sarine

Well, there's this: There are proprietary and open source VST3 licensing options. Even the VST3 SDK is open under GPLv3. https://developer.steinberg.help/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=9797944 I must confess that I for one don't understand the VST licensing. What are you actually being licensed to do? Creating modules that use the API? Using the SDK? Using the VST logo (mandatory)? If I create a module that uses the API without using the SDK (never having agreed to its terms), leaving out the logo which I'm not licensed to use, am I infringing their IP rights, and if so, how would their attorney explain it in court?

Because they were already deceased, you psychopath.

Resource management and return-of-investment considerations aside, generally speaking this actually sounds like a combination that could work. If one had the time and wits, they could customize the crap out of Reaper and hide the stuff you (or they) don't want them to worry about, and provide an interface tailor-made for the non-techie artist type. Or see if there already exists something in that vein and use that as a springboard.

I haven't read the license terms, but I'm pretty sure it grants you the rights to use Studio One and that's that. It would do good for everyone to read at least one end-user license agreement from beginning to end at least once in their life, as it provides a window into the wondrous world of defining boundaries in legal jargon. Occasionally you find funny and/or preposterous clauses, such as disclaiming responsibility of some ridiculously improbable outcome from some ridiculously stupid misuse of a product, or threatening with legal action would you decide to do something that is your moral right according to your moral compass. For example, EULA's typically explicitly deny you the right to reverse engineer the product in question, whereas I see tearing shit down to be my moral right. If it's software running on my computer, or a physical object that enters my home, you don't get to tell me in which particular ways I'm allowed to touch it - and that's that.

Everyone get your flamethrowers before this escalates.

Sounds familiar. I keep finding dozens of things in Nuendo that I couldn't do in Nuendo.

Some of the things that have made it worse: Everyone now carries a computer (i.e. a hackable device) in their pocket that is by default connected to the Internet at all times and that means more targets for identity theft, blackmail, theft or using as a component in an attack cluster, and the average user is even less educated about cyber security which makes relatively ridiculous scams (e.g. phishing) more lucrative. There are more people who grew up into the world permeated by this complex and fragile tech so the number of hackers is also greater. Possibilities for exploitation were globalized alongside the connectedness of the systems comprising the Internet. The tools have gotten much better and attacks easier to deploy due to the surgence of advanced scripting languages. The web is built on fragile tech written in languages that are too forgiving by compromising correctness for fast results, and the problems are amplified by stacks of overly complex frameworks, copy-paste culture, general lack of stringency expected from coders (both by employees themselves and their employers, for the benefit of fast results), and frankly speaking the average coder (the ones responsible for bringing you the web experience) are less tech-savvy, passionate, and knowledgeable about computers than your average application/game/systems programmer or a system administrator, which were pretty much the only occupations available in the field (aside from the researcher who nobody cares about) before the technology became a mainstream commodity. Broadband brought persistent connections so it is easier to form attack clusters and move fluidly between nodes in order to make yourself untraceable. Dial-ups were highly unreliable in this regard, although they also didn't tend to reserve your network address which made tracing more involving. TOR, encrypted tunnels and non-logging VPN services that provide anonymity and wash their hands from what goes through their servers. Then some things that have made it better: NAT's make it less trivial to get into your local network from the outside. These didn't exist before broadband, and your specific client computer's IP address would be exposed in every connection you made (unless using proxy). Firewalls are more commonplace and smarter, every home router (as well as Windows) comes with some type of configurable packet filter (along with the NAT). Anti-virus software has become more prevalent and OS's internal protection strings and access control stricter. Viruses vs. anti-virus software has always been a game of cat & mice, but in the 90's the balance used to be far more tipped in favor of viruses than it is today. Many ridiculously straight-forward exploitation possibilities such as "smashing the stack" no longer exist or have been made significantly more difficult. Memory management units and virtual memory abstract away memory addresses and memory/application/privilege isolation are common facilities in any modern general-purpose OS (that includes smartphones). Nowadays even when you break into a system you have to pull some advanced shenanigans like leveraging return-oriented programming in order to escalate privileges. That's not to say there aren't a bunch of scripts to throw at exploits but I'd say that today even the script-kiddies need to be smarter than their 90's versions. VPN adds an extra layer of security and makes your connection to the outside world more opaque. Ideally you should have it configured on your router and not just the LAN clients. The authorities are paying more attention to these things now. Telecommunications and network traffic logging is easy from a technical standpoint, and the law enforcement has adept hackers and investigators on their payroll, which makes random cyber-crime/harassment more likely to result in legal repercussions. Thank you NSA, you know I'm a friend and that I appreciate what you're doing. Finally some practical advice if you decide to at least sit at the edge of the grid for convenience: Only install applications from trusted sources. The more extreme versions of this would including downloading PDF's, images, audio/video files, as applications used for opening certain files have been known to be vulnerable to code injection (rule of thumb might be, the more complex the format or more proprietary/closed the reader, greater the chance of an exploit persisting undetected). Keep your OS and browser up-to-date and use pro-privacy browser extensions (from trusted sources). Don't visit shady sites. More extreme version would be to disable or severely restrict execution of JavaScript on your browser. Don't keep any personal information stored on your devices in unencrypted text or image formats. Use NAT, firewall, anti-virus and VPN. Don't store your most valuable data, such as photos of your kids on a connected device. Cloud services are fine but if you want to be pious about protecting your kids' privacy and identity, get a dedicated offline device & storage with redundancy (e.g. RAID) and be careful and pedantic about how you transfer files onto it, and make it the law not to connect that device to a network. Ransomware is really the biggest threat to the average person, besides identity theft and straight-forward stealing of stuff. Don't put details about your life on the web. Don't share personal stuff on FaceBook, Whatsapp, or the three dozen other platforms that you shouldn't give any of your information to which I haven't even heard of. It's not just about the One World Government with their future AI being able to deduce more facts about you than are available to your conscious mind, but also about criminal networks acquiring, stealing, selling and sharing data in order to plan & organize burglaries or blackmailing. Or the odd lone stalker. With all that said, you'll be fine. I'll be fine. We'll all - probably - be fine, if we just stop being stupid. It's like the germs on the rail or the dust mites in your bed - it's pretty disgusting when you look at it under a microscope and think about it, but as long as you're not licking the rail and you wash your sheets every now and then, there are other more pressing matters to attend.

