Starship Krupa

Same, except for location of lump.

Hmm, Last HB issue of these was Vegas Pro Edit 18 and Sound Forge Audio Studio 16. Worth it to me to update my Vegas to the later version. Odd to switch to Sound Forge Pro and drop it down a version. Since you're coming from a DAW skill set and familiar with the paradigm, Vegas Pro is worthy of your consideration. My video editing skills and needs are pretty light, and I find that Vegas scales down to my level while still potentially able to handle just about anything I can throw at it (although I haven't found a way to produce a slitscan effect). I know that I'll never outgrow it. It's probably not the easiest to use, but I've found it to be the one that's easiest for me to remember how to use when I go a long time between video projects, because its workflow is so DAW-like. It began life as a DAW and there are still people who use it as one. Its main working area has video and audio tracks, and fades and trimming are performed in a similar fashion on audio and video clips. VFX can apply to an entire project, a track, or an individual clip, just like with audio clips.

If you've never spent 10 minutes fine tuning a compressor only to discover that the compressor was either a: bypassed or b: on a channel other than the one you thought you were working on, then your ears are trustworthy enough that PD has little to offer you.

The use that I've found for it is to compare EQ and compression curves between various plug-ins. Out of curiosity, as a signal processing geek myself. It is interesting to take "emulations" from different manufacturers and set their controls similarly and then observe what they are actually doing. The variation between the half dozen "Pultec" emulations I have with all set up with the same settings was....quite interesting. It showed me that there are plug-ins with their own "bypass" switches where the signal is still being altered even when the bypass is engaged. It showed me that MCompressor, rather than the smooth curve I was expecting, actually has a bit of character. As far as whatever value it might have for musical production, sometimes I want to try using processors other than the ones I'm used to, and PD can help give an idea of how to set up the new ones to behave similarly to the old ones. It probably has little to offer the "trust your ears to tell you when your knob twiddling has produced a hit" crew.

I consider them to be, as their name suggests, essential. The one I use the most is KHs Limiter, first in line on every soft synth track to prevent the output of the synth from slamming the input of any subsequent FX. So multiple instances on every project I do. Pitch Shift is great in its straightforward approach, as are the rest. As with the MeldaProduction FreeFX bundle, there's no reason not to have this incredibly useful collection of plug-ins installed.

Am I the only one who picked up on the A|A|S $49 upgrade from Ultra Analog Session to Ultra Analog VA-3 w/Motion soundpack? I also dropped $10 to upgrade Loop Engine to 2.01. Still thinking about ChordJam w/Freezr for $32.

Once you've downloaded the .DLL, just drop it into your VST2 plug-ins folder and Cakewalk should scan it and add it to your plug-ins list. If you're going to check it out, I highly recommend also installing the extra patches linked from the site that John linked to. Installing patches for Synth1 is a little clumsy, IIRC, but also well worth the effort.

That is really odd and messed up. I've been thinking about creating projects that will allow me to change synth patches within the song, but it seems like this was made much more difficult. I also have so many soft synths that it would be nice to make "patch browser" projects that quickly step through the available sounds as a preview. This will be tougher to do as well. What are the workarounds?

The headquarters of both companies is in a tiny town just outside one of the entrances to Yosemite National Park here in California. Having participated in their beta program enough to get my name in the credits for the Mixcraft 7 release, something I can tell you about Acoustica is that they are one of the most quality-minded software manufacturers that I've ever dealt with. So please report your experience and findings about this performance issue to them. They will likely want to know about it and work with you and the BandLab Cakewalk engineers to fix whatever is. Good question, and one that I can't really answer. Without being able to read the minds of the folks at Steinberg, there's only speculation. It could be that there were starting to be too many extensions to the VST spec that weren't controlled by Steinberg, and they feared losing their grip on it. Maybe they thought that being able to announce a shiny new technology that their own DAW's would be the first to support would be good for marketing. Maybe the Cubase/Nuendo developers were having a hard time working out sidechaining support in their apps and wanted to force that work onto plug-in developers. Whatever drove the move, as far as I can see it backfired. Other manufacturers (correctly, IMO) saw little advantage to supporting the new format. Rather, it only increased their coding and testing burden. Adoption was slow. When they finally applied their legal muscle to force new developers to adopt the format by refusing to issue more licenses to develop VST2, it served as an alert to participating vendors that Steinberg had too much of the wrong kind of control and that a more open and flexible spec might serve the industry better. So now there is CLAP, a competing plug-in format. As for CLAP, as long as Steinberg continues to play nice, I don't think it will become the dominant format. But I'm glad it exists, because it serves to show Steinberg that if they do try any more funny business, the industry has other options My suspicion is that if you ask anyone in the business of developing plug-ins or hosts for them about VST3, they'll tell you that the canonical DLL location is the only thing that they benefit from. I'm sure it eliminated a LOT of easily resolved support issues. However, I was so used to using custom locations for my VST2 plug-ins that I initially tried doing the same with VST3's, which of course didn't work too well.... Is it that VST3 doesn't support it or is it that plug-in and/or host manufacturers stopped supporting it? Communication between host and plug-in regarding presets in general seems to have gotten lost along the way. Where it seemed like most VST2's relied on the host for preset management, and reported their own presets to hosts' preset managers, in the VST3 era, this isn't the case. Now it's unusual for a plug-in to use that part of the spec to report their presets, and every plug-in has its own proprietary preset manager. Which can be hard to find and quirky to navigate, depending on the developer. The VST3 spec does call for a canonical location for .vstpreset files, but few plug-in companies use it and Cakewalk's support for it is clunky. That's a drag, because I like using the host's preset manager more than the ones within the plug-ins, which have to be learned for each different manufacturer.

