Starship Krupa

Yes, but I've already decided that I don't like the results. 😄

Thanks for letting me know to give these a wide berth. I accidentally purchased the Yellow Submarine thing that came out about 20 years ago when the movie was re-released, thinking that I would be treated to a version of the first rock record I owned but with fewer scratches and crackles. What an abomination. I gave it away because I didn't want it in the house. That record was such a mind-bender that I made it through my teen years without touching drugs (I say my teen years, because I....um, later learned exactly what could have inspired them to create things like "Only A Northern Song"). The wonderful little guitar licks and sounds in those "Beatles at their most psychedelic" songs like "Hey Bulldog" and "It's All Too Much" were almost inaudible, and for heaven's sake, part of the weird charm is the hard panning. Lennon's lead vocal on "Bulldog," with the verses hard right, morphing to stereo on the choruses and fadeout. Martin's stereo mixes get a lot of flak, some of it....deserved, but listen to "It's All Too Much" and tell me that it's not a great mix. To me, heavy-handed remasters are like those lenticular 3-D versions of The Last Supper. It's a DaVinci masterpiece, the height of its time and for all time. You are not going to improve upon it with your brickwall limiter and multiband compressor.

"My name is Ed?"

Ah, a rhetorical question answered by a philosophical statement. Hmm. Coral reefs aren't talking, and the individuals who started it and formed the bulk of it are mostly long gone. If they could tell me, I'd guess it would be because it was formed of many small parts over along period of time by many organisms whose primary goal was to survive and thrive rather than conform to ideas of human aesthetics.

I noticed that some of them looked unselected but I wasn't sure. Are your fade lines showing up as none more black on selected clips? Why o why must there be so many gotchas and fixed elements to theme around?

Look into the Relay function in your iZotope suite. I think it lives in Neutron. Also, doesn't your Pro subscription come with their swoopy metering software? Studying up on how to use that might shine a light.

All right, 45 years ago, how many of the top 10 songs were disco? Let's take a look at the year end Billboard chart: 1"Silly Love Songs"Wings 2"Don't Go Breaking My Heart"Elton John & Kiki Dee 3"Disco Lady"Johnnie Taylor 4"December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night)"The Four Seasons 5"Play That Funky Music"Wild Cherry 6"Kiss and Say Goodbye"The Manhattans 7"Love Machine"The Miracles 8"50 Ways to Leave Your Lover"Paul Simon 9"Love Is Alive"Gary Wright 10"A Fifth of Beethoven"Walter Murphy & The Big Apple Band I'd say about half, not necessarily by "disco artists," but I'm going to count the veteran acts on the chart that were there with dance tunes. Dang, that's cool that "Love Is Alive" made the top 10. That is such a great song. How many of the others would you change the station on if they came on the car radio? If I never hear "Silly Love Songs" "Don't Go Breakin' My Heart," or "50 Ways To Leave Your Lover" again, it would be fine with me. Not that they're bad songs, I have just heard them more than enough to last me. Anyway, did this mean that the young musicians of the day were all striving to become disco artists? I don't think so. Young musicians were listening to and emulating the kind of music they always do, which is underground cognoscenti stuff that gets nowhere near the charts and older fundamental artists. I can tell you that for my part, I was into Steely Dan and Fleetwood Mac, and just a few years from getting into Talking Heads, Buggles, Joe Jackson, X, and the like. If the bakerzoids had the prescience to predict what kind of music kids were going to want to buy in a year or two, they would be running record labels. They're not, though, I daresay. All they can do is listen for what people want most, keep an eye on the other DAW's to see what features seem hot, and then decide which ones will be the most useful to the widest number of people, or give Cakewalk the most prestige, or whatever is driving feature development. I think the hip hop crew have SPOKEN when it comes to the #1 feature that would help Cakewalk be useful for producing those styles of music: gotta have that built-in sampler or sample track or similar. I suspect that most of us who work with samples would love to have such a thing. Having used Mixcraft, which has 2 flavors of built-in sampler, I can say it really makes things go faster and more smoothly. Select some audio, right click, Send To Sampler, bang. A long, hard look at drum composition workflow in the Piano Roll is in order, too. I can make beats in PRV, but it always feels like I'm using a tool that was really designed for something else. It's a pain the neck to get it displaying drum instrument names, the wheel zooming features don't work in the drum pane, etc. (haha, I just noticed that the forum algo bleeped out an abbreviation for "want to be" and a reference to the great Brian Epstein's orientation)

