Starship Krupa

Hello, today's lovely freebie is Cymatics Space Lite reverb. I don't get excited much about reverbs since I got Exponential Phoenix Stereo, but this one includes something that few freeware 'verbs do: a spring algorithm. Having tried it on some source material, I'll say that it's a nice enough sounding free 'verb, and the spring algo, while not sounding exactly like a spring, will probably be useful for when I want that sound and don't feel like hooking up my old handmade spring reverb box.

Very comprehensive explanation, Colin. I think it explains why certain soft synths, when I use "bass" patches are either not that bassy or seemingly below the range of human hearing. And sheesh, for a couple of the companies that founded the MIDI standard in the first place, it makes me wanna clonk their corporate heads together. Once the standard was defined, they did their level best to diverge from each others' efforts to expand upon it, like GS vs. XG. Reminds me of spouses who apparently used the extent of their relationship skills to get married and then develop none subsequent to that. "Got a standard, now it's time to get back to work making working with our stuff harder for other developers." It would appear that Stutter Edit uses the Yamaha standard (I would have thought during the Roland ownership days, Cakewalk would have had the Roland one thrust upon it). So if I set Base octave to -2 it should start lining up with the plug-in and I can stop getting lost in the MIDI tutorial and focus on getting lost among the plug-ins myriad controls. (How charmingly quirky that this setting appears under Display rather than say, MIDI.)

Yes, there are some VST's where I keep the VST2 version around because one of my hosts crashes with the VST3. VST3 is the New Coke of audio plug-in technology. Nobody asked for it, everyone except the company who made it prefers the earlier version. However, if you're getting three scans, that's one too many. I bet one of them is for a 32-bit version. Not hurting anything, just unnecessary. Not everyone (I'd say few people) are as fussy about this as I am. I sent a letter to A|A|S asking them to stop spamming my C: drive with copies of their plug-ins. Their installer used to put in multiple copies of the 64 bit VST2, the 32 bit VST2, the 32 and 64 bit VST3's, 64 and 32 bit AAX, and even the RTAS version. Just in case I had a 20-year-old Pro Tools system I guess. At its worst I counted over 12 different install locations where I would delete the extra plug-ins. I had a folder called "A|A|S Wipe" that had shortcuts to every location on my drive where they put their plug-in, and I'd go in there after every A|A|S install and weed them out. Now they've stopped with the redundancy, and no longer even supply 32-bit versions. All the weeding I do is for the VST2 and AAX versions, which is much more manageable.

As an experiment I tried deleting the VST2, AAX, and all 32-bit versions of the WavesHell dll and it had no ill effect. Now CbB and others scan only the 64-bit VST3 versions. If you have different versions of Waves plug-ins, you do need to keep the multiple VST3's, but otherwise thinning them out worked fine on my system.

Thanks for pinning this down, @Ronny.G. I think this is the "sacrifice a chicken" bug that has bedeviled me since adopting Cakewalk. I called it that because of all the different weird steps that it took to get MIDI working again once the soft synth or effect stopped listening. I use nothing but split instrument tracks, which seemed to cool it down somewhat, but I like to experiment with replacing synths, and that sometimes results in the need for chicken sacrifice: close and reopen the project, if that doesn't work, replace the synth a couple of times, if that doesn't work, delete the entire synth track and create it again, if that doesn't work, copy the MIDI track and delete the old one, and so on until you get to the "nuke the site from orbit" step of exporting everything as audio or MIDI files and starting with a brand new project. The trouble is, I could never figure out the exact steps that led to the failure mode, so I couldn't submit it as a bug. It just worked until it didn't.

That's awesome. I'd love to get some music in movies or TV. My genres are EDM, electronica, post punk and indie rock (like The Replacements or Pavement, not that overproduced swill that goes by the name "Indie Rock" today). I come up with stuff and think "this sounds like what you'd hear when the detectives are poking around in the darkened warehouse." I don't think I could do well making it to order, though.

Wow, that's awful, I didn't know that ReWire was falling out of favor. I agree with you that interoperability and treating DAW's as modules is a great way to grow the market. Don't need to look any further than MIDI. There were companies that believed they should try to keep their customers locked inside their own ecosystems in order to sell more of their hardware. Then some brave people came up with MIDI and it grew the market unmeasurably. I say unmeasurably because how many people only got interested in making music electronically after they knew they could sequence via MIDI? How many current DAW's started out as computer MIDI sequencers? You were there at the birth, Craig, you remember. I met you not long after the start of MIDI (Electronic Music Expo, 1985, San Francisco) and bemoaned my lack of funds for starting to work with it (I was on starvation wages at Orban at the time, making less than the janitor). You grinned and said "get a CZ101!" I took your suggestion to be that with MIDI, you could start out with the smallest, cheapest synth and then add other toys as the disposable income trickled in. The Casio would not become an obsolete investment until you were tired of its sounds.

