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Starship Krupa

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Posts posted by Starship Krupa

  1. 13 hours ago, Amberwolf said:

    I don't presently have anything that supports sidechaining (not sure if my ancient SONAR itself even does), at least not that works in that ancient SONAR.

    SONAR started supporting sidechaining a long time ago. According to Google AI, SONAR 7 was the version that introduced support for it. What version are you using? Surely not earlier than 7.

    It's dead simple to set up. You put the plug-in you want to control on the track that you want to duck, then create a send from the track that you want to do the controlling. I've never even had to tweak the send level for sidechaining.

    And of course if there's anything about it you have trouble with, those of us on the forum will have it covered pronto.

    13 hours ago, Amberwolf said:

    I'd prefer not to have to do it manually. :)   While it's technically interesting to learn the process, it's tedious and wastes time I could be doing other things with.

    Same.

    While I do think that learning to do it "manually" is of value to understand the principle behind EQ carving, there's no reason to struggle with doing it that way if better tools are available. Unless Trackspacer (and the other automagic tools like Neutron and MSpectralDynamics) suddenly vanishes, I think we're safe becoming dependent on it/them.

    As for the spectrum analyzer, like everything else Trackspacer, the display is very specific to what the plug-in does. It gives you a realtime visual of what the process is doing, and that's all.

    For general spectrum analysis, my needs are covered with MAnalyzer and SPAN, both free to use. MAnalyzer even shows you the exact frequencies of the peaks. Most parametric EQ plug-ins these days have pretty good spectrum analyzers.

  2. 4 hours ago, P-Rizzy said:

    ive just been looking for anyone with something positive to reassure me that bandlab won't pull the free versions like with cakewalk by bandlab, so im not left with a bunch of project files i can't open at some point, because even free is too expensive if that's the future. i guess no one feels confident about that, so im better off paying for something better?

    I think to the developers, Sonar is Cakewalk by BandLab with an updated GUI and a change to the licensing model. It's the same codebase they've been maintaining for a very long time, so to them, CbB is just the last version of the DAW that used the bitmap GUI.

    Yes, they have announced that Cakewalk by BandLab will soon not be able to validate, but they have provided a free-to-use successor that works exactly like CbB and can freely open any Cakewalk project files.

    I understand the FUD, but if you step back a bit, BandLab has provided a free subscription DAW starting in early 2018 and continuing through today, uninterrupted. Their communication and the wording of the announcements could....use some improvement, but they're software engineers, not marketing people and they put it plainly: nothing is guaranteed. BandLab runs the Cakewalk group pretty lean, so that's how it is.

    But if you look at the behavior of the company, they have kept it free and continue to do so. They've always been free to pull the plug, it's just that recently they've been saying so more out loud. It's a free subscription. As such they are not able to promise that it will always be free, because BandLab is a big company and management could change. They could go out of business. The Cakewalk IP could once again be sold in liquidation. The future's not ours to see.

    My take on it is that if you have been comfortable for the past 7 years with using Cakewalk by BandLab under a free subscription, there's so far no reason to feel any less comfortable with using NuSonar via free subscription. Yes, OMG, BandLab could decide at any time to discontinue free access, but it was that way with CbB too.

    Attracting people by offering a free DAW and then yanking their access to it would be the dewshiest of dewsh moves, and so far, BandLab hasn't pulled too many of those. Yes, a lot of people, me included, were very disappointed when NuSonar was released to the payware world as a membership only product, but they still let people use CbB for free, and continued to do that until the arrival of a free-to-use version of NuSonar.

    Speaking of free tier Sonar, they've put some resources and effort into coming up with a way to have a free version and then implementing it.

    In the event that this should ever happen, I feel confident that users would get plenty of time to save their stuff off as audio stems and MIDI files or feed it to the converter program or however they would want to migrate to a different DAW.

    It'd be a pain in the asterisk, but no more so than moving to another DAW for any other reason. The only difference is when you do it. If you do it now, you're guaranteed the PITA right now. If you wait and see, the PITA might be years off, it might never even come.

    No matter what DAW is your main, I think it's good to have another DAW around and at least keep rudimentary skills up on it.

    • Like 2
  3. 15 minutes ago, Amberwolf said:

    I'm still slowly learning how to make holes for things to interact without stomping all over each other with just a static EQ, and have barely begun the process of learning how to automate the EQs to do this throughout a "song" to make holes for whatever the prominent part is

    Impressive, I've never gotten as far as using automation to do this, my tools were/are static EQ and sidechained compression. I still do manual EQ carving and sidechaining, but they're no longer my main tools for trying to surgically create space.

