marcL

Thanks Larry! First I got the Lindell 254E (I like this one, it is really large enough for my old eyes! 😄) and then the SPL Vitalizer, each for $11.25 ($9.00 + 25% vat).

Just one thing: Did you know that the guy on the left side had some years of education/training in Switzerland, in Europe? Sincerely, I don't joke!

Your luck, it seems you don't live in Europe!!! 😁

This is exactly one of the reasons that I began to extract plugin installer content to a folder (most time with innounp.exe), delete what I don't need and create then a zip file to install the plugins by hand on my PCs. Runs perfect for most plugins (without garbage: Avid, menus, uninstallers, ...). This way I had also the possibility to have one central docu folder (with provider subfolders) where I really find the plugin documentations (because in one place). Of course, I have to uninstall by hand, but I have found out that this is the much cleaner way!!! 😄

It is just a sign where the patronizing of the software users can lead to! It is somehow the same if software companies create installers that download really big packages from the internet and delete it after installing, so that the user has no chance to use it on a 2nd pc, or if they install a lot of bloat that is not really necessary (e.g. menu entries, program folders, ... for plugins). It seems the software user is more and more victim of the developers!

Have you really read what I said? You can read a lot about that in the internet and even on this and the old Cakewalk forum! And I have noticed such config changes several times, instantly I remember 3 times reset of touch pad disabling, 2 times reset of deactivated wireless adapter, 2 times reset of registration settings and the newest one (1903): suddenly grouping of some folders by date (download...). and so on I think it is not worth to go on argumenting for some guys that look with blue eyes at Windows 10! They will/want never believe even the most obvious issues. I am not an Apple groupie, nor a linux enthusiast, because I TRY to rate all of their advantages and disadvantages! I prefer Windows over Apple, because it means more or less free hardware development/prices and linux has never really passed the step to a competing desktop/laptop system (just used in the server market). In general, I really believe in the gain of open criticism, blue eyed loyalty led to the worst things on this world in history! But it is very modern to shut people up!!! 😥

Still there are many people not distrusting cloud software! Ugh!

Me, I am such an ignorant guy! 😁 On 2 computers I have run Windows 10 from the beginning, but on a new one (recording only) I decided to use Windows 7 based on my experiences with 10!!! The main reasons are: the major updates of Windows 10 ... brought rarely improvments for a DAW user, but more network and phone stuff always changed back a lot of settings and you don´t know what implemented some "features" and additional bloatware (that I hated) made the system slower (except 1903 that restored a bit of the initial speed) force the requirement of new hardware on and on (I am glad that I do not get older myself as fast as Windows 10 hardware!) Windows 10 updates and inconveniences costed me a lot of time The advantages of Windows 10 over 7 for a user like me are very minimal (there are a few), many things are only different, not better IMO!!!

A MIDI file only stores some sort of "playing", but there is no sound attached to it. You have to assign/attach a sound source (in your DAW) that should perform the "MIDI playing". The sound source can either be a VST instrument (VSTi) or a physical instrument (e.g. synthesizer, drum machine). In the early days MIDI was invented to record the playing of a keyboard player, i.e. what keys he is pressing in what time intervals and how hard he is pressing (time position/note pitch value/velocity).

I think it's obvious, the companies try to make money by bringing no substantial changes. That's the idea of subscriptions! If they would develop valueable changes there was no need to invent new sale models like subscriptions, because the customers would be interested in having the new versions anyway. But those minor overprized modifications are difficult to sell, who wonders? As I said once before IMO subscription prevents somehow that the customers are able to rate the product progress, because they have to pay wether they like the changes/improvments or not!

I totally agree! You cannot "learn" music and all other kind of art like science. Maybe you can learn some basics about chords and arrangements in school/university (as I did), but it is not the key to write brilliant songs and arrangements! Also, it is not the only thing just to do it different than everyone else. It requires a lot of intuition and phantasy. Me too, I learned a lot of listening and analyzing my favorite songs. But I/we began immediately to do it in our own way. In the beginning it was much easier to play the songs of our idols, but then we were persistently working on our own songs until they came to life! So the playing ideas of my band mates have influenced my songwriting and arranging, too.