It's not a "bug" as in "error in the coding," rather it's a behavior that most of us would like to have changed. I know it might come across as pedantic, but there is a distinction when communicating with software engineers (I used to earn my keep as a pro QA engineer). "Not working as designed (I usually look to the Reference Guide and web documentation to see how it's supposed to work)" "unimplemented feature," etc. The bakers are fond of the "expected behavior/actual behavior" lingo. In our case here, expected behavior is that plug-in GUI's always sit atop any Cakewalk windows, actual behavior is that they drop behind floated windows on secondary monitors as soon as the floated window takes focus. Which reminds me, I'm still seeing the behavior with Synth Rack and Help where they shoot up to the upper left corner of my primary monitor regardless of where the Cakewalk main window is. Expected behavior is that the darn things would just float right where they are, like the Browser does.

I agree. What I and others are suggesting, rather, is that Cakewalk augment its existing workflow, or at the very least fine tune what's already there. After 3 years with it, I'm now to the point where I feel smooth creating drum parts with MIDI. For now, I've pretty much given up on seeing drum instrument names in the PRV, I've resigned myself to memorizing where they are on the keyboard. A sad thing is, a couple of the annoyances/speed bumps are bugs or unimplemented features. You can get drum names via the Drum Map feature, but my struggles with it are famous, and then once it's all set up, the Drum Pane omits mousewheel functionality, which is something I use constantly. You can also get drum names via the Note Names feature, but as soon as you close the Piano Roll view, it reverts to the standard piano keys with standard scale. Just fixing those two would help beat making. So I'm with @Mark Morgon-Shaw, nobody's calling for any changes to the basic workflow, which I love, I'd just like the existing tools to work better and possibly get more tools, such as a sampler. The hip hop/EDM people on YouTube seem to love Cakewalk despite its shortcomings for that style. I'll shout out @Xel Ohh, @AdK Studios and @Ewoof Music here. This has had the feel of a bunch of old dudes speculating on what "the kids" are up to, so why not ask the guys working in the popular genres? One last thing, the killer feature that attracts first time users is Cakewalk's free subscription licensing model. This surely leads a lot of Windows first-timers to check it out. Then it's a matter of user retention. This is something that only GarageBand, with its dongle being a Macintosh computer, can touch. I'm not a teenaged kid, and my budget doesn't get up to the FL Studio level. I'm in the REAPER/Mixcraft/Waveform zone.

I've been demoing Stutter Edit 2, which is an effect that utilizes input from MIDI notes to trigger events. When I play what I think of as C1 on my controller, it registers as C1 in the plug-in. I'm running into trouble with it in Cakewalk having to do with a seeming discrepancy in MIDI note names: in order to trigger the note labeled "C1" in Stutter Edit, I have to draw a C3 in Piano Roll. I'm sure there's some way to fix this or work around it in Cakewalk, but I'd also like to understand it. Do different bits of software call these notes by different names? I'm used to C1=MIDI 24 and so on. It seems odd to me that it could diverge by two whole octaves. When I'm recording MIDI, Cakewalk registers a C1 on the controller as C1 in the Piano Roll. What's going on here?

Nobody's using Stutter Edit 2 with Cakewalk?

There have been "kids these days" gripes as long as there have been kids. I can imagine Adam and Eve's children saying to their kids "whaddaya mean you're sick of apples, do you know the sacrifices your grandma and grandpa went through so that you could eat them? You don't like your loincloths? When I was your age I had nothing but a fig leaf to cover my junk." I remember people my parents' age scoffing at plastic model airplane kits that you could put together and paint in a matter of days. "I made my models out of balsa wood and it would take a month! Can you believe the short attention span of this generation raised on TV?" Then snap together plastic models came along and people scoffed at those for offering even faster results. One of the reasons that younger people might turn away from something that doesn't yield quickly gratifying results, and I'll take your example of the airbrush, a tool that I own and have used exactly once, to paint a gold Duco stripe on a vintage WFL snare I was restoring. For illustrations even I wouldn't try an airbrush. I only want the thing so that I can paint on objects. For anything else, I have Paint.NET and GIMP and Photoshop. They yield faster results and are way more forgiving of mistakes. The modern tools we are blessed with do yield quick results. A hand plane looks cool but there are multiple power tools I'd reach for first. I'm 60, and I recognize the tendency in myself to walk away from things that I'm not immediately good at. I have to force myself to power through when that happens, slog my way through tutorials, etc. My preferred way to learn is to start with a simple task I can apply the tool to and jump right in. Not everything lends itself to this approach. I've worked around it in different ways including deliberately choosing things that initially seem unfathomable and going nose-to-grindstone until I nail them. That goes opposite to my nature. And really, sometimes I find things that click right away, and that's how I find out things that I have an aptitude for. Your friend's kid will figure out eventually that to get really good at something takes time. Maybe airbrushing looks cool so he wanted to try it, but then realized that it's one of those things that will take a long time to master, and doesn't feel a pressing need to do any airbrushing. To anyone who thinks that "kids today" lack patience for mastering things, I suggest trying to play one of their favorite video games with them. 😄

