Starship Krupa

Oh, sorry, heavens, I didn't mean to admonish you (I would not wish thinking like I do on anyone 😄). I was sort of playing to the semi-imaginary audience. I knee-jerk react when I see what I think is someone drawing a broad negative conclusion about humanity based on a small sample or anecdote and I thought I detected that: see, my brain is definitely wired to detect and react to "threats." 😆 In truth, the sunny-side up thing is me rebelling against my own internal misanthropy. 🤨 The only truly good advice I have is that anyone who has the Meldaproduction FreeFX bundle, upgraded or not, next time you're feeling blocked or just feeling curious, take a sound source and go through the 30 or so of them that are actually sound FX and browse some factory presets. If you've paid for the upgrade, hit the button to download new presets. Just check them out whether you think you have any use for them or not. I suggest this because it took me years to get around to doing it and when I did, I discovered some interesting tools I hadn't realized I owned. They're easy to forget about when you have 30-some other FX in the bundle. The comb filter, MComb, is, in particular, an amazing device. MPhaser is also great. MTuner is the best I've seen, even does pitch-to-MIDI conversion.

Orange Frappe, Racing Green, Midnight Blue, Nickel Mint, Blue Ice, Yellow Submarine, EVA 01, Tungsten RS and foster theme Logical have all been updated with various tweaks for attractiveness and consistency. I'm always updating them and improving them, and I don't always announce when there's a new version up, so check from time to time for surprises. As always, they're at Dropbox. Be sure to grab the associated .CLR files to get the complete experience. They do wonders for the gridlines in Track View especially. https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ax7xeox3a5t003v/AABtPXXXSOxwJAkOH-fbyHRfa?dl=0 And as always, I love hearing from people who use them, any comments are welcome, even if there are things you don't like.

Yeah, it's sometimes called "doorknob twisting," the would-be hackers have bot programs that scan IP address after IP address and check them to see if they have open ports and/or services exposed that can be exploited. A firewall will log each of these attempts. The would-be attackers have computers that just sit there all day long doing this. They'll go through blocks of IP addresses sequentially, but there's probably some "shortlist" of the external IP addresses of financial institutions, etc. Presumably they're waiting for an inexperienced IT person to put an improperly configured server out live on the net, or fail to update their existing servers fast enough to close known exploitable holes. I used to administer the firewall for a security company. It's been a while now, we used to get multiple doorknob twists daily over 20 years ago. If all this interests you, go to Shields UP. You can actually have their site do a port scan of the system you're using right now to see if there are any vulnerabilities. (it tells me that my router has port XX open, so I should close that)

Are you saying that you think I have a moral responsibility to focus on the bad people do instead of the good they do? If so, that is interesting given what you said about how you've "taught my kids to look for, appreciate, give out freely and celebrate kindness." I thought that was what I was doing. 😄 From my point of view I thought that I was agreeing with that. I certainly wasn't trying to dilute the importance of doing those things. We should do them all the time, like crazy, as much as we can stand. I'm not going to toss out counter-anecdotes about times people were particularly nice and kind to me or people I know because it's pointless. Anecdotes are just descriptions of one event in a world of millions of events occurring every second. Nor am I going to try to list any credentials I have (familial or otherwise) regarding being able to see the world as it "really is." You have no idea about my background or life experiences. If I'm wrong about the world, please tell me exactly which of the statements in my post are false. I will say that expressing a positive view really seems to trigger some people (hence the "annoying" glass half-full tag). It's as if it's become a heresy to believe nice things about people in general. I've had people become condescending, even downright nasty and hostile because I dared to suggest that the world might not be the terrible place they believe it to be or that there's another way to look at it (mostly condescending, as if I must be coming from a sheltered place). To me, this seems weird. Is it just how people react when someone challenges a cherished belief (even if that belief is a negative one)? So I believe that there are more helpful, kind people in the world than there are hurtful and mean ones. I don't understand why some people take that as an affront. Years ago, when BandLab first acquired the Cakewalk IP and came out with Cakewalk-that-was-Sonar, there were many people who insisted that they must be up to some malware plot, that since they weren't making money on licenses that the quality of the software would degrade, and so on. I would counter this by saying that it seemed unlikely that a company would go to such a load of trouble and expense to target malware at such a small and specific market, when malware is so easily detectable and it would lead to their company becoming industry pariahs, and that it was entirely possible that with no need to grub for new licenses, the developers of Cakewalk might exercise their freedom to fix a lot of longstanding bugs and to introduce features that were practical and useful rather than flashy. The same "rose colored glasses" comment was hurled, among others. That's an insult, implying that since I wasn't coming to the same conclusions they were that I was naive or that my perception was somehow defective. There was one guy whose head I thought was going to explode, he got so het up about my positive speculations. I don't know if he actually even used Cakewalk, he just seemed to want to fight. I just said let's wait and see what happens. 😎 In the end, it's scientifically provable that the world doesn't care whether I think it's a kind place or a scary place, whether I think people are just awful or whether I think people are just great, whether I think "things" are getting better or worse. I've tried thinking each of those at various points of my life and none of it had any effect on anything but my own head. The world just kept on being what it was. It doesn't give a refried dog poop what I think, nor do I expect it to.

