, rather than fixing problems. But if these changes are going to come down the pike, and if eventually Windows 10 is not going to be serviced anymore by MS, we do not need to know what is being planned. And of course, what if DAWs and other audio related software starts gearing towards 12? Will that matter to earlier version people?

Either my getting older and the effects of my pain medication including high dosage morphine patches are messing with my sense of time, but I think Microsoft should take their foot off the pedal for a while and work on what they got for a bit longer. I don't know, maybe it's just me.

Bad Manners: Special Brew

The Specials: Too Much Too Young

The Clash: All the Young Punks (New Boots and Contracts)

Definitely send a CDR to the bakers as this is specific to your system. I have tried every possible way to export a mix as MP3 (which is not my common workflow, I always export as WAV and convert post facto) and cannot recreate your issue.

Back in the aughts, when I was recording pretty regularly and posting the results on soundclick, folks in the old Songs forum said some nice things about some of my songs. I would copy some of those comments and put them on my SC 'comments' page. I got a big head from them and thought I was the "Next Big Thing" when actually I was just a thing. 😁 At some point, I copied that section from SC and put it in a document in one of my now-dead computers. At some point, I backed-up that computer, so here it is, direct from the dusty archives, reviews of some of my songs. "Never Going Home": Nice little tune. Rolifer I love the guitar, the tune, the thoughtful lyrics. Mamabear very thought provoking. Truckermusic very nice guitar work. CreatingNoise Wow, Greg. Very nice. It put a lump in my throat. RobertB This song definitely packs a wollap, (sic) Taylor_514C a very lovely piece. mstodge Beautiful sound on that acoustic and your voice fits this well. I'm downloading this baby!! This is the sound that I want to achieve. lhansen Wow! Simple yet very powerful. amateur Good atmosphere, nice tune. ascottdesign excellent, The guitar stlye (sic) you picked supported the story line very well. Nutty Wow! Such a lonely sound to the guitar and lyrics. Danley Very nice work. love the guitar on this. sound fx on this are really good. very nice indeed! Beagle This song is very powerful. I haven't been quite the same since I heard it. Its very sad, and evokes such contemplation as to be more akin to a classic of our time. BOBK Great stuff Greg - very powerful and very moving. SteveStrummerUK "The Girl Of My Dreams": Got a little beach boys vibe there. robby Wow! I really like this. Mamabear fun song. musiccontinuum Well written song with some sweet changes to make it sound like a fresh oldie. No How Wonderful harmonies on this doo-wop piece of music. Well done! lhansen Greg, you rock! Excellent song. tdye "Lost In You": This is a great song, Greg! Mamabear I like the tune. robby You have created a very stylized soundstage. No how Nice tune! nice easy sound. Beagle this is a great composition. Lyrics, melody, accompaniment, all done well. tdye Instruments, arrangement and soundstage sound pretty good. Paul Russell Some of the names might be familiar to old-timers. Hard to remember which song they're talking about if it's not mentioned.

One of the nicest things someone has ever said too me about my guitar playing took place at a small club I was playing in City Island NY back in the 90's . I noticed a young lady in her 30's who need crutches just to walk and stand . She had came out to see me play every time I did a GIG there which turned out to be about once a week . At the end of this gigs night she hobbled up to where I had been playing in the area where I was now packing up my gear she said " Can I talk to you for a moment " I could see it in her eyes that she was energized and filled with positive mojo so I bent over a little and leaned in to meet her at her eye and height level . She asked me if I believed in Reincarnation and I said" Yes I believe in that " . Then she put a big wide smile on her face and blurted out "When I die I want to come back and be reincarnated as your guitar ." I was like wow ! I can tell she had become super embarrassed because tuned redder than an ripe Apple and I did the only thing I could do . I leaned in and put a hug on her that to this day I wish I could experience again . I felt so much emotion stir up inside me for this woman at that moment in time and I asked her was she local and how was she getting home . She told me she lived around 3 or 4 blocks in the area and she had walked to the club. So I strapped my small Fender combo to my motorcycle and left it in front of the club . The I slung my guitar in a gig bag over my shoulder and walked her home . We stood outside the fence of the lawn where she lived under a tree and talked for hours ....I felt so much of a connection that took place in the moment that to even touch her or kiss her would have taken away from the whole wholesome experience ...I figured she had seen and knew how my fingers moved on a guitar and I didn't want to spoil the moment ! 😉 When the Sun came up I said my goodbyes to her . To this day I have always kept a place in my heart just for her . Kenny Why spoil it

I'm not sure this counts as a critique of the music but, in early 1984 we had just finished a gig down in Cutoff Louisiana. A group of guys approached and informed us that if we didn't keep playing, they were going to turn over our truck. We declined. So, a bunch of them lined up next to the 22-foot U-Haul and started rocking it. I doubt they would have been able to actually turn it over but, we played another couple of hours. Afterward those wonderful, enthusiastic people turned out to be very generous tippers.

Nice playing 😀 One comment you will never hear concerning these two musicians is " Nice Beards " Kenny

Thanks for the comments. I've figured out the problem, sort of: I have 2 of these VCA Compressors listed in Softube Central! (Never had one before.) Both the web page and iLok only show one. It works in CbB and another host. That's good enough for me Maybe someday I'll try uninstalling the one that's not activativated.

The words of Leonard Cohen always come to mind - You don’t really care for music do you? I found that out when I started putting my music online on MySpace in the early-mid 2000’s. Pictures always got a lot of hits, but the songs not so much. I soon realized that priorities in order were: fame, then looks, and only then music. Sometimes, months after they added you and sent a bunch of messages and commented on all your pics, you’d finally get a message about a song, like: wow, your stuff's actually good. I remember one girl who started by telling me what my new song inspired her - it was all cute, very romantic images, but the next few messages quickly shifted from romantic to lurid and downright explicit. Which I can’t complain about, can I? I did eventually meet her and she remained a supporter ever after - and to this day - sending gifts and all. But music was secondary. As with a lot of people. There needs to be something else that will incite people to actually make the effort and listen.