Starship Krupa

4 hours ago, Notes_Norton said:

When an industry creates awards for itself....

I agree that entertainment industry awards seem to be silly opportunities for self-promotion and phony virtue signaling. The Motion Picture Academy lost me the year that Kramer vs. Kramer won over Apocalypse Now and All That Jazz. 1980 I believe. 1980 did a pretty good job of warning me what the next decade was going to be like.

The Grammys have always seemed hopelessly out of touch to me. 1966: The New Vaudeville Band, a studio-only project, won Best Contemporary (R&R) Recording for the novelty song "Winchester Cathedral," which was a pastiche of English Music Hall music. Maybe there were some rock 'n' roll singles that came out in 1966 that would have been better choices. Have they ever lived down handing the Best Metal Album award to Jethro Tull? I've never paid much attention to them anyway. The artists I really like tend not to be Grammy material, and even if they were, who cares about the tastes of a bunch of record industry people?

The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame seems to be below even those standards. The main criterion for inclusion is probably "who will make the greatest number of people likely to visit (and deflect accusations of racism and sexism)?"

14 hours ago, Billy86 said:

There is a custom Cakewalk themes link in your signature. Are those for the old Cakewalk?

Yes.

I'll reiterate: there is no way to create a custom theme for the new Sonar. You can't even change any of the meaningful colors. All you can do is choose from half a dozen color themes that the devs have come up with.

If you'd like this to be another way, please post in the Feedback forum.

18 minutes ago, Billy86 said:

I finally made the leap and got the year subscription of Sonar for $49. The color/contrast level of the GUI is terrible.  I can hardly make anything out. Are people doing themes and sharing them?

I'm 64 and my vision isn't getting any better. While I like the look of NuSonar, I agree that there are visibility issues.

Unfortunately, there is no theming available to end users. We can't even choose any meaningful colors. All we can do is go to the color settings and choose one of the factory color schemes, all of which use varying shades of grey for everything but buttons and some text. They seem to be designed more for overall appearance than visibility.

The only cause I can think of is that Ben must have the contrast on his monitors cranked way up. That's not an option for me, I also use my workstation for photo and video editing, and if I set my monitors so that NuSonar has better visibility, the colors in photos and videos is messed up.

The most recent release has improved on the contrast in grid lines, but it's still nowhere as good as when I could choose actual colors rather than varying shades of grey. In CbB I used red for the measure lines and green or blue for the beat lines, depending on which of my themes I was using. It looked great and really helped with visibility.

As someone who spent weeks on each of my half a dozen custom CbB themes, I'm very disappointed in the lack of customizable options in NuSonar's UI.

If you don't like this situation, please post in the Feedback forum. I've been lobbying for at least allowing users to change the colors of the grid lines. I'd also like to be able to set text colors in various locations. The only color theme that currently uses anything but white on black is Mercury Classic.

I don't think the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is much of anything more than a tourist attraction.

Still, I don't quite understand her stance here. It seems like with her induction, their board or whatever is now finally recognizing the unsung session players.

So why would she not show up for the ceremony? Seems like it would be an opportunity for her to say something at the podium like "it's great to see the Hall acknowledging the contributions of the many great session players. I hope that they continue to honor the many other deserving musicians." Words to that effect.

I'd think it would be more constructive than a no-show protest.

3 hours ago, Mr No Name said:

you're themes are great, I have the 1970's yellow installed, makes using the cakewalk daw a more joyful experience.

(I changed one of the yellows slightly to a more orange shade)

How did the 1970's happen?

who took responsibility.

You're using Yellow Submarine? Cool! I haven't gotten much feedback on my themes except from fellow themesters. But since they appreciate the craftsmanship that goes into extensive theme creation more than actually using them (not surprising, they have their own ultra-tweaked themes), it's different from hearing from someone who actually uses it.

Especially one of the ones that was based on an animated movie (I did another one based on Neon Genesis: Evangelion).

How did the 70's happen? Same reason Yellow Submarine did. The Beatles took LSD, and they were so influential that whatever they came up with afterward was going to wind up being the world's "theme." And since they broke up at the beginning of the 70's, we were stuck with what they were up to at the height of psychedelic garishness. The designers of furniture and fashion had to extrapolate from there.

