Starship Krupa

+2 Thijs Van Leer and I concur.

Most of Airwindows' plug-ins don't have UI's, they rely on the hosts' "default UI," which is usually just some sliders and at best resembles the UI's for say, ReaComp from the ReaPlugs suite minus the meters.

Pretty sure that's what petemus is talking about.

Cakewalk offers an excellent way around that in the form of Effect Preset Chains.  The person who dedicates the time to making up a nice little UI with knobs and buttons and legible text is the user. You just make an Effect Preset Chain with only the UI-less plug-in.

I did one for Airwindows' DeEss and it works great.

Any parameter that the plug-in allows the host to automate (which is usually all of them) is yours to access via a knob or button.

I see it as a worthy goal to be pursued as development goes forward, as fresh pairs of eyes get to have a look. A thing that happens is that new users see issues like this in the bigger, longer picture, and longtime users have all the shortcuts and workarounds memorized so well that they don't notice how clunky and impenetrable things can seem to a new user.

"Just hit Ctrl-Shit-Z Space-T, then select the audio you want to ZlorpStretch, then paste it, then Alt-0, then Shift-Del-N to ghost flip it into the frequency region non-destructively, then put it back into ripple mode and you're done. Takes longer for me to write it than to do it."

To my mind as a piece of software evolves there can be many objectives, none of them ever "reached."

Adjusting the menu layout to make more logical sense (whatever that is deemed to be) or for greater ease of use (likewise) or to make it easier to learn can be a goal to pursue, to devote resources to. Look at the popularity of the FlexIQtm feature of the Smart Tool. Much of that was, conceptually, allowing the user to turn some of it off.

Same with reducing resource consumption, adding new features, fixing bugs, etc. It's all what ya deem important.

Back on the old forum, I think we lost a lot of users who were torqued because  BandLab wouldn't provide a roadmap, but everyone navigates using their smartphones now, so who's got the last laugh? If you're gonna have to license content from TomTom or Magellan, I'd rather get some loop packs or a phrase sampler or something.

My own current favorite prime example is the  Drum Map, but in another case I'd like to see made easier, I took a look at the Track View's menus.

The Track Control Manager  is something that I wasted a good many hours not being able to remember how to get to  when I first started using CbB.

We could have a right-click context menu entry for it. "Header Layout,"  or "Header Widgets." "Header Controls?" Part of my trouble was that the phrase Track Control implied that  I would be launching something that was controlling tracks. And don't laugh, the reason why I couldn't find what I was looking for right dead center screen in front of me was because when things were screwed up, the button to access it was labeled either "FX," or "I/O" or whatever. Not gonna click there. I'd be poking around, accidentally hit the button, or poke it wondering what it did and not notice right away and be all messed up.

Couple of last things, if you don't always have your Track View docked in the Skylight right under the main program window, you might start to notice that the menu commands for Insert Audio/MIDI/Instrument Track are nowhere to be found under the Tracks menu. Nor is Insert Folder or Template on it. Can't add a Bus from it either. Yeah, I know, just memorize the keystroke. Eventually you won't even need a monitor.

Also: why is the Process menu and every item under it all the way up there on the main menu and not sitting down next to (or even encompassing) the Region FX menu? Most of the things under it seem to have to do with tracks and clips, so why not scoot it down where it can travel with the rest of the Track View menus?

Wow, I didn't even know that reverb.com had software. The Sonivox Session Drums and BlueJay Drums are probably worth checking out for $1 each.

As much as I love DrumMic'a, it's kind of cumbersome to load up Kontakt every time I want to do some drums.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure what you're talking about is right there already. I know there's something called a Tempo Map, but I don't know if it applies.

I think some of the tempo correction stuff hides out under menus that refer to vocal correction, but it just as readily works for other material. I've yet to use it, so if you ask about this in the larger forum, I bet you'll get the recipe straightaway. Or recipes. It seems like there's usually more than one way to accomplish a given task with this great beast.

HR-16 for life!

I am also of the opinion that there are many processes in Cakewalk that involve the user way more than they need to.

One of them, for instance, is assigning a Drum Map to the Piano Roll View for drum editing.

