Starship Krupa

Try this: https://dnyuz.com/2024/01/13/their-songs-were-stolen-by-phantom-artists-they-couldnt-get-them-back/

Still, for whatever reason(s), they do sell a lot of them. It looks like PreSonus have put together a good package for people who want a USB mic. ASIO driver, OBS driver (nice), etc. Based on this review, if I couldn't talk someone into a dedicated interface with separate mic, this would be the package to recommend.

The part of their saga that I liked was that both of the guys in the band are retired lawyers with specialties in copyright, and being retired, these guys will never let up. The people who ripped them off kicked the hornet's nest.

1. Following the manufacturer's uninstall directions is a good thing. If you're getting a message saying that the files are open in Universal Control, the thing to do is quit Universal Control. You can do that from Universal Control's File menu. Down at the bottom of the menu, Quit. 2. I don't know why ASIO4ALL suddenly entered the discussion. ASIO4ALL is a special case driver for use where your interface itself doesn't have its own true ASIO driver and your audio software doesn't support WASAPI Exclusive. The Audiobox, the iTwo and your new Behringer UMC204 all have their own true ASIO drivers, so there's no reason for you to mess with ASIO4ALL. 3. Did you try my suggestions to try a different cable and delete unused Device Manager entries?

I'm sure that you're trying hard to figure out why on earth you'd face this kind of crap when posting your own original music to YouTube, but how exactly would such a scheme work? You said that your video was flagged while you were trying to upload it. Does that mean that you uploaded it and were immediately notified that it matched music for which FUGA controls the copyright? Or were you notified somewhat later? The first would suggest that the infringement-catcher detected tags while the second would suggest "softer" algorithmic detection. According to the New York Times article, the Bad Dog song files were scraped from Soundcloud with metadata intact and that metadata got added to whatever giant database these companies (Disc Makers, YouTube) use to spot infringements. Presumably when the perps sent the songs to the streaming services, the services put the tags in the database. If your songs got flagged that quickly, it could mean that their metadata had already been put in that database. The thieves' motivation for doing this kind of thing is to get raw material for cheating Spotify and the other streamers. They send a song with a fake artist and title to Spotify, then get bots to request the song over and over thousands of times, then collect the playback royalties from Spotify. The songs that they send have to be undetectable as fake copies, so they can't use stuff from popular artists, or test tones, or noise, as that would get flagged by content matching detection. The music has to sound like music and be unique enough to get past the detection systems. It can't pattern match with music that Spotify is already playing, and it has to have enough material in it to look and sound roughly like music. It seems to me like like adding some kind of digital fingerprint would make it more difficult to get away with the scam, if anything. It was the extra tagging data in the music files that made the band in the NYT article aware that they had been scammed. In the event of legal action, the presence of such a thing would be something that investigators could potentially find and use as evidence of wrongdoing. All it would take is for a clever person to make 10 mixdowns and run the resulting files through a pattern recognizer. Any common pattern that wasn't part of a known audio file type container or meta tag would be suspect. As always comes to my mind when evil!BandLab theories pop up, doing something like that seems like spending a LOT of trouble and money to fool Spotify for only as long as it takes for users of your DAW's and the authorities to figure it out. After which they'd be facing multiple class action suits and nobody would touch anything with the company's name on it until the end of time (instantly tanking their stock price and rendering most of their IP assets worthless). Remember, the actual target of the scam isn't people who do music, it's Spotify and every other streaming service, and I suspect that if they caught a company the size of BandLab aiding and abetting this kind of fraud, they'd devote some resources to going after them.

According to its Wikipedia timeline, it was initially freeware, then became shareware, then fully payware. It's been payware for a very long time.

Yes, same as REAPER was once freeware and is now payware. Are you suggesting that if someone likes programs that go from freeware to payware they might also like REAPER? Seems like an odd criterion....

And you posted this in a topic about the latest release of Cakewalk by BandLab because....?

Okay, I found it. Holy crap! It IS us, literally. I must read the whole thread....

I don't remember that, I guess if I search the forum it will come up?

I remember well when this was first broadcast. I was a high school freshman, living in Mississippi. An academic society that I was a member of took a trip to the state capitol of Jackson to attend the state convention. We stayed overnight at a Holiday Inn. Of course, for any high schooler in those days, you watched Midnight Special religiously, especially if you lived in a cultural backwater like Pascagoula, MS, so a bunch of us gathered in one of the rooms to watch, most not knowing ahead of time what was going to be featured. Some of us liked Bowie's music well enough, but hadn't been exposed to his stage show, just then at the height of his glammiest and most androgynous. We were a bunch of kids in Southern Mississippi, although I wasn't born and raised there like most of my classmates. There was no place to buy Rolling Stone from a rack, you had to subscribe to it or you didn't get to read it. The closest place to get it was in the newsstand at the Mobile, AL airport, so that was a treat when my stepfather would take a business trip: it meant the current issue of Rolling Stone. The show came on, and of course, in order to reinforce our own masculinity we all had to scoff at how effeminate the proceedings were, while also being absolutely freaking Krazy Glued to the screen. And of course the next school day it was all anyone could talk about (with obligatory scoffing about the presentation). (for more cultural perspective, if you've seen Dazed and Confused, my high school was 2 states over from the one depicted and had a similar hazing tradition, albeit more lighthearted, without the dumping of gross stuff, etc. I would have been the same age as the freshman baseball pitcher kid played by Wiley Wiggins)