I'm being silly here, but not entirely. My Yellow Submarine theme is based on animated movie about The Beatles that came out in 1969, but you read it as a "70's" theme. The Beatles were  the "theme creators" of the time when they existed. We were stuck with modifying the last themes they did for about 10 years. I remember Isaac Asimov writing in the 70's "I have long hair today because 10 years ago, 4 kids from Liverpool felt that going to the barber was a drag."

As for who took responsibility, nobody. "Responsibility" was not a popular concept in the "Me" decade.😆

7 hours ago, Terry Kelley said:

Starship, I wasn't directing an insult at you. If you believe that I offer my apologize.  I was only critiquing the new offering and pondering the reasons.

I didn't take it as an insult at all. I really do want to know what you think may be about to happen.

Multiple of your hunches about how things would play out have turned out to be prescient. More so than some of my own that I was pretty sure about. Notably the absence of The Licensing Model That Must Not Be Named.

I'm glad that one of my hunches, that BandLab would not hang people out to dry in regard to a free licensed Cakewalk/Sonar, turned out to be accurate. I really didn't want to have to answer to the people I've hooked up with CbB over the years.

22 hours ago, Brian Walton said:

a lot of the older (but still great) T-racks plugins are pretty light.   The 670 comp

All hail the mighty T-RackS 670! Getting a freebie for that one was a watershed point in my development. It's the one that helped me finally "get" the awesomeness of M/S processing.

5 minutes ago, Terry Kelley said:

I don’t think things went as planned. And something else is about to change.

Care to elaborate?

I'm glad my life doesn't depend on figuring out what BandLab have "planned" at any given point.

They seem to be full of surprises.

BTW, I tried an experiment where I logged Sonar out of BandLab and then logged back in using an account that doesn't have access to the premium tier, and the old style Track Manager is present in Free Tier Sonar.

Which actually makes its UI more similar to CbB's than Premium Tier Sonar's is.

6 hours ago, CSistine said:

I guess that BL will soon stop CbB with the introduction of the "free" SONAR. Again, this would be an essential shift for the people using CbB, because they would be forced to change their installations/habits/workflows. And besides the functionality is probably reduced in some areas.

I've been using Sonar since it came out, and switching back and forth between it and CbB requires no adjustment that I can perceive except that some of the text and icons in important areas have shrunk and contrast also suffers in comparison to what you can do in CbB with themes and custom color sets..

Cakewalk have been pretty good about that kind of thing in recent years. It isn't some huge change like the SONAR X, it's not much different from using a custom CbB theme. I've noticed over the past 7 years with Cakewalk that new features that they have added don't usually replace something else, they augment what's already there and are easily hidden. The lone exception I can think of is the recent replacement of Track Manager with the one that docks in the Browser. This new Track Manager replaces the old one, and I guess Free Tier Sonar has neither of them.

As far as reduced functionality between Free Tier Sonar and CbB, they've explicitly listed what the differences are. I went over them in my post. They seem trivial to me.

I suspect that the CbB validation server will be shut down in the near future, then installations of CbB will switch to permanent demo mode after the last validation times out.

Sad to see that, because I have half a dozen themes that I put a lot of work into that are tailored to easy visibility, and as I said, Sonar is less friendly to people with impaired eyesight. Its failure to allow the user to even set grid line colors causes problems for me. I don't understand at all why users can't be allowed to make our own color choices. This feature was in CbB, it's in most other DAW's and it's easy to revert if a user messes up their colors.

7 hours ago, CSistine said:

Someone above said it correctly, essentially it is a free subscription

As was Cakewalk by BandLab. When I wrote the Wikipedia entry about Cakewalk by BandLab years ago, I put in a descrption of the licensing and said that it was a "free subscription."

Since it's in Wikipedia, it's the Official Truth of the Internetz.🙄

I agree that if it needs to phone home to a server every 6 months or every month or whatever interval to keep functioning, that's a subscription. In the case of free tier Sonar, the "cost" of the subscription is embedded advertisements for the BandLab membership. Fair play, CbB was always an advertisement for the BandLab brand.

