Starship Krupa

I have done both in the Windows 10 era, and I would say that it depends on how much you like your current Windows 10 installation. Anything prior to Windows 10 I would have said to go ahead with the clean install, but Windows 10 seems to handle being cloned pretty well. Also it doesn't cruft up over time as badly as earlier Windowses. Of course for content creation people like us, we have so much software where registration is system-dependent, which for me tilts the scales toward "clone." It is a non-trivial task to go through and deauthorize/reauthorize every plug-in and program, and since I don't stick to certain ecosystems, some of mine are Waves, some iLok't, with licenses being either on the hard drive (Plug-In Alliance) or USB dongles (when possible). Some places have no discernible deauthorization process, or it must be done via their website. How to remember which and how many I have to do? I always forget a few. Others, like A|A|S, W.A. Production and Meldaproduction, don't have any deauthorization process, but if you register them to "too many" systems, they will refuse and require you to contact them and plead your case for further authorizations. I have something like 600 plug-ins because I'm an amateur and a geek who loves to try things out.

Hey, on Saturday I bought a GTX 550 Ti to replace the Quadro FX! On Craig's List! Paid $20! 🤦‍♂️ Well, the most taxing things I do on the system are Cakewalk and Vegas Pro (and other video editors), so I figured that for $20 the extra CUDA cores and DDR5 memory would help perk things up. Gamers are not sucking hind teat when it comes to being served in the GPU market. That honor goes to those of us who use our computers for higher end 2-D graphics apps. I haven't FPS gamed since Quake Arena, last night I tried out SVET (a Myst-like post-apocalypse walkaround) and it ran great, but it's half a dozen years old and doesn't have a lot of changing imagery. BTW, @craigb, when Quake first dropped, before Internet game servers were a thing I used to have what are now known as LAN parties after work (which is now known as "still being at work") in my lab at Macromedia (pre-Adobe). My boss wouldn't let us put a server on the company LAN, so I cobbled the setup together out of castoffs. I ran the server in headless mode on a 386 Toshiba Satellite I found in a box somewhere in. Then y'all started up the online servers and because we had a T1 and work and I only had ISDN at home, I'd crawl home from work at 11:30 with bloodshot eyes from playing capture the flag Quake for 5 straight hours. "N2O's Gas House" rings a bell, as does "N2O." Pertinent to the thread, my Quake handle was "Gandhi," (later "JonBenet Jovi"). I still have my Logitech Gaming mouse, the one shaped like an animal foot. You and members of your clan probably slaughtered me a time or two. Do you remember that West Coast clan that had Hello-Kitty-esque avatars? Those guys were ferociously effective. I especially miss playing Quake capture the flag (or "capture the Scrag," in one server mod) Due to the dearth of information regarding 2-D performance specs, mostly I've gathered is that more and faster memory is good, and more CUDA cores will make rendering and encoding go faster. All the graphics card information out there is SO game-centric it drives me batty. If you ask somewhere like here or the equivalent NLE forum, you'll be told "just about any nVidia or even your onboard Intel will be more than enough." On nVidia's site, all they will say is to get a Quadro. Sure, I totally would love to buy your driver-crippled DisplayPort-only gaming card for 5X the price of the equivalent non-Quadro. It just ain't true. I ran with the onboard Intel after I determined that Mixcraft and my AMD 5770 were not playing nicely with each other and if I played a full-screen movie, closed it, then switched back to Cakewalk, I'd briefly see white boxes in Console View. I stopped getting that once the FX 580 arrived. The only time Mr. Dell Optiplex seems to suffer is when I have a video preview running alongside Vegas, Cakewalk, or Mixcraft's tracks views. I can't run it at larger sizes without getting stutters in the playback, so I'm hoping that the GTX will either help or at least not hurt with that. $20 worth, anyway. As y'all say, anything newer than that is insanely expensive for a used computer part.

I have to put in a word of thanks to @Jesse Jost (and anyone else responsible) for creating these new discussion areas. A great addition to an already great forum. Looking forward to reading and contributing!

