Starship Krupa

A thing that helped me to understand it is that when you're using the Smart Tool, it's oriented toward the "speed" workflows, which live up to the name once you get a handle on it, but can be frustrating if you're trying to do something other than linear comping of a series of takes, using the best bits of each. When you step out of that and get into cutting, copying, and pasting sections to loop or repeat them is where things can go sideways. The thing to do if you want to edit in that way is to turn off the Comp feature of the Smart Tool and switch over to the Edit Tool for the editing operations. It's easy to get stuck to the Smart Tool, because it usually works so well, but when you're in the Take Lanes, it can become a source of unintended results. I use the F5-F10 shortcut keys to switch around among the tools, and upcoming changes to my custom themes will be including them in plain sight on the Tools Module.

Nah, this is just after finishing up recording. I came up with something I liked fiddling with a synth pad and a stepped filter. I started hearing beats in my head so I set up to loop record my drum kit, 4 minute takes and played for 20 minutes. All I did before performing the slip edit on Take 1 was the obligatory Healing Of The Clips ritual, which must be done every time I record drums in loop mode. This must be done due to Cakewalk's unfathomable practice (as mentioned above) of splitting all the clips in a track at the endpoint of the shortest (usually last) take. The weirdest part is that the takes/clips are the first and last, not adjacent ones, and that the fades were created only on the tracks I didn't actually click on (the clips were all grouped, however). The clips in the first drum track were left alone, fade-wise. Cakewalk does weird things, no doubt. Some of them are known and accepted, others are not. First I need to make sure this is not in the former category.

Hey, we have a winner (unfortunately we also have a loser, who at this point is me)! You must have also noticed the flattening of the waveform display, which escaped me in my advanced state of bemusement. I guess I somehow accessed a feature of Cakewalk that adds really gradual complementary fades to the beginning of the first take and end of the last take in your lanes, and does so only on the tracks you're not directly editing. Now at least I know how to make them go away. Maybe they're something that Cakewalk just does, and I need to get used to removing them like with the spurious clip splits.

As much as I like Cakewalk, I really do, from the start of our relationship it's been my experience that although recording and (especially) mixing give me pretty much what I ask for, when we get around to editing and comping, things get....non-consensual. Because of this I have over the years spent more time trying to figure out how to get Cakewalk not to do things than I have figuring out how to get it to do things. It's always had this tendency to do stuff that I never asked it to or gave it permission to. Being able to change the Smart Tool helped, and there was a bug involving closed take lanes that got fixed, but it still has that weird quirk where it puts a spurious edit in all of my takes if I happen to record one that's shorter than the others. I know how to clean up after it, but I wish I didn't have to. I just accept that Cakewalk does that, there's no way to turn it off, nobody has an explanation why it does it, so it's best that I get used to it, and I have. Recently Cakewalk has taken to drawing lines on my clips, again with no provocation on my part. As shown in the screenshot below, I have a set of drum takes that are grouped for easy editing and comping. The first thing I wanted to do was to clip out some silence and warmup noise from the start of the first take, so I clicked on its left edge, held down my shift key so that Cakewalk wouldn't move all of the clip edges for all of the takes in the track (also no idea why its default behavior is to do that. Am I to believe there are people who want the edges of all of their clips to move simultaneously if they happen to line up with each other vertically? Perhaps they are in a vast majority, and I should just be happy that I have the option to bypass the behavior with a modifier key), and dragged it a few seconds worth. All was fine until I took a look at the other tracks and saw that there were now diagonal lines on two of the clips in all of the other tracks. The grouped clip I meant to shorten had a diagonal line superimposed on it, and the last take in the stack had one too, but going in the other direction. All three of my other tracks exhibit similar lines: The lines seem harmless enough, but I didn't have "View>Show Spurious Lines On Random Clips" checked and I can't seem to do anything to get rid of them, even with Undo. They'd look okay from a style standpoint, but they're not on all of the clips, so they just look weird, and it does worry me a bit that given Cakewalk's propensities, it may have marked them for some later, unrequested operation. Anyone have any idea what these lines signify? Is it okay to ignore them?

I just checked it out using the numbers method and the Take and Automation Lanes work thusly: Cell 1 is normal state with no lanes Cell 2 is the pressed state, which only appears in "no lanes" condition Cell 3 is the rollover state, also only appears in "no lanes" condition Cell 4 is lanes open Cell 5 is unused Cell 6 is lanes closed (but present) Cell 1's look of white on grey is Cakewalk standard for inactive buttons waiting to be pushed. Same with Cells 2 and 3, Cakewalk standard. Cell 4 is the brightest one, which is appropriate for open lanes. The relation between Cell 1, Cell 4 and Cell 6 is important. Cell 6 stock is a dimmed version of Cell 4, which is appropriate, but considering it's supposed to let us know at a glance whether or not we have lanes, it's too muted. I think I'll lighten it up in my themes. Again we have a rollover and pressed state that are only used for one operation, the initial opening/creation of a lane. Once that happens, they're never seen again. There's no reason not to use those when closing and reopening the lanes as well but Cakewalk doesn't. Also: why is the button for removing a Take Lane an "x," while the similar button for removing an automation lane is a "-?" To add either type of lane is a "+" sign, so bye-bye "x."

