Starship Krupa

@bdickens is going to love this: I recently bought a Presonus Studio 2|4 to use as a portable interface with my laptop and iDevices. It sounded so much better on playback than my old Firepods that I hit Craig's List and picked up a new-in-box Focusrite Saffire Pro 40 to get the newer PLL converters and famous Focusrite preamps. However, I just found that with a couple of MIDI-only projects I opened on my laptop, it starts making what sounds like a cement mixer grinding in the background about halfway through the songs. That's bad enough, but I experienced the same counterintuitive result from jacking the latency up to 2048 (as high as the Studio will go): the grinding got worse. Cakewalk's Performance widget doesn't show any missed buffers when it's doing this. No amount of muting FX or even channels will keep it from happening. It gets even weirder: my laptop is an i7 840m with 8G of RAM, which, yes, is getting kind of elderly, but it's usually been able to handle almost every project I've thrown at it as long as I keep the latency up around 20ms. On my oldest system, a Core 2 Quad 6600 with 8G of RAM, the same projects play back without grinding, using the Presonus. The part that's going to confound my man b is that if I unplug the Studio 2|4 (with its freshly installed and up-to-date ASIO driver) and instead play back through the laptop's onboard hardware CODEC using WASAPI Exclusive, it plays perfectly. 😮 This is obviously some kind of strange anomaly, but I thought I would chime in. This could be the first known example of onboard and WASAPI fixing an issue that happens when I use a modern, up-to-date interface using its own native ASIO driver. It's bummin' me 'cause I bought this nice interface to go with all my portables.

1. No, not exactly. Others have described ways to cope. If it's any consolation, imagine the confusion and consternation of people going to Live! from Cakewalk (or one of the other DAW's that handles this the same way) and not seeing any way to return the playhead to zero. I do not personally have to imagine this. 2. Only with sufficient discipline on the part of the one doing the recording. I end up with probably more than I need, which makes for too much weeding at mix time. 3. Set Record mode to Sound on Sound. 4. Cakewalk allows for MIDI recording without arming a track:

Probably like a bat compared to any of mine.

First, when you just open Cakewalk with a template, even the "blank" template, it names your project "Untitled Project" and if it does any automatic saving, it will be at the top level of your Cakewalk Projects folder. Look for it. Second, if your project included recording audio and/or using samples (as opposed to being entirely done with soft synths), audio in a Cakewalk project is saved as soon as it is recorded. Again, by default, there will be a folder called Audio Data at the top level of your Cakewalk Projects folder. Any audio or samples you created or used should be in that folder. Normally, these files and folders get moved to a subfolder below Cakewalk Projects, but you suffered a crash just before that could happen. For anything else, well, I am sorry to hear of your misfortune, but as others have said, the purpose of these settings is to help allow us to disappear into the zone without experiencing tragedy when we look up 10 hours later and realize we haven't explicitly saved (it's happened to everyone who makes music with a DAW, so consider it a rite of passage; your 10 hours may not have yielded a song, but you may now speak with the experience of one marked in battle):

None that I know of. Vertical mousewheel zoom is completely broken in PRV, last time I checked.

Today's iTunes, Spotify, et al=yesteryear's major labels and Clear Channel-controlled radio. The point I was trying to make is that compared to 25 years ago, we have better alternatives. The difference is that rather than having to pay for CD manufacturing and then trying to find some way to peddle them to stores, with Bandcamp, an artist can issue a song or album and start selling it right away. It's up to them to promote it however they want to. Bandcamp also has room for labels who can act as curators and promoters. I'd also like to add that whatever audio CODEC's they're using for their web, iOS, and Android players is excellent as far as sound quality, and that's another very important thing to me. The last time I tried listening to the biggies, the sound was a transient-smeared mess. Whether this is due to their CODEC or passing the songs through their automated de-flavorizer, I don't know. I work too hard on getting my spatial elements to work to have it messed up by some service's reprocessing.

I hold a fairly positive attitude, but I think the most important word is "CAN." As throughout the history of getting paid for creating music, there's no guarantee of "WILL" or "HOW MUCH." "The internet" is no more responsible for ripping off musicians and listeners than "the radio spectrum" was 25 years ago. Parasitic organizations will spring up no matter how the information gets around, All the internet is is a faster, cheaper, and more direct way for information to get from one place to another. I will say that the channels that the internet has opened up have made it more possible for small-timers to connect with an audience (and even earn money) than before such channels existed. It's not created any goldmines or licenses to print money, but what ever has? The idea that one person, or a small group of people together could earn more than (or even) a comfortable living playing music is one that only had traction for a small period of human history, starting in the late 1950's. It's always been difficult to make a living from creating music. It still is. If the only difference is that now it's easier for me to discover new artists that I love to listen to and buy their music in high-resolution form while allowing them to keep 90% of what I pay instead of 12%, that's a big improvement in my eyes.