A pair of 23" 1920x1280 flat LCD's. Not a matched pair, just two of them. Track View/Browser/Inspector go on the left hand one and Console/Piano Roll/Misc. on the right hand one. Sometimes when I want to get an especially wide view of the Track Pane I'll drag it across the width of both monitors. If I'm switching back and forth between tasks with the computer, like right now when I'm taking time to check the forum and write, I'll park the paused task on the right monitor.

Thanks, I fixed my post to include "MIDI."

More than "slightly off topic," it's off forum. 😄 This forum is dedicated to Cakewalk, a DAW that runs exclusively on Windows. I suggest you will get better answers if you ask on a forum dedicated to Reason, and/or the hardware in question, both of which are more likely to have people using it on Mac/OSX. Good luck, I hope you get it sorted.

The first thing to do is make sure that you plug the controller into the same USB port each time you use it. If that doesn't help, then unplug the controller and use Windows Device Manager to delete all existing entries for the Keystation. Then plug it back in and let Windows recognize it. After doing that, make sure to use the same USB port each time.

The confounding thing about this thread is that people keep posting "can someone please answer this" when it was answered in the second post and subsequently elaborated on. Given the lack of information supplied by people posting the question, it's been answered to the best of anyone's ability. Here's a recap: If you're using SI-Drums (and many other virtual instruments, especially drum machine plug-ins), you can't record MIDI data by playing the pads with your mouse, they are only there to preview the sounds. The way to record MIDI for these instruments in real time is that you must use a MIDI controller, either a physical MIDI keyboard or the Cakewalk Virtual Controller. Alternately, you may manually enter the notes you want via the Piano Roll or Step Sequencer. That's really all there is to say about it. If you don't know how to do steps 2 or 3, it's not in the scope of this thread to teach you how. You can post questions in Q&A and/or watch tutorial videos, or even read about it in the Reference Guide. RTFM/WTFV.

Maybe by now you've seen the YouTube ad for Drip, which is a plug-in effect that from what I could discern, you're supposed to indiscriminately throw on all audio sources in order to make them sound perfect just by clicking on one of the obtusely named buttons. The results sound easily accomplished with various combinations of delay, EQ, and phasing. I mention this because I think it's in sharp contrast to something I tried out this evening. I decided to give some plug-ins a try whose "demo" videos I'd watched, videos that contained no identifiable audio demonstrating them, just a lot of images from old educational films and cheap graphics, kinda reminded me of stuff I'd go see at underground video festivals in the 80's. Kinda put me off a bit at first, not that I mind that aesthetic at all, but if you want me to buy an audio effect, I want to have some idea of what it does before I throw down my money. Curiosity finally got the better of me and I went to their site and discovered that their stuff is available with a 2 week timed demo, so I wouldn't have to pay upfront to find out how they actually sounded. I first tried the one that seemed the most obscure (and therefore intriguing), called Dumpster Fire. It fulfills a similar "need" to Drip, you put it on a track after you've run out of inspiration. In the case of Dumpster Fire, though, I think the idea is that you want to destroy whatever track(s) you've been working on. There's no way to describe exactly what it does, but if you like Glitchmachines' stuff (to say I "like" their stuff would be a sad understatement) or Unfiltered Audio's Sandman, Fault, SpecOps, and BYOME, you'll find yourself in friendly, familiar, yet unsettling territory. GM and UA's stuff is incredibly versatile, has zillions of knobs and virtual patch cables, lets you ruin audio in just about any way you want. As much as I love their stuff, I find myself using the randomizers a lot at this point because, well, to be honest, I may never fully understand all the controls. Dumpster Fire, on the other hand has 5 knobs, none of which are labeled with text until you click on a small icon of the old CBS "eye" logo, and even then the labels include "generates hellscapes" and "scales the Aether pitch spread." You know, for when you're thinking that your snare could use some Aether pitch spread to make it sit in the mix. What I'm getting at is that Dumpster Fire is like a Glitchmachines or Unfiltered Audio effect with only 5 knobs but more immediate gratification. There are no presets, you throw this thing on and start turning knobs. If you share the same diseased sense of humor and delight in audio torquing as I, you will be grinning like a fool (specifically, me) once you hear what this thing does. I chose the Van Halen-y "80's Metal - A" backing track that comes with Cakewalk. Just a few degrees of knob turning made it sound like a dixieland band being buried in lava. On my own material, it sounded great (meaning giggly insane) on the drum bus. There is no LFO, so once you dial in a sound, it can be kind of static, but it really shines when you make some automation lanes and doodle with the Draw tool. All 5 knobs plus bypass are available for automating. There is no mix control, which seems right somehow. I also tried their Backmask effect, which, once you get past the truly bizarre graphics and control labeling (again, clicking on a button gets better explanations), is a very versatile backwards effect. I already have one, Initial Audio's Reverse, which to be fair is designed to be simple and succeeds at that. However if I had experienced Backmask first I wouldn't have gone for Initial Reverse. Backmask has 3 different triggers, note value, mS, or level, which is crazy useful and not something I've seen in a reversing effect. I could probably figure out how to do the level-triggered backward thing using MRhythmizer, but it would take me hours. It also has an automatable freeze function. The big surprise was that neither of these FX do any bitcrushing that I can discern. From the graphics and advertising, I expected them to ruin audio in a distortion-y way, at least partially, but they do it in a smooth way, which is somehow more subversive and unsettling and delightful. They probably don't do anything in the end that I couldn't already do with my vast collection of sound deformers, but they do it in a quick and fun way. I've emphasized the chuckles I got from Dumpster Fire, but it could be seriously good for ambient ethereal drone-y sound design. So much fun at $20 each. Since Plugin Boutique carries them now, the purchase qualifies for whatever monthly giveaway they have going, and I hear that they may put them on sale from time to time. https://freakshowindustries.com/ (they have an unusual feature with their pricing, to discourage piracy they will let you "steal" the products at a variety of discounts depending on which theft option you choose, but their stuff has so much play value that there is really no need. These crazy people deserve to be rewarded and encouraged).

