Starship Krupa

How odd. I was so hopeful that the new forum software would finally allow functional screen grabbery. I feel like such a bozo when I try to post a full-size image and the best I can do is a text link to my Google Photos or Flickr or whatever.

The expected behavior for me would be that it would just do what it says: if your FX are on, it will turn them off when you hit Record. When you stop recording, your system will be returned to whatever state it was in before you hit Record. If you had already switched global FX off, that would be the same.

Oh I like this idea. It would be a good thing to have under Preferences/Record. Having FX switch back on when in Play would also eliminate that moment of "my mix sounds like poo" before I remember that of course it does, I turned off all the FX in order to track. 😅

A nice stylized "V" would do the trick.

I have yet to try any of these FX, but there's one GLARING problem I have with the UI. You have something to be proud of there, they should have your logo on 'em.

@Craig Anderton wrote up the procedure for enabling them in the April Sound On Sound magazine, singing the praises of VX-64 and PX-64. I believe that it was @scook who said that some of the Style Dials depended on VX-64, PX-64, and TL-64. This makes sense because there is a transient shaper Style Dial, a de-esser, gate, saturator, and those processors are all to be found in the "-64" modules we're talking about. Nothing else native to CbB has a transient shaper besides PX-64, and while you could roll up a de-esser using the sonitus fx, it would be easier to use the one in VX-64.

I'll settle for merely having a recipe for getting my own images to work and being able to tell other users how to do it, so if I can get the resize options that @Chuck E Babymentioned to work, I will be happy. The following is something that confused me at first, then I learned it was expected behavior. Augh! The Resize dialog will only let me make it smaller! @MusicMan11712 (aka Dr. Steve), where did you find "the re-size boxes (the ones you drag. not the ones you enter numbers in)?"

How can I Unsubscribe from Subscription offers? 😆 To the extent that the subscription model makes sense for anything to me, it's particularly silly for me to subscribe to a plug-in bundle. I'm a big ho-bag for plug-in deals in the first place so I have to watch it to make sure that my drive doesn't fill up with a bunch of great stuff that I wind up never using on projects. I need to be careful to only even download and keep things that I know I will make use of. The idea of paying monthly for a collection of plug-ins I might use 5% of is insanity. First, I'm not so into bundles. It would be like going to a woodworking store that carries Porter-Cable and telling them to give me one each of everything P-C makes whether I actually need a router, circular saw, jointer, planer, drill, etc. I may already have a Hitachi drill that works great, I might never use a jointer. I may not even like P-C's model of sabre saw. I might make an exception for Meldaproduction. 😂 Next is the subscription model itself. I think it works in situations where the software is used in a commercial environment where it's used to generate income. A graphic design house can just pay Adobe every month for their software and be done with it. It's another invoice. Where someone's a broke bedroom musician who saves up to buy one $25 Waves plug-in at a time every 2 months, and it's regularly going to be down to buying groceries or making rent vs. paying their $12.95 plug-in subscription, no way, not now, not ever dream on.

There is no reason to get rid of the Theme Editor, because its only function is to allow the user to make changes to the program's appearance. No user is forced to use Theme Editor. Most Cakewalk users don't, most users only ever use the Mercury and Tungsten themes. Theme Editor is not even part of the default installation. If a user wants to make changes to the default colors, there is a more direct way to do that in Preferences. It was originally only intended for use by in-house developers, then polished up and released for end users to use if they chose. I think the ability to create and alter themes/skins is wonderful and I am involved in it in a small way, doing my own alterations and participating in discussions when I can contribute. Theme Editor has nothing to do with interface scalability, that is a completely separate issue. Yes, I agree that right-click context menus are a very good way to access operations. That was the original intention of the right mouse button in the Windows 95 UI. I was working at Macromedia when Microsoft introduced Windows 95 and was trying to get companies used to the idea of how to use a right mouse button. If your program has any kind of object, a block of text, a picture, an equation, a sound file, whatever, to make changes to it you place your cursor on the object and click the right mouse button. I got it right away and became the world's fastest right-clicker. I was in QA and if they gave me a program to try out and it didn't have right-click context menu functionality I would march into the project manager's cube with eyes rolled and tell them that their stupid Macintosh Cmd-click stuff was history, that in a couple of years people would be hooking multiple button mice up to their Macs, etc. IMO, every operation pertinent to that area of the screen should be available on the context menu. Especially processing. Select a region, right click, boom. This has been discussed, and @Craig Anderton has said that one of the original functions of Lenses was to "hide" or "reveal" features for proposed different versions of Cakewalk. Logic has Basic and Advanced views and defaults to the Basic view on first run. The Start Screen would be a good place to choose a Basic or Advanced view. It just needs to be "sold" to TPTB and then someone needs to design the Lenses. I think Basic/Advanced views is a great idea and would love to see it implemented. This is one we can say is "easy to do," because it's just a couple of lenses. But then the question needs to be answered: what does the Basic view of Cakewalk look like?