No it wasn't. Not my intention at all. What that means is that I performed a search on that exact string. Then I pasted the results I got. I didn't search for "what's the most popular DAW?" or "comprehensive list of DAW's." My intent was to do what someone new to DAW's might do and search Google. My point was that apart from any other context, they will see the name "BandLab." That is how they're getting their money's worth: brand name recognition. They make the same amount of money on Cakewalk whether 1,000,000 or 100,000 actually use it. It earns its keep by helping put their name in front of people while also presumably helping to get more people interested in making music, therefore creating more customers for BandLab's commercial products.

Thanks. As I said, I know about linking. It is fab. Something that Mixcraft doesn't have. I did some research and the way Cubase does this is that MIDI tracks can have sends similar to audio tracks, so you can set up any number of MIDI Sends. That seems pretty elegant to me.

Yeah, not something I'd ever make use of. When I do need extra bands, that's what things like your Fabfilter and my Meldaproduction EQ's are for. It's too specialized a use case to be concerned about having it built in to CbB, IMO. There is a plethora of freeware EQ's that will do it. The Quadcurve is a console EQ at heart, which traditionally aren't used for fancy surgery. You use it to notch out the honk(s) or add a bit of sweetness. It happens to have that fancy popout display with the analyzer, but it's still a console EQ. Adding extra bands would clutter up the non-expanded view. (This reminds me, I need to remember the ReaPlugs EQ's when I'm doing corrective surgery on unfortunate camcorder footage. They do things like linear phase and allow for unlimited bands. ReaFir is crazy good for noise reduction.) I'd much rather see the LP EQ's make an appearance, either included or for sale. Not too many linear phase multibands out there, and I never owned a SPlat license. There has been mention of makeovers of the Sonitae, updating UI's and going to VST format. That would be nice, too. I especially like the compressor, it does a passable dbx 160 imitation. The bakerzoids don't seem to be interested in plug-ins at this point.

These actions are present in menus but can't be bound to a keystroke or Custom Module button: Rename Clip and Insert Synth. Both of them are actions I do multiple times in every project, and having to invoke them from their menus each time is slower than if I could bind a key and/or add them to Custom Module buttons. I don't know why they're missing. You can bind a key to rename Arranger Sections but not clips. Every other kind of track has its own default keystroke.

I don't and I didn't. The point is not how popular Cakewalk is or might be, but rather that a person doing a search for the right DAW will have the BandLab name flashed at them. I don't believe I said "here's a comprehensive list of DAW's in order of popularity."

