lmu2002

I've been using BiasFx  VST a couple of years now and never had any issues. Are you using the same preset in both standalone and VST? Same gain? Recorded clip also sounding bad? Track interleave set to stereo?  Do you have 'direct out' selected in BiasFx output settings?

I can't think of much else. Maybe you could describe further what you mean by weak.

22 hours ago, MediaGary said:

I just updated my signature, having substantially migrated from my 12-core 2010 Mac Pro to my newly-built AMD 16-core 3950X.  I'll try my first serious CbB mixing today.  The machine has:

• AMD 3950X / 128GB RAM (Corsair Vengeance LPX 3200-C16) ASRock x570 Creator
• Sabrent Gen4 1TB NVMe, Sabrent Gen3 2TB NVMe, 2TB Crucial MX500
• 10GbE link to external servers : Media server with 4TB SSD RAID-0 and 16TB RAID-0 HDD.  Redundant Server with two 12TB RAID HDD's.
• Cooler Master HAF XB EVO case

All the Universal Audio software installs fine, and the UAD-2 Duo PCIe is recognized in the Device Manager, but it fails with a Code-10 (failed to start). So for now, the UAD-2 stays back in the Mac.  I have no Thunderbolt devices to test.  My M32 mixer/interface is connected via an RME MADI ExpressCard. 

If anything unexpected happens with Cakewalk or Reaper or Studio One in the new machine that might be relevant to this CbB community, I'll update here.

Maybe a bit far fetched but could this be a pci lanes thing? If you have two m.2 drives, (presumably) a graphics card and this UAD all sharing the available 24 pci lanes, some settings might need attention in bios. I'm not an expert but I would try removing the other m.2 drive and see what happens. Unless you have all the daw stuff on that drive. 

Just a thought.

17 hours ago, Kevin Walsh said:

The build experience was smooth as silk. I've had absolutely no problems with any of the components I used. I've always built my own PC's. (My first build was as part of a computer club project in the 70's, an Altair S100 bus 8080 computer, lol)

My most recent build prior to this was centered around an Intel i7/970 CPU and an X58 motherboard from EVGA. By comparison, that build was complex and fraught with challenges and while it ran well for over ten years, it had it's quirks. The DIY world for high-end PC's has come a long way and the parts I used were all well-thought out, well documented and extremely easy to assemble. I felt like I was cheating.

Event the liquid cooler was easy as pie and the temperatures are nice and stable. The build is very quiet. You can hear the fans ramp up a bit when I'm stressing things and I wouldn't call this an absolutely silent build, but I'm pretty sure if I monkeyed with the fan heat profiles I could get it pretty darned close.

I'm using the Ryzen Balanced Power Profile in the Windows power options control panel settings. That comes with the chipset drivers and sets up the memory speed profiles and CPU configurations. I haven't felt the need to use any more extreme settings.

Here's the parts list:

Motherboard: Gigabyte X570 AORUS Master

Memory: 2 G.Skill Trident Z Neo Series 32GB sticks

SSD's: 2 Sabrent 1TB Rocket NVMe 4.0 Gen4 PCIe M.2 Internal SSD's (I mistyped earlier, these are 1TB drives, not 2.)

Power Supply: Corsair AX1000

Cooling: Corsair Hydro H150i 360mm liquid cooler

Graphics Adapter: Sapphire Radeon Pulse RX580

Case: Phanteks Eclipse P600S 

Firewire card: Ableconn PEX-FW107 1394b & 1394a (TI XIO2213 Chipset)

Looks very good! You surely didn't cut any corners! A great ticket to the future 👍

I start to feel intimidated with just 16Gb of ram. But as I don't use huge sample libraries I rarely see usage above 8Gb. So far so good.

I chose a Noctua D15 for cpu cooling. Maybe a bit of overkill but it's running perfectly quiet once the temps curves are set.

17 hours ago, Kevin Walsh said:

I'm running a Ryzen 9 3950X with 64GB of ram and 2 2TB PCIE 4.0 drives. I built this powerhouse machine for my daily work as a software developer but it's a fantastic audio workstation as well. I use an Audient ID22 USB 2 interface with it and it just kills. I highly recommend the Ryzen family as a great platform for DAW boxes.

As far as I know the motherboards for higher than 3700x cpu requires  stronger power output and cooling  regarding the vrm. Maybe you can tell about your motherboard and experiences with it?

