Starship Krupa

I picked up all the Unfiltered Audio products I wanted in last year's holiday sales, so I'll put in a plug (heh) for their BYOME, which encompasses most (or all) of their other FX, plus adds one of the sexiest UI's I've yet to see. It says something that Glitchmachines created a pile of the factory presets. I don't have Triad, which they describe as being similar to BYOME but with 3-band multiband processing added. If you do any work with glitch/experimental sounds, either of these is a must-have.

Dang, @Pete Brown, your approach to malware defense is so....rational. As opposed to crusty like mine or fear-mongering. 😁 Thanks for outlining the steps that you, as a savvy home network administrator, take. I've been away from IT as a profession so long that I've barely heard of "drive-by malware." Or Pi-Hole. My home firewallin' is done with DD-WRT-on-yardsale-Linksys. If there were people under voting age at my place, I'd be so fearful I'd probably set up an entirely separate network to prevent my Roku Box getting pwnd. I haven't disabled Defender, just the realtime scanning part of it (which choice is, I believe, more exposed on Pro). I use it ad hoc when I download .EXE's, and I do nothing to stop it from doing its thing during "idle" periods. I'm not against anti-malware software, just the kind that stays running all the time constantly examining my computer activity to make sure I'm not doing something to ruin my system. When I moved my main DAW system from Windows 7 to 10 and Cakewalk playback got noticeably balkier was when I fired up Resource Monitor. It revealed that A. Cakewalk streams every audio file in the project whether or not it's associated with an unmuted clip (unless it's entirely owned by an archived track) and B: Defender was malware-scanning my audio files, plug-ins, and other .dll's every time Cakewalk read them. At the time I had a spinny drive (a pretty fast one, but spinny nonetheless). 6 takes of drums x 4 drum tracks was (at least) 24 audio files filtering through the Defender engine every time I hit Play. I had to figure out how to put a stop to that and figured out how to turn off realtime scanning before I learned about folder and process exclusion. I'll look into Pi-Hole. I use Ad-Block for my browsers (and politely disable it on sites that ask politely), but having something stop those scripts and apps before they get to my trailing edge devices makes perfect sense.

IMO, the issue that needed to be "fixed" is that Waves Local Server keeps running after I exit my DAW. I guess they're trying to close the annoyance gap with iLok PACE. Waiting for support for generic thumb drives to be dropped.

I've been using Vegas Pro for my single-camera videos for years now (meaning about one a year). One thing I notice when browsing NLE's is that some of them crow about how they support multi-camera. I don't quite understand this in the context of an NLE where obviously I can import multiple videos from whatever sources I choose and dissolve and cut all I want. Does it refer to being smart enough to keep different files shot at the same time in sync or something like that?

Controversial, to the point that I seldom recommend it unless people ask, but I disable Defender realtime scanning completely on all my systems. Excluding folders and processes from it as you suggest probably works as well. "Kids, do not try it at home" caveats apply. Background: I have my own anti-malware system in place I call "not clicking on random crap I get via email and on-demand scanning any executables I download." In the 40 years I have been using DOS and Windows, it's never failed me. Having been around that long in the industry, I'm also cantankerous about lowest common denominator precautions. In my IT career I never encountered malware that was as destructive and invasive than the malware solutions I encountered (slow startup, resource hogging, performance degradation, pop-up nags, etc.). I understand that as the user base for Windows has expanded (and to be fair, malware has gotten nastier) it may be considered essential to harden the protection to make it more fool-resistant. I'm a very persistent fool. 😁 Regarding updates, I've found that the standard control in Home is fine for my amateur home studio.

Beat me to it. I was going to suggest that if you still had the original spinny drive in a laptop that's old enough to have SONAR X2 on it, that you might run some in-depth fault tests on it. My guess is that crumbling drive was the issue. If the update had anything to do with it, it might be that installing it wrote to a section of the drive that had funky clusters but hadn't been used before. Well done, sir.