    I've also used the EQ spectrum matching features of MAutoDynamicEQ (now on deep discount as part of MEssentialsFXBundle) and EQuivocate. Those allow you to take a static snapshot of a track's spectrum, then invert it to set the EQ's bands MAutoDynamicEQ is a dynamic equalizer, but it only has 8 bands (I believe). Neutron 4 has a similar mode built into it, and being iZotope, it requires less user intervention than those two. It works more like Trackspacer. MSpectralDynamics has a sidechain ducking feature, but it lacks the straightforward display.

    Trackspacer doesn't take a static snapshot, it continuously follows the sidechain input and ducks accordingly. It has 3 knobs. One each for low cut and high cut, to let you restrict the action of the plug-in to a narrower spectrum, and one for Amount, for how much ducking you're going to apply. The higher you crank the knob, the more space you give the sidechaining track, but the more you can hear the hole that it's making. It usually doesn't take that much to increase audibility. The ideal, really, you don't "hear" it until you switch it off. It also has a spectrum analyzer display front and center to let you see what it's doing.

    If you're getting into reducing frequency collisions and carving space, Trackspacer bypasses a lot of struggling and drudgery, IME.

    If it's piqued your interest, why not download it and demo it while it's on sale. It runs in a noise burst demo mode until you feed it a valid serial.

     

    • Like 1
    • Thanks 1
  4. On 7/5/2025 at 12:12 PM, SuperFreq said:

    Imagine you're the left fielder on a baseball team that wins the world series. Then MLB picks you, and you alone, to accept the ring, give a speech and get your name, and your name alone, engraved on the wall.

    Imagine you were a utility infielder for 2 different teams throughout the 70's. In the 2020's, the Baseball Hall of Fame picks you, and you alone from the teams you played for to be inducted.

    Well, yeah, that's how the Baseball Hall of Fame works. It recognizes the achievements of individual players.

    The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame does too, except it expands on this to also allow for people to be inducted in small groups when their achievements were known by the name of the group.

    Ms. Kaye is being recognized for her individual achievements, something she's never had trouble with promoting in interviews. I have seen other session players of the era point out that Carol Kaye wasn't the only session bassist in Los Angeles in the 60's (of course they all seem to accuse each other of claiming gigs they didn't actually play on).

    What would she propose? How should the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame recognize the achievements of deliberately anonymous session musicians? It's not the Hall of Skilled Performances That Contributed to Others' Success in a Variety of Musical Genres.

    Carol Kaye is as well-known as she is partly because she has actively built her own brand over the years. More power to her, she's a role model for female musicians and a symbol for the contributions of session players. She's sold a few method books too. But....quick, without the help of Google, name a single person other than actual band members who played bass on a Beach Boys recording. I'm a pretty big Beach Boys fan and I can't think of one name. Glen Campbell went out on the road with them on bass, but I don't recall if he also played bass on any of the records.

    People who care about fame start bands or solo acts. Session players make a living from playing music without the part where you have to ride around on buses without going home for weeks or months at a time, or answer the same 5 interview questions over and over, or get approached by fans and media when you'd prefer to just be going about your normal business, or have your personal life examined by a bunch of strangers.

  5. 2 minutes ago, Xoo said:

    How noticeable is the effect in the rhythm guitar part in the example you gave (I tried a demo of this or a similar product and didn't notice any beneficial effect on the mix, but that might have been me :-))?

    It's really just to be used in situations where there are frequency collisions. If your tracks don't have that problem to begin with, it's not going to do much. Maybe the program material you tried it on wasn't especially collision-y in the first place?

    It's also wonderfully transparent. One of the principles behind EQ carving is that you don't perceive the track being carved as missing anything because the presence of those frequencies in the other track's program material masks it. Trackspacer goes a step further and applies the cuts dynamically, so it's less noticeable. What you'd be listening for is only a perception that the vocal track is louder (even though it's not, it's just not being masked by another track). I sometimes have to pull the fader back a touch to bring things back into balance.