Here I go again, being one of those annoying "glass half full" people, as someone once called me: 1,000 hack attempts doesn't equal that many individuals trying to hack your site. It's just knob-twister bots making multiple attempts. The poor losers probably paid some other loser for their mostly useless "hacking" software. How many hits do you get every month from people who legitimately want to see what's on your site or use your services? Even if it's just 100,000, that means a whopping 1% of visits have some malicious intent (that's too weak to even pose a threat). The thing is, if you go looking for evidence of any human characteristic, you'll find it. If you want to look for evidence that the world is packed with people who love to share what we've learned with others, look at all of the how-to videos on YouTube, or even this very forum. Look in the Tutorials section, the Q&A section, or here in the Deals section, or in the UI Themes section. I've spent countless hours developing my themes, not just for personal use, but so other Cakewalk users can have a better experience using the program. Look at Cakewalk itself, which still exists and flourishes because Meng digs music and wants people to make more of it and decided that supplying the world with a great free DAW would be a good way to build his brand. Sure, his accounting department probably loves the writeoff, but there are plenty of other ways he could have gone. He chose the cool one. Look at all of the people who make our music with no expectation of any financial return whatsoever and put it out there on Soundcloud or Bandcamp or YouTube just for people to enjoy. Our brains are designed to go on the alert when presented with danger, and calm down when presented with comfort. It's part of how we survive. It's why threats of any kind register so strongly and kindness less so. Honor kindness by acknowledging how much of it we take for granted. Yes, absolutely, there are plenty of people out there who think only of themselves and who perform malicious acts. But there are overwhelmingly more who either just don't or who even go out of our way to be helpful.

This. I, like @msmcleod, use it as a writing/arranging tool, and I also use it in this way, as a "guitarish" sound for EDM. Like the Solina/ARP string ensemble, the Mellotron, and "brass" patches on synths, it falls short of its (presumably) intended mark, but has a sound all its own that's useful. In "note" mode, they're good single note pluck sounds. Not useful enough to trigger an upsell to the full verson, but one of my Humble Bundle soundpacks was "Pop Rocks," and I've figured out how to use the Strum soundpacks in Player. Although my go-to is now elysia mpressor, I still use MCompressor for basic things like sidechaining. It has HP and LP filters for its sidechain (as well as a more complex EQ if you want to use it), which makes it great for sidechaining drum loops and stereo-only drum machines. I dug deeper into it and found that you can draw your own compression curves, like turn it into an expander. Freebie or not, it's one of the most versatile compressors out there.

6.7G download? It better be outrageous. 😄

These are great bug reports, but I'd suggest you open a new thread in the Feedback section for them. Then they have a better chance of being noticed by the developers.

Seems like the free A|A|S Player might suit your needs. Unless you get under the hood with the A|A|S synths, the soundpack sounds can all be used in Player. I almost pulled the trigger on Chromaphone, mostly because I wanted to be able to turn off the reverb that so many soundpack sounds are drenched with. Or at least one of those paperback business success books. "When pricing your product, the goal is to get it just under your target market's price-point to pain threshold." Ah, how could I forget iZotope. I've got so many paid iZotope licenses, and that started with the iZotope Mastering Essentials plug-in that came with Mixcraft. It got me to buy Ozone Elements, maybe the first plug-in I ever spent money on (partly due to Mixcraft coming bundled with a plethora of decent plug-ins). It's good to see so many positive responses in this topic, because I believe in "give 'em a taste for free" marketing and it's nice to see that it works. Demos and trials are essential, but it's not the same as having a full license for something that can make it into tight rotation.

You're not the first I've heard this from. The ad hoc "educational discount." It could be that the recognition of this helped clue companies into the value of getting lite versions out there for nothing or next to it. I'm going to hazard a guess that Ableton's piracy dropped when they came out with Live! Lite.