The create/show lanes buttons work in an interesting way. It has a logic. Before it's clicked on it's grey to indicate there are no lanes, and it responds to a rollover. Then when there are lanes (the first of which are created the first time you click the button to open the lanes), it changes color to indicate that lanes exist, so that when the lanes are closed, you know that they are there, but hidden. If you delete all your lanes, the buttons go back to their original state. I'd like every button to have an appropriate rollover (meaning you'd have a rollover button state for any button that can be pushed and get a result), but once the lanes exist, the buttons are static, with no rollover state. The bakers of yore seem to have been more into pressed states than hovered states. This has me thinking that it would be good to have more of an indication that lanes exist, because I didn't understand or even notice this behavior until you all started discussing it. The "lanes exist" buttons on the stock themes seem kinda dull for their function. So do mine because I didn't understand it. There's plenty of weirdness around with hover states. For instance the buttons to expand a track header have a hover state when they're in the "expand" mode, but not in the opposite ("contract?") mode. So there's visual feedback for expanding but not for the other way. As with so many elements in Cakewalk, less consideration for consistency was given to this than I'd like.

I misspoke, I guess. The add track flyout buttons will change state if clicked on, they're toggles. I think the UI should let you know when you hover that if you click here, something will happen (it fails to do that in many other locations, like add and remove lanes). It's appropriate visual feedback. The thing about the Export module is that it's really a radio button, click on this empty circle and the state changes, click on the other empty circle and it changes again. Clicking a second time on an active button will not result in a state change. Which lane buttons do you mean? The expand buttons work correctly as far as I can tell. The behavior can be changed with Theme Editor like I've done with my Export Module. I made the hover image the same as the normal image so there's no longer a change when the selected button is hovered or pressed. I can do it on any other buttons that exhibit incorrect (in my mind) behavior. If there are any other buttons that act like this, please let me know and I'll eventually fix it in my themes.

This might be something for TYLIP, but I'll post it here for all. @Colin Nicholls may add it if he chooses. I decided to take on the task of figuring out the button logic for the Project/Selection radio buttons in the Export Module. I saw an opportunity to have fun with green circles and orange dots. This required a lot of button/image logic detective work, because the image has 8 cells, 6 of which are used for the button states. Yes, 6 different button states, all used. Since the buttons are so small, when I tried to create a test image with numbers in each of the cells, the numbers were too small to read, so I put colors in in the order of ROYGBIV. As follows, in order of the cells in the image: Position 1 is normal for the unselected button Position 2 is for when the unselected button is pressed Position 3 is for when the unselected button is hovered over Position 4 is normal for the selected button Position 5 is for when the selected button is pressed (this seems odd to me, I can't think of anywhere else in the UI that pressing on an already selected button results in an image change Position 6 is for when the selected button is hovered over (again, odd) Positions 7 and 8 are what is displayed with no project loaded I wound up using the same button image for conditions 4, 5, and 6, because I don't believe that the user should get any feedback from pushing or hovering a button they've already selected. It's not a toggle. I used a darker circle for condition 1 and a brighter one for condition 3. I had some fun with condition 2, I have a green dot for the pushed state that switches to an orange one for selected. It's fun to dig up these locations that are often left alone due to it being a pain in the neck to change them. I hope this helps.

I have multiple AIR products and yes, the .big file is their sample container. It doesn't get unpacked during installation (or ever, the instrument just reads from it directly). My guess is that with the Pro Tools installer, it only installs the AAX version. These folks mentioning Pro Tools and Avid lead me to believe that this might be the cause of their problems. Unless there is some way to choose to install the VST version, you may not be able to install it from the installer you got from Avid. I don't know what their policies are regarding bundled software, but you may be able to use your licenses if you just download newer installers from AIR/InMusic. I would try using the newest installers and see if they recognize the licenses on your iLok.

My favorite option for 3rd party sampler is Speedrum Lite, but Sitala is a useful and popular option. From what I can see, having an integrated sampler in Cakewalk would result in a big uptake among EDM and hip hop producers. A demographic that I am sure BandLab would love to see more of.

I took a peek at the other text images and they look fine. It just looked like you used different options in that one module.

Nice. Inspiring. I see a couple of ideas I might want to swipe incorporate, especially as regards rollovers. A couple of issues I notice: in the Mix module, the Clear Automation Write button (position 4 in the image) appears as a blank white rectangle when any track has Write enabled. Also, I really like the text for the Marker module "Prev" and "Next" buttons instead of the triangles and tiny arrows, but on the black background it looks over-smoothed, like what I get if I have Paint.NET's font smoothing set to Smooth instead of Sharp (Modern).

Cleared for takeoff. They're like mixes, never finished, merely surrendered.

It occurred to me last night that in addition to The Joker from Batman: The Killing Joke, it's also The Incredible Hulk's look.