Groan. @Colin Nicholls, I notice in YLIP that when you demonstrate custom colors for clip fades, they appear as the correct color on your "Normal Selected" clips. I've not found this to be the case on my system. Cakewalk obeys the color choice in unselected clips, but as soon as I select the clip, the fade line turns black. As you might imagine, the screws with my ambition to go coal black with my selected clips. I could have sworn that this worked at one point, so anyone else who would like to try it for me, much obliged. Just set your Clip Fades color to any color other than white or black and see how it behaves. One more thing: how does one go about setting the clip background color for unselected clips? There's a theme item for selected clips, but that seems to be it. Is it "Track view / Clips Pane / Clips / Tracks 1,11,21.<. Background" and its sisters? TYLIP warns about the clip backgrounds rabbit hole, but I went and jumped in it because if I can get it sorted the way I want, it will really help.

My guess would be that it has to do with an Instrument Track being a conjoined set of Synth and MIDI tracks, like the Grouping is failing to apply to the audio track. If it once worked correctly and then broke, that makes it relatively low-hanging fruit. A programmer with access to the code before and after can diff them and see what was changed.

This also illustrates how for one user something can be a nasty, while for another, they might never see it. For instance, I never use Instrument tracks, only split MIDI/Synth. I like to experiment with different synths on the same MIDI material and there are advantages to just switching the output on the MIDI track.

Does it seem odd that Cakewalk lightens selected clip backgrounds in Tungsten? This works fine with Mercury, where it gets really light, but in Tungsten, I find that it reduces contrast with the waveform, which is the opposite of what I want. When unselected, an unmuted clip has a nice contrast-y dark background. Select it and you get a lighter background that for me at least, makes it more difficult to see what I'm doing. Also, at the 3-year mark I still find it difficult to tell at a glance what clips are selected but muted, not selected and muted, selected and unmuted or not selected and unmuted. This suggests that it could be improved upon. Another question: if a dark theme were to offer clip backgrounds that went darker when selected, would you find that confusing? I'm going to be doing this in the versions of my themes that I use myself, but if it would be too confusing for others, I'll fork it and offer alternate versions with Tungsten-style backgrounds. I'm thinking of doing a Leonard Cohen tribute theme called "You Want It Dark," which would be close to Tungsten, but with 1F1D1C black in place of dark chocolate. Matthew might already have the "none more black" territory staked out, though, I must check.

Update FYI: I nailed down a repro condition on it and sent in my project and it seems that it's in that odd category of "works as designed, but it's oddly designed." It's for such reasons that I posted this as a question, and yes, I didn't understand how it worked. It actually does have to do with having auto-crossfade enabled while working with my other lanes closed. Auto crossfades will be applied to the clips in the closed lanes but not in the one you have open. Not sure why it would have been designed that way, and no doubt it will be revisited. Moral here, especially for those of us who sometimes experience Cakewalk "getting in the way" of our preferred workflow: sure, it's fun to commiserate on the forum, but what gets the better results is to send the devs a .CWB of a project with instructions on how to duplicate your frustrating conditions. They do not want Cakewalk to feel like it's impeding your process. Can't please everyone, but some things are just idiosyncratic, designed to a different standard, maybe under "rush to ship" conditions in a different era. What's more, they probably don't use the program exactly the same way any of us does. If you hand them a way to spend 5 minutes and see what you're seeing, you stand a much better chance than if they have to take 30 minutes from their other duties to play with it until it breaks. ALSO: If you reported an issue or issues 5 years ago and got fed up with the lack of response, keep in mind that the company that failed to address the issue went out of business over 3 years ago. The current owners skimmed the top developers who now have a different set of priorities. If your old bug is even still around in the database, it's very "stale." Worst that could happen if you tried again would be...nothing.

Be careful. There have been reports of an odd grinding noise that some have said resembles the sound of Delia Derbyshire scraping a guitar plectrum across the bass strings of a piano.

I would discourage taking this viewpoint. The company to which @David Baay submitted that bug report hasn't even existed for the past 3 1/2 years. In that time, the entire staff was laid off, then some of the engineers got re-hired by a new company to continue development of a new product based on the SONAR code. Since then, new development staff has even been added directly from the Cakewalk user base. So a new organization, with visibly different priorities. Even if to us, who are using a program that looks pretty much like the old one, it's the same user experience continued. Something that was tabled as low priority in the Gibson years might be a bigger deal in these better days of BandLab, so take a few minutes and submit it. Worst that can happen is nothing. I understand the frustration of going to the trouble of submitting a good report and having it seemingly shrugged off. Believe me I do. But things are different now, and the current dev team seem to take a lot of pride in the number of longtime bugs they've fixed. They'd probably like to fix some more. Even if the old bug database survived the transition intact, there can be an assumption that if an issue has been sitting there for 5 years, it's probably not ruining everyone's day. So a ping about these old things might be in order.