Subscriptions require the user to trust the software manufacturer not to change the rules, go out of business, whatever. Fortunately, BandLab have so far continued to provide a free way for Cakewalk/Sonar users to access our projects. This has never been interrupted in the 7 years of BandLab's ownership of the Cakewalk/Sonar brand, although there was the scare of the announcement of payware Sonar replacing CbB.

The differences between Free Tier and Premium seem trivial to me. If your plug-ins have a case of the grainies, get new plug-ins or render at 88.2K or 96K. I did some subjective tests using a virtual synth that benefited audibly from plug-in upsampling, and rendering at the double rate had the same effect as 2X upsampling.

As far as which dithering or stretching algorithm I use, should I care enough to do a shootout?

Multiple Arranger tracks is nice, but I've never used more than one per project.

5 hours ago, Hose Gef said:

The serial (also?) unlocks the T-RackS v6 module in case you're wondering.

It did for you?

I tried it and the T-RackS  6 version said that it was unregistered. Seems that further investigation is called for....

(edit)

....further investigation was called for and yielded desirable results: to get the TRackS 6 version to work I had to click on the "Buy" button in the plug-in UI and let it take me to IK's website. Then upon refreshing IK Product Manager, it worked.

On 6/18/2025 at 5:44 AM, Shane_B. said:

I've read that one psyco inparticular actually co-wrote some of their hits but never received credit. Hard to say if that's true but there's no denying their involvement with him.

Dennis, the most troubled, out of control one was friends with him for a time and traded said psycho some cash and a motorcycle for the bare bones of one song. It was an album track. Not a hit.

Stephen Desper, the house engineer, says that the only time he ever saw Chucky rattled by anyone was one evening at the studio when Chucky, in his usual way, was tossing around insinuations and said something to the effect that if they screwed him over, it would be "terrible to see anything happen to anyone as a result," followed by the trademark psycho leer.

Carl, the sweetest brother, the peacemaker, the one with the angelic voice who sang lead on "God Only Knows," got right in his face and said words to the effect of "if you ever lay a finger on anyone in my family I will end you." According to Desper, it shut Chucky up and wiped the leer off his face, not an easy task. Whatever else, the guy wasn't stupid about who was or wasn't buying his con, and he probably realized in that moment that Carl was not impressed and that he had been patient with him up to a point, which had been reached.

The Wilson brothers were all-American types who played sports in high school and had survived an abusive parent. Chucky was a bully who was built like Gollum and talked other people into doing his fighting for him. He fooled Dennis for a while. Dennis never had the best judgement, eventually drowning across the street from my childhood home while drunk, at age 39. I learned later in life that Dennis and I docked our sailboats (mine was 8' long, his was about 40'😄) very close to each other.

I'm tempted to drop the price of a medium pizza on this upgrade, but alpha mastering compressor is one of those plug-ins that I've never seemed to be able to fit into my rotation.

Did the alpha mix compressor that came with v.1 also get upgraded?

I wonder if mpressor will be getting this treatment soon.

7 hours ago, Shane_B. said:

To me, the difference is they didn't hide it so to speak.

There's an odd fact about mid-60's Brian Wilson/Beach Boys: "Caroline, No" was released as a Brian Wilson solo single a couple of months before Pet Sounds came out and included the track. None of the other BB's appears on it, not even on vocals. It's all Brian and session players.

As with so many things Beach Boy, just about everyone involved (or not involved as the case may be) has a different story about whose idea it was to do this and what the motives were. Steve Douglas, who had been a session reed man on BB's records before he became an executive at Capitol, claims that it was he who pushed it the hardest.

Was Brian considering going solo?

Was his buddy Steve Douglas trying to rescue him from the dysfunction he observed within the Beach Boys? If the song had done better than #32 on the Billboard chart, would he have done so? Would Pet Sounds have been his last album as an official Beach Boy?

I'm a fan of the Beach Boys and the Beatles, and I've never understood why they get compared to each other. They're two different animals. The Beatles were the first pop act to make fans care much about who played or wrote what on any given song. Bob Dylan followed close behind.

Was it that the Beach Boys were one of the few American acts that seemed to be able to hold their own against the British Invasion?