Good thread idea from @Eusebio Rufian-Zilbermann: we all snap up freebies from companies who put them out there to encourage people to check out their paid license products; sometimes these freebies are payware that is being given away for a short time as a promotion. Which ones have worked on you (this excludes trialware/demos)? For me, the most obvious would be the Meldaproduction FreeFX Bundle. Meldaproduction were relatively early in the "pro quality" loss leader plug-ins game, not the first to ever do it, but before the recent ongoing tidal wave of freebies. MCompressor is the plug-in I used when I had my "I know kung fu" breakthrough in understanding how compressors work. Once I paid to register that bundle, since there were more panels and things to open up and see I started digging more deeply into them and concluded that the guy was a crazy talented programmer, and that his normally-licensed stuff would likely be of top quality. Since then I've spent hundreds on Meldaproduction licenses (always during sales of some sort) and recommended them far and wide. After that, Unfiltered Audio G8 CM (a near-freebie, CM plug-ins are loss leaders) was my first taste of that company, since then I've acquired all but about 3 of their FX (the synth, the compressor and the bit crusher). A|A|S Swatches and freebie soundpacks got me to jump on a Humble Bundle of their stuff. Bark of Dog was my first Boz plug-in, I now have several more. Glitchmachines' Fracture and Hysteresis are so off the hook that I knew to buy everything they had when it went on sale for $5-10. I'm nowhere close to figuring out how to control them, but they make sounds that I like anyway. Definitely for people who are into "turn this knob and see what it does."

I did the policy editing trick, added the registry keys and all that, and it worked for a long time. But damned if a Windows update forced it back on. I finally added a reg key that killed Windows Defender entirely, which I didn't want to do because it also killed the ability to scan on demand. What I want is an anti-malware solution that never does real-time scanning, yet allows me to do scheduled scans and ad-hoc single file scans. I had that with Defender for a long time. I've been using computers online for 35 years (including BBSing) without any real time scanning and have contracted exactly 3 bits of malware, none of which caused any data loss. The last one was 20 years ago (and I should have known better). I achieve this by practicing safe computing: I never open executable email attachments, and only download from sites I trust. If I'm ever in doubt, I scan the single file. From time to time I run Malwarebytes ad hoc, and it never finds anything. This is why Microsoft's treating their entire user base as if we're all gullible and sloppy infuriates me. I get that their zillions of seats in businesses around the globe are often occupied by....less savvy users, but if someone's got enough chops to enable Group Policy Editor and use it, it's safe to say that they knew the risk even if they do get into trouble. Anti-virus "solutions" commit most of the sins that people attribute to computer viruses: slow the system down, display annoying pop-ups, very difficult to remove, block legitimate software from running....

Ohh, okay, I get it. Thanks for the clarification. It's not about input quantization, nor is it about just selecting the notes and right clicking to add the quantization at one go, you guys want to be able to select the notes and then adjust the quantization on the fly. While listening to the effect it's having. That does sound like a very handy thing, and I, too would want to be able to do it with Humanize.

Ever check out: https://vst.saschart.com/binauralgenerator_monaural_beats or https://vst.saschart.com/binaural_monaural_golden_waveform_generator?

It used to cause some nastiness with the Cakewalk installer because it grabbed a DLL from the Cakewalk Core folder. Then the Cakewalk installer would not be able to update the DLL. Somehow this was fixed, not sure if it was the bakers shutting down the process during install or Waves got their act together.

How would this be different from what is already available in the Inspector and with the Piano Roll right click menu?

An oft-requested feature addition to Matrix, one I agree with.

Definitely check out Matrix view, then. But as with any other tool if its type in any DAW, it's a "best effort at giving our users an Ableton-like workflow." If you've messed around with Ableton Live! and were inspired by it, really, that's the one to go with. I think the current issue of Computer Music comes with a license for Ableton Live! Lite and extensive tutorials on how to use it. I have Live! Lite and haven't gotten into it much, maybe because I'm so used to the more linear workflow. I haven't tried everything, but Ableton own the "create from loops and phrases" style of music making. Maybe FL Studio, but I only know of it by reputation. Due to the way they've evolved, every DAW has a central focus, plus other features that they've incorporated. For Ableton, the focus is the Ableton-style workflow, but by popular demand, they added tools for recording and comping and MIDI editing. Cakewalk and Cubase started as MIDI sequencers and quickly added audio recording once the hardware made it feasible. Pro Tools was early out of the gate with audio recording and MIDI came a bit later. So it's a matter of what's most important to you. Go for one of the ones with an audio/MIDI focus if you want that, or if you're more "sandbox" oriented, Ableton or FL Studio. The latest issue of Computer Music comes with a license for Ableton Live! Lite and has a bunch of tutorials for it, so even if you have zero budget for a DAW, you're good to go. And getting to know multiple DAW's is a very good idea. There's synergy with Live! Lite and Cakewalk, you can ReWire them together, take stems out of Live! and do your final mixdowns with Cakewalk, whatever. Then come back and tell us how it goes and what features you like best!

