Starship Krupa

Based on his posts in the wake of the Sonar/Next announcement that he wasn't too excited about the prospects in Cakewalk land.

Relaxxxx. Why do we get this kind of thing when people suggest adding a new way to accomplish something? "Nooooo, pleeeease, I like it the way it IS! Don't force me to learn a new way to do it!" Nobody has suggested that the current way of doing it should be removed. We're just saying that it's clumsy and nearly impossible to figure out without deep-diving the documentation or Googling or asking how to do it on the forum. Maybe you were able to intuit how without research, but I wasn't and I've seen plenty of other users who also found it obtuse and frustrating. Me, I hate deleting markers in Cakewalk because I'm always afraid that I'm going to hit Del at the wrong moment and delete a clip or a plug-in or something. Every time I do it, it makes me clench up. This is 5 years and 11 months after I learned how to do it (it took me a month of using Cakewalk to get around to learning how to do it). I've been asking for years for Delete Marker to be added to the dialog that pops up when you right click on a marker. For those people who like clicking on a marker, holding, then pressing Del to delete it, nothing would change. You would be free ignore the fact that there's a way for new users to figure out how to do it without Googling. Which is how I figured out how to delete a marker in Cakewalk. Gave up in frustration, Googled it. Found a post on the old forum responding to someone else who also wasn't able to figure it out. If anyone reading this thinks that experienced DAW users needing to use a search engine to figure out an operation as common as deleting a marker is just par for the course, you're wrong. Yes, there are many operations where it's not out of line to have to consult the manual. Things like setting up Groove Clip Looping and such that exist in every DAW, but usually in different forms. Deleting a marker? C'mon. It doesn't have to be a complete overhaul of the feature or a rethink of the UX philosophy or a retool of the Markers module or view or any such thing. Just add Delete Marker to the context dialog. It's the very kind of thing that context dialogs are meant for.

I've been complaining about this for years. IMO, it should be in the Insert menu. Project would be the last place I'd think to look. I hoped Sonar might be an opportunity to clean things up in the Global Menu, but so far, no go. BTW, I like your theme. 😉

The comedic genius of Desi Arnaz:

Ah, the legendary Sandy Bridge. Plenty of those still in service. If I had it, I'd be tempted to see if it would take an i7 2600 (making sure to update the BIOS first). $30 on eBay. But I like polishing the 'tater. Your system is fine as long as you do what you're doing, which is vet your plug-ins thoroughly. My philosophy is that if a plug-in is eating up too many resources on my computer, it ain't the computer that needs to be replaced. At the upper right corner of the forum page, click on your name and select Account settings. Then on the left, you should see a link for Signature. I suspect you're right. Either MODO Drums or MODO Bass (can't remember which) was the first plug-in that ever refused to install on my old laptop (1st gen i7) because the processor was too old. Yours has the AVX instructions that they were asking for. The constant crunch might have been a matter of graphics (if you're using the onboard HD 2000 GPU or same age external card). Software that makes heavy use of DirectX can have problems with certain older GPU's. Lotsa good pianos and drums in the Freeware Instruments topic. As you say, Hammersmith is a good free piano, so is the Monastery Grand that comes with the free MeldaProduction MSoundFactory Player. Here's a tip for keeping older systems viable: download HWInfo64 and use it to monitor your CPU speed and temperature. Sometimes cooling issues can slow an older system down because heatsink paste is getting old and/or the case is filling up with dust. Both have easy fixes. HWInfo can tell you if your system is throttling due to getting too hot.

What are the exact specs of your "humble" PC? Processor? RAM? My favorite virtual piano is MeldaProduction's Meldway Grand, which is 60GB of samples. It runs with no issues on my laptop system with 16GB RAM. Correlation vs. causality. What exactly were the bad problems that MODO Drums caused? Plug-ins may be written to make efficient or inefficient use of RAM and CPU resources, they may have bugs or be bug-free. The size of the install file has little to do with either. In the case of Meldway Grand, they are obviously not loading all of the piano samples into memory at the same time or it wouldn't be possible to use it on my 16G laptop system.