I can only find Session Drums, which I found to be inferior. Session Drums has a bunch of electronic and highly processed sounds, which are useful, but I can do better with myriad drum machine plug-ins. Blue Jay instead has a lot of different acoustic kits, which is what I want from a sampled drum VSTi. I actually only wind up using a couple of them, but when the instrument has many to choose from, there's a greater chance that they'll suit my purpose.

The caravan to Aruba is not the road you'd choose.

It could be useful in a smaller project that you wish to keep more compact, but certainly I can see where that could get very confusing in a large project with many takes. My brain can only keep track of so many before I have to start thinking in terms of "the one at the top is the most recent, and probably the keeper." +1 for giving the user the ability to switch this behavior back to the way it used to work. I haven't encountered it yet, but if I did and didn't know it worked that way, I would find it confusing.

Thanks for the detailed information. That's a good attitude to go with: building a DAW is something of a project, so it may take a bit of fiddling and you may need to learn a thing or two about subjects you don't really care about. 😄 The behavior you are witnessing is not normal. You have downloaded the driver package for your Focusrite interface, and by running it, you install the driver. At that point, your system, including Cakewalk, should happily recognise that you have a Focusrite audio interface installed. This works just fine, but then you restart the computer, and the computer behaves as if the driver had never been installed. That's what the trouble is, and what we need to solve. I can only take educated guesses as to why this happens. My first two: your system may have anti-malware software that detects installation of drivers and removes them at next system restart, or your Windows user account may not have sufficient privileges when running the installer. These are the most common causes I've seen for this problem. To check for the first, you can look in the system tray in the lower right corner where your clock and sound icon and all that other stuff is. There might be a "^" icon as well that you can click on to see more system tray programs. One of the icons down there may be for an anti-malware program that you can temporarily disable while you install the driver. As for the second, you can try running the installer with elevated Administrator privileges. To do this, right click on the .EXE file in your download folder and select Properties. In the resulting page, you may see a notice down at the bottom that says "Security: This file came from another computer...." etc. with a checkbox marked Unblock. If so, check that box to unblock it and then click OK. Then right-click on the .EXE again and select Run as Administrator. Try these and see if they help. You don't have to try them in the order I suggest. If you don't find an anti-malware program, go ahead and try the elevated privilege thing anyway.

Ohhhh. Maybe I got that wrong. Well, maybe not. I did get into trouble a few times with having more than one project open and "mixing" the wrong one! I tried to figure out how Efrem might have possibly been seeing "multiple mixers" and that was all I could think of. I also agree that at first having those duplicate channel strips off to the left of the Track View was confusing, and it made things seem cluttered. All I really use it for now is advanced MIDI stuff like the arpeggiator. The rest of the time it stays collapsed. That is an unfortunate issue with the default layout of Cakewalk: when I first opened it, it looked "busy" and cluttered. Then I figured out what I could leave collapsed most of the time and I run with a much cleaner view now. But if you give new users a "clean" layout they will not know that all these features exist. The Inspector isn't a bad thing, as long as you know that you can keep it closed most of the time. It's handy when you have a 15" screen laptop and you want to use ProChannel.

I try to be sympathetic, and I am far, far from a "pro" user. I only started using Cakewalk by BandLab in April 2018. One scenario I dislike myself and try to avoid is being a Feature Request Apologist, where someone makes a good feature request and I respond with some convoluted workaround. I at least try to acknowledge that it's a reasonable feature request and that what I'm suggesting is a way to soldier through for now, not a way of saying that their request is unnecessary. 😄 It's often hard not to do that with Cakewalk because it's such a deep program and there are many ways to do things. I this case, however, I lost my cool, because the gentleman in question seemed to go out of his way to self-sabotage by trying to "fix" things, copying what he thought were installation files from various locations on one computer to other places and running them. Then when this resulted in a damaged installation, he responded to it with multiple suggestions that the current licensing and authentication model be "substituted" with pop-up ads at start time as some kind of trade-off. I ignored the first couple but he kept at it. Is the idea that we're somehow paying for the program in Annoyance, and rather than paying in one lump sum, it would be better to pay it off in small amounts over a long period of time? I don't know. I'm unclear on the concept. Unfortunately, BandLab support, which is where the issue should end, has been unable to undo this specific user's mess, but in the meantime, I maintain that the answer to the occasional authorization failure is not to "replace" authorization with pop-up notifications at start time. They do not serve the same or even a similar purpose. If users who experience authorization failures contact support, best case scenario is that the mechanism can be made more robust if it needs to be. If support knows there are issues and what they are, development will be informed. I'm one of the lucky vast majority who's never had a problem, but I can see where it would be really bad news if it happened at the wrong time. I have noticed from watching the forum that it seems to only happen at install time, not for Cakewalk installations that have already successfully authenticated, so there doesn't appear to be much danger of demo mode happening during a critical session.