How about "if" one is overusing them? 😄 After all, you don't know how many EQ's or bands I typically use. And pretty much the only time I use more than 4 bands+hi and lo pass is when working with challenging material such as the cam footage audio from a party I attended a couple of weeks ago. The guy performing wanted me to play cowbell, and nobody else wanted to hold my camcorder for more than about 30 seconds, so I wound up with 30 minutes of the closest instrument to the mic being my danged (and dinged) cowbell. You'd be amazed how many harmonics a cowbell throws off until you try to notch the friggin' thing out. Ideally, I'd travel back in time and set up a couple of nice condensers in an X-Y or mid-side, mic the amp, take a feed off the vocal PA, etc. and only use the camera feed as a reference. Since I seem to only be able to move forward in time, I had to rule out that approach. I wound up with 5 bands of MAutoDynamicEqualizer clamping down every time the cowbell was struck. I made my notches narrow enough that it didn't have much effect on the rest of the sounds. This is something that a 4-band knob EQ would have been inadequate for. If anyone who listens to it notices phase shifts or whatever, I'll give them the raw audio and let them re-do it. My philosophy is that "doing it right or wrong" can only be determined by listening to the final mix. If it sounds good it is good no matter how many EQ's or bands the mix person used. I do endorse the notion that some approaches make it harder to get good-sounding results, but "doing it wrong" is too absolute for me. Before the time Daft Punk came along, audible pumping was considered a no-no, an indication that the mix engineer was overusing it. Now there are dedicated plug-ins that simulate it, along with bitcrushing plug-ins to simulate "bad" A/D D/A conversion. The term "overdrive," in the guitar world now indicates a desirable tone (most of the time), but broken down, it means "too much drive." Also, ne of the genres I dig is industrial noise, where "doing it right" can mean the opposite of what it usually does (it's all right, but I prefer it more grating). I share the opinion that if someone absolutely can't get listenable results with "only" 4 bands plus lo and hi they probably either lack a grasp of the basics or they're working with badly recorded material. In the case of the former, hit some YouTube and call me back. In the case of the latter, if it wouldn't result in a time travel paradox, go back and record it over after you figure out what messed up the capture the first time.

Other DAW's as well. Mixcraft, for example, has tracks similar to Cakewalk's "Instrument" tracks, with the difference being that instead of having one conjoined synth, you can add as many as you like.

And rightly so!

I didn't make the list, just copied and pasted. https://www.google.com/search?q=what's+a+good+first+daw

I would love to be able to route the output of a MIDI track to more than just one synth. Natively, without the need for external loopback software. As it stands, the only way to get this result is either to use a synth that includes a MIDI thru function or to duplicate your MIDI tracks. The most obvious use case for this is only needing to edit one MIDI track no matter how many synths are playing in unison (yes, I know about linked clips, but they add complexity, as does using an external MIDI splitter). Secondarily, there is screen clutter reduction, and not getting mixed up as to which MIDI track is going to which synth. (If anyone knows of a MIDI plug-in that can accomplish this, please tell me)

Oh man, the thing I miss the most when I'm using Cakewalk instead of Mixcraft is Mixcraft's infinitely nestable bus/folders. To create a bus/folder, you just drag one track onto another. Boom, now the target track is a bus and a collapsible folder. And they're nestable. You can have a Drums folder with an Overheads folder inside it, a Vocals folder with folders for Lead and Backing, etc. And nest them as deeply as your computer resources can handle. The routing for this can be duplicated with Cakewalk's excellent routing abilities, but I took to Mixcraft's way the moment they introduced it and I still love it. If this interests you, download their trial and check it out.

I think those of us on the forum get a skewed picture of the user base due to the younger folks not being forum-oriented. Regarding Mr. Dylan, I read Clive Davis' autobiography and he said that although Dylan's records for Columbia at the time of their release didn't see great chart action, he wanted Dylan due to the prestige he brought to the label. Of course, time has shown that Mr. Z's albums were fantastic catalog sellers. Even if they never download it, everyone who is shopping for their first DAW will at least see/hear the name "Cakewalk by BANDLAB." I just did a Google search on "what's a good first DAW?" Here are the results: Cakewalk by BandLab – Free (PC only) Reaper – $60. Logic Pro X – $199 (Mac only) Ableton Live 10.1 – $99, $449, $749. FL Studio 20 – $99, $199, $299, $899. PreSonus Studio One 4 – Free, $99, $399 So I think BandLab are getting a fine return on their investment. Addition and refinement of the tools that people use to make beats is probably what they need to focus on if they want to pull in the younger crowd. The YouTube dance music crew, X.E.L. Ohh, Adk, and eWoof have all stated that lack of a sampler/sampler track is the biggest drawback to using the program. Add just that and I think they'll see way more uptake. I can only imagine the slew of tutorials on "How to use the sampler in Cakewalk by BandLab."

"Macho macho man...." 😊 I can mix with a 4 band EQ, but I get more satisfying results by using the various modern tools I am blessed with. It's 2021. The classic productions would certainly have used these things if they had been available. As for "feeling I need," need's got nothing to do with it. I can cut a sheet of plywood with my handsaw, but I choose to use my circular saw and table saw. Am I "doing it wrong" by using whatever tools I have at my disposal? I've often said that I could happily do a mix of a standard rock song using whatever FX come with the DAW (more happily if I also get to use the Meldaproduction freebie bundle 😁). However, I'm happier and faster with the 3rd-party FX I've acquired. (Once I get into EDM territory, though, things become much more complicated. The FX I use become an integral part of the composition.)