I dug how Noel started as a beta tester and then McLeod'd up. Pondering: if he knew COBOL, he could have cleaned up in 1999 when all the old business apps that were written in COBOL had date rollover issues. COBOL programmers were in short supply. I wonder if he cashed in on that skillset.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC56wTOgrEzHityGuCToqKnA @Xel Ohh 's YouTube channel should provide tax relief.

I'm one of those people who was using another DAW but went for the CA-2A freebie offer, so I can say. That act later came in very handy, as when BandLab took over and froze new registrations, I already had a Cakewalk ID. I was able to use it to download and install SONAR Home Studio, which came with some nifty add-ons that work great with CbB. Rapture Session was one of them. I could also post to the old forum while we were waiting for this one to come online. I think I was the only person active on there who didn't have a current license for SONAR in some form or other. Snagging CA-2A really worked out in a lot of other ways! CA-2A is registered via Command Center like SONAR and the other Cakewalk FX and VSTi's that required licenses to purchase if you didn't have SPlat. I did the offline license thing in case the old Cakewalk licensing server ever goes down. Good reminder, I need to check and make sure I still have my code around somewhere.

I have the earlier version of those cans, they're my "lightweight" phones. Replacement ear cushions are readily and cheaply available. I recently did mine as the original ones were starting to flake.

Bug fixes. This time there were some features introduced with v12, even for antiques like TrueVerb. These would be the resizable UI (a big deal on the older ones like TrueVerb with tiny buttons) and the new preset browser (kinda meh to me, but still it had to be grafted onto some pretty old code). Adding new stuff like that will induce bugs. Also, BTW, I notice that with 12.7, the Waves Local Server that broke Cakewalk's installation process no longer stays on after I quit the DAW. That could be the only reason for 12.6-12.7 and still be significant, because I'm sure people didn't like having that thing sitting there eating up the resources it did. Unlike, say, the PACE driver or BandLab Assistant, that server app did use enough memory to make a dent in older systems like my laptop. People moan about WUP, but it's not so different from most DAW licensing: you have to pay to upgrade to each major release. If there aren't new features you want, don't fork out. Waves like to sow a bit of FUD about how the previous versions are "unsupported" (which DAW companies do as well), but in my experience, Waves stuff gets very stable by the time they move up a rev. I've yet to experience bugs with any of their plug-ins, updated or not. One of my systems still runs a license for TrueVerb v.10, solid as a rock. If I iever run into trouble, I can always WUP it up.

