Starship Krupa

So I guess in your opinion, no DAW developer has brains. It's not you, it's every DAW ever created.

Whoa. $95 for the budget solutions. $295 for the dee-luxe. Sidewidener 2 looks better all the time.

You referring to this one or the CM version? It looks like the Boz branding is gone from v. 2. So many stereoizers (iZotope's isn't half bad), but the only one I have that can touch Sidewidener CM is Polyverse/Infected Mushroom Wider 2.

Tempting despite the plethora of stereoizers I already have. The original version, which was a Computer Music giveaway, is really the best one I've ever used for taking a mono phone recording and polishing it up. Looks like you can sign up for their newsletter and get another 10% off. $17.10 Hmm, an update to the best-in-type plug-in I've ever used for less than the price of a large pizza?

Peter @PavlovsCat has attempted to do just that. I'm not sure where to find his list at the moment. He was maintaining it in the Deals subforum. There are way too many great free instruments that aren't in this topic just because nobody has gotten around to posting them. Even in just the 5 years since we started the topic (and its sister topic about freeware FX), there's been such an explosion in the area of loss leader plug-ins that I don't have enough time to try them much less post about them. At some point, I hope to get another song into a releaseable state....

If you want to keep using your Behringer mixer as an interface, I'd suggest trying WASAPI Exclusive. It looks like the only step you're missing is that you need to choose an input on the track itself, before you arm for recording. The issue with the Behringer mixer is that while it's good at being a mixer, it's not great at being an audio interface due to the lack of a true ASIO driver. 2-input interfaces with ASIO drivers may be had for as little as $70 new, much less to get a used one on Craig's List.

Sorry, I haven't tried the instruments. I got free-reed instruments confused with reed instruments being offered for free. Have you tried this (found in the concertina.net forum)?: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1KZ1EPAueS-xBiBLDeMVfa3Fvno85UHHg?usp=sharing It needs an .SF2 player, but those are plentiful.

It looks like you're running a plug-in called Tonocracy and it's crashing in Cakewalk Next.

I think I tried a free version of Halion at one point and it was such a pain to set up the eLicenser thing for a free product and then once I got it going it was kind of crap anyway, UI way too small, couldn't locate the supposed plethora of free sample content....yeah, they can keep it. The licensing system gave me a bad vibe, I'm usually pretty easygoing on that front, iLok has never bothered me, but this eLicenser...it seemed like a half-a55ed imitation of iLok, which made me wonder why the hell they didn't just use iLok.

Bapu'd.

I have yet to experience any computer virus that was as destructive to a computer's operation as realtime anti-malware "solutions." While you're at it, go into Windows Settings/Update and Security/Windows Security/Virus & threat protection/Manage settings and scroll down to Exclusions. In there you can exclude folders from Windows' own realtime virus protection. By default, Windows Defender scans every disk read and write. I exclude my Cakewalk programs folder, projects folders, plug-in folders, sample folders, anywhere I don't want or need realtime virus scanning. You might find that file I/O operations get even quicker. I actually turn off realtime scanning entirely, but that's up to the individual. I'm fine with having Defender just scan my drives while I'm not using the computer.

Well, they claim that. There are people on this forum whose knowledge and opinions I respect highly who don't agree with me in regard to the possibility of DAW's sounding different. They cite the theory behind it, but that theory was conceived decades before there was such a thing as a DAW. Theory is one thing, actual real world implementation via algorithm, code, talking to drivers, that's another thing entirely. I can name three DAW's that in the past 10 years or so claimed that they improved their sound (Samplitude/Sequoia/Music Maker, Ableton Live, and Mixcraft). If it's not possible for DAW's to sound different, how did they pull that off? I know that jitter in a digital audio stream results in audible degradation (avoid most interfaces made before 2010 when JetPLL was introduced), and I don't think Fletcher, Munson, Linkwitz, Riley and company accounted for it.

With any complex software such as a DAW, it will take at least a few hours of familiarization. There is often a tradeoff between ease of use and versatility. There are plenty of them that are free to try. When I set about learning to use a modern DAW, I chose Mixcraft, whose motto is "software should be easy to use."

First, one scenario.

"Long-windedness," as far as I can gather.

