Starship Krupa

Since the thread has expanded a bit to include pitch correctors in general, I'm curious to know if anyone's messed about with Meldaproduction's MAutopitch. The only pitch correction I've used for a finished product was Melodyne Essentials to do a bit of "drag the blobs around" here and there, one with some vocal tracks and then on a bass guitar track where the player just hit the wrong note, so it's kind of an undiscovered country for me. My understanding is that there are two ways of doing it, one where you tell the corrector what to do and it listens to the track and processes it as it goes along, and then the way I did it with Melodyne where you go "clam" digging and drag individual botched notes into the correct pitch, add or correct vibrato, etc. Do I have that right?

Whoa. "Honor your partner/Then parade/Now get lost in this masquerade!" And everybody has masks they hold up when the caller says the line? That sounds pretty awesome. An acquaintance of mine, square dance caller, I never thought he was quite cut out for it, he had the look and manner of a family therapist. I always wanted him to say something like "hold your partner/swing and sway/how are we/feeling today?"

I don't understand how this is not the desired effect. To clarify: you are recording in Comping Mode, you are trying to punch in a section, you have Auto Punch selected, with Mute Previous Takes checked, and you can still hear the first take and all subsequent punched takes? Or you can't hear them and you want to? Or you can't hear your other tracks? Or your clips are all muted when you're done and you can't figure out how to un-mute them?

Doesn't Melodyne do what V-Vocal did?

My understanding is that "null tests" are performed by recording simple stereo and mono sine waves into a single channel, then rendering them. This leaves out two very important elements! First, playback. That is what we hear when we are playing back a file or a mix or whatever through our computer's speakers in real time, and it's handled through a different engine than rendering. This is HUGE, and a HUGE thing to just hand wave and ignore. Think of how many plug-ins have settings that allow you to separately set the quality for "normal" and "rendering." That's because they know the difference between the two states of the host. When I came to Cakewalk from Mixcraft my biggest culture shock was beginning to see the Audio Engine as this separate thing that starts and stops, and sometimes stalls out and you have to lean over it and pull the cord and get it going again like a lawnmower. Turns out that Acoustica are very thrifty with playback compared to Cakewalk by BandLab. I did some poking around with Resource Monitor and found that on my same 4-minute song, one that I started in Mixcraft, exported as stems, then continued in Cakewalk, Mixcraft is not streaming anything from the disk to play it back. Nothing at all. It must be very quickly, during downtime, analyzing and loading the whole thing into memory to stream it, and to do that, it may be compromising the quality. To be sure, it does some other smart stuff that I would like to see Cakewalk also do, like ignoring files that are only associated with muted clips, but Mixcraft ain't streamin' nothin' from the drive to begin with so who knows how they're doing it. The null-test ding-dongs, as far as I've seen, ignore this crucial fact: playback ain't rendering. Second, and perhaps even more critical, summing/mixing. There has to be some algorithm(s) to handle the mixing together of multiple audio streams, and programming decisions must be made, it's never going to be a simple 1:1. If there is some way to do a "null test" on taking 5 sine waves and summing them all together into the Master Bus center panned, I haven't heard about it. And think of 5 different audio streams, one of them panned 50% left, the other 50% left, one at -7dB, etc. Those are all things that fall outside the realm of simple reproduction of 1's and 0's, and there are no rules for how to implement that under the hood. What happens when a signal hits the mix engine too hot? Something has to happen. Hard clip, soft clip? After this, of course, there must be programming to handle connection of effects, on and on, it can all sound different depending on who is doing the coding and what decisions they make. So unless all that the null testers are doing with their DAW's is recording single tracks of audio and then rendering the same with no panning, no effects, none of that, and they don't care how their DAW's sound while they're mixing on them, then "null tests" are beside the point. All they do is prove one single thing, that the DAW accurately renders a single track of uneffected audio. Which a DAW should do, to be sure, but there are lots of other things that set them apart from each other sonically. And BTW, check out this site: http://src.infinitewave.ca/ Unfortunately it hasn't been updated in quite some time, but it shows that there are, or were, plenty of digital audio programs that couldn't handle the simple task of converting a 96KHz sine to a 44.1KHz sine. Some of those plots are nasty looking. So not even all rendering engines do a perfect job of it. I can say this: Mixcraft does a lot of things way more easily than Cakewalk. It's taken me a long time to get Cakewalk working as well, a long time, especially with comping and those fiddly tools and the bugs in loop recording. But when I imported my first set of stems (see, rendered stems, the Mixcraft rendering engine sounds great) into Cakewalk from Mixcraft and set up a rough mix and heard how freaking great it sounded when I hit Play, I didn't care how often I had to restart the damn thing, I was going to get it happening in Cakewalk no matter what because it sounded like I wanted my mixing experience to sound. The sound of playback was such an improvement over Mixcraft. There was a smoothness, less "grainy" somehow. That and the fact that I got a decent mix going in a matter of hours with just the ProChannel FX 😜.