E.g. the MSI 450 series motherboards were great but MSI 570 series have a problematic reputation so far. Gigabyte X570 AORUS ELITE, Asus TUF GAMING X570-PLUS and Gigabyte X570 AORUS MASTER all look like solid choices for 3900x.

And what ever the motherboard, efficient cooling is essential for a reliable daw. I recently replaced the stock fans of my case (Fractal R5) and both the noise and temperature improved significantly. Three fans 7€ each so well worth the trouble. The stock cpu coolers are also noisy and offer the bare minimum for cooling, so better change it for something bigger/cooler.

Here's good reading:

https://www.scanproaudio.info/2019/07/12/amd-ryzen-3600-3700x-3900x-dawbench-tested-3-is-it-the-magic-number/

According to this, if you are running extreme number of Kontakt instances  with small  buffer size Intel has the edge. But for normal use I wouldn't worry about it. Ryzen 3900x is a very strong cpu for daw use. I hope someone can give you a more detailed view.

There's already two strains of the virus, and a third one is expected. Who knows how many will follow.

Let's hope we don't  get to the point where we have to decide a specific age which divides the cure/coffin. The elderly or the civilisation.

The economic impact will be a mayhem in a month or two.

4 hours ago, Starise said:

I'm not really worried about it. Maybe I should be. I think there's more to this than meets the eye. I don't know exactly what that means.I hope I'm wrong. I really do. I'm not even worried if I get it because I think I would live through it. 

Lots of other people are worried. Reminds me of winter here, when they call for snow everyone goes out and buys bread and milk. 

 If the mortality rate is very good and if it's similar to the flu only maybe more intense, then why are all the medical system overloaded?  I have heard that it's because people need respirators. I have also heard that plenty of people who have it are sent home. There basically is no treatment. It just runs it's course.

In light of that, then the only reasons I can see for the need to go to a hospital are A. You had prior breathing issues. B. For isolation reasons. 

Point B could be handled just as well by sending people home to stay away from  others. What am I missing here? Or did I miss everything? lol.

 

Point A. What's the percentage of population with prior breathing issues?

Point B. People are not very good at staying away from others.

Last point: people will die and money will be lost.

Thanks abacab! I'm sure I tried it first but a second try apparently did the trick better. And it also appeared in the synth rack 👍

I recently purchased Izotope Vocalsynth 2. Can anyone help with setting up the midi functionality in Cakewalk. All other daws have a detailed tutorial on Izotope website  but Cakewalk is missing.  I tried several routing options but couldn't figure out how it's supposed to be done.

I looked closer at my audio folder. There's more than just a few of these odd 4Kb wav files. Starting in new year. Until then the wav files look normal. Those 4Kb ones don't have a track name specification like all other files, just the name of the project and rec (and a five digit number). And they don't contain any audio.

Any thoughts?

Now I had the issue appearing again. I recorded a single audio take but no picture of the take and no sound either. I checked the audio folder and there's four (!) wav files with the same time stamp and name. One of them contains the actual recording (2Mb) but the other three are silent, two of which are 4Kb and one 1.5Mb. I recorded another take 15mins earlier with no issues or weirdness.

Saving and re-opening the project doesn't change the situation, the clip doesn't show up. When there's no clip I can't use the 'recompute pictures' command. When reopening the project another 3 copies (4Kb each) appear in the folder. And then disappear when the project is closed again.

Has Corona finally reached my DAW?

I noticed that Cakewalk freezes if I don't choose a project within a minute in the start screen. I bypassed any internet security software with no help. When monitored in Task manager Cakewalk keeps adding something into memory in small chunks (4Mb or so every sec.) while the start screen is on.

Cakewalk must know where your plugins are. Go 'preferences - vst settings - add' and then locate the plugin (.dll file) of the desired plugin. Once it's there and the path shows on the list, it's ready for use in Cakewalk.

5 hours ago, Kalle Rantaaho said:

Doesn't "Re-compute pictures" or "Re-draw waveforms" (or what's the name of the function nowadays) do the trick?

Thanks! I will add this to the to-do list when this happens again.