    P.S. Some Italian university students came up with a freeware plug-in called "The Masker" that claims to perform a similar task:

    https://audioplugins.lim.di.unimi.it/

    I haven't compared them side by side on the same program material. I already have Trackspacer, and $29 (below my "party-size pizza" threshold) is cheap for what it does. One thing I noticed about The Masker's UI is that there are way more controls, which suggested to me that using it may require more dialing in. It also has a freeware "look" to it while Trackspacer's visual design is easier on the eyes. I'm glad The Masker wasn't around when I bought Trackspacer because my cheapskate ***** couldn't have resisted fiddling with it and I might not have gotten around to trying the processor I'm so happy with.

    There are plug-ins that are "industry standards" that when I've tried them, I could see instantly why they were industry standards. XLN's RC-20 is another one. RC-20's purpose is to make sonic material that's too clean sound more lo-fi, using the usual methods of adding vinyl crackle, wow, flutter, other noise, bitcrushing, etc. It's really a multieffect, and it doesn't do a single thing that I couldn't do using other plug-ins. But it's so focused on the task it's designed for that it's worth the price of a party-size pizza. Just in the speed with which I was able to get the results I wanted and could then move on to the next thing.

    • Like 3
  6. 4 hours ago, Amberwolf said:

    aaannnd...what is it that it does so well for you?  ;)

    It does what it is designed to do and claims to do.

    From Wavesfactory's product page:

    "Trackspacer creates space in a mix by carving the frequencies that a track needs. It applies an inverse EQ curve after analysing the sidechain signal."

    In one example, let's say you have a rhythm guitar track and a lead vocal track. The frequency space they take up overlaps and collides, leading to unpleasant build up and/or less intelligibility of the vocals.

    Put Trackspacer on the rhythm guitar track, feed a send from the vocal track to its sidechain input, and it will carve out a sonic space in the rhythm guitar track. It does it dynamically, so that during the times when there is no vocal, the rhythm guitar track will be unaffected. It only carves out the space when the space needs to be carved.

    The traditional tools for doing this sort of thing are EQ and sidechained compression, sometimes both. The advantage Trackspacer has over them is that unlike EQ carving (which I believe is what Mark is referring to), it's dynamic, and unlike simple sidechained compression, it only ducks the frequencies that need to be ducked, not the entire spectrum.

    With static EQ carving, when (in our example) there's no vocal, the rhythm guitar track will still have the EQ cuts, which will then not be masked by the presence of the vocal. This can make the mix sound thinner.

    In situations where you can't revisit the arrangement or sounds, perhaps because it's someone else's music or the genre calls for having those two specific instrument sounds, Trackspacer is especially useful.

    • Like 3
    • Thanks 1
  7. https://www.pluginboutique.com/products/3259

    One of the best plug-in purchases I've ever made. Def in the top 5, maybe #1. I've long held that given a DAW's stock plug-ins, MFreeFXBundle and Kilohearts Essentials, I'd feel comfortable mixing just about any project, therefore the rest of my collection of FX plug-ins is pure luxury (except for the weird ones like Glitchmachines and Unfiltered Audio). The only one I'd miss would be Trackspacer and I'd miss it bad. It's not even worth questioning whether it'll actually get used. If you're mixing 2 or more audio tracks, it will get used, probably on every project, and your projects will sound better for having used it.

    Does what it does so well and with such little effort that it feels like cheating. Surely, something that gets this important task done so easily must have a drawback? Well, I have yet to hear anyone say anything negative about it. I've tried other products that claim to perform the same function and while I got similar results with one of them they all cost more and....I already have Trackspacer.

    It goes on sale maybe once or twice a year at this price. I've never seen it for less.

    • Like 3
  8. My impression right now is that when NuSonar was announced, along with the impending discontinuation of Cakewalk by BandLab and no mention of any free tier, the robust collection of CbB oriented YouTube channels either stopped producing anything or did one video about the announcement and stopped.

    6 months after the announcement, I did a YouTube search and there was no new content at all.

    After the announcement of Free Tier Sonar, new videos popped up very quickly. My most recent search, which wasn't really deep, turned up 8 about the announcement. I guess the YouTube creators were watching and waiting.

  9. It occurs to me that Tony Burrows is the perfect artist for Adam's schtick. "Professor Rock" seems to have a special place in his heart for one hit wonders and Burrows generated 5 of them.

    The video for "Pop Muzik" is so great. Looking at it today, was Robin Scott like Nostradamus or something?