Uh oh, you had to go and launch hater's kryptonite. So far we've heard about how Bandcamp is supposedly on a "path to irrelevancy," yet my understanding of irrelevance in such things as entertainment and retail requires something else becoming relevant in place of the thing that has become irrelevant. So, those with a disdain for Bandcamp, please tell us to which music distribution outlet we should flock to instead. Perhaps one that accepts Venmo or some other form of payment more popular amongst the youth of today?

Ha, the provisional name is "Orange Frappe," as an homage to the New England roots of Cakewalk.

Thanks! Since nobody commented, I kind of slowed down. It's not quite ready for release, but I have done a lot of work on it. I'll take a look and see where I am. It's always a matter of hard choices when I restrict myself to only 3 colors like this.

Please share what video display system you are using so that we can get a better idea. I use a pair of 23" monitors with an nVidia cared and the GUI looks fine. Are you on 4K? What GPU?

Caveat: my experience is based on being a fan (and artist) of the electronica genre, although I've bought several albums and songs from other genres on Bandcamp. I've no idea what the impact of ownership by Epic might be. My purchase loop is "hear it on SomaFM, who recommend and often link straight to Bandcamp in their players), then go check the rest of the album on Bandcamp, buy either the track or the whole record." I'm active in seeking out new music, even at 61, and their recommendations and articles are a great way to do that. There's so much information available that it's like trying to drink from a firehose. Going back 45 years, I've found my favorite music outside "mainstream" outlets, college radio, true indie labels buying cassettes and CD's at shows, etc. I read Albini's "Some of Your Friends Are Already This [Plucked]" (aka "The Problem With Music") when it was first published in Maximum Rock 'n' Roll and it blew my mind and destroyed the fantasy of "getting signed." As such, I frickin' love the platform. I'd much rather buy there than anywhere else. One HUGE advantage that they've long held over the biggies is that you can upload (and purchase) lossless, which is the only thing I buy. A buyer can leave a personal note to the artist, which I usually do, and I've had conversations with a couple of my favorite artists as a result. I contacted Chris Zippel through the platform and he sent me a song that wasn't available for purchase anywhere. I'm a big "soundstage" listener and being able to get lossless files from sound sculptors like David Tipper, Telefon Tel Aviv and SCANN-TEC is, to me, essential to listening to those artists. Bandcamp's streaming CODEC's are also some of the best I've heard, and that, too is important to me. Knowing that the platform only takes a 10% vig is also very important to me. See Albini article. For my own (so far) meagre output, I don't even bother with any other distribution platform. No offense intended, but I'm not interested in whatever listeners who might hear me in some algorithm-generated Spotify playlist. I make music for people like me who put some effort into discovering stuff they'll like and get excited about finding a new (to them) artist. This may seem like a contradiction, as the ambient music I'm making these days would seem tailor-made for any number of "chill" channels. Basically, you could say that my musical goal is to live the dream that started 40 years ago: make music that reaches people like me and engage with them as directly as possible, without having to rely on middle-entities who take too much compensation for work that I do. I love that the internet has made it possible. Albini himself a few years back had a much more optimistic take on the current state. I'm not an Albini fanboy; I think he's kind of abrasive, actually, but on these topics I tend to agree with him. As such, Bandcamp is the best platform for me. Something else may come along, maybe the relationship with Epic will ruin it. But that's the fun thing about these times: if Bandcamp is ruined, something else will pop up to replace it. Your mileage will almost certainly vary, but that's my take.

One thing I figured out, it seems obvious now, but my voice is an instrument, and as such, improves with practice. We didn't sit down with any other instrument and expect to be able to use it correctly without practice. I learned this by doing take after take on a song and noticing that as I went along, my takes started to get closer to being on pitch. Well, duh. Any instrument needs practice to achieve proficiency and the voice is no different. If what you want is the obvious pitch-corrected robot voice, Meldaproduction's free MAutopitch is a handy tool. I put it on in front of the vocoder and they're a good match. It alone might get you where you want to go. I made a tutorial about using TAL Vocoder, it's over in the Tutorials section.

Those mentioned are VST2's. You need to figure out what folder they're in and then add that to Cakewalk's list of folders to scan for VST's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Coke#Backlash It wouldn't be as bad if it only lived up to its advertised promises. The thing is, those features such as the ability to hibernate when no signal is present, depend on developers actually using them. So far the only developers I know of who put plug-ins to sleep when there's no audio at their inputs is Meldaproduction, and their VST2's also have that feature. VST needs things like protection against taking down the whole DAW when there's a crash in a plug-in and maybe the ability for different instances of the same plug-in to share core code. Would it be more efficient to to this rather than have the multiple instances all independent? I don't know, but it's the sort of thing that I think should be accounted for in the spec.

I liked it better in the olden days when a DAW would query a VST and get back the list of factory presets, which would then show up in the DAW's pull-down list of presets. Nowadays, with every new plug-in I have to poke around and play a bit of "find the preset manager." At least I now know about looking in the VST menu in Cakewalk to see if the manufacturer is storing them in a canonical location. I'd be a happy boy indeed if Cakewalk could scan the presets when they are in the location(s) specified by the VST3 spec and then present them in its own preset menu.