Cakewalk essentially forces the user to create a list of drum maps they want to use in the project, then choose which one they want to use for each MIDI drum track, and the nomenclature is confusing. What's more, the user gets at the interface for this not from the Piano Roll View but from either the Output selector on a MIDI track or in Preferences.

With your concept, if the user wants to do some drum editing, it would be right there in the PRV. "Use Drum Map." And then the user would be presented with a wizard or dialog allowing them to choose which mapping they wanted. For the past 20 years, that's been General MIDI, with manufacturer variations like XG, GS, Band-In-A-Box, etc. Or they could choose "New" to create a new one.

This is a good idea. I think I'll submit it as a feature request.

If you look at the change log and new features list for the current build, you'll see that a lot of heavy lifting is going into making what's already there work correctly and work better.

There are some existing features that are ripe for the picking, like integrating the Matrix View into song composition, making Drum Maps more seamless, that would help make Cakewalk more attractive to people who want to use it for EDM and the like. I think if some attention were put to the Matrix, for instance, that might be the feature that you're talking about. It's already there, it's just kind of isolated.

Cakewalk's an incredibly deep program, and its features were added in stages over decades, so some of them are integrated better than others. It seems like the developers have more breathing room to go back and do some touching up, and so far, the results are nothing short of excellent.

Every new build is like Xmas morning!

Here's an odd recommendation, a sightseeing-only trip, because the plug-ins on display, while some are free, are all 32-bit, and at least one is known to me to have issues when I ran it with another host.

But Dutch Producer/Studio Owner/Plug-In Coder Terry West's site is worth a visit just because of Terry's unusual vision.

While some plug-in companies go for futuristic UI's and others go for skeumorphic imitations of vintage gear, Terry's stuff looks like what might happen if you took Hornet and had someone whose last gig had been designing video poker machines do the UI's. He kinda has one of everything, and they all have the same gold-on-black glowing Native American casino look to them. Which I sorta dig in a way, because why not. Man's got a vision.

Rock on, Terry, and I would drop the $15-for-everything license in a minute if his stuff were 64-bit. The stuff of his that I've tried sounds pretty good, although  some of them had a tendency to crash Mixcraft, so beware. His interests seem to run toward NY-style compression and mid-side manipulation, as well as various techniques of excitation.

When you get to his "MHorse" series is when things take a turn for the whoa Nellie.

The MHorses are his mastering all-in-ones, where he brings everything together, and there are 6 of them. The UI's get way more colorful, with neon added, and the knob and button count explodes. Here's  his description of one of them:

"MHORSE P3 Parallel Mastering Unit v3.6
Full Analog Parallel Mastering Processor.

* Full Bypass. * EQ Bypass. * In/Output -3dB option. * Output Inverse option. * 3 parallel parametric (serial) equalizers. * 6 Q wide settings per band. * 4 freq. for low, mid, high. * Boost/cut option per band. * Peak/LoShelf - Peak/HiShelf. * EQ dry/wet mixfader. * Loudness boost filter with 3 stages. * Special filters: Mellow, Punch, Body and Shine (39K) modes. * MS Parallel Clarity processor. * NY Parallel Compressor. * NY Compressor Editor (2 modes). * Two compressor modes (soft/hard)) NY Solo, link/unlink channels, Motown enhancer, Snap/Body EQ, Widener. * 3 bands Parallel Tape Saturator with optional Analog noise. * Tube PreAmp simulator. * DC remover. * MS Parallel Stereo Widener with Zero Width Freq. * CrossTalk emulator (2 modes: Vintage, Modern). * Low / High Exciters with frequency selectors. * Unique Deharsh processor with Stereo/Mid/Side modes. * Side Stabilizer, four frequencies. * Lopass and Hipass filters with selectable frequencies and 16/34 steepness. * Brickwall limiter with 4 thresholds. * Clipper with 4 thresholds. * Transient shaper with Attack and Release. * Auto Gain Control. * Two digital VU, one Analog VU meters (-60dB~+3dB). * RMS Meters. * Pan peak/correlation and Source material detector meters. * Input/output 3-color peak leds. * 3-color i/o headroom leds for low, mid, high. * Effects energy/compress meters. * Parallel/Serial switch. * 20 presets. * Tooltips."