Brian and the BB's stuck closer to the earlier tradition as soon as they could afford to hire session players. Brian was the only one in the band whose musical talent got any attention.

I don't think there was any attempt to "hide it," they just didn't think that people cared about such matters. I think they were blindsided by the rise of the more serious rock press.

They finally got on board the "authenticity" train, but late in the game. Maybe too late to be taken seriously by the fans of the day.

Maybe Pet Sounds and Rubber Soul could be considered on a par? Brian is said to have been knocked out by Rubber Soul, the idea that an album could be its own work of art rather than a collection of a couple of singles and the rest filler. But by the time of Revolver, the race (to the extent that there was one) was over.

Whatever, I think it's pointless to compare the acts. The Beach Boys were closer to The Association, The Mamas and the Papas, and other vocal groups where some of the members happened to be competent enough at one instrument or the other to get to play on the records.

On 6/13/2025 at 7:27 AM, Sheens said:

 

Not sure what this is supposed to mean in this context, that Brian's songs hold up outside the Beach Boys context? Or not?

To address the matter of writing/playing all of their songs, well, it ain't as if The Beatles played everything on their own songs. "Within You, Without You" and "Eleanor Rigby" being examples. Paul of course sang "Rigby," but does he or any other Beatle play a note of the music? George may have played some sitar on "Love You To" and "Within You," but there are no other Beatles on it.

I consider "The Beach Boys" to be a brand under which various people have created music over the decades. Starting with Brian, then later other people. I think that post Pet Sounds, the "producer" of individual songs was different for each of them. There was also a changing collective of individuals that was referred to by that name, and the people in the Beach Boys collective would vote on what songs to include on an album. Then whoever wrote the song it or brought it in took charge of it. Usually using other band members on vocals and a combination of band members and session players on other instruments. Brian might make it into the studio to offer assistance with arrangement and studio trickery. Depending on his mental state.

Live, they were a cover band of their own songs.

You can't exactly call Brian the "creator" of "Feel Flows," to name one. That was Carl's baby, and the backing vocalists aren't even official Beach Boys. Marilyn (and maybe  her sister Diane) is prominent. Brian may have played the piano, and he claimed to have played organ and added some production tricks, but it's a Carl song.

Post Sgt. Pepper, The Beatles also functioned this way, although the lineup never changed. The core musicians were always there, but they did use Billy Preston and Eric Clapton for some prominent parts.

Brian, under the Beach Boys moniker, was a great creator/producer of songs. He created them in collaboration with some of the century's other great talents, like his brothers and cousin and classmate on vocals, and various session players and lyricists.

Beach Boys songs are hard to cover well because so many of the production and engineering details are integral to them. Like the above cover of "'Til I Die." The first thing that popped out at me was that the bass line was run of the mill compared to what Brian did on the released version. I'm a bass player and I've tried to work out the exact rhythm and notes of the bass part of "'Til I Die" and been frustrated every time. It goes against so much of what is considered "rock bass" that it's as if it's in a language that I don't speak. It's not physically hard to play, it's mentally hard to play. Where your bass player instincts tell you to play this or that note, there's no note, and when the next note comes, it's a note you wouldn't expect on a beat you wouldn't expect.

Other songs stack melodies and countermelodies 3 deep.

He could communicate stuff like that to other geniuses like Carol Kaye, but I have to listen to it phrase by phrase and even then....it's no wonder that McCartney practically idolized him.

So it's hard to "cover" a Beach Boys song because first you have to round up a vocal group as good as Carl, Dennis, Mike, Al, and Bruce, then you "cover" the production techniques, and by the time you do all that, what's the point? You can incorporate his style into your own songs, as Carl did on Surf's Up and Sean O'Hagan did on Hawaii, but it's rare.

It's not impossible; John Legend did a cracking "Sail On Sailor" on a Brian TV tribute that I wish I could find on YouTube or Dailymotion. And they did what I say: get a hot vocal group, and copy as many of the production and arrangement details as you are able (the guitarist even nailed Carl's guitar fills). The original "Sail On Sailor" had Beach Boys footnote Blondie Chaplin on lead vocals....

