Canopus

Installed! I mean – Pre-ordered! Pre-order before release May 16 and save up to €20/$20. And for those living in the EU, VAT is included.

(That's odd. When editing a post a new one gets created. Never seen that happen before.)

Sounds interesting. Almost as if Cakewalk by BandLab will be marketed as Cakewalk SONAR in the next release. Or, maybe Cakewalk SONAR by BandLab. Or, maybe I've just had too much coffee this morning.

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True. However, accidentals may happen.

In the nineties a colleague of mine wrote pi with a ridiculous number of decimals on a big window of the office room we shared (whiteboard marker, not permanent). We then challenged ourselves to remember more decimals day by day, and, of course, to remember more decimals than the other. I can’t remember exactly how many decimals we reached at best, but it was well over thirty. He was slightly better than me, but I’m proud to say that twenty-five years later I still remember the first two.

déjà vu noun dé·jà vu ˌdā-zhä-vü -ˈvᵫ 1 b: a feeling that one has seen or heard something before

Interesting. I have two desktops attached to holders under of my table top and have no place for a regular drawer. That thing would be the perfect place for me to store pens, papers and USB sticks. It seems to be currently unavailable on Amazon but I’ll keep the link.

Yeah, I’ve made all my latest iZotope purchases from third-party resellers so my memory might be fooling me. Seems like I’ll have to continue doing so until I can get my hands on that $15,000,000.00. Let's hope it won't take long. The email seemed very trustworthy, though.

An upgrade for me from MPS 3.1 to MPS 5.2 seemed to be $199. However, when going to checkout (I had no intention to buy, I was only curious) I noticed that iZotope, despite being a US company, now have started to add local VAT for foreign customers. In my case that adds a hefty $50. Yes, VAT is often quite substantial on this side of the pond. Most European developers actually include VAT in the sales price on direct sales, at least within Europe. That way it’s easier to accept that the price in EUR and USD often nominally is the same despite the difference in currency rate. But obviously not so when buying directly from iZotope. Oh, well. They can keep it. Edit: I just noticed I’ve got an email from a “Mr. Rogers”. According to the mail “The World Bank Group and IMF have approved $15,000,000.00 compensation payment in your favor for your unsuccessful transactions in the past and present. [...]”. That’s quite a lot of money, although I apparently have to cover the $210 online account opening fee myself. Hm, maybe I can afford the upgrade to MPS 5.2after all despite the VAT?

Printed books covering fast evolving software is definitely a thing of the past. As for BandLab, the best you would find is most likely SONAR X3 Power! by Scott R. Garrigus, but it was released back in 2014 and of course does not contain any of the enhancements made to SONAR Platinum and Cakewalk by BandLab. The book you mentioned is even older. Like it or not, but there is most likely too little demand for printed books nowadays to make such a project economically viable. I had SONAR X2 Power! myself in the bookshelf until I realized it was time to put it in the recycling bin. If you need more up to date material on paper, one option would be to load up your laser printer with three reams of paper and print out the Cakewalk Reference Guide PDF manual. It was last updated in January 2022 so it’s not as up to date as the online documentation, but it’s more current and thorough than all printed books available on the subject. But unless you’ve got unlimited time and patience at your disposal, trying to delve through 1,042 pages of reference material, I would say that video tutorials are currently your best option if you ever want to get into making music with Cakewalk. They are of course free on YouTube and most that are available are referenced in the Tutorials sub-forum. There are also some third-party tutorials that you can purchase and download from sites such as Groove3 or Udemy, but the last one I’m aware on Groove3 is only covering Cakewalk SONAR Platinum ($15) and the one on Udemy Cakewalk : A Complete Guide was last updated in 2021 ($35, not downloadable). And, of course, if you still got questions after all your reading and/or watching, post your additional conundrums in this forum.

I’ve got every MIDIpak (and ADpak) in AD2. When I search for “tambourine” on the Beats tab I get six matches, five of which are located in the “Indie Rock” MIDIpak. There’s a note saying that they should be used with the Indie ADpak. When I use that kit it all sounds pretty tambourinish to me. But hey, what do I know about tambourines?

Yes, great videos as always, Simeon. I noticed that the upgrade price from HALion Sonic 3 to HALion Sonic 7 Collection (which is what the direct successor now is being called) is the same as if you only have HALion Sonic 3 SE (which came free with Cubase). I find it strange that Steinberg doesn’t acknowledge the current owners of the paid product in any way. But to be fair, an upgrade to HALion 7 from HALion Sonic 3 is pretty affordable and there doesn’t seem to be an upgrade path for owners of HALion Sonic 3 SE. One main advantage of the new releases as I see it is the larger GUI, which previously was pretty useless small. Hopefully Groove Agent, which has the same useless small GUI, is next in line for an update.

No, I’ve got different instrument on each track so that doesn’t matter. But yet again, the idea was to reduce the manual interaction by having Cakewalk display the GUI of the instrument attached to the selected track automatically.