Apparently the original sound file is no longer there. But in general, great guitar sound is one thing, great guitar sound in a mix is  completely another thing.  The marriage of guitars and bass is the key. In my experience guitars must lean heavily on the bass and stay away from the vocals. And must still sound energetic and articulate. This is very hard to achieve. But amp sims are great in this regard as it's easy to go back and adjust the drive, amp and speaker stages.

I usually end up shaving off a lot of low mids end to avoid bass and guitar fighting for the same space. I also use a spectrum analyser to check where the vocals sit in the spectrum and make a careful scoop there.  And especially with metal guitars, less distortion and overdrive often gives a better impact  and clarity in a mix even they might sound too light alone. Too much distortion makes guitars easily too soft and muddy.

I just bought a nice guitar which I tried in a recent project with amp and track settings for another guitar. The new one sounds terrible with those settings, thin, glassy and ear piercing. The pick ups (Duncan Blackouts vs. Duncan Custom/59) are just so different in character that these guitars need a very different treatment in the signal chain. The guitars themselves can be a factor too (Fender/Gibson etc).

Sometimes you just need to adjust the other components in a mix to make  guitars sound great. Soloing guitar with other instruments one by one can be helpful as well.

And in general, mixing rock/metal is hard. You can't stray too far off from the 'standard' as it will easily sound too strange or unacceptable by most listeners. It's a fine line.

Any of the mentioned cpus will do just fine in a daw, especially if mixing is not the focus here. But 4k video can be taxing if you use many layers and effects. You will need a capable graphics card as well, cpu alone with an integrated gpu won't take you far.

But it's great if you have a  dealer  who is willing to help you with your needs!

I have 200Mb of files in the pictures folder, so nothing strange there. It's set at 500Mb max.

When the disappearing take issue happens next time I will check if the audio is there. That would be a mess though, ghost takes without images 😲

Thanks guys! The crazy cursor relaxes when I open a project, close it and then go back to the start screen. I have nothing but Avast stuff in the start up tab, which have been there for ages. I wouldn't see them as the culprit here. And hard to bypass.

I realize the system is busy doing something. The cursor wheel also keeps spinning when I go to preferences menu, if straight from start screen. It even hung Cakewalk completely once when I changed settings in the asio panel (directly from start screen). Didn't try other settings as it froze requiring a reboot.

Maybe not related but I noticed that my start screen cursor  relaxes when I open a project, close it and then go back to start screen. But I noticed another odd cursor behaviour which happens in asio panel when opened during the start screen: when changing the buffer and latency settings and then 'apply', the cursor starts spinning the wheel and only stops once a project is opened.

I will now keep reopening a project  before any actual recording, just to see if the recording issue is connected to the cursor one. It looks like it's loading/busy which can't be right.

No punch points in use. Clean track with just a guitar amp on it. I will experience further with different options and see if there  appears any predictability to this issue.

When I record audio, Cakewalk draws the waveform ok but when stopped the take disappears. I just had to record three times until the recording stays. And it's titled 'Record 1' as if it was the first take. What' going on here? It's a clean track with no previous takes etc. This seems to occur mostly when  recording right after opening Cakewalk.

-  latest asio driver in use, recording 44.1/24 as usual

- 'sound on sound' option picked, also 'reuse existing lane'

-  I made no changes in Cwbl or Win10 lately

I have no possibility to try another interface but so far my Spl has been rock solid.

I also reported a weird start screen behaviour in an earlier topic. I never had  much issues with Cakewalk. But I just had a couple of months break from recording anything. A frustrating restart I must say!

I'm annoyed with a never ending wheel shaped hourglass (not sure what to call it) in the start screen. What could be causing this? It doesn't turn into the arrow/hand that it used to be. It just keeps spinning. Apparently this doesn't do any harm and projects open as usual. But it surely is annoying. Anyone else having this?

Some discussion here:

Can you not exploit the  returns policys of online shops and buy-return  until you find your favourite for your needs? Somebody's favourite is another's rejection when it comes to microphones. Sampling at stores is mostly useless, same  applies with recording studios: try it with your gear, your room and with time (14-30 days returns policy is quite normal in webshops).

Your budget offers a huge choice. I would start with the industry standards: AKG, Shure, Sennheiser, Sony, etc. Just browse what's recommended for vocals. Surely you can start with the Rode you mentioned 👍

I use a dull sounding click (a soft kick drum or similar) to avoid such bleed when recording quieter sources without backing tracks.