Once you get everything set up, realtime protection will turn itself back on. It's very difficult to disable, and unfortunately, scanning a file every time it's read or written eats up resources and hurts performance. But you can go into your Windows settings and exclude various directories from realtime scanning. I do it with my plug-ins and Cakewalk projects folders, as well as the Cakewalk program folder.

He's put in a couple of chronicles of my button spelunkings. Step Sequencer and Export for sure, maybe others, can't remember at the moment.

Check TYLIP for some epic battles with button states. The Export module has a crazy amount of states for something that's basically a checkbox. The Step Sequencer cell buttons are wonders of (IMO) excess complexity. The arpeggiator Latch button is ripe for customization. I make mine smaller so as to separate it from the global arp On button. A state that I would like to have in all of them is rollover when a button is already "on." Some have it, some don't.

Hear hear. I consider myself to have started with the initial CbB issue (after a 20-year break), and I am very grateful to those who invested in the product. And you're right, the topic here is about stuff we got for free. You get the updates for free, but that's what you paid for (an excellent investment). Regarding the stuff I got for free (or as Plugin Boutique "with any purchase" deals) and use, the many A|A|S soundpacks (including Swatches), ObjeqDelay, TRacks FX, (especially the 670 copy), several Meldaproduction FX and Monastery Grand, BL Gain, Waves Element, Orchestools ROMplers, multiple Plugin Alliance FX I got with no-minimum vouchers, Drummic'a (and Kontakt Player), Sampletank 4 (and Syntronik and Memory V), Voxengo Boogex, Mastering the Mix LEVELS (on every project), Valhalla Supermassive, Cymatics Origin, Slate Fresh Air, Cockos REAFir, Ozsoft Xpander, Boz Panipulator, Padspheres, Deep Jupiter, Drumazon, Sigmund, Combo Model V, Speedrum Lite, Surrealistic MG-1 Plus, luftikus lkjb EQ. As for ones that I never use, I have so many plug-ins that I tend to keep them weeded out, so those are harder to recall. For years, I downloaded them while I was learning what I wanted in that type of plug-in and eventually found my go-to's. Mostly ones that I was psyched to get and then haven't used: Arturia Filter Mini, Soundtoys Little Plate (I know, an excellent plate, but I don't use plates), anything I've ever tried from Audiffex, AudioThing Things Texture, iZotope DDLY, Pulsar Smasher, and any number of amp sims, compressors and EQ's that I went through. Getting MTurboEQ and MTurboComp ended my search for anything else in their categories. I don't need to try any more character EQ's or compressors.

Like the way that your buttons blend seamlessly with the rest of the cell. It's what I'm trying to do with the Control Bar in Blue Ice and Nickel Mint. Not every button has to stand out so much, although I do still want them to look like clickable buttons. I erred on the side of caution when I started working on the Matrix because I'm just getting my feet wet and don't know which elements should stand out, which can be less obtrusive, etc. I'm still not sure why those little buttons are grey or blue depending on their state. The usual paradigm says that grey=inactive, but they seem to all be just different states. There is some business with the loop button changing state depending on whether the setting is global, though.

It seems to be similar to changing themes via Preferences. Some colors stick, the Browser's expand button gets reversed, and the Browser's tabs get wonky. Would be nice if it did refresh everything. Wow, you've obviously found more uses for them than I.

It's usually 4 clicks, with a list browse to choose the theme. Not a big deal if you don't change themes that often, but if you work on theming, you have to switch themes every time you preview your work and then save it. Here's how to get it to a single click: Use workspaces. All you do is load the theme you wish to be able to switch to quickly, then create a workspace for it, selecting only "Theme" for what you want to "Load from Workspace." Next time you want to switch to that theme, select that workspace and it will load the theme without making any other changes to your layout. I have them for all of my 7 themes.