A hundred times this. To build and maintain such a codebase requires certain demanding personality traits, dedication and immense self-discipline (besides the obvious intelligence, but many garbage-coders have that and sometimes intelligence and creativity are just there to facilitate and excel at laziness). I like that he's been at it for 15 years or something, and still pushing forward with enthusiasm, it makes me feel good about investing in him. Also goes to show what one determined individual can achieve when there's no team to argue with and no boss to impress.

For the uninitiated, he means something like this:

They are fine! I've done a 180° and now go to the DAW's own channel strip first. If the effect is not integrated into the mixer then I tend to go to Melda. In the few rare cases I go to the handful plugins from other vendors, such as PA for that certain warm or gritty sound (or just to batter & smear my pansy drumbeat into something BIG and BOLD), and Flux IRCAM Verb for the expansive "hell yeah" - or subtle and clean - reverb.

Hackers may or may not use a VPN (or TOR), but that's only the first step on the way, and you'd likely never know, because the attack won't originate from their computer, but another hacked device such as the yesteryear computers found in abundance in "developing countries" running old Windows versions. Chances are they've gone through quite a few devices before they attack the actual target from that last node (or multiple if the attack is of that nature, such as DoS or bruteforce login attempts). Bots are another thing as mentioned, and those could be used for various purposes (including automated growth of the botnet), and they all aren't interested in your data, and it may be impersonal (as also mentioned). If you truly have 1000 attacks (whatever that means) per month against a company/organization (I assume), you have it pretty good. My personal firewall easily logged similar monthly numbers of SSH bruteforce login attempts and many apparently trying to leverage some known exploits - and I'm a nobody. The vast majority of them traced to China, Russia, Central Asia and South-America. I think of it mostly as cyber pollution. That's not to say there is no malice and more goal-oriented individual actors targeting specific entities, but the number of connections doesn't say much about the good:evil ratio of the world, as the reality of this technology is such that the amount of power one individual can have and the damage they can do is so disproportional to the average person who doesn't dedicate most of their time to exploiting the technology.