Orchestools Funimator. A nice sequenced filter/amplitude modulator: https://musictop69.wixsite.com/orchestools/media While you're at the site, also check out their free orchestral instruments.

Ah smaat guy, eh? Fixed, thankyouverymuch. I was using my favorite limiter, Unlimited (by Sonic Anomaly, where did they go?), musta stuck in my mind. But if you know of anyone else who makes a BYOME (or Triad), let me know, 'cause I love the BYOME I got (which is by Unfiltered Audio, at least I think it is). The thing must be monstrous if Glitchmachines supplies factory presets.

I read somewhere that all that happens if you nuke Waves Local Server is that the new Preset Browser doesn't work any more. I haven't tried it, don't remember where I read it. I, too have checked and found Waves Local Server gobbling up resources. I have maybe a dozen of their plug-ins and only regularly use about 3 or 4.

As mentioned in the first thread, the Unfiltered Audio plug-ins are worth a look. At this price, especially BYOME and Triad. If you do glitch or sound design, I consider Unlimited's stuff essential.

Who are currently running a sale where all but a handful of their plug-ins are $29 each. A very good deal seeing as some of the ones included in the sale normally go for hundreds.

The only thing that I can offer is that in many cases I find that shaving mS in driver latency doesn't affect playability of MIDI instruments as much as latency induced by FX PDC very much does. I poke around bus FX first, then on tracks the usual suspects like just about anything iZotope. As someone who composes and plays in that genre, I understand that in many or even most instances, the effect is part of the instrument, or an instrument to itself (long delays and reverb tails), but it may be that it's not a plug-in on your piano that's inducing the gap. It may be something that isn't integral to recording your piano. If you have any unused extra audio takes, Cakewalk streams them from the disk whether they are muted or active, so delete or archive any audio takes that aren't being used. If you want to tune your system, there is currently an excellent thread on optimizing Windows 10 for DAW work here in this forum.

One issue with the Cakewalk plug-ins is that they would need their licensing code stripped before inclusion with CbB. ADHD Leveling Tool is a freeware LA/2A with a great-looking GUI that gives more control over Attack, Release, and Ratio should you want it. Try it, it may ease your craving for CA-2A.

What happens is that it works a treat! You, sir, are one steely-eyed Cakewalk man. I wouldn't call this a "workaround" so much as "a better tool for the job." I have nothing invested in getting Bounce to Track to do what I want, I just want tracks with my vocoder vocals printed.

In this time of "roll your own Platinum," there are plenty of 3rd-party freeware plug-ins that have presets that can load a system. A|A|S Swatches on a Chromophone patch with many layers and long releases can get greedy on sustained chords. I'd love to have a standard test project to play with, test the limits of a system, test the impact of different thread scheduling models, load balancing. While I get Noel's point about "real world" performance being the last word, there can be so many variables with edits, numbers of audio takes, plug-ins, some features like stretching and audio snap used or not. Also the possibility of file corruption.

I've tried both requirements, my tracks play back wonderfully and are audible when I do an Export of the whole project. Still produces silence if I Bounce to Track. The one thing I have yet to try is doing an Export while selecting only the track I want as the source. Not that it should be any different, but the results can't really get worse.

I picked up all the Unfiltered Audio products I wanted in last year's holiday sales, so I'll put in a plug (heh) for their BYOME, which encompasses most (or all) of their other FX, plus adds one of the sexiest UI's I've yet to see. It says something that Glitchmachines created a pile of the factory presets. I don't have Triad, which they describe as being similar to BYOME but with 3-band multiband processing added. If you do any work with glitch/experimental sounds, either of these is a must-have.