Starship Krupa

The Creative Collection has DB-33, their excellent Hammond emulation, Mini Grand, their piano, and XPand!2, their workstation ROMpler: https://www.pluginboutique.com/product/1-Instruments/58-Inst-Bundle/1685-AIR-Creative-Collection The Keyboard Collection has DB-33, Mini Grand, and Velvet, an electric piano that includes Rhodes, Wurlitzer, and Hohner Pianet emulations: https://www.pluginboutique.com/product/1-Instruments/58-Inst-Bundle/1686-AIR-Keyboard-Collection Since I already have 2 licenses for XPand!2, which covers all 4 of my computers, I'm looking at the Keyboard Collection. Demo the pianos and see how they sound.

https://www.pluginboutique.com/product/1-Instruments/64-Virtual-Instrument/1560-Xpand-2 A favorite of Cakewalkers as a supplement/replacement for the venerable TTS-1. At this price, if you don't already have it, just get it, don't even think about it. It also qualifies you for this month's PB freebie, iZotope Nectar Elements, if you haven't picked up on that yet.

Also, are these VSTi's, live instruments recorded through microphones, or what? Are you recording them at the same time, or overdubbing?

This is what I do once I've settled on a "keeper" track. Either that or as I said, move the unused takes to another track and then archive the track, which stops them from being streamed. Sometimes I like to keep alternate takes around for archival purposes in case it starts to nag at me that maaayyyyybeeee the other vocal take was better or I liked the other guitar track or something and that's one way to do it, but I have also used your method of renaming the project "XXXArchive" or whatever and then start deleting the leftovers. It can perk things up. Sometimes it has little effect, but I have a friend who likes to record drum take after drum take until he finds his groove, and I mean this guy will get up to like 20 takes, so even with my minimal mic'ing, that's 80 lanes!

As far as I know, SONAR by itself, excluding the add-ons, only takes up about 1G of disk space, so maybe this is not so much to worry about? The majority of the hard drive space is consumed by the extras, which is what you want. Others please correct me if I'm wrong.

Really, those higher sample rates that they put on interfaces have no bearing on any kind of real-life situation. The storage media companies pay the interface manufacturers to put them there so that people will use up more drive space. An analysis showing that it's freaking 2dB down by the time it hits 20KHz, then looks like Dr. Frankenstein's lightning storm above 25K isn't surprising when you try to record at sample rates higher than 48K. Just kidding! I own a pair of Firepods, actually Firepods with their firmware upgraded to the FP10 specification. After you posted this I decided to download the RightMark Analyzer and try it on my own system. No problem, looks great, at 96/24 my system is only down about 0.1 dB at 30KHz and about 0.6 dB at 20Hz, with none of that craziness above 20K.

Since Cakewalk streams project audio from the disk as it's playing it back, I keep my project (including audio) files on my SSD. There's actually a lot of disk reading overhead with Cakewalk's normal operation if one keeps a bunch of unused takes around, because Cakewalk streams everything, even if it's muted. There's no way (yet) to archive takes except to move them to another track and then archive the track.

My favorite free optical compressor emulation VST is the AdHd Leveling Tool.

Oh thank heaven. One that you pay for, I presume. I can only hope that it means you will be wasting no more time and energy here.

That's terrible. Vegas Pro Edit 15 is crashy for you where it was a big improvement for me. Video NLE is probably the application that is most finicky about system configuration. If it doesn't like your video card or sound interface, you'll find out about it. I've had to play around with different video cards on my main system. The one that I'm using now was originally causing trouble with Mixcraft when running the 64-bit version. Then after I upgraded my system to Windows 10, I was able to put it back in and it plays nice. But at various times I've used an nVidia, the onboard HD4000 (which caused Cakewalk to have lags drawing screen elements), and then finally, the Radeon. The FP10's still seem to be rock solid, thank heaven. They're good, workhorse interfaces, and a great way to get a lot of inputs.

So telling the world that a single user with a very poor command of grammar and spelling is having unspecified troubles with the software is supposed to motivate the development team at BandLab to deliver a product that better meets your requirements? Ad hominem attacks laced with obscenities, that's your idea of constructive criticism. I start with the assumption that the people making the software want the product to work properly, so if something's going wrong with it, I tell them, and they pretty much fix the trouble, sooner or later. When I'm having trouble I also ask other users if they, too are having the same issue to see if it's a problem with the software that I need to report or something going wrong with my computer setup or what. It's honestly never occurred to me to come here and start insulting the people who work on the product, but to each his own, I guess.

I got lucky and scored Vegas Pro Edit 15 along with Hitfilm Express, Sound Forge and a bunch of other stuff in a Humble Bundle a few months ago for $25. I had been running Vegas Pro 10, and the difference was astonishing, to say the least. Not so much in features or anything in the UI, but smoothness, speed and stability were vastly improved. I am far, far from being any kind of power user of Vegas. Every time I fire it up I have to re-learn how to do a fadeout, but the the improvement was immediately noticeable, so Magix are doing a good job. I've gotten good information in this forum: https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/vegas-pro-forum/

That you eventually got Sampletank 3 to work without crashing the host is a mystery to me, because at least with Cakewalk, Mixcraft, and Cantabile, it doesn't last very long before going bye-bye, at least with the sampled grand. The free version at least.

You only need to run BandLab Assistant when you want to install Cakewalk and/or the Theme Editor. It can stay running all the time, but it's very easy to turn that off and just run it when you want to. Cakewalk itself will let you know when there is an update available or a couple of weeks in advance of when your subscription needs to be validated. The subscription needs to be validated at least once every 6 months. Cakewalk has a downloader, just like SONAR did. The difference is that you need to run the same program at least once every 6 months to re-validate your license. You are never forced to update Cakewalk if you don't want to, and SONAR and Cakewalk coexist happily without interfering with each other.

When I click on Advanced options, down at the bottom under Pause updates it gives me the option to select a date up to 35 days in the future. This is Windows 10 Home v. 1903. Down below this is where you can click on Delivery Optimization to stop your system from becoming a torrent server for Windows updates.