Starship Krupa

Too low an impedance load for magnetic guitar pickups, those are line inputs, so you either need a breakout with hi-Z instrument inputs or a direct box to go between your guitar and the inputs you have. As far as doing tricks to reduce noise resulting from your tracks being recorded at too low a level, the solution to that issue is to not create the issue in the first place. Record a healthy, strong signal where the guitar's level is plenty far above the noise floor and you should be fine. The noise-killing technique I use when I am stuck with a source that was poorly recorded is to use ReaFIR, a freeware plug-in that allows me to sample the noise profile in an otherwise silent part of the recording and then process the recording to reduce it. Used only in circumstances where I can't obtain a good audio capture.

Nice track. Relatable lyrics. I agree with what has been said about your voice being attractive. Just the right amount of your gentle Ghanian accent comes through. And just enough electronic processing on it to sound interesting. I like the birdies on backing vox! Rather abrupt ending, though. Maybe a few more "fe-e-els" with a fade? Care to share what reverb you used? Sounds great.

Great sound! It's huge. When the big pad comes in, it's quite emotional. Agree with PhonoBrainer about the bass. Doing the same part, but on the grid in Piano Roll using a P-bass sample, would really improve it.

Here's a screenshot of the current Logical:

I'm kinda leaning toward nvelope. I downloaded both of them and the only thing the SPL Transient Designer + has that nvelope doesn't have is the external sidechain input. nvelope has that dual band mode, which I think I'll get more use out of. I was having fun putting it on drum loops and bringing the snare or kick up and down. Now that I know the trick for getting at the VST3 presets that PA ship with their stuff (at least Lindell, bx and elysia), it makes it easier to demo things. Picked up TRIAD yesterday. What a monster.

There are some "little" ones that would help me every day, in the "driving me nuts" category: A "replace effect" in the context menu like we have "replace synth." (I made this suggestion on the old forum almost 4 years ago and Noel liked it) The option to have new synths' property page automatically open when you replace another synth with them. Who doesn't want to immediately see the new synth's UI when they replace another synth? (this would also apply to #1 above) As much as I'd like having a built-in sampler (I don't know what chord tracks and VCA faders are), having these 2 would make me happier and impact my use of the program over and over in every session. I know that many people work the way I do, swapping multiple plug-ins and synths in and out looking for the one that best suits the song. Especially with creative FX like delays, I'll go through 3 or 4 of them before I find the right one.

You mean across the entire length of PRV rather than just the piano keys as it is done now?

I made one humongous change, which came after I actually looked at some Logic Pro screenshots: I gave the Piano Roll a Tungsten-style dark color scheme. This matches the rest of the dark UI and more closely resembles Logic's piano roll. I hope the change is welcome. If you want to revert to a light PRV, just open it in Theme Editor and remove the PRV colors.

Basically, what can be done with Theme Editor is change the colors and sometimes, the look of the buttons. So yes, the icons and time display are going to look very similar to Cakewalk, just in different colors. Logical is someone's idea of the Logic color scheme, applied to Cakewalk. I don't even know their name. If you want a dark theme that is more complete and IMO, even improves the clarity and legibility of the Cakewalk UI rather than just changing colors, try my Racing Green or Midnight Blue. Or one of Matthew's many dark "M" themes. They go further than just changing some colors. We put thought into legibility and visibility of control status as well as making it more attractive. I especially pay attention to making gridlines more visible, via the custom color presets that go with my themes. I find the stock gridlines difficult to see. Tungsten RS adds the clarity features without changing the Tungsten colors.

Okay, the ZIP in my post up there has the update for 2021.12, plus a few RS features. @Brian Nixon, if you would kindly edit your message to me to remove the quote that includes the link to the old file, I'd appreciate it.

I guess I could....let me see.... If I'm going to be the unofficial keeper of this one, it may get a few RS features....😉

From what I understand, Command Center should allow you to download, install, and authorize CA-2A and Z3ta. I don't know about TH2, things are different for the 3rd-party pieces of the bundle.

The switch distortion is the most versatile.