If those are not "VI synths" what do you consider them to be? "VI ROMplers?"

Excellent! It doesn't get more authoritative than this. I knew about excluding folders from Defender scanning (a tweak I figured out on my own, really good to disable it for your Cakewalk Projects folder and the VST3 and VST2 folders) but I didn't know that you could also exclude processes. One note: If you wish to mess with Group Policy settings (which are absent from Pete's guide) Group Policy Editor comes with Windows 10 Home, but the feature is not enabled by default. Fortunately, it's not difficult to enable it. I've done this, and it worked a treat (although at one point a Windows Update disabled it again so I had to re-enable it). I haven't tried the 3rd-party policy editor they recommend.

Still no go on any of this. Is Cakewalk supposed to be able to handle sidechained FX in this bounce scenario? I've never tried to bounce a synth bass track that is sidechained with a compressor from the kick drum track, but I imagine that it's a pretty common task.

My first suggestion won't address the drive space issue, but really, SPlat at this late date? Cakewalk by BandLab has 3 years of development on it (bug fixes, features, optimization) and is still supported. As for addressing your system drive issue, you may not even need to migrate any programs to another drive. First, move all of your VST2 plug-ins to one of those 1TB drives. Your system will run better anyway. You can easily tell Cakewalk where to find them in Properties @abacab is correct about checking to see what's taking up all that space. A favorite tool of mine is WinDirStat, a utility that analyzes a drive and shows you both in list and graphical form what files and directories are taking up space. One of my systems (on which I have Cakewalk and most of my plug-ins installed) has a 120G system drive and I got it to 25G free with the help of WinDirStat and then Googling the stuff I didn't know about. Windows has built-in utilities for drive cleanup that work pretty well. Disk Cleanup, if you've never run it before, will probably give you back several gigs of space. Access it by right clicking on your drive icon and selecting Properties. Halfway down on the General tab. Then click on Clean Up System Files. By default, Windows 10 keeps the installation files for its updates, so that it can roll back if something goes wrong. Also, check C:\Users\<your username>\AppData\Local\Temp and you'll likely find a ton of cruft left over by program installations, etc. Delete anything over a day old that the system will let you. They're temporary files left behind by installers and other sloppy programs that didn't clean up their messes. On my systems, I noticed a folder in Windows called WinSxS, which is where Microsoft stores information about indie rock artists. Kidding, it's where they keep those old versions of the OS. Here's how to clean that up. Another trick is that by default, Windows puts all of your user Documents, Downloads, Music, Videos, and Pictures folders on the C:\ drive. You can easily move all of those to another drive by right clicking on their names in the left pane of Explorer, selecting Properties, then selecting the Location tab. Move all of those to one of your TB drives. This may free up more gigabytes depending on how much stuff you keep in those folders. The installer shells for some companies like MAGIX and iZotope by default drop copies of their installer files in Downloads, where they just sit taking up space. I just delete them, but moving my Downloads folder to the D:\ drive has in general saved a lot of space on the system drive. Finally, Settings/Apps will give you a list of all the applications installed on your system. I can forget about some of the programs I have installed but never use. Do all that stuff and see if you're still maxed out. I bet you get back at least 5-10% of your drive. Once you've done that, at least download Cakewalk by BandLab and try it. Won't hurt your SPlat installation at all, and you'll still be able to use all the juicy SPlat extra content.

I've been attempting this one track at a time, but it hadn't occurred to me to try going through a bus. I'll try it, thanks!

