Starship Krupa

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 There's a lot of outdated folklore floating around in the Windows audio community about what settings to enable or disable in BIOS.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 That advice is about 25 years out of date, but it stuck around in a company's documentation.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.

22 hours ago, pwal³ said:

how does it know which one you want?

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.

15 hours ago, John Vere said:

You tube is getting worse and worse for the amount of unqualified presenters spreading misinformation

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. 😁

49 minutes ago, David Baay said:

My only complaint is that watchers might be more convinced of its badassness if he showed something like the Gloss EQ flyout instead of Sonitus compressor and the Step Sequencer instead of Step Recorder.

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.

1 minute ago, Wibbles said:

Clapton is permanently on the naughty list as far as I'm concerned.

At the height of the COVID pandemic, apparently Clapton came out as anti-vaccination. I saw a meme that suggested that maybe he'd be enthusiastic about taking it if it were named "George Harrison's Wife."

I give this joke  *** out of ****.

One of my favorite songs ev-ar.

Warts and all it still leaves Clapton's cover in a bloody battered heap.

The absolute coolest thing about the song, the hypnotic slap-damped guitar rhythm, Clapton both got the timing slightly off and played notes on that stroke instead of completely muting it.

I remember hearing Cale's song on the local FM in high school and just being mesmerized by that rhythm guitar, sly, like the guy was playing it with a little wink, never heard such a simple rhythm guitar part say so much. It felt like having the coolest guy in the school do that thing where someone reaches across your back and taps you on your opposite shoulder, then give a smile and nod after you fall for it. Or like that little mute was the moment of in-ha-lation.

When I read that Clapton had covered it...I thought "I bet he gets it as wrong as he got 'After Midnight'), and I was correct. So much so that I. Can't. Stand. to listen to either Clapton's version or any cover that imitates the way Clapton played it, which, once his record came out, was ALL of them. NA-na nuh Na na-NAHH. Do not play the "na" in red under penalty of lame.

Cale's solo also cuts Clapton off at the ankles.

I agree that if he had access to Joe Osborn (which according to those credits he did), why not get him in for an overdub? Google says he was a Wrecking Crew guy and he played the cool intro on The Association's "Windy" (as well as the rest of the track). The mess that wound up on the released record sounds like a scratch track. I hear even more f-ups on it than you listed. That damn rhythm guitar keeps such a lock on my attention that I never heard it before.

Maybe the story went something like "When we went to mix, somehow Joe Osborne's bass track had gotten lost, and my scratch track was all that he had to work with."

7 minutes ago, Kreveta Puket said:

Hi im from Czech Republic And still not work, It must be bug oř region lock? Who know ... Offer Nice day

That's odd, MeldaProduction headquarters is in Prague.

Good lord, pseudopop, have you actually played Doki-Doki Literature Club?

I'm about what I'm guessing is the halfway point, and mind:thoroughly blown. I think it's doing a disservice to the game and prospective players to post a full game play video because it's the sort of thing that is best enjoyed going in knowing as little about the specifics as possible. So don't watch the video or read too many reviews if you plan on getting it.

All someone needs to know is that it IS a horror game, although of course the graphics and ad copy make it look like something else, which is part of the point. If you like creative headfracks that subvert expectations, that color outside of the lines....you may find it to be a masterpiece. I will spoil it enough to say that "experience the terror of school romance" is creatively misleading. I would just hate to see anyone who might find this sort of thing entertaining pass it by as I almost did because they thought it was going to be a humorous take on how scary it can be to deal with romance at an early age. Although it is kind of about that, but with not very much humor and plenty of real horror.

I've never played a game quite like this one. I have never run a computer program quite like this one. This is....brilliant. It's like if someone made an academia manga in the style of House of Leaves.

Hmm, I dunno, wasn't the original purpose of Eurovision to promote friendship among European countries in the wake of WWII? If the US and Canada are invited, there's another pretty large North American country that would be left out, Mexico (yes, Mexico is North America, not Central America). I bet Mexico could come up with an appropriately insane, over the top contender.

I'm still p.o.'d about the UK choosing Katrina and the Waves over Do Re Mi (featuring Kerry) in 1997. "Yodel in the Canyon of Love" is a stone classic.

He's not "unsung" to me. Not only for his work on Steely Dan's records, but also on Christopher Cross.

3 minutes ago, User 905133 said:

Are we all talking about the same thing?  

Yes. Base octave for pitches is Preferences/Customization/Display.