I found them in the "VST3" menu in Cakewalk's plug-in properties window. Click on it, Load Preset, and there is a ton of them. A lot of Plugin Alliance stuff is that way, too. Seems at first like there are no presets, then you check that menu....

Meldaproduction is the brand that has inspired the most devotion from me. They have the most geek appeal of any developer, IMO. Sound fantastic and you can get very far under the hood with them. iZotope's products are great, especially for "don't know what I'm doing" people (and no insult intended toward the company or anyone else). They have so many wizards and assistants and really good presets, and should the time come when you crack your knuckles and decide to get under the hood, their stuff sounds great, too. I don't use anything from iZotope lately except for the Exponential reverbs. I've never heard a reverb that could beat them, although MTurboReverb comes darn close. Apparently my ears are good at picking out reverb tails, and they are the smoothest I've heard. I know FabFilter have a heavy rep, but I've never tried any of their products. This is because they never flow any freebies, and freebies are always my "gateway" to becoming interested in a given company's products. I can't think of a single effect I've bought where the company was one where I didn't first get a freebie. Meldaproduction is the most notable; they pioneered that marketing method with their insane collection of free FX. Not the first to do it, for sure, but they did it on such a massive scale. In the case of McDSP, the single license/cloud activation can be a pain in the neck, this I know from Fresh Air, so I hope they'll do what Slate did and repeat the offer so I can snag another non-cloudy license. Hard to find fault in a freebie, though. As far as I'm concerned, they have a lot of leeway. Thing is, though, as others have pointed out, if the stuff you have to pay for is similarly licensed (single seat cloud), I'll have to take that into account if I think about buying any of it.

Also busted. I've managed to snag A|A|S' Objeq Delay and D16's Sigmund as freebies, and they are both monstrous powerhouses of sound design. The Unfiltered Audio Sandman Pro/Instant Delay bundle that you can get for free (or close to it) during PA's no minimum sales is another favorite. The big disappointment in delays was iZotope DDLY, which I also got as a freebie but have never been able to do DDLY 5h1t with.

So it's possible for someone who owns MTurboDelay to want another delay enough to buy it? 😄

Haven't snagged one this big in a while: Global/Drop Indicator (on p. 10 of TYLIP) is used for the line that appears between track and folder headers when dragging and dropping.

If I were looking for a USB interface in your price range and feature set, I would be looking hard at the brand new Universal Audio Volt 2. It has slightly better metering than the Studio 2|4 Audiobox (two LED's instead of one 😄), and they're doing some fancy stuff with the preamps. UA have a reputation for quality (including build quality) that they're probably not looking to squander with this new line of budget interfaces. Incidentally, I just bought a Studio 2|4 (no "c", but Presonus have confirmed that the only difference is the color) for $30 on Craig's List, and its playback blew away my ancient Firepods. Sure, any interface from the past dozen years will sound better than the Firepod due to the adoption of better convertors (with PLL jitter correction). When I say it blew them away, that's almost literally. The 2|4 sounded SO much better that I knew I had to dump them and went back on Craig's List and snagged a Focusrite Saffire Pro 40 (I like Firewire, and I record drums, so having 8 mic pres is essential to my studio). It's well in the era of better jitter correction, so it also sounds fantastic by comparison to the Firepods.

I generally use the modules as inserts in channels or buses. If I were using the reverbs, I'd use them as sends. They're just an FX bin that you can place before or after your regular FX bin. Check the Cakewalk signal flow diagram in the Reference Guide for better understanding.

I have a rental cottage at the rear of my property, my tenant, Steven, is a music teacher (been around the SF East Bay music scene forever, was giving lessons to Mike Dirnt a few years ago). One of his longtime students works for Avid, we know as makers of Pro Tools, and he told Steven that most of the people coding for them these days are in the Ukraine. I don't have any news, but he's obviously very concerned for them (as well as the possible impact on the business).

Well done, Shane. I can't think of an explanation where increasing the PSU wattage would result in a boot speed increase. Unless it was putting out "dirty" power that made it so that it took the detection circuit on the muzzabo longer to give it the green light. Of course it's always good to blow the crud off of your heatsinks and fans. It's always great when the upgrades you put in jack up the performance so much. And LOL at your "old i7 6700K DAW."😄 Check my sig. Adding the GTX550Ti really opened up graphics performance. 😄 Still, it does what I want it to do, Cakewalk, Vegas Pro. I don't feel that it's holding me back. It would be nice to have better performance, but it would just make things faster, not necessarily better. My thing is that I rely heavily on the kindness of others when it comes to acquiring new computers. I still know enough people who work IT and facilities at big Silicon Valley companies that I can score systems that have been retired only because some executive got in a computer weenie-waving competition with the executive in the next office. I'm good at keeping trailing edge hardware viable. Most of my projects can play back just fine on my 2011 Dell Latitude E6410, which I upgrade by swapping the i5 in it with an i7-720M. 8 virtual cores helps a lot with the stuff we do.