All this packed into a UI that looks like it belongs in Vegas (not the video editor) ca. 1982.

I have tried them and for put-it-on-the-Master Bus-and-try-a-preset roulette they hold their own with Ozone. All the functions do have their effects, although whether they map into things my poor brain can understand is another matter. These do not come supplied with documentation, which given their complexity is baffling.

If you try any of these things, do so at your own risk, and do so forewarned. One of the MHorses made springs shoot out of Mixcraft when I tried it. It's been years since I've seen a new plug-in or update on the site.

Yeah, there are a variety of plug-ins that claim to be able to smooth out clipping with varying degrees of success. I finally snagged a license for iZotope RX Elements and it does the job as well as any.
The trip to Terry West's site is worth it just to check out the oddness of it all.

More about Terry on the Freeware FX thread....

Saturday night's alright for freeware!

I'm not like some mix engineers who seem to use mostly emulations of classic analog gear, I kinda go the other direction. My philosophy is why should I constrain myself to what was possible in 1967 in hardware?

However, a lot of the records I love were made using that gear, and I do appreciate the value of simplicity and the effect of transformers and real world components on tone shaping.

Which brings us to Luftikus, my favorite analog "color" knob EQ. As described:

"Luftikus is a digital adaptation of an analog EQ with fixed half-octave bands and additional high frequency boost. As an improvement to the hardware it allows deeper cuts and supports a keep-gain mode where overall gain changes are avoided."

It also has "mastering" and "analog" modes, whatever that means, but basically, it's yer familiar 6-knobber, just happens to be my favorite.

The developer, ljkb, became slightly notorious in Cakewalk land for entering the 2018 KVR Developer's Challenge with TinyQ, the UI of which was a blatant copy/tribute to the collapsed version of the Sonar/Cakewalk Quadcurve EQ. When it was first released, the developer used a library called JUCE, which I guess at the time was owned by Google and the license for the version they used popped a splash screen and it was supposedly sending info to Google Analytics. I never even tried it, because, hey, I already have a free license for the original so who cares.

They have just updated the plug-ins to use "the latest version of JUCE," and I don't see the splash screen, so either they shelled out for the license or JUCE's license changed, but whatever.

There's a total of 6 plug-ins, all freeware. Luftikus is my favorite, but I've also messed about with ReFine, and they just came out with a linear phase EQ called QRange.

My usual "vetted by Erik 'Starship Krupa'" does not so much apply here because they've just put out these new revisions, but the previous versions were rock solid.

Please post back to this thread if there are problems with anything anyone suggests (which should go for any license model).

On 7/23/2019 at 7:08 PM, scook said:

You may want to start looking for a replacement for Organized Trio

I recommend AIR's DB-33, which is currently on sale for $14 at Pluginboutique. You can even use its Leslie emulation separately on other tracks.

I bought a Soundblaster Live in the late 90's thinking that its S/PDIF input would be good for copying DAT CD master recordings to my computer. These DAT's had of course been made at 44.1.

I made the transfers and they sounded fine, but then I started reading about something called "bit perfect transfer" or "bit perfect audio."

This was the notion that contrary to what we had been led to believe,  "digital audio" was not this pristine incorruptible thing that once the A/D converters had converted it to ones and zeroes, every step of the way it was going to stay unharmed until it was delivered to D/A converters on our end, then sent to an amplifier for reproduction.

Especially in computer realm, this was actually a big, laughable lie on a par with Father Christmas or the Easter Bunny. Your CD had ones and zeroes on it, but once it left the CD drive, the OS would merrily upsample, downsample enhance, do all sorts of terrible things before delivering it, and if you were trying to work with digital audio, it was much more difficult to keep it pristine than if you were just working with analog audio.

I also learned that my Soundblaster Live was one of the worst offenders, because without telling anyone, they had designed a card that, while it was fabulously powerful as far as processing digital audio effects, was awful at the job of merely passing a clean stream. While it claimed to be able to do I/O up to 96K, whatever sampling rate you sent it, 44.1, 48, 88.2, 96K, it would resample to 48 for internal processing before passing it along. Yes, it would take in 48K, then perform an unnecessary resample to 48K. And this was 25 years ago, and its algorithms were not great.