Have you ever read a description of headphones or speakers that referred to them as "revealing?" That may be what you are experiencing. Your Adam monitors may be more "revealing" than your Grado headphones. The criteria for pleasant listening vs. mixing are different. People have made multiple suggestions, but I'm still not clear on whether it's your vocal tracks you are unhappy with or just your vocal tracks when you play them back on your monitor speakers. And I'm not clear on whether it's any of the monitor speakers you own or just the Adams. Do your vocal tracks sound bad on all of your 3 playback systems (Adams, Avantone, Grado)? Or just the Adams, or just the Adams and the Avantones? You say that Boz Scaggs sounds good while Mike McDonald doesn't. Is that true across the cans and both sets of speakers? Or just the Adams, or just the Adams and Avantones? We need to eliminate some variables before I can make any suggestions.

https://www.pluginboutique.com/deals/show?sale_id=16051 Tactic for $5 (my favorite Glitchmachines instrument) Polygon2 for $10 Quadrant for $10 Cryogen for $10 Fracture XT for $5 Convex for $5 (my favorite Glitchmachines effect) Subvert 2.0 for $10 It's hard to describe what these things do, but if you like glitchy sounds, the company is well-named. The line is split into FX that process incoming audio and instruments that use samples and then process them in strange ways. If you have a song and you want it to have a section that goes "bloip squark zert squee" or maybe you have an entire song you want to sound like that, then you will like these.

Veak sauce.

The last time I did an Ubuntu build it came with more bundled software than Windows 10 does, mostly in the form of LibreOffice. What do you do with a freshly-built Windows system? I get busy installing whatever software I want to use. In this way, Windows and Ubuntu aren't that much different, it's just that when I go to install the apps on Windows, there are more and better ones available. Apple were really the first suppliers of personal computers to understand that people want to start doing things right away and may not have known that you need software other than the OS to do anything, so they bundled a word processor and a paint program with the Mac.

According to the tooltip and the Reference Guide, that menu is called the "Edit Filter." There's room on the menu to label Track Automation "Track Automation." Shouldn't it be labeled that way?

This one by Robert Fripp is rumored to have been the cause of Captain Christopher Pike of the USS Enterprise's disfiguration:

I've been brushing up on automation; I've only ever used volume and pan automation on tracks, buses and clips and wanted to dig more deeply. First question: The way I've always done track or bus automation is to open an automation lane, select what parameter I want to automate (volume or pan) and start adding nodes. Works a treat. From reading the Reference Guide, I guess you can also do that right in the track if you set the edit filter on the track. Cool, but here's where things got weird in the documentation. The Cakewalk Reference Guide repeatedly (and I mean repeatedly, look on p. 641) says to "Set the track’s Edit Filter control to the desired automation parameter (Track Automation or Clip Automation)." When I click on the Edit Filter, here's what I see: There's "Clip Automation," but their ain't no selection for "Track Automation." I'll hazard a guess that plain old "Automation" means "Track Automation?"

I'll take a guess here that you have his Cakewalk set up to use ASIO (as you should, in general)? The problem with that is that ASIO "steps outside" the sound system used by the OS so that the program and the hardware can talk more directly to each other. That's great, but it means that Windows can't route audio between programs if one of them is using ASIO. In order to hear what's playing back in Cakewalk from his computer, you would need to switch to WASAPI Shared. That's not the best mode for regular use of the DAW, so only use that while you're showing him the ropes, then switch back to ASIO.

The pitch and mod wheels on MIDI keyboards are a special case. They're automatically mapped to control those functions on whatever target synth they're connected to, whether it's a hardware synth or virtual instrument.

Generally, those of us who try to help out here read the topic titles and if we think we can contribute, we try. As for why we participate, speaking for myself, I just like to help people. And I'm really good at searching and reading documentation, so even if I don't know the answer, I'll look it up, and in that way, I learn the software better. The best way to show appreciation is to post a follow-up in the same topic where you asked the question, letting people know that their advice helped. That also helps the people who just read the forum but never post know that the suggestions worked.

Whatever DAW you go with, if plug-ins are what you seek, Kilohearts' Essentials, MeldaProduction's FreeFX Bundle, Native Instruments' Komplete Start, IK Multimedia's Sampletank CS (and other CS instruments and FX), Soundpaint, and the free Vital synth will give you a pretty deep collection of stuff for absolutely free. No DAW user at any level should pass those up. The abundance of great free loss-leader software is the reason that I've never felt restricted by the relatively small array of plug-ins that Cakewalk ships with (although don't neglect the Pro Channel FX, which are pretty excellent). Given the choice, I'd much rather pay as little as possible for the DAW itself and pick my own plug-ins.