Many of my favorite songs by artists are accompanied on their albums by less stellar tracks (post Pet Sounds Beach Boys were especially guilty of this, Surf's Up I'm listening to you, or about 2/3 of you, the rest is forgettable or downright bad), so I guess we're rewarding consistency over individual songs.

That said, The Cure's Disintegration, Elliott Smith's XO, and Miles Davis' Kind of Blue and The Beatles' Revolver contain my favorite songs by those artists and are otherwise solid. AIR's Moon Safari, not a less-than-excellent track on it, but since "Once Upon a Time" came out on Pocket Symphony, I can't call it my favorite. Favorite to listen to end-to-end? Not that the rest of Pocket Symphony is substandard, it doesn't rise to the heights of anything on Moon Safari.

Maybe The Doors. Except that "Back Door Man" is a skipper....

On 6/14/2025 at 6:42 PM, Rain said:

Googled and quickly found a link to the full album on Bandcamp. I won't post the link because I would hate for Lars Ulrich to knock on my door for encouraging illegal downloads. 🤣

???

Bandcamp has pirate downloads of major label artists? How is that even possible? I'd think that algorithms would sniff that out in a heartbeat.

I'd think that Bandcamp would be ferocious about policing that sort of thing, this isn't 2000 and Bandcamp isn't Napster.

On 10/21/2024 at 10:31 AM, Eusebio Rufian-Zilbermann said:

"Real bugs" are rare and generally ironed out by the time that 1y expires.

This. I can't remember a Waves plug-in even crashing in my many years of using their freebies, much less having a repeatable bug.

On 10/21/2024 at 10:31 AM, Eusebio Rufian-Zilbermann said:

I pay for WUP renewals when I want the new plugins that have been added to the bundles I have. Another reason for getting WUP would be for versions that add support for newer OS or chipsets (this mostly impacts Apple users, I use Windows and I cannot remember when it was the last time that older versions of Waves didn't run on newer Windows) or updates related to hardware evolution, like high-dpi

Another reason is when older plug-ins have been given UI facelifts. Some of the tried-and-true ones like Renaissance Vox and SuperTap have gotten makeovers so that the "party like it's 2002" 3-D fake metallic look is left behind. Although SuperTap is probably the most advanced multi-tap delay that doesn't come from MeldaProduction, It's never made it into my projects due to the yoogly UI.

I feel shallow admitting this, but dated UI's do make me less likely to use a plug-in. I'd been neglecting Addictive Drums 2 for years before 2.5 introduced the new, modern UI, then suddenly it piqued my interest. I wish looks didn't matter, but they do. Best electric guitar I've ever tried is the Parker Fly, and despite the fact that used ones are now becoming affordable, I just can't take that look.

There are two types of UI that I find engaging: either the flat look that's currently considered "modern" or the very skeuomorphic design like T-RackS. My least favorite is the uncanny valley 3-D faux brushed aluminum, it seems as outdated to me as simulated woodgrain on small appliances. I've never needed my computer programs to resemble imaginary physical objects, but if the goal is to look like well-crafted rack mount gear, nobody does that better than IK Multimedia (IMO). Maybe UAD, but I can't afford UAD's products. IK don't put fake "wear marks" on the TRackS panels, they have dabbled in non-functional screws but have phased those out. If IK ever decide to go flat, it will be a sad day for me.

As Waves phase UI updates in, I may WUP some of my oldies. I imagine that TrueVerb will end up looking like the newer SuperTap.

"Glitches" seem so good for business that I've been skeptical that they were unintentional. Especially when the timing seems a bit too right and especially when they go on for a week or more. Like how some iZotope biggies seemed to come right before the end of a fiscal year, and also right around the time they merged with Native. Remember how brainworx was shoveling vouchers and licenses out the door right before they merged into the same conglomerate? How about IK Multimedia's week long glitch not long after the introduction of T-RackS 6?

The licenses that go out this way usually go to people who wouldn't have obtained the product otherwise, which costs the company nothing. I've never obtained anything through a glitch or insane virtual freebie that I would have bought at the regular discounted price. Except maaaaaybe some of the Unfiltered Audio processors from PA. I sure wouldn't have most of their catalog, as I now do.