I read that one could buy sound cards that used a chip by a company called CMedia that had S/PDIF headers on them but did not do the resampling that Soundblaster Live cards did. CMedia chips were used in cards costing anywhere from $12 on up to $150, so I bought a cheapie and did a test transfer of the DAT CD master of my girlfriend's album.

What came out of my speakers when I played it back literally brought tears to my eyes. It sounded like her voice was floating in 3-D above my speakers, the way a good mix should.

I immediately grabbed all the DAT's I had previously transferred and did them over. The Soundblaster Live was relegated to office computer use and my studio computer continued to use the $12 CMedia for digital I/O.

Playing devil's advocate here, and because I used to do phone support at a software company, they probably dump the AAX stuff in there in case the user decides they're going to run Pro Tools someday. It reduces the need for tech support calls.

After all, look at the people who come here convinced that "Cakewalk deletes your Sonar plug-ins" or "Cakewalk won't run your Sonar plug-ins" because a friend couldn't figure out that all they needed to do was reinstall Sonar or just fix their VST scan paths.

The Native Instruments Native Access program will also indicate that your products need "repair" if you remove the 32-bit components, but they will work fine without them anyway. And disabling the drivers that they install for their hardware (even when you don't own any of their hardware) will not negatively affect anything.

I'd prefer mine to be non-destructive.

Unfortunately, it appears that Beatmaker, the company who originally made it, has gone under, but ATMOS is my favorite ambient piano, and one of my favorite instruments for ambient music period.

The link is to the page at VST4Free, which is still hosting the download. I haven't mentioned  VST4Free because it's just a repository and as such doesn't vet the plug-ins it hosts, but it is a hugely valuable resource if you're willing to be adventurous and try out what's there. They will host downloads when a company goes under. The page for each plug-in also includes a place for users to review the plug-in, so you can get a good idea whether it's buggy or worth the time to try out.

(Many of the plug-ins hosted at VST4Free are 32-bit. I only use these on a legacy basis, meaning that I don't acquire 32-bit plug-ins. I think I'm down to 3 of them that I use occasionally when nothing else will do the job. One of them is the de la mancha dlm sixtyfive, which is an emulation of the dbx 165a compressor that so far, nothing else I've heard can touch.)

What Bob Bone said is a clue: ACPI.SYS is part of what controls your processors to give your laptop longer battery life. Take it out of the picture and you get performance back.

Me, I refuse to believe that there is no way to wrest control of the hardware away from the OS, although you may need the help of Google searches and maybe a 3rd-party utility.

I have had good luck with Process Lasso.

Rather than having it running all the time, I set it up to kill all the processes that I didn't want running while I'm doing DAW work, then start it before I do a Cakewalk (or whatever) session. The default view is to have its activity log visible, and I still remember this one session where it delivered a repetitive utter beatdown upon the poor Apple Mobile Device Service, which I had excluded. It kept trying to start up, but Process Lasso would have none of it. It went on, every 200mS for about 15 seconds, which is forever in computer time, until the Apple Mobile Device Service just stopped trying.

Yeah, MusicMan, I can't read your screen cap, but I assume from context that it's a folder with AAX plug-ins?

I go further and hunt around for possible extra content that the installers may have left around, like convolution files, samples and whatnot. Meldaproduction, much as I love their products, is one for shoveling unnecessary content in with installs.

And if you've installed the Native Instruments Komplete Kontrol stuff, be aware that you now have at least 3 software drivers running on your system that are useless if you don't also own one of Native Instruments' hardware controllers.

I just experienced "Cakewalk: The Vanishing" right after inserting an instrument track.

Sequence of events:

Save project (yay)

Insert Instrument Track (simple)

Boom, Cakewalk disappears from the screen with no crash, no dialog, no dump file, nothing.

5 hours ago, Keni said:

You nailed this one fast.

Excellent! The telltale was where you were seeing MIDI activity in the system tray icon but nowhere else in Cakewalk.

Keni, this is a long shot, but I recently had the dreaded "MIDI can talk to everything but Cakewalk VSTi's" effect, and what it turned out to be was a rogue control surface entry.