Is there a context for this? I think we're all adults here.

It looks like I'm the odd one out with regard to how I got pulled into the Meldaverse. I hadn't used their free plugins before I stumbled upon the MSoundFactory intro offer and started digging what that thing was all about. Something about Vojtech's methodology and design philosophy resonated with me. I also like his contentiousness (I could be in the minority in this regard too, as I'm quite fond of his "trash talking"). MTurboReverb and MDrummer were next, and I was now also using his free plugins (I still do although I have all their stuff). MDrummer is one that I hate to hate, as the pattern triggering is just broken. I could export the pattern MIDI into the DAW but that just wrecks the whole organization and workflow that was concentrated into the plugin which I had already grown accustomed to, and if I have to depart from that then I might as well look at other options for my beatmaking. My wet dream is Steinberg salvaging Acid from MAGIX and integrating it with/into Cubase/Nuendo.

I mostly use it to color and support sampled sounds. But I'm sure it will eventually see some more up-front role in my projects. Sugar Bytes Guitarist is pretty fun for this kind of thing too. The sounds aren't spectacular but you can also use it as a MIDI controller. I rarely use it though as I don't use chord/pattern triggers (including arpeggiators) as I prefer to put every note down by hand. There's a "pattern generator" in my head from having listened to and played classical music on piano (and having listened to most other kinds of music, but I mainly attribute this to extended exposure to classical).

I used to feel the same way about certain sounds, such as electric organs, electric pianos and string machines. It was by chance that I realized - while using VS-3 in a new project - that this was neither a real string instrument nor an emulation of one, but rather its own thing. Had I replaced it with any of those things or a more "conventional" synth, it would just not be the same. I then learned to appreciate the synthetic sounds produced by VS-3 and GS-2 and embrace their artificiality. A lot is up to the listener's expectations and how you set them up, i.e. don't be shy about and try to cover up the fakeness, but instead make it a point and do it with grace, saying "I bet your real guitar can't do this." I think when you're authentic and interesting your audience will not be driven to analysis ("Is this in the category of a synthesizer or an acoustic instrument? Is it pretentious or misplaced? If so, what is its intended function?") to find their enjoyment, they'll appreciate it for what it is because the whole validates its constituents.

When it comes to synthesis I prefer to build my own sounds (if I had the time, space and money, I would probably do the same with samples). Defining the/an initial state in physically modeled synthesis is problematic (and ultimately impractical and undesirable), so I just made my own "init" presets to start from sounds that are by themselves uninteresting, i.e. clean. I despise over-processed samples. Give the sound to me dry and let me be the artist, instead of using them to demonstrate just how fake you can make it sound. I'm never impressed unless the processing serves a specific purpose that is clearly stated or implied - e.g. "here's our finely polished viola that fits perfectly into the mix with the rest of our finely polished chamber orchestra and gels reasonably well with our Hollywood-style thumpty-thump epic drum set with its 24 variations on three different sounds (and will destroy any other sounds whose fundamental frequency falls within the same sixth of the entire audible spectrum, that it wasn't engineered for)" - and even when I'm impressed I probably still don't want it, although I can at least see some value in it. I really dig Sonic Reality's stuff and their samples end up on vast majority of my projects. I might get some weird looks from this one, but; I really like SONiVOX Strings/Brass/Woodwinds. I have SampleTank 4 SE, HALion 6 + HALion Symphonic Orchestra, Avenger and a handful others that could fill the same needs, but the SONiVOX almost always seem to make the effect I actually want. Maybe they've been shaved down to cut through a dense mix or something, but they always sound clean and unbusy.

