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Warren in Canada

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Everything posted by Warren in Canada

  1. Hey folks, Anyone using thunderbolt 3 audio interfaces with cakewalk? How is it and which one?
  2. A subscription won't fly, when they are competing with Presonus Sphere (StudioOne). I hope that they offer perpetual sonar licenses, and continue to honor prior lifetime sonar owner's lifetime upgrades.
  3. You will get better sound if you buy a headphone amp for your high end headphones. It's NOT about the total RMS output. There's a lot to audio signals and high quality DAC and well engineered audio analog stages, you WILL be able to hear the difference. That being said, if you're happy, it's good enough. No measurements needed. Your ears are the measure. But if you haven't A/Bd the difference, you won't know.
  4. Tezza, man, the voltage of the power supply has NO effect on the quality or the amount of "power" an amplifier or a DAC has. That being said, most USB DACs do have an option to have their own power supply. The problem is not voltage, it's total current draw from a USB port. Saying that 5V versus 12VDC matters tells me you haven't got a lot of knowledge about electricity, or possibly, audio, in general. A USB port limits the total Amps you can draw. However, you do not need more amps than a USB port can provide to effectively drive a pair of HD6xxx cans. The problem with laptop audio is NOT ONLY to do with the total RMS wattage output of the laptop audio interface, it has to do with the extremely LOW quality of the analog elements of the amplifier circuit and the digital to analog (DAC) convertor stages on board your laptop sound card. Google "DC to DC convertor", Tezza, my dude. You can turn a 5 VDC signal into a 12 VDC signal. What you can't do is exceed the total power in DC watts (volts times amps) that a particular source can provide, and that source, in both cases, is pretty weak. Good thing it's not a problem of power, but rather of clean signal, high fidelity, rather than "power". We absolutely don't need more power than a laptop can provide to drive headphones. These cans are not high resistance, they are high impedance. So many audiophile websites on the web are so full of nonsense. Headphone amps are overcoming impedance with a higher signal level. So far so good. The thing is that your laptop and your usb powered DAC absolutely have enough power to provide a much higher signal level. We're not driving a 10" speaker here. We're driving some cans. A 10x higher impedance means a 10x higher signal than needed to drive earbuds. All well within the capacity of your usb DAC. USB3 can deliver 900 mA, almost an AMP. USB2 can deliver half an amp. 5 vdc at half an amp can probably drive any headphones in the world.
  5. Other models show the proper drivers. I think this is a mistake on Behringer's website. It doesn't make any sense to me.
  6. I bought the massdrop HD 6xx.... https://drop.com/buy/massdrop-sennheiser-hd6xx#overview Original question: OPEN back for mixing. Closed is ONLY for monitoring tracking when there's a live mic in your same room. Closed has the wrong sound stage for mixing. Many people have told me that mixing with cans is always a tradeoff, but that if you simply can't get your room set up for critical listening, that cans can be better. Many pros mostly mix with cans. Note that for a pair of cans like the HD6xx or HD650, you either need a headphone amp or an audio interface that can drive them. Your laptop's audio out is not gonna do. And if you're mixing using a laptop audio card, you're doing it wrong. High fidelity is important for critical listening and your laptop DAC is not good enough. Don't bother buying fancy cans till you own a proper audio interface.
  7. Not an expert. But here's what I do know: 1. Most amateurs (including you and me) over use reverb. Don't over think the reverb, just don't over do it. Per track reverb is how I do reverb, I would never ever add a reverb on master bus. If your pc can't handle five reverb instances or ten, you need a better pc. 2. Most amateurs including you and me probably are going to do a bad job on EQ. 3. You also didn't mention compression, so I'm guessing you probably need to get familar with compression. My first few mixes my focus was: i. Only add a little reverb, and make sure that the dry/wet is never set too far into wet. ii. Begin some EQ work. iii. Figure out where to add bus and mastering compression, and if limiters were needed anywhere. The other thing us amateurs usually don't do well is set your space up for critical listening. Do you have reference quality open back headphones, or studio monitors?
  8. I do have a real audio interface (I mentioned it in one of the replies). The main reason for using a laptop onboard sound card is just to be able to try out this software and learn its user interface on a laptop without any external boxes. I think if Cakewalk devs KNOW that certain ASIO drivers or windows 10 audio hardware PCI identifiers spell trouble, they should warn users, and the app should not freeze. I'm gonna try the WASAPI driver mode just to see if it works. Ok interesting factoids. I think I know WHY the ASIO drivers don't work: 1. a real pro audio interface will support variable sample rates. 2. a toy one (like a laptop card) won't. When I select the WASAPI mode, I get this error: Cakewalk --------------------------- The default audio format is not compatible with one or more sound cards. It has been reset to 48000 Hz (16 bit), as suggested by the driver. --------------------------- OK That suggests to me that the ASIO mode audio interface code in Cakewalk is not programmed to notice that a given sample rate (44.1) or resolution is NOT supported. Cakewalk could be improved, that's why I'm leaving details here, in case the devs are reading along. It would be nice if there was a "Test ASIO" button somewhere in Cakewalk... Is there one? It should go through various sample rates and bit resolutions, and see if it works. For dummies playing around (that's me today), WASAPI + an appropriate dithering choice (anything but the default NONE option) results in acceptable audio quality for goofing around! THANKS so much for the help everybody. Now that it's working I'm reminded of what is so great about Cakewalk/Sonar. This is a beauty of a DAW with a wonderful UI and a great workflow.