Definitely not expected behavior, so it might be a nice thing to submit the project to the devs with instructions on how to reproduce the issue.

Ecclesiastes 1:9 "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun." The Buggles "There's no technology to make up a song." When I was born in 1961, the musical entertainment industry was ruled by singers who were told by their handlers what to record and perform, these "A&R men" as they were called at the time controlled every aspect, hiring the musicians, choosing the studio, choosing the songs, hiring the arranger(s). There was no assumed correlation between being a great singer/performer and songwriting or even musical ability beyond voice. If the performers managed to become successful enough to exert leverage, they could negotiate choosing their own repertoire Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland and Elvis Presley had supreme mastery of one instrument, which was voice. All of them could sit down at a piano and make it work, but virtuosos none. Sinatra and Garland never (to my knowledge) wrote a note. They hired the people who were the best at it. Presley has songwriting credits, but his manager was famous for buying songs outright and including the clause that the writers would give all credit to Presley, so who knows how much he actually came up with. Nobody gave a crap about where the particular input came from, good singing was good singing and the writing and arranging and playing was good and it didn't have to all be the same person doing it. My favorite pair-up from this era is probably Sinatra and Gordon Jenkins with all the great songs on September of My Years. I'm oversimplifying the evolution and leaving out but when the massive boom of teenaged kids came along, they got interested in music that "spoke" to the experience of being a teenager, with the usual feelings of confusion, anger, rebellion, and aimlessness. Jazz, Blues, and their descendant, Rock then came to the forefront and elbowed everything else out, became "the music industry." The kids wanted to see young-looking people who wrote songs and played instruments. Bob Dylan, who wrote lyrics vague enough that you could make them take on a meaning personal to the listener. The Beatles, who started out being very direct, then started listening to Dylan and adopted his lyric sense. All this started to be considered "authenticity," and artists who happened not to also be songwriters were considered somehow less authentic. There were plenty of artists in this rock era who still operated in the earlier fashion, but they've been relegated in music history (see Three Dog Night). The discussion we're into now is shot through with our (I have them, too) ingrained prejudices about "authenticity." The thing is, as Pink Floyd pointed out " It's alright we told you what to dream. You dreamed of a big star. He played a mean guitar...." The image and presentation of these rebellious rock heroes was just as crafted as that of the artists who preceded them, maybe more so because "authenticity" is more difficult to fabricate and maintain. Brian Epstein took the leather-jacketed rockabilly ***** Beatles and gave them the ***** eye for the straight guy makeover, early 60's London style. Cute moptop haircuts, tailored collarless suits. 50-odd years later, my favorite pair of shoes is my Chelsea boots, the style that Epstein customized to turn into the famous Beatle Boot. Their iconic drummer, who has probably inspired millions to take up the instrument (including me) was replaced on their first couple big label sessions. (NOT by Bernard Purdie) Dua Lipa's job is to be the best singer and dancer she can be, and presumably to be smart about hiring the other talent (or she's hired a smart person who can do that). It's not her job to write lyrics and music or learn how operate any part of the studio other than the mic. More power to her if she does. The songwriting credits is because musician/producer/songwriter A has a cool set of changes, m/p/s B comes up with an awesome breakdown (I have two songs right now that have been waiting for months for my 60-year-old brain to come up with breakdowns), m/p/s C has a great suggestion for a bridge, the lyrics may have multiple authors, etc. Also, songwriter credits are often given out as pure compensation these days (which is not new either) because there's no other mechanism for people in certain critical roles to get paid. It's like actors and crew taking "points" on a film in lieu of cash payment. It also helps them get work with other artists. So if you're capping on multiple people getting songwriter credits, you might be capping on hardworking/talented people getting compensated. The thing is, it's hard work to make money in music these days, and it takes a lot of people to put together a package that the masses are going to like. In the past, the multiple people involved in recordings got onetime payouts as "work for hire." Session players who had more musical chops than the artists they were backing would come up with hooks and melodies during the sessions that made the songs (see Carole Kaye on "California Girls"), pick up their check for a few hundy and be pleased when they heard themselves on million-selling singles. Clare Torry improvised for the length of a song over a set of chord changes on Dark Side of the Moon and got paid 30 pounds. There is no "The Great Gig in the Sky" without her performance. She had to fight for a writing credit and royalties, and only got it 30 years later. (interesting story: she did her thing, the band and Parsons were awed into near silence, and she figured that their lack of spoken approval meant that she had botched the gig) One more thing: about whatever good old days we may be comparing today's pop music to, our brains tend to filter out things that we didn't like from the past because, hey why hang on to "Havin' My Baby," "You Light Up My Life," and "Muskrat Love?" But those hits from my childhood sold way way way more than anything put out by Thin Lizzy, Cheap Trick, or Pink Floyd. They even beat Fleetwood Mac in terms of sales of a single. I've noticed a musical cognitive error of comparing today's mainstream to the underground of our youth. Sure, cognoscenti music from 50 years ago sounds better than bubblegum pop of today, but there was bubblegum pop 50 years ago that sucked just as bad. And there's plenty of great new music out there today for those who aren't too lazy to dig it up. 40 years ago I was putting effort into digging up great obscure cognoscenti music, ordering Japanese imports of stuff you couldn't get in the states, etc.. Singles? Nothing under 12" thanks. If I turn on some TV awards show and the wind-up doll singer-dancers look like a joke compared to my favorites from back then, well, TV awards shows have always been like that and likely always will. Now, I can go on Bandcamp and be overwhelmed by the amount of great music currently being produced. South American Acid Cumbia, anyone? There's too much of it for me to take in! An overload of excellent, innovative, wildly creative music in so many genres.