The only case I recall is AAS. I believe I got the gimped versions of some of their instruments as a PluginBoutique freebie. I don't think I ever installed them, but it grabbed my attention and I ended up buying the full versions of String Studio VS-3, Strum GS-2 and eventually Ultra Analog VA-3. I put VS-3 and GS-2 up for sale at one point because I needed money for something else. Somebody bought VS-3 and it's one of the few things I regret selling and intend to re-acquire at some point. Strum GS-2 is so-so when I weigh it against some ancient SampleTank pack that just has that raw & dirty brilliance. I tend to choose the samples for the primary sound, whereas GS-2 currently sees most use as an enhancer for sampled instruments or other synths. Right now it's in the category of "I wish I could sell this, but probably shouldn't." Same goes for VA-3, really. I use it sparingly, but there are places where it seems irreplaceable. I wish I didn't need it, but apparently I do just enough that I can't toss it. I expect Chromaphone to be much like GS-2, i.e. it could potentially end up in my collection if my needs change, but currently I have a clear preference for sampled instruments over synthesized when it comes to the territory covered by Chromaphone. Then again, VS-3 taught me to love synthetic strings, and was freakin' satisfying on its own. Image-Line's Sakura is currently substituting it, but I will most certainly buy VS-3 again.

Only garbage entertainment on television, commercials on radio. Streaming services aren't remarkably better. I don't watch nor read the news, but it's not like I don't know what's up as everyone talks about the same things, because broadcasting. Why ask me what I think about the thing of the week/month, didn't the news outlet clearly communicate to you how a normative citizen is expected to think and feel about the thing? I also absolutely hate feeds as a concept. News feeds, video feeds... whatever other kinds of feeds the human specimens of the web 2.0 came up with. I think we're nearing the limits of the human brain's capacity to absorb and organize the information without becoming afflicted with premature dementia. Technology was supposed to free us, but here we are voluntarily dedicating our personal time and energy to doing trivial processing tasks, including (but not limited to) psychologically regressing to tribal savages on social media as if to throw the last desperate tantrum, the purest expression of humanity, before technology finally frees us from being human altogether. This forum, the YouTube landing page (which I'm too lowly to ignore) and recommendations, and whoever's on my phone are barely within healthy limits for me. Well said and very true. I feel so lucky that I wasn't born in the 2000's, there's enough trash deposited in my brain as it is. Now git yer dang kids off my lawn! 🚯

You're conflating UI design with API & implementation. It is only courteous to assume he meant UI design, and that "no interest" means "little interest" (in contrast with something else). The "genius" of whatever technology they're using is not really a point of interest to me as a non-tinkering end-user. (Although, now that you mentioned it, I have to look it up, and if I end up with a fully customized Reaper I will find you and I will kill you.)

Isn't MTurboEQ just a clean, simplified interface (i.e. a bunch of macro knobs) to the overwhelming Melda DSP spaghetti beneath? By the way, I really dig the spartan, generic Melda GUI's. Not an aesthetic pleasure, but everything looks and feels uniform and familiar when you jump between plugins, which kind of helps me concentrate on the task.

See, YMMV. This is why I don't like Reaper. Disclaimer: I have ADHD. Having 20 years of experience in diddling & doodling with Linux and FOSS (before the days of Ubuntu and systemd) just for the shits'n'giggles (and learning), I don't see this as much as a feature as lack of effort and direction in architecture and/or design. In my opinion, Reaper was a lackluster DAW out-of-the-box with insane, endless spirals of submenus and general lack of cohesion. The developer basically regards the user experience as low priority and has delegated it to the community. The community has done admirable effort in towing the UX forward, which proves that there is demand for that line of thinking and preferences and justifies the modes of mind and operation. It reminds me an awful lot of the Linux & FOSS mentality and culture, with zealotry and all. I'm not part of that community and I don't use Reaper because I no longer enjoy this activity. Customizing the heck out of my productive tools has proven to be a main distractor and killer of inspiration and productivity for me time and time again. No matter how imaginably slick of a workflow I might be able to devise around the process, my experience makes me expect to lose more than I'd gain. I pay a software developer for the UI design and sane defaults. Sometimes they deliver, sometimes they don't. Nuendo is far from perfect and I detest some of their design decisions, but it's stable, familiar and I find my way around it. Even if the ways are sometimes unreasonably curved, the fact that I don't have to continuously reflect on what I'm doing is far more important than saving a few seconds here and there. Just to drive the point home: I also own a 3d printer and use Emacs. I bought the printer as a kit and ended up deconstructing and reconstructing it until everything except the frame, heatplate, carriages, belts, bolts and some wires - had been replaced, and the rest slightly modified. In the end I had a pretty good printer, but my interest in using it had faded. Then there's Emacs. I don't want to even talk about it. I'd rather disassemble my 3d printer, shake & stir, and rebuild. Twice. I'm not arguing that Reaper is not good software, just that the model doesn't appeal to me. The thing that made me ditch it, though, was that (presumably) the UI or process scheduler seemed to choke when having a large number of plugin windows open. So when I opened a project it popped up all the windows from the last session and just kept jumping between them indefinitely in rapid succession while the interface was totally unresponsive. Granted, an edge case, but it was just the final nail in the coffin.