I'm probably the deflator of VST3 hype that John is thinking of. To recap my usual points: VST2 plug-ins that support sidechaining do so just fine on every DAW except Steinberg's. The "VST3=sidechaining" stuff is only true for Cubase and Nuendo. PreSonus came up with a widely-used extension to the VST2 spec (so widely used that it was incorporated into the VST3 spec and hyped as being new) that allowed for plug-in UI resizing. The "plug-in goes to sleep when no audio is being passed" is a nice idea in theory. In practice, it's not that big a deal because just like any processing, plug-ins usually only eat resources when they're actually processing something other than silence. Also, implementing that part of the VST3 spec is not mandatory. No part of the VST3 spec is mandatory; it's a spec, not a law. There is no authority enforcing compliance. Of my VAST plug-in collection (Cakewalk has it at almost 500 FX), there is only one manufacturer I have seen implement silence=sleep, and that manufacturer, MeldaProduction, also implemented the feature in the VST2 versions of its products. Think about it: how many projects have you ever done that would benefit much from turning off a couple of plug-ins when they were idling? Due to slow uptake of VST3, most plug-in manufacturers still provide VST2 versions of their products. Since they are less likely to want to code two separate versions, that results in their VST3's being restricted to a VST2 feature set. The one single big advantage of the VST3 spec that I perceive is that it has a canonical location for the DLL's. But even that isn't without issues, as anyone with a 256GB SSD for their C drive and a large plug-in collection can tell you. Yes, you can circumvent this with sym links, but relatively few people have the knowledge and skills to implement that. Regarding Cherry Audio's products not working so well in VST3 form, this, unfortunately, is less of a surprise than it should be. Cherry Audio shares staff and management with Acoustica, makers of Mixcraft. When Mixcraft first started supporting VST3, the otherwise rock solid Mixcraft was so crashy and buggy with VST3's that I gave up on VST3's for over a year waiting for the next version of Mixcraft, which worked fine with VST3's. It appears that even now, they may not have cozied up to the VST3 spec? It's been a long time since I've run into VST3/VST2 issues, but one notable exception is Acustica (not to be confused with the DAW manufacturer) Multiply, the excellent freeware chorus. From its initial release, the VST3 version of Multiply will not work in CbB.

Well, I guess there's little to win, but nothing to lose....

Who, indeed, cares what games we choose?

I can't find in the documentation where it says this, but if it does, the documentation is in error, not the program.

I snagged Loop Engine during its not-that-long-ago intro sale and I do like it. As idea jump-starters go, it's my favorite of the ones I've tried. The Note Editor "piano roll" thing by itself seems to be worth the upgrade tenner, so I'll snag this. That they're keeping Chords, Chords Pro, Chords Pro+Notes and Loop Engine 1.1 all as active products is asinine. It's not a deep enough product to support 5 different feature levels and this just adds to the confusion I ran into when I was trying to figure out which one to get. Their ad copy isn't explicit enough in stating that each product contains all of the features of the next one down. Fortunately none of that affects my enjoyment of the product I bought. Still, though....considering that they're under the same corporate roof as FL Studio and MeldaProduction, one might think they'd get their upgrade policy act together.

My favorite de-collision tool, Wavesfactory Trackspacer, is currently on sale for $39 at Plugin Boutique. So easy to use and effective that it feels like cheating. As for ScalerEQ, I haven't looked into it enough to understand what it has going for it beyond presets. Cakewalk's QuadCurve EQ includes a piano keyboard graphic as a visual aid for figuring out where you're emphasizing and de-emphasizing frequencies. All of the MeldaProduction EQ's include similar visual helpers. So if I wanted to do some in key EQ'ing, it would be easy enough to start there. This assumes of course that one knows what the song's key looks like on the piano keyboard....