I've been doing some pretty deep diving into images and backgrounds for the next release of my themes and I've run into a couple of images that I can't find either in Theme Editor or TYLIP. I'm getting my themes to the point where there are few elements that have been left to default due to not wanting to go to the trouble. Almost everything that's on the screens is stuff that I've either changed or examined. Unfortunately, it looks like there are a few pretty prominent fixed elements. As follows, in Track View and Inspectors/Arpeggiator: The background images for Vel, Swing, Dur, Pitch, Flam, Volume, Pan and Vel + (as well as Send Level, Send Pan and Key + but not Time + for who knows what reason) seem like they are going to have to stay chocolate brown. This is a drag if you're trying to use a nice dark black for high legibility. The only similarity I can see is that these are the only track controls where the user clicks and drags horizontally to change the values. The other (themeable) items are buttons or a secondary menu pops out. It is an undertaking to make such extensive changes, juggling color choices with the limited options. Yeah, I'd love to color more things royal purple in the EVA 01 themes, but it's tough to keep a color just where you want it. I found I needed to let the green and orange dominate for legibility, same with the dark black.

I like those knobs and processor skins. The +/- 3dB lines are also a great idea given how many tutorials give that number as a starting point for cuts and boosts. As far as the knob highlight colors, I like to stick to no more than 3 (4 if you count the neutral value background) colors in a theme. Background, Accent, Highlight. I like coherency among the different elements where I can enhance it. A different goal could be to make individual elements stand out from each other, which looks like the direction you're going with this. It's fun, like having more toys to play with. (Racing Green is my attempt to take coherency as far as practical without looking boring. Months after first issuing it I'm still finding things I want to turn green. With EVA 01 the challenge is to spread the theme colors around in a way that makes visual and functional sense. Racing Green is built for speed and function, EVA 01 is more for eye candy and to create excitement) So I would choose the theme's own contrast color(s), which in yours, seems like Tungsten orange is the highlight color. Tungsten also uses a lighter yellow for its loop markers, so if you want to emphasize that more as a highlight color, it could be fair game. Something bright to show off those knobs. Also, I really like a color for Alternate Text #2 other than plain white. Maybe the orange or yellow? Same for the Browser text. Do you have a name for it? Something-Console or Channel would be my suggestion, to give a hint that so much work has gone into the look of the ProChannel modules.

The entity with whom you had the contract, the Cakewalk division of Gibson Brands, no longer exists. However, you are entitled to continue to use SONAR, it doesn't require any reactivation. The core program and plethora of add-ons that you paid for should continue to function just as they did when you bought your license. Cakewalk by BandLab is licensed under a completely new and different licensing agreement. It's a free subscription that requires contacting BandLab's server once every 6 months to re-subscribe. BandLab is not affiliated with Gibson Brands or the defunct Cakewalk company. It bought some of the liquidated assets including the code for Cakewalk's old SONAR program and has now issued it under the name Cakewalk by BandLab. It has nothing to do with SONAR except for being still mostly derived from the old SONAR code and being compatible with SONAR projects and workflow. You have the choice to use SONAR under the old license terms or Cakewalk under the new license terms or even switch back and forth between both of them (if you take care to avoid certain Cakewalk by BandLab features that never existed in SONAR). Cakewalk will utilize the extra software and content that came with SONAR. There is no conflict legally or technologically.