This is the first I've even heard any reference to any "SSD Read/Write limitations," for audio or any other application. Rather, I've seen so many people recommending them for audio production rigs that I started making jokes about it on the old forum. When I Google "are there limitations to using SSD's for audio production?" I get nothing but people asking and being told "no, they're way superior." Therefore, I am going to stick to the belief that they are superior in every way to spinners except for cost per gigabyte. In my personal experience, my SSD's read and write the ones and zeroes way faster than my spinny drives, and they don't discriminate based on what kind of file the ones and zeroes belong to. Media production (and anything else with large file sizes) is probably the #3 task where a user is most likely to notice a performance improvement over a spinny drive. #1 is system startup and #2 is program launch. However, for anyone who has any SSD's that they feel might be holding them back, either now or in the future, I volunteer to help out and save you electronics recycling fees. For the cost of a 1st class stamp you can send them to me and I will dispose of them properly. If these limitations exist, I'm certain they would be worse for higher-capacity SSD's, so if you have any over 1TB capacity, I advise sending those right away. Seriously, though. I have seen people talking fidgety about the fact that SSD's have a finite number of reads and writes in them, as if that's unique to them, as if HDD's have unlimited rewrite capacity. Well, the Easter Bunny was our parents, and HDD's have a finite number of reads and writes in them. In this, the SSD again has the advantage, although not by as much as it does the speed advantage. SSD's are way less fragile, though, way less subject to failure by external forces (impact from your computer falling off the desk, being near magnetic fields, etc., SSD's can survive conditions like flooding that mean instant death to a HDD). The only advantage that HDD's have as far as reliability is that in some of their failure modes, they give warning that they are becoming flaky. So if you are using proper monitoring software, you will find out and maybe be able to replace it before it goes completely dead. Most people don't. When SSD's go, it's usually with no warning. They just suddenly won't be recognized by your controller. HDD's sometimes fail without any warning too. We shouldn't choose one or the other based on whether sometimes one will warn you when it's about to croak, with the idea that this makes our data more secure. The solution to concerns about data security is not in choosing a more or less reliable primary storage medium (they're both pretty reliable and they both eventually wear out), it's in making appropriately regular backups of your data. Disks fail, therefore we make backups.

Despite having participated in the sack of PA last year and taking advantage of Meldaproduction's 60% off everything sale, there's one type of processor that I don't feel I have the "right" one yet: transient shaper. I have WA Production's Imprint, which is supposed to be a multiband transient designer, but it's so far resisted my attempts to get results with it; perhaps starting with a multiband one isn't the best route. Imprint has about 3x the number of controls. It seems like the PA choices are either SPL Transient Designer Plus or elysia nvelope. Leaning toward nvelope because of the way it can narrow processing to certain frequency bands. I have fun with "turd polishing," taking the worst phone-recorded live small gig or practice recordings and turning them into something halfway listenable, and this would seem to be a useful tool for that as well as the usual transient shaper-y tasks. If anyone has any wisdom to share regarding Transient Designer Plus vs. nvelope (for instance some special feature of Transient Designer Plus that I'm not aware of), please share.

You're referring to the ones you access by opening the "VST3" menu in the plug-in properties page. Funny, I had Plugin Alliance plug-ins for years before I figured out that most (not all) of them come with presets installed in that canonical (according to Steinberg's VST3 documentation) location. I'd been expecting them to show up in Cakewalk's own preset saving box.

Yes, likely. Shut them off one by one until you find the bad one.

I wonder if there's some way to shuffle core affinities around so that Chromaphone, when running as a plug-in, could have one mostly to itself. Someone told me that VSTi's were not included in Cakewalk's plug-in load balancing.

Blew the dust off! I did some experimenting with turning off layer 2. Since you can "solo" them, I found that in the incredibly dense sounds Chromaphone is capable of, the second layer wasn't contributing that much. Their sound designers create these sculptures using everything available, and sometimes in the context of a piece, they're too dense. I was following the conventional wisdom on that for a long time, then tried enabling it and my processor clock shot up to 3.8 GHz (stock is 3.4) and stays there. This is on a Dell, which are notoriously clock blocked. So I'd encourage folks to experiment with that setting, monitor it with HWInfo, see what you get. The trick was to turn on the turbo boost, but keep the power saving one off. Must confess at this point: I'm not (at this point anyway) much of a "synthesist." I call myself a "preset jockey." Mostly I turn off synths' internal reverb so I can replace it with R4 or Nimbus. My compositional process often involves browsing patches, finding an inspiring sound, then building the piece around that sound. It used to cause me a bit of shame, like "real" synthesists dive in and create their own unique sounds, blah blah. But then it struck me: some of my favorite composers' keyboards only had one "preset," and it couldn't be tweaked at all. 😄 If A|A|S Player would only allow me to turn off reverb, I'd have much less interest in Chromaphone, which is probably why they don't allow it. Hybrid 3 (great arps and sequences) is actually my most-used synth, and Vacuum Pro is up there too (some nice basses in there). XPand!2 is great for the kind of workflow you describe, and of course has sounds that can stand up to being used in a final mix (basses, arps, and pads). As Cakewalk itself has gotten more nimble and resource-friendly over the last few years, I guess plug-ins have gone the other direction. AIR will probably never develop my favorite workhorses into the resource hog zone.😄