  9. What's really odd is I can't report my underlying WIndows audio driver as the device exists in device manager, but there's no driver version at all in windows 10 for this realtek audio (onboard laptop audio) device. Here's what I get in device manager: Device SWD\MMDEVAPI\{0.0.1.00000000}.{bfd15c82-fcc3-49d1-81b9-34c06a9d4d11} was configured. Driver Name: audioendpoint.inf Class Guid: {c166523c-fe0c-4a94-a586-f1a80cfbbf3e} Driver Date: 03/18/2019 Driver Version: 10.0.18362.1 Driver Provider: Microsoft Driver Section: NO_DRV Driver Rank: 0xFF0000 Matching Device Id: MMDEVAPI\AudioEndpoints Outranked Drivers: c_swdevice.inf:SWD\GenericRaw:00FF3001 Device Updated: false Parent Device: INTELAUDIO\FUNC_01&VEN_10EC&DEV_0298&SUBSYS_1028087C&REV_1001\4&2223f159&0&0001 Driver : NO driver? SOLUTION attempt #: INSTALL ASIO4ALL http://www.asio4all.org/ It sort of worked once then ASIO4ALL went dumb. (Showing device is disconnected) After a reboot and some messing around in the ASIO4ALL setup, you can sometimes get it to work for a bit. The audio is uber bad (scratchy, clicky, poppy, hissy) like someone compressed it down to 8 bit at 8 khz sampling, and then played it back through an IBM PC XT speaker that has a bullet hole in it. (yeah, that bad) Anyways, onboard Intel realtek-compatible Audio chips, Windows 10, ASIO, REAL REAL BAAAAD. Tomorrow I'll try this with a real audio interface, a steinberg UR22MK2, and a USB DAC that I have lying around. Hope it works better. What's super sucky is this sound device works fine with every other app I use on here, including other DAWS that use ASIO, like Harrison Mixbus.
  10. Only VST folder in the VST plugin folder path is the one containing vsts that ship with cakewalk. ASIO driver is the Realtek ASIO HD. There are NO THIRD PARTY VSTS. This happens even with a blank project, with ONE empty audio track. The thing just goes busy. There are no VSTs and no insert fx, and no instruments at all in use. Cakewalk has just gone stupid. If I uncheck the realtek ASIO HD input and output audio devices, leaving my laptop with no audio in or out useable in Cakewalk, then the transport controls start working, I can play my empty project. (Of course I don't hear anything). Consider this a bug report that your app should either work with Realtek ASIO HD, or warn users that the Realtek ASIO HD driver doesn't work with cakewalk.
  11. This is Cakewalk 2019.5 build32, on Windows 10 ver 1903 build 18362.175 on a Dell XPS 15 laptop model #9570, Core i7, 16 gb RAM, 1 tb SSD. Freezing up isn't exactly the right word. I can open Cakewalk, I can open a demo project. Once a project is open, it just starts doing something really weird. The cursor switches to the busy cursor. The one that used to be an hourglass and since vista, became the little spinny circle. That cursor flashes and animates, nothing can be pressed in the main window. I can't use cakewalk, but I can close it. In the task manager, the task flips into "not responding" mode every three seconds. It's like something is using up a huge amount of CPU and freezing, and then repeating that. IT's too busy to do anything I ask it to do. The app is not exactly crashed (no errors) but it's totally non functional. --- Update: If you use the SHIFT key when opening, it prompts before loading plugins. If I do that, and say NO to all plugins, I would expect the project to load with just audio files and midi tracks or whatever was in there, and all instruments and fx inserts would be gone. Instead it crashes with an access violation. SAFE mode EH? The project I'm opening is literally the DEMO project that SHIPS with this program [ Chernobyl Studios - Withered Moment ] --------------------------- Error - Unhandled Exception --------------------------- A fatal error has occurred. Module: C:\Program Files\Cakewalk\Cakewalk Core\Cakewalk.exe A crash dump file has been created here: C:\Users\warre\AppData\Roaming\Cakewalk\Cakewalk Core\MiniDumps\Untitled_07052019_203425.dmp Exception code: c0000005 Address: 0000000140972004:0000000000000000:000000000000006C As a result of this error Cakewalk is about to exit abnormally. Should Cakewalk attempt to save a recovery copy of your work? --------------------------- Yes No --------------------------- Warren
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