Thanks for your comment. In fact, I already have a dedicated button on my MIDI keyboard/controller called “Inst” that’s supposed to open the instrument on the current track in Cakewalk. And it does, the first time. But if I change selected track and click “Inst” once more, nothing happens. However, my thought was to reduce the mouse-clicking/button-fiddling to a minimum by having the option to display the instrument on the selected track automatically, as a function built into CbB, and having that option possible to bind.

A feature that I’d love to see is an option to have the VSTi associated with a track (if any) to automatically open its GUI when that track is selected. In my workflow, I can easily switch to the next or previous track in CbB using dedicated buttons on my MIDI keyboard/controller. But in order to see the instrument I’ll also have to stretch out for the mouse and click the tiny track header icon to make the GUI visible. This is something I think could be made more streamlined. And better yet, to be able to toggle that behaviour on or off through MIDI CC and/or keyboard shortcuts. Well, I can dream, can’t I? As for anyone afraid that this should impact performance, the ongoing transition from HDD to SSD storage along with faster graphics (even integrated ones) should over time make it a non-issue. Also, it would only be an option to be turned on by those that wants it. Edit: I think this feature is missing in Cubase as well, but present in both Logic and Studio One.

The Fade tool only works on Audio tracks. On Instrument tracks I would use Automation, having the filter set to the default Volume parameter. For even more options you can check out this old thread.

Fun fact: FL Studio is written in Delphi, which is the modern successor of Turbo Pascal. Well, that, and a lot of assembler as well. As for CbB I'm pretty sure it's written in Microsoft C++.

I spent quite some time yesterday listening to the examples of some of the Falcon expansions. One that I found had some potential was Analog Motion. Until I realized I’d purchased that one almost five years ago. I guess that’s an indication I should actually start using the things I’ve bought instead of constantly looking for new toys. Maybe that would be a great New Year’s resolution; to create at least one song based on each synth/expansion/Kontakt instrument I’ve ever bought? That would definitely keep me busy for a while.

I don’t know about Waves or IKM, but as for XLN Audio all their products have a setting called “Use OpenGL acceleration” which can be turned on or off. You can reach that setting through the Hamburger menu in the top-right corner of each plug-in and choose “UI Scaling and Settings” (in XO called “Settings”).

I still had a copy of “FET Compressor.dll” v 2.5.46 tucked away, so as soon as I saw that v 2.5.52 made Cakewalk crash I simply replaced the new VST2 version in my VstPlugins folder with v 2.5.46 using copy/paste. I didn’t replace the 2.5.52 version of the VST3 plugin as I knew it had nothing to do with ProChannel. And once I later had updated to the current v 2.5.55, I yet again replaced the VST2 plugin with v 2.5.46. The reason your VST2 shows up when inserted into the effects rack might be due to not having both check boxes ticked under Edit > Preferences > File > VST Settings > VST3 Migration. Of course, here I assume that you do have the VST3 folder specified in your VST Scan Paths on the same page. Personally I always use my own Plug-in Menu Layouts which gives me full control over their content. My recommendation would be for you to send Softube a support ticket about the VST2 version of FET Compressor v 2.5.55 crashing Cakewalk when run as a ProChannel module and also nicely ask for a link to v 2.5.46 of that plugin. They might be able to help you. Of course, once the legacy VST2 plugin is installed, you should keep a copy of the resulting “FET Compressor.dll” tucked away. Until Softube finally fixes this issue, you will need it after every future Softube Central update for as long as you intend to use it in ProChannel.

In my experience FET Compressor v 2.5.46 worked as a ProChannel module, but when I quite recently upgraded to v 2.5.52 Cakewalk started to crash when the nodule was instantiated. Again, I might add, as this is an old problem that dates back a few years but at one time seemed to have been solved. Same with Softube’s Passive-Active Pack, containing the three EQs that also come as ProChannel modules; they seem to work in v 2.5.46 but not in v 2.5.52 or later. I guess the same is true for Softube's TSAR-1R Reverb although I haven’t tested it. To bypass the problem I have personally rolled back my VST2 version of FET Compressor to v 2.5.46, but at the same time using the latest available VST3 for the effects rack. To my knowledge, ProChannel still only supports VST2, although @Noel Borthwick has said that he’s planning to make a VST3 ProChannel specification sometime in the future. Let's hope he'll find the time as VST2 soon seems to be a thing of the past.

Toontrack’s Holiday Sales used to be $29 for a full EZkeys license. Both in 2017 and 2018 I even got an extra EZkeys expansion included, so effectively four instruments for $58. Not quite so anymore.

Okay, sorry about the confusion. I was told by someone I know that the link I had posted didn’t appear to be read-only, but one that allowed anyone with access to the link to update the zip file’s content. Of course, if that was the case it wasn’t good. I was in a great hurry and hadn’t time to check it out, so the only quick fix I saw was to remove the file altogether and make a short post here that the link had been removed. Now that I’m back I have uploaded a new copy of the icon file and updated the OP with a link that I’ve double-checked should be read-only.