A|A|S licenses may be transferred, so if you wanted to flip your full licenses, you might be able to find a buyer and recoup your cost. You'd need to surrender the full upgraded license(s), though, as I'm pretty sure the upgrades themselves aren't transferable. So if you still want to be able to use your version 2 stuff, that wouldn't be possible. I am very glad that I ran the trial before paying for a license. I started out very enthused and ready, and then became less so. I still want it, just not now. I think there's a tradeoff that media software companies (I used to do software QA) have to keep making: hold back functionality from the latest version in the hope that they'll sell some licenses to people with older hardware, or put in the features and hope to more licenses to people with newer hardware. And the answer is often to do the second thing, because people like me who squeeze every last bit of use out of older hardware tend to spend less money in general, which includes for software (especially upgrade licenses).

Without access to the original plug-ins (and what that would mean would be opening the project in an older Cakewalk DAW)), then screen capping the plug-ins' UI's so that you could copy the numbers over), there is no way I know of to duplicate their settings short of listening to a render of the last mix you did and figuring it out by ear. On the bright side, I'll hazard a guess that your mix engineering skills have improved since the days of Home Studio 6 (and BTW, that product wasn't "several," it was "many" years ago, you can't fool us 😄). If so, you'll likely be able to make better choices in how you set those FX up (and the FX you'll have available will likely have better sound than the ones that came with HS6). Maybe you'll decide that the huge chorus you used back in the '90's should be replaced with something else? Or doubled down on, whatever your taste. If the projects were already as you wanted them, would you want to open them in Cakewalk? If you're going to work on them, maybe they'll work out better with newer techniques and tools. With your drum kit instrument issue, on the other hand, Cakewalk has a feature available called Drum Maps that should allow you to set up and save a new drum map and remap the note number(s) for your hi hat and/or crash. Then you can call it up in any project where you need to shuffle the note numbers and sounds around. Drum Maps were made for the kind of thing you're doing, they act as a translator for these cases. There's a learning curve on getting one's head around them, but basically what they do is take in note numbers from a MIDI track and assign them to note numbers and instrument names in a synth (which may be the same number, we hope, for most of them).

Sigh. Yeah, I love me some Chromaphone, my favorite A|A|S Player soundpacks are Chromaphone sounds. I really like what they can do with the arpeggiator(s), especially once they start stacking layers. Most of the time I can ease the resource hit by knocking the number of simultaneous voices down to 8. Many of the sounds have long decays, and once you add in arpeggiation, they can really stack up. I want to purchase at least one full A|A|S synth while they're half off, so first I tried the Chromaphone demo. Even with cutting the number of voices and shutting off reverb (I prefer to use my own), I still couldn't jack my buffers up high enough to stop the dropouts, and that was with only one instance. My system is no rocket sled, but I don't feel it's quite ready for the boneyard, and I don't have good feelings about dropping a hundy on software that's going to make me yearn for a more powerful (expensive) system. Maybe after the next computer upgrade. I know that I can freeze synth tracks and all that, but my composing workflow for my electronic stuff doesn't lend itself to that. I do a lot of slight nudging of note start and stop times and I'd be constantly freezing and thawing. String Studio and Ultra VA are somewhat better on resources, but they suffer in varying degrees from FrankenUI, where there are new, Chromaphone 3-style elements mixed with the kinda outdated clunky and hard to navigate "Session" UI. As if they were released in mid-update. If you're disappointed in your upgraded versions, please take a moment and send them a polite email telling them what you've said here. I've known them to be responsive in the past, and they should know that earlier customers are struggling to be able to use the newer versions.

I feel you. I have a raft of songs that have been sitting here because none of my channel strips can pull off the kind of subtle transformer saturation I require. And what's a channel strip without a bus compressor? Where are all the bus compressors?

Okay, considering what you pointed out about how the downward arrow pops open a menu on things like I/O, I think I may have it. How about the one used on narrowed menus and some buttons? It doesn't point straight down, it isn't a burger, and it's still consistent with option menus used elsewhere (Tools, for instance): Still a compromise, but hey, name of the game. (notice how I put an extra line on the Track tab so that it doesn't look as burgeresque?)

That's baked into Tungsten itself, unfortunately. Since there's no hover cell when the button is in its active state, there's nothing that can be done. Although now that you bring up that button, I don't know why there's a mouse over and a pressed state when the button will have no effect (when you don't have Write Automation enabled on any track). That might have to go.