If I ever decide I want to jump into the thriving job market for commercial studio employment, I'll be all over Pro Tools. You seem to have mistaken me for someone who disagrees with you/him. He summed up my experiences and opinions pretty much perfectly. I'm merely following it up with saying that even Studio One for Linux is unlikely to turn the tide, and when it doesn't, the Linuxoids will have even fewer excuses for Linux failing to penetrate the DAW market.

I do have a license for it on my personal account. That's how I know it's a "must have." This is from an account I also have access to, a friend's who isn't as on top of these things as I am. I guess I should check their list of products and make sure they didn't snag it at some point, although I thought that they hadn't. It ain't the end of the world if I can't figure it out.

So Behringer's first synth turns out to have "borrowed" the look of an existing product. How very Behringer of them. I dunno, though, two wheels on the left, woodgrain frame, and bunch of knobs on the face isn't exactly unique. Cherry Audio and IK Multimedia have made closer clones of hardware synths. I wonder if people were looking harder for it to be a copy of an existing product, given Behringer's past behavior.

This is what I see: No place to click on "get coupon."

Pro Tools, the Word Perfect of DAW's. I don't consider them an industry leader these days. I know the issue is hardware support, and the Linux rah-rahs' lament/excuse has been that since the big guys don't ship DAW's for Linux, there's no incentive for interface makers to provide drivers, blah blah blah. My theory is that PreSonus just got tired of the whining and slapped it together to shut them up. The DAW that Linux users should adopt and be happy with is REAPER, which has similar appeal and even UX. Then they can join the REAPER hordes and clutter up discussions of other products with their preaching.

TBF, PreSonus is a larger DAW developer and have tossed their hat into the Linux ring. At this point, I'd say to the Linux advocates "you got your top tier DAW, so you can't use the excuse that big developers are 'cowardly.'" If they're right, then Studio One on Linux would be the tipping point, but it ain't gonna do it. At least when one drops into this forum and starts begging for CS to go Linux, we have somewhere to point them. Studio One is at least every bit as capable as CS, and they've jumped into Linux, so reward them for their bravery.

Perhaps. As early as 1988 or so, when online forums meant dial-up BBSes, there have always been users of some platform or other who believe that if they just advocate hard enough for their platform, it will step into big time popularity. In those days it was the Amiga. Amiga users would not STFU about how great they were, how they represented the future of computing with all their multimedia features. Trouble was, they represented the future. What was happening in the present was that people wanted office apps like word processing, databases, groupware, spreadsheets, desktop publishing, etc. That was what was driving adoption and growth. Microsoft saw this and stepped up, and took over the world. Employees could learn Word, Excel, etc., and drop into any company. The multimedia stuff, while fun, was a niche market by comparison. The Amiga had office apps, but they were from tiny vendors. Not incidentally, on the hardware side, businesses are wary of single-source vendors. Apple and Commodore, with their locked down hardware platforms, were less desirable. Buy or lease a pile of Dells, Gateways, Compaqs, HP's. Otherwise you're at the whim of one manufacturer, who could change the game on you with impunity. Witness the recent developments with Apple Silicon. Not saying that there's anything wrong with Apple Silicon, quite the contrary, but it's caused everyone who develops for MacOS to have to re-do their software to be able to run on it. Anyway, when Linux came along, it became the next one in this role. It got so bad in the 90's that I swore to all of my computing friends that I'd never touch Linux with a 10' pole because of the endless blah blah. Instead, I tried working with FreeBSD. What finally got me to break my promise was Ubuntu, which finally delivered on the promise of being able to rival Windows for desktop use. OpenOffice was great, all the browsers worked, and even some plug-and play stuff. But by that time, Windows and MacOS were already at a higher level. Now we had high res gaming, video editing, DAW's, etc. all of which by their nature have to cozy up to the OS to squeeze every bit of performance and compatibility. Someday, Linux will be able to be a decent platform for gaming and multimedia creation, but it ain't someday, it's now, and there's no sense in adopting a platform where you'll be struggling.

You were curious and you gave it a shot, and I thank you for doing it so that I don't have to. The Linux rah-rahs have been overselling its capabilities for 25 years. It's still great for keeping old low-end hardware useful for things like web browsing and office apps. I have an old iMac that was hopelessly slow, wiped it and put on some light Linux build or other and it works great. Pretty much useless, as I have other computers to do those mundane tasks, and nobody else I know is in need of a computer that can only do those tasks. But it was a fun exercise.