Here's a brain-twister I've been wrestling with the past couple of evenings. I have a song with 2 tracks of vocoder vocals. I'm using Meldaproduction MVocoder. MVocoder works as a straightforward sidechain effect, where you insert it on the carrier track and send the modulator to its sidechain input and voila, vocoded whatever. I've set it up using 2 different synths as carriers, each with an instance of MVocoder. The modulator is a single audio track with the modulating voice. I have sends going from the audio track to both of the MVocoder sidechain inputs. This plays back just fine. However, I would like to do some further fancier processing tricks on these vocals like echo throws and reverse delays/reverbs and backward audio. Things that can really only be done using an audio file as the source, not a synth output. Solution (I thought): just bounce those synths and do the fancy throws and reverse whatnots on the resulting audio tracks. Right? No. I can't get the darn things to render out properly. I've tried selecting the synth output track and bouncing it. Silence. I've tried bouncing both the modulator (voice) track and the synth track. Silence. I've tried turning my formerly split instrument track into a simple instrument track and bouncing that. Silence. I've tried freezing the instrument track, going to the Audio folder, copying the resulting audio file to a new file. Silence (it had no level when "frozen," either). While I'm doing this, I have both the modulator and carrier tracks soloed. Am I doing something wrong? Is Cakewalk not able to handle this scenario? I'm kind of disturbed by the idea that sidechain effects may not be working correctly in a bounce/freeze situation, what with the kick drum-to-bass sidechaining that goes on in the world. How do I work this?

It was very clear. "Return hindering" is unstable, "memory on functionalities" is left behind because Cakewalk never adapted to Windows Vista.

Absolutely anything, not Drum Map Manager. 😆

Well hello Robert. It's intrigued me very much to read about the history of Cakewalk, Inc.'s various mergers and acquisitions over the years. My stepfather was CEO at a couple of leisure product companies in my childhood, so I heard him talk about that stuff over the years. Then as an adult I toiled in the software industry, including a few shrink wrap houses like Adobe, prior to and during the advent of the www as a game-changer. My thesis has always been that as a freeware corporate giveaway, the quality of Cakewalk is likely to increase. This is because development will be driven by the developers' impulse to please their own needs (one of which is to do a job they can be proud of) and those of the user community rather than the survival need to acquire new licensees. I was called a dreamer on the old forum and this one, and well, I'm so happy to be able to say "neener-neener." There were (and still are) those who insist that the whole scheme is doomed and that there is no possible way to maintain high-quality software without charging people to use it. They'll post these assertions using Firefox, Chrome, and Edge, and apparently have never been to a trade show where companies are giving away tote bags or guitar picks with their logos on them. Just gotta think of Cakewalk now being the promotional item rather than the thing being promoted. I've seen people endlessly confounded when after almost a year, the developers have been working their butts off to ship the latest major version, and it finally ships. Yet it still carries all these bugs and design annoyances and oversights that people have been complaining about since 2 versions earlier. I've been both on the selling side and the buying side. The reason is simple: because fixing bugs and small featues doesn't bring in new licensees and upgraders. Fixing bugs costs money, adding flashy features makes money. It's why so many companies would love people to subscribe to their software as a service. With that model, if you continue to ship buggy crap, you open yourself to loss of subscribers due to people questioning that $30 per month bill, with competitors lining up to eat your lunch, and you can also afford to attract new users at a reasonable rate of uptake because you have a steady stream of cash coming in. Rather than depending on huge adoption right after the magazine reviews of the new features (which never mention bugs) are published. I've seen others wondering what effect Cakewalk's free license scheme is going to have on the DAW market. Will it take out a smaller program or two that someone might have used to get started? On that topic, I have no idea. Maybe there is less room for the Mixcrafts and Mu Studios of the world. I dunno. What I haven't given much thought to is the effect it might have on people who teach and produce instructional materials, like Warren and Robert. Did the companies that were doing this before Gibson binned Cakewalk Inc. suffer? Probably? Will there eventually be an uptick, or are we already seeing one? 3 years later, there are 4 YouTubers I know of who are publishing regular tutorials, which means there are probably more. Are colleges showing interest? Or do they still pretend that what you must do is learn Pro Tools prior to moving to L.A. to "make it" in the recording industry (iLok in hand)? Things will take longer than with payware programs due to there being nobody paid to go around and advocate for it. Always fun to watch the story unfold....