    As for Rick Beato, I think even he gets that people are getting tired of his hating on the hits of the current day. I've never cared for it myself. Wow, he listens to the top 10 most popular songs of the day and concludes that they mostly suck. To use his own question: how can he not know that about pop music? At any given moment in the history of there being such a thing as top 10 songs, most of them will be forgettable, saccharine tripe. "Forgettable" being the operative word. We don't remember how crappy pop music of the past was because the songs themselves are not memorable.

    • Like 1
  10. On 7/4/2025 at 9:24 AM, Brian Walton said:

    installed Splat to see what would happen - there was no option to import themes

    Not sure what you mean by this.

    You installed SONAR Platinum and were expecting it to give you an option to import custom themes?

    AFAIK there's never been any dialog or mechanism to import themes, you just put the .STH files in your C:\Cakewalk Content\Cakewalk Themes folder (that path is hard-coded) and they show up as available in Preferences.

    I only installed SPlat after years of using CbB and creating themes for it. Themes created in newer versions of Theme Editor seem to load fine into SPlat. I guess as with the DAW itself it just ignores the stuff associated with newer features, which is the way to do compatibility, IMO.

    I don't think Cakewalk/SONAR/Sonar gets enough credit for how well it handles 2-way project file compatibility. Newer project files usually open okay in older versions. From the limited testing I've done, this goes for themes as well. My up-to-date CbB themes work in SPlat.

    This is good news, because with my aging eyes, Sonar's new Squintlight™ interface makes comping more difficult.

    • Like 1
  11. On 6/30/2025 at 12:17 PM, Sergei Pilin said:

    More contrast needed, look how immediately much more readable and easier on the eyes the whole thing becomes with just one simple slider move in Photoshop

    Nice.

    I've had this question in the back of my mind since Sonar came out: do the developers use monitors or monitor settings with greater contrast/vibrance than my poor old Dell and Samsung HD monitors'?

    The other day I bought a 27" 4K monitor thinking that it might help with my Sonar legibility issues. Unfortunately it didn't.

  12. 10 hours ago, GIM Productions said:

    Up until 5 years ago I considered Sonar the best Pro DAW on the market overall

    What happened 5 years ago? CbB came out over 6 years ago. IMO, it improved a great deal over the years, up until the point that development on it stopped.

    Do you mean that 5 years ago another DAW surpassed it?

    • Like 1
    • Thanks 1
  13. 12 hours ago, sjoens said:

    I customized it so it's more visible.  I use it to quickly troubleshoot basic midi issues but this becomes an issue when it fails because I can't tell what's causing it to fail.

    I would love to find out how to customize it to be more visible. I would prefer it not to then go missing from time to time.

    Does it still go missing if you back out your customization(s)?

    I've never been able to detect any change in "LED state" in the icon, not from the start. The "lights" are just too small. My MIDI chain troubleshooting is to look at a MIDI track's meters to see if Sonar is able to take data in, and then if it's not, then I fire up MIDI-Ox.

    I find MIDI-Ox' port mapping setup screen to be mostly unfathomable, so I use a "brute forcing the puzzle" approach to setting it up. Once it's set up, MIDI-Ox is a powerful tool.

  14. People actually use this? I've never been able to detect MIDI activity, the thing is just too small. Permanent disability.

    A longstanding feature request of mine is to move the indicator somewhere within the main UI. Maybe at the bottom or somewhere in the transport module.

    • Great Idea 1
  15. 5 minutes ago, mrneil2 said:

    Any idea on the number of people who have tried the Evaluation Sonar and gone back to physically using CbBl for day to day operations?  Would be interesting to know.

    Only BandLab know for sure and that information is locked behind a wall of non-disclosure agreements.

  16. 11 hours ago, T Boog said:

    I'm just whining Krupa. Can't a grown man whine anymore?! 😫

    You're either not reading my posts or you don't think I'm a grown man.😆

    • Like 1
    • Haha 2
  17. On 6/19/2025 at 9:18 AM, Jeremy Oakes said:

    I have a F/W Focusrite LS56, it works fine on W11 (out of the box, no need for the W10 legacy driver)

    That is great news, if I remember correctly, the 56 is similar to the Pro 40, but with onboard FX?

    I saw a post on VI Control from a person whose Liquid Saffire 56 had become unusable on his Windows 10 system. When he upgraded his OS to Windows 11, the interface started working again.

    Reports of Firewire's death on Windows seem to still be premature.

    I'm not concerned in any case, my Pro 40's can continue to be of value whenever Firewire finally does breathe its last. They should function just as well as an Octopre, and they're already paid for.

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