Absolutely fascinating article from The New York Times: Their Songs Were Stolen by Phantom Artists Not only is it interesting in and of itself, but I feel like the band in the article is kinda close to many of us. A couple of retired dudes who play music as a hobby, doing house parties and putting their stuff up on Soundcloud. Read the description of them and you'll probably agree that if it could happen to them, it could happen to anyone here. It's important reading for independent artists because it details the steps they went through to remedy the situation. There are some interesting twists to the story that I won't spoil, but I'm very interested to hear what y'all think of this. To check their music out in a legit way: https://soundcloud.com/davidpost-1/

A good maintenance thing to do is open Device Manager and select Show Hidden Devices from the View menu. Look under Sound, video and Game Controllers. If there are duplicate greyed out entries for your audio interfaces, uninstall them. While you're at it, disable the display audio driver (on my system it's "Intel Display Audio"). Windows can get weird if there are too many unused copies of USB devices. Also, bus-powered interfaces like this pump the 5V supplied by the port up to 48V to power condenser mics. Sometimes, especially if there are multiple bus-powered devices plugged into the same root hub, the hub just can't supply enough power. In that case, a powered external hub is called for. Last but not least, USB cables can go bad just like any other cable and cause problems with data and/or power transmission, so try another cable. My own PreSonus Studio 2|4 which I picked up used, came with a cable that messed up performance, and when I finally got a good cable, it started working fine. PreSonus is a well-established company with a good reputation. I myself use one of their USB interfaces and have had no problems with it whatsoever. The Audiobox 96 in particular is a tried and true workhorse.

If you have your eye on MeldaProduction bundles that include MTurboComple (including my favorite bundle, MEssentialsFX), get this. It will get you a substantial price reduction when the next 50% off bundles sale comes around. As a plug-in, MTurboComple is an odd bird. It's supposed to emulate the operation and sound of 19 classic vintage compressors, but the models don't have the same controls as the originals, and were/are confusing for me to set up. For instance, in addition to the usual ratio and threshold controls, there's often a "compression" knob that's supposed to control the "amount" of compression. I wasn't able to get a handle on that until I ran it through Plug-in Doctor. It seems to run counter to the usual "surgeon's tools" MeldaProduction design philosophy. It's a set of compressors where you mess with the knobs and listen to the result. A "use your ears" affair.

This illustrates the main benefit of systems like Dell and HP: components are built to be compatible with each other. It also illustrates that latency issues these days often don't come down to horsepower, but rather system tuning. IMO/E, horsepower buys me the ability to run more plug-ins and more CPU-hungry plug-ins. This is speaking as someone who never ever buys new. My systems are made of hand-me-downs and Craig's List/eBay parts. Retired corporate Dells. AAA gamers' castoffs. My newest main DAW/NLE system (specs in sig) was built from 5 year old components. Can handle anything I throw at it, games at ultra resolution, as many plug-ins as I want. YMMV.

Sounds like it would be pretty simple for Rebelle to make a compatibility mode PSD save that strips out the problematic tags.

If you haven't tried the guitar strumming and picking patterns in Cakewalk's own arpeggiator, you should.

I don't think it's for newcomers, I think it's for people who would like to own an actual CR-78 but can't afford the thousands of dollars they now sell for. It seems to me to be like D16 Drumazon in that it's designed to resemble and function exactly like the original, down to how you program it. It's not about the sounds, which are readily available for free from various sources, it's about the interface and controls. Programming beats with such a thing will lead the user in certain directions and make it easy to nail particular sounds from songs made with the original. I'm a fan of certain songs that used it prominently, like "I Can't Go For That" and "Me and Sarah Jane." Those patterns and sounds evoke a certain time in my life and in music history. I'm part of the targeted market for this product for sure. As such, it tempts me, but I can't justify dropping $40 on yet another friggin' drum machine. I have too many as it is. The drum VSTi that I fantasize about is one that would use the A|A|S engine, either made by them or licensed. Their soundpacks have some cool drum sounds in them, but sticking half a dozen instances of Player in a project is kinda clunky.