Wikipedia's ARA page has now been updated to reflect the facts that Cakewalk by BandLab has always had support for ARA 😎 and that it supports ARA2 as of release 2019.05. (Cakewalk and SONAR's representation in Wikipedia seems to have always been rather dire. I've spent hours sorting out some of the most garbled grammar, confused timelines, incorrect punctuation, outright misinformation and unintentional vandalism I've ever seen in relation to a topic on that platform, and there are still no entries for either CbB or BandLab)

Woo-hoo! BTW, the Tech Specs section on Cakewalk's product page hasn't yet been updated to reflect the newly-implemented ARA2 support: https://www.bandlab.com/products/cakewalk The world must know! I think CbB is in a small minority at this point, isn't it? I will be updating the Wikipedia ARA2 page shortly to add CbB to the list of DAW's that support it....

Oh, right, you mean those who believe that for some reason it's inherently not possible for the software methods that two different programs use to mix together multiple streams of digital audio and deliver them to the ear to make an audible difference? Because, "digital?" I should think the challenge would be to get multiple programs all doing that to sound reasonably similar, that is to sound like a good hardware mixing board doing the same thing.

(Yahooie, the return of Steev! Master of hyperbole, and I mean that with all due respect and affection. I'm glad you're back, my man, 'cause a friend of mine is looking to buy a computer for DAW use and I need yer experteez) As for whether BandLab know how many users of Cakewalk there are, yes they do, rather accurately thanks to BandLab Assistant. Cakewalk isn't just downloaded, people have to register and activate it, and then re-activate it at least once every 6 months. So they know exactly how many people are actually installing it and then continuing to use it. Months ago during one of our silly discussions about the licensing model, I came to the realization that Cakewalk is really licensed under a free subscription. The subscription requires that the user contact BandLab's licensing servers via the Assistant at least once every 6 months for a re-activation. As for market share and positioning, the features that we have seen get attention now that the program is known as Cakewalk seem oriented toward audio recording, don't they? With the change in stretching and pitch algorithms, the work on Melodyne integration? BandLab's other DAW's, the iOS, Android, and web-based ones kind of have the loop-y thing covered, so maybe Cakewalk development is going to be focused more on audio features for a while. This would suit me, as audio recording is where I'm at right now. Although it might amuse you, @Craig Anderton, to know that I'm 58 and have been doing songwriting, playing, and audio recording for most of my musical career, playing in bands and solo, for 35 years or so. But I've been getting more and more interested in composing and producing electronic music, whether introducing elements of it into my other stuff a la LCD Soundsystem, Postal Service, and Air, or going full on a la Daft Punk and Perfume. So I'm heading the opposite direction from the kids you know, learning how to sidechain my kick drum and set up TAL Vocoder. Fortunately, my other DAW is Mixcraft Pro Studio. The only problem is that Cakewalk's playback engine has spoiled me. It just sounds so. Freaking. Good. And the console view in Mixcraft is....well, I won't say it because I like those guys, but I will say I find it mostly unusable and leave it at that.

I think he said that he signed in to his account and everything was there. Happy time! There might have been some confusion between Cakewalk Sonar, Cakewalk by BandLab, a Cakewalk account, and a BandLab account. Have you ever been asked to renew your "membership?" Via a red warning and a blue warning? I have not seen these. The license for CbB is a subscription requiring renewal at least once every 6 months via the BandLab Assistant contacting BandLab's activation servers. The OP got it figured out. For anyone else reading this: connect computer to Internet. Start BandLab Assistant. Follow prompts. Enjoy renewed license.