I really don't like the standard location for plugins 😖, because a) if forces all your hosts to have the same plugin list! (e.g. I don't need all my plugins in an audio editor or I want to avoid plugins that make trouble for one host only) b) some plugin providers put their plugins directly into the VST3 folder (no subfolder) and if you have a lot of plugins this is really a mess having all in 1 folder. Additionally there are hosts that do not have a great plugin manager like CbB and for them it is sometimes an advantage to have a folder-organized plugin directory. Yes you can do it in the VST3 too, but because it is a "standard" location many installers do not give you the chance to define a subfolder location!

I don't know if it had not been possible to implement an ARA specification that was based on VST2 instead?! And you must admit that there are not many examples of plugins that really profit of VST3! 😁 There are even big plugin companies like NI that do not support VST3 until today!

Thanks msmcleod! I forgot to mention that when I compared the "Shared Plugins" of my systems lately, I found some differences although they have the same CbB and Splat versions. For some reason, most surely my fault, they ended up to be different. It is also possible that the installation order was not the same, but I really don't know.

Yes, maybe you are right. But IMO the conclusion that it would be a QA fault is not quite correct, because a user may have only a problem in combination with his PC, operating system, configuration, interface driver, plugins and the DAW. So they can test a new release as long as they want, but they never will be able to verify all possibilities! Hence, in such a case it would be a great parachute for the user, minimum to postpone the trouble till there is time to investigate the real problem. "It will simply never happen": It happened actually, you were able to rollback Splat with the Command Center to any release back! I liked it.

One thing that concerns me are the changes in the "Shared Plugins" folders and there are more candidate folders to be mentioned ("Vstplugins", "X3Vstplugins", ...). Are they compatible with older CbB versions, Splat, X3? I wonder, are there surely no side effects? Second, I saved the installation executable of most versions. Can't I uninstall and then install such an old version? Is there a caveat?

I totally agree, IMO VST3 was more targeted as a randy thing for the developers than as an improvement for the DAW users. In the contrary, in many cases the existence of 2 plugin versions (4 if you add 32-bit) makes the chaos complete! The whole handling of plugins would be so much simpler for the users and for the developers of DAWs and plugins, if there was only one version! Now you may have noticed that also me is just venting and that does not help Paolo either! But I have to mention that I also had once a problem with a plugin's VST2 version (TH3) in combination with Splat and a Focusrite interface. Yes, you hear right, only the combination of all 3 components caused the crash! When I used my Behringer interface or another DAW the crash did not happen. But at that time I could leave the thing pass, because actually I wanted to use plugin as VST3 and it was my fault that I used the VST2 version. Although there was really a problem with the Focusrite driver in combination with TH3 and Splat. For this reason I really like your formulation below Starship Krupa: And how does that opinion help the OP? Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't, and sometimes it's a grey area. One thing I suspect, if the OP were to post this screen grab in the plug-in manufacturer's forum, the chorus of "Sektor works just fine in every other DAW" would be deafening.😂

I cannot explain exactly what I do not like with the 3.x versions, but I have downgraded to the 2.x versions with what I feel more comfortable! I don't like those inaccurate new controls on the main panel (reminds me of Facebook and Google) and I feel that they included too many things/functionality in the new version. I just need a guitar or bass Vsti, not an every purpose plugin, where I always have to check whether I have disabled all the superfluous stuff! IMHO they have overshot the mark considering instrument plugins for DAW use. To me it looks now more like a standalone play tool!