I haven't watched the first video yet, although I will, just to check it out. The recommendation to disable hyperthreading is a red flag, though. I've tested that one pretty thoroughly and modern audio software seems to prefer having those virtual cores. To the point of the same Cakewalk project not even being able to play when hyperthreading was disabled. At least, if you try it, don't do so blindly, test before and after with a large project with lots of plug-ins to see if you get a latency improvement with no other negative consequences. There's a lot of outdated folklore floating around in the Windows audio community about what settings to enable or disable in BIOS. It neglects to consider that technologies that may have not worked so well when they were first introduced but then got the bugs worked out by the hardware manufacturers and Microsoft. Up until a couple of years ago, the Cakewalk Reference Guide even suggested disabling ACPI in your BIOS 'cause that darn plug 'n' play just didn't work right. That advice is about 25 years out of date, but it stuck around in a company's documentation. The one about setting processor performance time check interval, though, whoa doggie. I never heard of that one before and at least in my initial testing, it's cut my LatencyMon average measured interrupt to process latency in about half. Remains to be seen how that will affect actual use of programs, but it seems impressive at least for now. The other one, setting process scheduling to long quantum, I'm much more skeptical about. I Googled it and it seems like it would cause problems. I'm not even going to try that one. This topic also inspired me to go in and double check one of my favorite tuning things, which is to set as many devices as possible to use message signaled interrupts. This has to do with our old, old configuration bugaboo, IRQ's and what happens if two devices wind up sharing an IRQ. On my system, my motherboard loves to assign both my Firewire adaptor (which of course connects my audio interface) and my nVidia GT 1070 to IRQ 16. Fortunately, the nVidia supports message signaled interrupts, but somehow it got disabled, so I just turned it back on. Thanks for posting these tweak guides. With all of them, do your own independent research via Google, don't take any single person's word for it (except maybe Jim's 😊). If you don't understand what it does, make notes about what you do and test your system before and after. If it has no effect or a negative effect, back the change(s) out immediately.

I've also recommended to the devs that the MIDI monitoring function be moved from the system tray to the main UI. These days, it's so tiny as to be useless on my systems, and of course keeping the function inside the program is probably better for not having the Cakewalk.exe process hanging around after the program closes.

Have you never inserted a plug-in from the FX Rack menu? The one that you want is the one you select, just as you do now: press on the "+" sign, which flies the menu out, then once you see the name of the plug-in you want, you click on it and the menu collapses. The plug-in whose name you clicked on gets inserted in the FX Rack. What the OP is suggesting is that everything work the same way it does now, except that when you switch between Sort by Category, Manufacturer, or type, it doesn't collapse the menu before letting you select the plug-in. It's been on my mind to suggest this myself.

BandLab got lucky, Benn is neither unqualified nor a spreader of misinformation. Me, I say YouTube is what it is. An "unqualified" presenter may be more accurately demonstrating a new user's experience than someone who knows the software inside and out. As long as they don't outright say something like "this is the EQ you get with Cakewalk" then no foul. If some of Cakewalk's most compelling features are hard for new users to find, then maybe Cakewalk needs to make them easier for new users to discover. A great series of videos by someone making their way through Cakewalk for the very first time is by my friend Lorene. She used to use Sony Acid back in the day, then decided to try CbB a couple of years ago, turned on the camera and went for it: We became acquainted because in several cases, I couldn't stand to see her struggle, so I helped out. 😁

He may not have even found them in whatever short time he spent with the program. I had to patiently explain to a former Cakewalk user in the comments that Step Sequencer was still a part of Cakewalk, just no longer in the main view by default. No control over what reviewers are going to say, unfortunately. And he is demonstrating the eq plug-in that ships with Cakewalk, in all its glory. ProChannel modules are plug-ins, but they don't go in the main FX bins, you can't float their UI's, etc. Some people might be less inclined to use them for those reasons. I think that Cakewalk would benefit from some more modern-looking bundled FX. I nominated the Kilohearts Essentials package as a bundling partner. Got kind of a lukewarm response here on the forum. The disagreement seemed to be along the lines of "just let people go download whatever they want for free," but as we see here, people still put stock in bundled plug-ins. Like it or not, they are considered when a DAW is reviewed.

By Benn Jordan (he humorously addresses his initial perception of the program):

In 1975 I was 14 and happened to catch this weird UK band on In Concert. The guitar player was made up like a mime, the singer was 40 if he was a day, wore jeans and a striped t-shirt under a pirate coat with tails, and prowled around the stage like he was James Dean or Humphrey Bogart. Blew my little teeny bopper mind. People from across the pond will know right away I'm taking about The Sensational Alex Harvey Band, and they came to mind as of late. It's who I got into when the rest of my class were into KISS: I bought the live album that had just come out. They were, among other things, an instruction in how lyrics don't have to make a damn bit of sense as long as you deliver them with emotion. That thing that he and the bass player and guitarist do where they all put one foot on the monitors and lean forward, I was later slayed by Johnny and Dee Dee Ramone doing that in sync, as their entire stage schtick.