I'm going to wee-wee into the windstorm here and remind that the OP said that re-recording is NOT an option. Maybe the vocalist is no longer available, maybe the OP doesn't have a TARDIS, whatever.

I don't know of any freeware plug-ins that are designed to do "de-clipping," but there are commercial ones, the first that comes to mind is iZotope RX. They're all pretty pricey.

So the thing is to weigh the cost. Is it worth it to buy an expensive plug-in to fix this one track (presumably you won't make the same mistake in the future)?

Another option is a free demo. iZotope's products do have free demo periods, so you could get RX on that basis and test it out on this problematic track.

On 10/6/2023 at 9:25 AM, MisterGreen said:

Never would have thought it would be in the "Display Settings".

I went through the same thing when I went looking for it. I would have expected it to be in with the MIDI settings.

3 minutes ago, Helios.G said:

Respectfully, there are many of us, me included, who use mixing surfaces to control our daws.  These look and feel just like a console, and in some cases integrate function/function directly with a daws layout. Maybe this would ring true for bedroom/home studio producers, but many people work on large format mixing surfaces just like in the old console days.

Don't get me wrong, I don't intend to be an apologist; in my perfect world, Sonar will get comprehensive theme editing so that we can have skeuomorphic images or flat as our hearts desire.

As I said, "whether we like it or not." My preference is for at least a slight bit of shading, it gives the eye something to "grab."

I was just musing out loud about why the trend may have happened. I use iOS devices, and I remember when Apple dumped iOS' skeuomorphic look in favor of a flat look. It's been a long time for that, and a whole new generation of people who don't even remember what iOS looked like back then.

It remains to be seen whether the current flat and dark trend in UI's will stick, or whether at some point skeuomorphic and shaded will be a cool retro look. In the meantime, Mixbus ain't so expensive. 😏

Also, I meant to caution the OP about putting too much time and effort into learning Theme Editor. The feature will not be included in Cakewalk Sonar. Considering how many themes I created, how much time and effort went into them, you can imagine how I feel about that. Theme Editor became a pastime all its own, and a valuable one, as it really made me up my pixel editing game.

18 hours ago, Kevin Lawrence said:

Any updates from the company?

No.

On 2/6/2024 at 2:54 AM, Emanu3le85 said:

I like sonar 7 buttons for the three-dimensionality that is missing in Cbb where everything is flat, I have many things to customize. I have been using the "M thungsten" theme for a long time, minimally modified by myself, but I don't know how to use the theme editor well. Will Cbb themes be compatible with the new sonar?

Unfortunately no. And doubly unfortunate for you, the Sonar UI is specifically being changed to be more flat.

Whether we like it or not, that's the trend in UI design, and Cakewalk was falling behind.

The trend doesn't surprise me, we're collectively getting more used to using computers to do things that we used to use physical objects to do.

For instance, with the Step Sequencer, there's no reason for the pixels we click on to make a cell active to try to resemble buttons we would press in the physical world. Most people using a computer step sequencer will by this time never have touched or even seen a hardware sequencer. If we're not already, we'll soon be at that point with mixing boards.

There's no practical reason for a Console View "slider" to look like we'd be able to grab it and move it. The original reason for it to look "real" was to give us a feeling of familiarity and comfort when transitioning from a hardware mixer to a software one, and that reason is (no pun) fading away.

Maybe that's why simulated woodgrain has fallen so far out of fashion: having lived with higher quality plastics for so many decades, we no longer need to see "wood" as a point of familiarity and quality.

There is not, however you can drag individual tabs outside the Multidock and arrange them as you wish. So you could have one window with Console, another with Piano Roll, or one with Event Viewer and Piano Roll in the Multidock and another with Console. And so on.

The thing you can't do is have two windows with multiple tabs.

I suspect that it's CPU power, not memory, that is limiting you here.

As already suggested, use Task Manager to make sure that there are no unnecessary other programs running while you're working (browsers love to eat up resources).

Also, check Preferences/Audio/Playback and Recording/Plug-In Load Balancing. That can affect system performance under the load of multiple plug-ins. Usually enabled is better, but in some situations, performance will be better with it off.

A valuable resource for getting as much performance from your system as possible is Pete Brown's Windows Audio Workstation build and tweak guide.

2 hours ago, User 905133 said:

Sounds like they should be making plastic kitchen models

I think it's actually a great name, already sounds like it should be a household word.

Swatches fans, remember to download the latest version, which includes 10 or so patches from this pack, free.