Regarding Meldaproduction plug-ins, I asked Vojtech about this, and he said that for whatever reason, he had neglected to do this from the start with his plug-ins, which made it impossible to go back and fix it, so it's a feature that will apparently forever be missing in Melda-Land. Since I have 38 of his plug-ins (I upgraded the Free Bundle), it kind of makes it a pain in the ***** when both versions pop up in the Cakewalk pick-lists. What I do is use the Plug-In Manager to manually disable the VST2 versions of all Meldaproduction and any other plug-ins that don't implement the feature.

Tread carefully regarding the legacy of Ray Thomas within range of my typing fingers. 😒 I've been a Moody Blues fan since high school, and my high school career was in the late '70's, not exactly during their heyday. By rights, I should have been in The Kiss Army I, too, once subscribed to the theory that Ray fit into the "he doesn't have a lead vocal or flute solo on this one, so give him a tambourine so he has something to do onstage" rock paradigm. But a few years ago as I assembled a MB library of the 2006 remasters and started listening critically, sometimes on headphones, I started to marvel at how thoughtfully and how prominently Ray's tambourine was integrated into the arrangements of many of their songs, especially the uptempo ones. Of course I hadn't noticed it before because it's so well integrated, it fits so well. Mellotron, check, flute, check, tambourine, check. Listen to "Ride My See-Saw" or "Lovely to See You" or "Question" and try to imagine them without the tambourine. A really cool effect they used that I want to swipe someday was how they have Ray double Justin's strumming rhythm on "Question." That tambourine kept the Moodies grounded in their beat group origins, helped keep them accessible when other prog rock bands lost touch. Most musicians would love to have that "half a career." So there.

I sure as hell am, mostly right here in this forum. You would be amazed at the number of posts by people who make it all the way through the process of discovering that the old Cakewalk company's forum is locked, registering an account with BandLab, navigating through the popups and dialogs telling about CbB, only to get to this forum and post about how they're running Sonar X1 or whatever and having some technical issue. Or they come in and post asking in earnestness whether they should even try CbB. They are not sure whether their bundled plug-ins will still be available, etc. And, once again, we reassure them that CbB installs right alongside, works great, very similar except more features and faster and more stable, and you get to keep your existing bundled plug-ins and installation of Sonar. No risk. I've asked, no, begged, for a sticky on this topic, so far to no avail. I just hate to see all these people missing out on something that's such an improvement.

Okay, for anyone who is having trouble with this plug-in, I vastly simplified the routing over what that guy on YouTube does with his Aux track and all that mess. Just make two instrument tracks, one for Instachord and one for the synth you want to control with Instachord. Configure Instachord's Input to your MIDI keyboard. Enable MIDI output in Instachord. In Instachord's Output, go to Selected Track Outputs... and choose MIDI, and select the synth you want to control. In the synth you want to control, set your Input to Instachord. I had to set it to Ch. 1 to get it to work with the Virtual Controller, but YMMV. And that's it. Just 4 steps. No Aux Track, no Sends, none of that weird crap Mr. YouTube has you do. I'm still kinda underwhelmed. You select a chord with the left hand and then get all notey with the right hand. Maybe I took too many piano lessons for this to seem like a big deal, or maybe I just need to fart around with it. I already know how to improvise over a scale. It's kinda fun, but not OH MY GAWD THIS IS A GAME CHANGER.

So far I can't even get the damn thing to do what it's supposed to do. I play keys on my MIDI keyboard, and they light up on the Instachord plug-in, and I hear the notes coming from TTS-1, but the whole chord and picking and strum thing just doesn't happen. I press a key or keys in the "Chord A" or "Chord B" zone, then a key or keys in the "Picks" zone, and all I get is TTS-1 playing the piano notes you would expect to hear from pressing down those keys. I know that Instachord is listening because the key presses are showing up in its GUI. I'm pretty sure the routing is correct because I can click on the Instachord GUI's keyboard and the piano will sound. I've tried loading presets and it doesn't change anything. There's this one guy who goes on about this thing in his YouTube video as if it's the cure for cancer. Then he presses a key with his left hand, a chord sounds, presses another key with his right hand and an arpeggio plays. Well, I can play a chord with my left hand and a simple arpeggio with my right hand. This is not revolutionary. I used to have a Yamaha home organ from the '80's that could do this.