On this forum?? I guess I was lucky enough to have missed that....or I already have the user blocked. 🙄 As I've said previously, if having to authenticate once every 6 months is too high a price, then there are many other DAW's, probably even a couple that don't contact their home servers every time they start. We are blessed with so many alternatives. One thing that's great about the new BandLab integration feature is that CbB doesn't force the user to use or even notice it. It exists in the release notes and as two menu items under File (like the LANDR integration that used to be in SONAR that was a menu item under Utilities).

The theme creators in the UI Themes subforum are pretty diligent about updating our themes and putting that in the topics of the posts that link to our themes, so you had to browse past at least two dozen updated themes to find one that wasn't updated. The updated themes will have threads that have been bumped to near the top or state outright that they are 2021.04 compliant. If you still have an archive copy of your customized Tungsten theme, it's the work of a few minutes to export your Record Arm button image and then re-import it back into a stock Tungsten theme. Perhaps I don't understand what your issue is, Like Colin, I don't see how it could be made clearer or less ambiguous that a given track is armed. The button turns red in both Mercury and Tungsten. That's been an industry standard for over half a century, going back to the tape days. As a matter of fact, the MSR (RW*A) buttons are some of the few images still left unchanged in my own themes. I figured they were standard and should be left alone. Also, you definitely should not have been getting the "invalid theme" message just because you had a non-updated theme sitting in your Cakewalk Themes folder. One thing I found out the hard way is that I can't just rename a theme in Explorer, if I want to change its filename I need to open it in Theme Editor and save it with the new name. If I don't do it that way, Cakewalk gets confused about which theme is which.

I'm in agreement with you: what is the "Instrument Tracks" selection on there for if you can't have it checked, uncheck the other two types, and still have Instrument Track strips showing? Mostly, I don't need MIDI strips in the Console. I use the Console for mixing, and any fancy MIDI stuff, I open the Inspector and do it there. I no longer use Simple Instrument Tracks, but if I did, I'd feel kinda frustrated that I couldn't use that menu to get only my Audio and Synth/Instrument strips to show up, the strips I actually use for mixing. I brought this up years ago and it was explained to me that since "Instrument Tracks" (not "Synth Tracks") are a combination of a MIDI track and a Synth track, hiding MIDI tracks must hide Instrument Tracks. At this point, I still think at least the nomenclature should be changed to reflect what the selections actually do: "Instrument" should be "Synth." So the user will at least be able to understand what these checkmarks do.

I have seen this in the past but unfortunately can't remember what conditions or solutions were involved. I think maybe it just happened, then stopped happening as it is with your system. Sorry I don't have more.

Another thing, especially for those like @treesha who are getting the message that the installer is corrupt, open Windows Explorer, right click on your C drive, select Properties, click on the Tools tab and then click on Error Checking. This will scan your drive for corruption. It may be going bad or you may have something wrong with the file system.

As you know, I'm sympathetic to people who get started with onboard sound. I still want to perform the experiment of recording an entire audio project by running the output of my Yamaha mixer to the line in on my laptop just to see how it goes. As you point out, if someone's doing electronic type music with MIDI and samples, they don't really need to invest in an external interface (put the money into a good set of cans first!). I'm such a geek that I downloaded and read Realtek's datasheets on their hardware CODEC. They'd have us believe that they've been working on it like it's the cure for cancer. There are many features like S/PDIF that every current Realtek chip can do that just aren't used by the people who design them into their motherboards. Based on that, I suspect that in current systems the noise floor issue might be more down to the motherboard manufacturers' implementation than something inherent to Realtek's CODEC. Still, it's not like we can go in and change anything. Love to have access to that S/PDIF, though. Can you imagine being able to connect an external A/D directly to your laptop without going through USB? I've long suspected that the other interface manufacturers are paying off Realtek to keep them from coming up with a functioning ASIO driver. It's certainly not like they haven't had enough time.😅 To anyone reading this, I too can start getting the "hit Play and instant dropout" if I run Cakewalk in WASAPI Shared vs. Exclusive. It's also essential to launch the Sound applet in Control Panel and make sure that Properties/Advanced for your output device has both Exclusive Mode boxes checked.