Yeah and just to clarify, those are mixbuses which you use to sum signals from multiple other buses. The master bus where everything comes together would be the 13th.

Not to contradict, but skeptically inquire; what makes it so great for making beats with specialized tools? Granted that if you're sequencing within the specialized tool you're to some degree avoiding having to deal with Mixbus's sequence/track editor, but I don't see the greatness - unless you refer to the mixer, but I personally associate "digital audio workstation" with something that covers more ground than a channel strip. For instance, Audacity isn't a DAW in connotative sense of "DAW" even though denotatively it definitely can be regarded as a digital audio workstation. I'm nitpicking on this because when I think of Mixbus/Ardour (or a dozen of certain others), "a great DAW" is not a label I'd use. Rather, it's a bad DAW that comes with a great mixer. I admit I didn't work much with audio tracks in Mixbus as I was mixing in realtime, so I can't say if it's as bad as working with MIDI and VST's. What I liked about the mixing experience itself was that it just worked for me. I have never touched an analog console, so it seems to me that the layout and workflow are products of cultivation, while more or less arbitrary software mixer interfaces without the historical roots may or may not make sense from efficiency standpoint. I also liked the sound although I was never quite sure if there was actual "secret sauce" in the channel strips or summing algorithms, or if I was just getting better results due to the workflow, or to what extent the effect of "Mixbus sound" was a psychoacoustic illusion created by the hype around and high expectations towards it, and the "feel" of the GUI. In the end I didn't care what, how and why, because shit got done.

Flux IRCAM Trax is very good. It still needs a lot of attending, but that's just how it is with these pitch/formant transformers without AI smeared all over them yet (I'm not complaining). If this computationally complex step (that is difficult to tune in) is part of your routine, you need to flip your perspective so that instead of doing your thing and expecting technology to fix it, you get familiar with the technology so that you can do your thing in a way that respects its limitations while making it easier for the algorithms to do their thing. (As a sidenote; It's similar to how if you're designing a 3d model to be printed using a FFF/FDM process, your whole CAD process is subordinate to the mechanics of the printing process.) Even if you can't sing the correct pitches, you want to have as clean a source recording as possible (staying on scale has very little to do with that), so pay attention to all the extra noises you're making and get rid of everything you can before it even hits the microphone, and clean the rest before doing more involved pitch/formant processing. It's possible that the voice transformer just doesn't like your natural voice, but may be pleased with you singing in a voice that feels slightly unnatural, producing more satisfactory results after all processing is done, even if the source sounds more awful to you. If you want to change the gender or age of your voice, you have to take it into account at the recording step, and you need to play with your voice and the processing software in parallel to find a co-operative zone where you can meet in the middle. When you find that zone, hone that voice and save those settings, and don't expect it to magically work if your target age/gender or other impressions of the voice change - you're better off doing all the work for any specific voice separately (if you want good results). Also, don't obsess over perfecting anything, usually it's a waste of time and even on "succeeding" it'll suck life & soul out of the voice - unless that's what you aim for, which is a totally appropriate target considering most pop music doesn't seem to appreciate the human element in sound anymore.

I think it's safe to say that nobody has switched from Cubase to Mixbus, as one is a robust, full-featured DAW and the other is a decent software mixer with horrible everything-else. I did at one point use Mixbus in conjunction with Reaper, routing the audio from Reaper on separate channels via Jack to be mixed in real-time in Mixbus. For mixing Mixbus just worked for me, but for composition it (Ardour) sucks horribly. It was also unstable. My experience was on v4 however, but I'm willing to bet it's the same crap it's been year after year.