Not so long ago I spent a lot of time trying to chase down a difference in sound I thought I heard between CbB and Mixcraft. It was weird, like chasing a phantom, but I trust my hearing. Initially, I wasn't testing side by side trying to find a difference, quite the opposite. Ultimately, after trying to set up an objective test, using VSTi's, in REAPER Mixcraft, Studio One, and CbB, my conclusion was....that it's really difficult to come up with an objective test, even if, like me, you use software that double-blinds the files. It's sometimes said that you hear a difference because you want to hear a difference, but for me the opposite is true: I want there to be no difference. Cakewalk feels more comfortable to me than Mixcraft. If any difference I hear is all in my mind, why would listening on the less comfortable program sound slightly better? I know that it's possible for audio playback engines to sound different from each other because I can hear differences between various music players. My favorite so far is JRiver, followed by AIMP and Music Bee. They all claim to provide bit-perfect playback (which means that they feed your ASIO or WASAPI driver the exact ones and zeroes that they read from the file, bypassing Windows' mixer), but they all sound different as far as detail, soundstage, and transients. in all of my many years of participating on music software forums, nobody has ever taken my suggestion to just try one of these bit-perfect music player programs (AIMP and Music Bee are free, Jriver has a trial period), and I don't expect that to change now, but if you do, set them up to use your ASIO driver or WASAPI Exclusive. If you try this, and A-B it vs. Windows Media Player, you may get a sense of what the differences are between playback engines. Listen closely for "masked" elements of the sound, like when an artist mixes in sound effects or brief little ear candy samples. Also reverb tails. Some players reveal those, others bury them. I'm not knowledgeable enough to know why this is, but I can hear it. Whether the player is better at suppressing jitter, or what, it's there.

I'd like a definition of "jibba jabba," and I don't mean reposting my "Old Euthymia" bourbon label. 😂

Last I saw he was calling it "feature complete." From Wankipedia: "A feature-complete (FC) version of a piece of software has all of its planned or primary features implemented but is not yet final due to bugs, performance or stability issues. This occurs at the end of alpha testing in development.."

Yeah, it doesn't seem to choke other hosts. My guess is that, if Windows barfs upon encountering that situation, it's passing the barf on to Sonar. Cakewalk is probably using a system call to get the file list whereas other hosts may be doing their own thing. For who to realize? Plug-in manufacturers such as IK Multimedia seem to have gotten it wrong, and innocent end users can't be expected to check for it. We have a situation where some installers seem to do this. It would be great if vstscan.exe could handle it more gracefully.

I haven't noticed this, but then again my system has 20 virtual cores, 32G of RAM and a 4GHz CPU to play with, so performance differences kinda get lost. The current Sonar is supposedly still a preview and not a fully released product, so who knows. As ever, if you've done anything to tune CbB like plug-in load balancing or thread scheduling model, make sure to apply those settings to Sonar.

Wow, this is old, old news. HG Fortune definitely came up with some idiosyncratic UI's. At least one of them allows the user to choose the number and behavior of "spooks," Halloween ghost like sprites that float about. They are on the crash-y end of 32-bit synth plug-ins. Use at your own risk.

I'm going to make some assumptions here, so correct me if I get it wrong. 1. You want to record the PSR's audio via its own USB audio output. 2. You also wish to be able to play to a metronome beat while you're recording. 3. You don't want the metronome to be audible in your recordings. In order to help, I need to ask a questions. Do you have speakers (or headphones) connected to your computer's audio output jack or are you listening to the metronome and your playing through the speakers in the PSR? It looks like the reason you are recording the metronome along with the music is that you have Cakewalk set to use the keyboard's audio to play the metronome as well as recording the keyboard's audio, so of course the metronome will be recorded along with the music. It's coming from the same device. In order to be able to record the audio from your keyboard and listen to the metronome without also recording the metronome, you will need to have speakers connected to your computer's output and use those speakers to hear the metronome. I'll assume that you already have this set up if you've been using Cakewalk to record guitar. Generally speaking, you'll get better results using WASAPI Driver Mode than MME. MME is very old technology, it's been replaced twice. WASAPI is current technology. Once you set things to use WASAPI, set the track's input to be the stereo output from your keyboard's USB. You currently have it set to record only the left channel, it will sound much better if you record the stereo output. Then route the metronome bus' output to the speakers connected to your computer. For monitoring the keyboard's output you may use either the keyboard's audio (through its speakers) or the speakers connected to your computer (Realtek, if you don't have an external interface). Going forward, you may wish to look into getting an external 2-input audio interface with ASIO support for recording and playing back audio. They may be had brand new for as little as $75, and even less money if purchased used.

So you've been using Cakewalk by BandLab for the past 6 years and you have always had troubles when using virtual instruments? And you're asking whether the developers have plans to improve the performance of Sonar in hosting virtual instruments. I can only speak for myself, Cakewalk and Sonar seem to be not much different from other hosts for this use.

This is a most confusing topic. My understanding of Quick Grouping has always (in 6 years of using CbB and Sonar) been that you select the tracks you want to participate in the Quick Group, then hold Ctrl and grab whatever control you want to adjust on all of the selected tracks. Am I to understand that it used to adjust similar controls for all tracks in a project regardless of selection status?? That would make it pretty much useless for me. I'm glad it was changed.

Since you bought a BSP subscription just to test this, that's the best way to find out. If you skipped past the past 6 years of Cakewalk by BandLab, the engine was given many optimizations during that time, so you should see a noticeable difference between SONAR and Sonar. I've been using Cakewalk the whole time, and in my observations and testing, the engine is more stable and uses fewer resources than it did when Cakewalk by BandLab was first released. It's more "it has already been" than "will be" optimized, but I'm sure that the developers will take whatever opportunities they can to improve it even more.