I have seen them blow up multiple forums, where the name of the product is put in a topic title and then stays near the top for a week.

"People seem to buy a lot of audio software based on what they read in forums. How can we get the name of our product in a topic title and keep that at the top? How do we get them to keep discussing our product, keep our brand in front of them when so few read print magazines these days?"

"I know a way we can do it for free. We let a few licenses go out for the price of our processing overhead and then claim it's a clerical error. It's a 'mistake,' so it won't ***** the users who paid the normal price, and we don't run the risk of devaluing the software."

This would be a stealth way to get the effect that the juicier Plugin Boutique BOGO's (used to) have: the product's name stays on the front page for a month, a huge buzz is created, you get the registration info of a bunch of deal chasers who weren't going to buy it at regular price anyway, some of these people might be surprised at the quality and recommend it to others, they might even pay to upgrade when the time comes (I've done both). How much does PB pay vendors for BOGO licenses? I don't know, but if it's anything, it can't be much.

Maybe even people who juuuuust missed the deal will be told by others that the normally discounted price is still a great deal. I was psyched about getting the entire iZotope Music Production Suite 5.5 for $150 I couldn't shut up about it. And I might even pay to upgrade it a few revisions down the road.

How many weeks has this topic right here been bobbing around?

Many upsides, and the downside is that you'll miss some normal price sales to people who were happy waiting.

<rant>

For a vendor to act all butthurt as if being lucky/savvy enough to wangle a free license for their $60 product is tantamount to piracy is unwise. The only way they "lose" any cash is when someone who would have bought at normal price ends up not doing so. I'd imagine that the percentage of people who glitched into this full version only Kontakt instrument who already wanted it but were saving up to be able to afford the $60 is....not significant.

For the ethical people who obey your admonition to stop using the glitched license, your brand is now associated with a tinge of guilt. For most of the rest of us, we'll think that blaming your mistakes (only create codes that work for a SINGLE user, duh) on a vendor or even the end user is kinda spineless. Instead your brand could remind them of how slick and savvy they felt when they grabbed their license.

Sheepishly welcome the new users, come out with a new product that they'll buy based on whether they liked the one they got for free, revamp the UI and sell them an upgrade, whatever. Leverage it. Don't treat them like thieves.

</rant>

Maybe we could get that zMods guy to do a new skin for it.🤔

This is great! Thanks for making it.

On 5/30/2025 at 10:31 AM, Herbert Chong said:

the identical instrument and preset across Cakewalk projects can do different things

From your post it looks like it's confined to Kontakt and the Aria Player. You mention no other virtual instruments.

My first question is whether you're using your synths as "Simple Instrument Tracks" or as split Synth and MIDI tracks.

On 5/29/2025 at 3:58 PM, Herbert Chong said:

1. moving the Cakewalk level slider does not move the level setting inside the instrument.

By "the Cakewalk level slider," do you mean the audio level slider on the channel strip in Console View? That should never have any effect on a virtual instrument's own master volume control (or any other control internal to the synth).

I have had it happen that Kontakt's internal volume control resets itself upon rewind and start. The solution to that was a setting within Kontakt itself.

On 5/30/2025 at 9:12 AM, Cocorico said:

I will drop the plugins, at least I tried

That is a drag, TDR Nova is a very popular plug-in and I'm surprised that you didn't get it to work.

On 5/27/2025 at 8:54 PM, Cross V said:

Is there a need for Cakewalk beginner training that’s live and personal?

I believe that this service is already offered by a number of people. The level of its success would answer the question of how needed it is. I think I've seen a couple of the YouTube guys, maybe Robert McLellan and Mike "Creative Sauce," offer 1-on-1 tutoring.

I agree that some people learn better when they're able to ask for clarification on topics they might be struggling to figure out, also to present their own individual scenarios to the instructor.

On 5/26/2025 at 8:03 AM, tparker24 said:

Still no option to change skins.  Just the one incredibly dark gui.  Very disappointing.

While I'd like to be able to change the colors in SampleTank, at this point I'm just psyched that they're even doing maintenance work on it.

Maybe the ability to change UI colors will come with ST 5, whenever that comes out.