I looked at Preferences/MIDI/Control Surfaces, and for whatever reason, the input device was set to be my MIDI keyboard controller, and so Cakewalk was interpreting all of its keypresses as control surface movements.

Once I set that device to be what it was supposed to be (my nanoKONTROL), all was well.

Yes, Gerry, please post the solution, and not just to satisfy our curiosity.

There are lots more people who read this forum and don't post and plenty more who will have the same problem you did and search for a solution via Google.

It lets the forum serve as a database of issues and solutions.

On 7/26/2019 at 10:36 AM, fret_man said:

I have never had a problem with Waves. I recently built a new computer and all I did was 1) on my  old computer, move my licenses to "the cloud", and 2) on my new computer, retrieve all my licenses from "the cloud". It worked without a hitch.

This. Same with plug-ins that I have authorized via PACE/iLok. I had one experience similar to the OP's, but the next one was careful to just deauthorize or move all my licenses to the cloud before rebuilding my DAW computer.

This is critical, for anyone reading this thread, you must do this before changing your motherboard or system drive. I have moved my Waves licenses to a thumb drive so that I can take them anywhere or upgrade my system and not have to mess with anything and it works great.

Then, once your DAW system is up and running, you move the licenses back to your hard drive if you want, as I said with Waves, I just leave them on the thumb drive.

At the moment, I would call it a "newly discovered color mapping."

In other words, good find. If there is not already such a thing, I would love to have a Google Sheet or some kind of shared document where we could keep track of these correlations, maybe also map some of the terms into "friendlier" names. I spent hours trying to figure out which color parameter affected the text in the Custom Module before I found it in this forum.

I'm new to this, both to themesmanship and to Cakewalk itself, but the Theme Editor looks like something that were originally designed to be used in-house but then made into a more end-user friendly tool.

It's serendipitous discoveries like yours that led me to that suspicion. It  makes better sense when you're designing an overall color scheme for a product that's going to be reviewed by an in-house team before being released to the public, and it explains the obscure naming.

I know why CD's are 44.1, and that's what I use, because I still go by the theory that if my audio files are recorded at 48 and I then mix down to a CD master, they will have to go through a downsample, which costs more in CPU and puts me at the mercy of the downsampling algorithm.

My DAW computer has 8 virtual cores, runs at 3.2GHz and barely even notices when I render video. I've read that up and downsampling algorithms are now so sophisticated that this has no effect whatsoever if it even ever did, and who the heck even listens to CD's any more anyway. Yet I cling to my silly notions like an old lady throwing eggshells in her Krups coffee maker.

I also do video projects, and when I do, I try to keep the whole thing at 48, because I am off my rocker, no, I mean, DVD's are at 48.

I don't know why the standard for video became 48K.

Anyway, the sensible answer is probably "it depends on what your eventual target master is." If you'll be making CD's, go ahead and record 44.1/24 and it will give the rendering engine one less thing to think about. If CD's are not a consideration, then it doesn't matter.

As Mark (kind of) said, the rate is of no concern quality-wise. The "difference" could be measured in a lab. It's bit depth that we wallow in, that wonderful 24 bit dynamic range.

If you really want to experiment with sound quality differences regarding rate, crank that puppy up to 88.2 or 96 and record some acoustic guitar or vocals and listen on a good set of headphones and see if you hear a difference. Some do, some don't.

No, it's a free license, like Cakewalk,  I just had to give them the Yahoo email address I use to sign up for things like free software.

I suggest that anyone who regularly takes advantage of free offers that require you to give up your email address create an account at Yahoo or GMail or Proton or wherever just for this purpose.

And here's a security tip from someone who used to work in IT for a nationwide security company (me).

If they make you create an account, don't use the same email, username and password you use for more sensitive activities. Not that the owners of the software companies will do anything nasty with the information, but we can't expect smaller companies to have the same protection against hacking that larger ones do. They just can't afford it. Wells Fargo's security dept. is probably larger than iZotope's entire company.

I use a system that allows me to have a unique password at every site, but if you don't do that, you can at least split them up so you have a "banking password" and a "buying toys password." And/or use a different email address.

Not trying to put the panic into y'all, just suggesting you maybe ease into doing this in future transactions if you aren't already.