Major update to EVA 01 (and Racing Green). It introduces new images for Inspector and Browser, larger more easily visible single arrows instead of the small double arrows and +/- signs used most places in Cakewalk to expand track headers and show and hide panels. There are also new sharper images for the EQ graticules in Console/ProChannel. I also updated many images with sharper, more legible graphics. https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ax7xeox3a5t003v/AABtPXXXSOxwJAkOH-fbyHRfa?dl=0

Major update to Racing Green (and EVA 01). It introduces new images for Inspector and Browser, larger more easily visible single arrows instead of the small double arrows and +/- signs used most places in Cakewalk to expand track headers and show and hide panels. There are also new sharper images for the EQ graticules in Console/ProChannel. I also updated many images with sharper, more legible graphics. https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ax7xeox3a5t003v/AABtPXXXSOxwJAkOH-fbyHRfa?dl=0

I so much expect it to happen that from time to time I forget and double click on the collapsed EQ expecting it to pop out.

So they've reintroduced Neutrino?

So what do you get if you try switching your driver mode to WASAPI Exclusive? I prefer it over ASIO4ALL when working on my laptop. For troubleshooting especially, it adds a layer of complexity. If you still want to try to get ASIO4ALL to work, it has its own configuration, which you can access from the ASIO4ALL icon in your system tray. There will be a list of devices. You may enable or disable whichever ones appear. My suspicion at this point is that ASIO4ALL is set to talk to your onboard CODEC instead of the Alesis.

I'll pile on with more Bistre-bashing and concur with 905. I ran it through MAnalyzer and there's a spike that comes up at 5K and then climbs up to about 10K before repeating its screeching journey. Fascinating that the same patch would sound fine in the synth but not in its playback-only brother. Makes me wonder if the Player playback engine has a bug that causes it to miss a filter or EQ setting.

I'm posting another snip from my next revisions of Racing Green and EVA 01. This time I've retooled Global>Drop and Dockbar Right. Dockbar Left and Up and Down got the makeover but are not shown here. Elsewhere, Track View>Bus Pane Hide and Show have gotten the one big triangle treatment, as has Piano Roll>Show/Hide Controller Pane. I don't care for the tiny double triangles for opening and closing panes and I think the single larger one adds a sense of weight and sturdiness, in addition to simply being easier to see on a large high resolution monitor. Also, for the thing we click on to get docking options, rather than having a small single arrow that points to the bottom of the screen, it's an "O" for "options," scaled up to match the big triangle to its right. Next I'll be experimenting with single arrows in the Track Headers to see if this concept can work there.

I tried it, and, yes, I think I hear what you're talking about. If I really hammer a chord, about 2 seconds in, there's an organ sound that comes in. It's a pretty shrill patch anyway, but this organ sound is grating if I get anywhere above middle C. The organ sound doesn't come in if I don't hit it with as much velocity. I'm with you, I don't think I'd have a use for something as ice-picky as this.

I'll check it out, as I am a big user of A|A|S Player and have both Cinémathèque and Starlight. My ability to detect high pitched frequencies ain't what it usedta be. One thing: with the update of Chromophone and VA to v.3, A|A|S "remastered" their soundpacks to make use of the new features, and the new versions sound different. So if you've updated your Player and soundpacks, it's possible that Bistro/Bistre was remastered in some way that is causing the sounds you hear.

That's funny about your daughters becoming the wine-fueled spectators. Do you know how many singers it takes to screw in a lightbulb? Only one, they can just stand on the ladder and hold it while the world revolves around them. Time to hit Device Manager and check whether the Alesis shows up there. Also, I'll beat bitflipper to this one, it's possible for Cakewalk to lose track of your audio interface if you switch which USB port you have it plugged into. If that happens, and switching it back doesn't help, you'll need to remove all the instances of it in Device Manager and let the OS detect it again. After that, the world of WASAPI should open to you. Yeah, messing with DAW's and NLE's will keep your neurons plastic!

I didn't mean to imply this with my comments. I just turned 60, so I'd be the Sphinx calling the pyramids "old." Rather that people's concerns are often misdirected. DAW software phoning home is an odd target given that the browser software we are all using right now to post or read on this forum is harvesting data like crazy, tracking our every movement on the web. A program pinging their home server to check for updates is nothing. The operating system we use to run our DAW's is talking up a storm to its home company. My bemusement is about people getting all wound up about Cakewalk having rolled the authorization into the main program, threatening to stop using it, whatever. Especially after the years of fussing and fuming about needing BandLab Assistant to refresh authorization. And implying that something nefarious might be behind it, or someday be behind it. If someone is really concerned about this stuff, IMO they should study up and learn how to better protect themselves. I've given basic security advice before, like not using the same email address you use for banking to register with smaller companies who can't afford the same level of security hardening. Anyone savvy enough to use a DAW can learn how to block individual apps' network activity either in their computer's firewall or their Internet router. All the tools they need are right there in Windows 10. I decline to use audio production software that requires a network connection in my mixes. Too much of a pain in the anatomy, and I sometimes like to take my laptop to places where I don't have Internet access.