I write this not because I want to mention a bug. Essentially it is not one, only a difficult to understand "feature" for the DAW user and I stumbled about it yesterday. I like Cakewalk's Plugin Manager and working with my plugin menu layout a lot. Since about a month ago I have begun to edit my layout only on my laptop in CbB and use it in all CbB and Sonar instances, also on other computers. So far that runs fine, even if there are not all the plugins on each PC! In the past I had a layout for each PC , CbB and Sonar and I updated the layouts in parallel, how labor-intensive! So just coping /linking the layout saves a lot of time and reduces mistakes. But then there was that transient plugin that was grayed on my studio PC (SleepyTime Transient). First, I thought it has to do with the renaming (I had to rename this plugin in the Plugin Manager, because there was another "Transient" plugin). I tried a lot of things to fix the issue (without resaving the layout on this 2nd PC). No success! One thing that I had noticed from the beginning is that the CLSID of the plugin was not the same on the different PCs. Searching on the internet I found out that the CLSID is a unique plugin ID generated by Sonar/CbB based on the DOS file name (8 characters + extension). The old thread talking about it (look more at the end): http://forum.cakewalk.com/SOLVED-How-to-solve-the-quotCakewalk-Missing-Plugin-StandInquot-error-m3258647.aspx So it depends on the install order of plugins with similar name (or in my case the missing other plugin) what DOS name they get (e.g. TRANSI~1.DLL, TRANSI~2.DLL, ...). Knowing this, I removed the plugin above, created a pseudo plugin with similar name on the same folder, copied the plugin back again and removed the pseudo plugin. Voila, now the DOS name was TRANSI~2.DLL as it had to be and it appeared in the layout again. Success! By the way, you can display the old DOS file names on a command prompt with "dir /x".

Many thanks Noel and Cakewalk team! I really esteem your effort fixing many of these annoying issues! This has been a real burden for me, although it is (was) not a big issue (but happened all the time), but because sometimes I forget about it and if the copy clip was not on the current visual page, I had not a visual feedback of the bug!

John, some things that I have "learned" from professional mixes are: Always cut the low end of your reverb instances and not too hesitantly! Cut cut cut the low ends of most of your tracks (except the bass OR the bassdrum). For me it was like a wonder when I had noticed the first time that to take away the low end of an instrument makes it often louder and clearer in the mix!!! To create space do not only add extensive reverb to some tracks (as I did some time ago), but rather set some tracks to the front left and right side (so like in a semicircle arrangement). A space perception has to do with the DIFFERENCE in distance that you hear. I always had thought that there was nearly no reverb on the vocals on Beatles albums, but then I found out it is the contrary. They gave a lot of reverb to the lead vocals, but always set some instruments on the left and right side near the listener (nearly with no reverb) that really crop out the vocals and give the illusion of space.

I use the Alt+MouseWheel for quick horizontal zooms. To make this possible I changed "(Track) Options > Mouse Wheel Zoom Options", i.e. I set Horizontal to a chosen value (e.g. 1,5) and Vertical to 1. This does it perfectly for me! NOTE: With this the zoom is not centered to the now time, but the cursor position!

Cool, like that the take lane copy bug does not appear (that a clip is being removed from the original position when copying to the same position on another lane)! On the other hand if you have a lot of take lanes and you want to copy a clip to another lane that is not visible, then a normal Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V is more convenient IMHO. By the way there is also a similar bug when you want to import a clip into a chosen take lane with the right click menu! In this case it doesn't matter which take lane you select or on which take lane you open the right click menu, the target take lane seems to be randomly chosen! Even worse, if you import another clip it often overwrites the first one. This is very annoying when you want to import a bunch of clips for comping. The only way I have found to do this correctly is to drag the clips into CbB instead of using the right click menu. But as I like to use right click menus I often forget about this bug!!! 😁 Well, I think there is a lot of work to do on Take Lanes by the Bakers! Although I like the concept, they are very buggy (the take lanes, not the Bakers 😄)!!

Sometimes new features like ARA2 are a boon for a few and a PITA for all the others that do not use it! 😄 It is the same when a new Windows release brings a lot of wifi, smartphone and game stuff (e.g. 1803) and you use your Windows just for a DAW. Then it is likely that you have more trouble than joy of such an "improvement"!!! 😢

Thanks! Though I will not update since for Blackhole and 2016 Stereo Room only the installers have been changed, and the last update tag "Maintenance release" (whatever it means) sounds not worth to do the reinstall!