Starship Krupa

Also directly from iZotope: https://www.izotope.com/en/products/free-audio-plug-ins.html

Scratchy pots is seldom a reason to retire a piece of otherwise functioning gear. Especially if you're thinking of dropping $500 on a replacement. The easy fix is a squirt of DeOxit FaderLube (the green can, not the red can). I fixed many, many scratchy pots with this back when I was doing amp repair. Since the lube in it is thinner than what pots come with, there will be a difference in the feel of the knob, but if the choice is between tossing the unit and opening it up and giving it a shot of FaderLube, I'll go with the change in feel every time. Never had a client complain. Another trick that I used was just to work the pot. They're designed to be self-cleaning to a certain degree. What I do is quickly turn the knob back and forth 20 times. So in effect, the pot's wiper travels across the resistive element 40 times. This takes about 5 seconds and is great for situations where the pot is rarely adjusted. What happens in that case is that the resistive element gets a film on it in the areas that are less often used. Whipping the wiper across the resistive element brushes the crud off. If you do it with your amp turned on, you'll likely hear the pot getting progressively quieter after about 5 turns. If not, then FaderLube is called for, and if that doesn't do it, then the resistive element is likely damaged and replacing the pot is the fix.

My suggestion for people wanting to spend the least amount of cash on an interface is to check out M-Audio's bottom of the line offerings. Reputable manufacturer, full ASIO support. $50 for the M-Track Solo and $69 for the M-Track Duo.

I'll venture that looking for free plug-ins comes "naturally" to the children of professional composers who were DAW users before the kids were even born. 🥰 You're a pro, you've been at this forever, your opinions come from that viewpoint, which is valuable. You don't want or need a pile of bundled plug-ins. But I think a lot of people do. I'm trying to put myself in the place of someone who's new to DAW's and maybe even recording in general. I'm 62 and have musician friends around my age who just never got into it. Sometimes they ask me to help them set up a recording rig. I start with Cakewalk of course, provided they have a Windows computer. Then I spend hours loading up the latest versions of my favorite freeware fx and instruments because otherwise, they won't know what's possible. In order to look for a plug-in, you first need to know that that type of plug-in even exists in the first place. When I myself first got Mixcraft 9 years ago, I was dazzled by the bundled plug-ins, about half of which were available as freeware. In my initial explorations with the DAW, I used only the bundled plug-ins because even they were far past my abilities. There are people who come to this very forum asking about where to get free or inexpensive FX and instruments because they want more than comes with CbB. And this is a forum with huge lists of freeware instruments and FX that are tested and known to work with Cakewalk. There are also the mixing purists who swear that they use only the plug-ins that come with their DAW. That ain't you, and it sure ain't me, but they exist. As for clutter, I've gotten a look at the Sonar installer, and the add-ons are separate checkboxes. So nobody is forced to install anything but the core DAW.

A year or so ago, my machine-registered iLok registrations decided to go sideways. I submitted the reset requests via the iLok manager, which worked in most cases. For the AIR licenses, I had to contact their support staff directly. Take a look at AIR's KVR support forum for how to contact them directly. I much prefer physical iLok for registrations, but on a laptop, there is a vulnerability factor where that dongle is too easily damaged. Fortunately, the AIR synths register just fine to the first generation iLok, so as long as you don't have iLok'd plug-ins (such as the iZotope Exponential reverbs) that require an iLok II or higher, you can get a cheap and plentiful first gen iLok for your AIR synths.

Seems like there's a lot of guessing around this. Anyone try filling out a support ticket? https://help.cakewalk.com/hc/en-us/requests/new?ticket_form_id=360000025633

Just ask the data recovery service representatives who comment on the DIY "how to repair your hard drive" videos on YouTube. According to them, all you need to to is take the lid off outside of a clean room and your drive will be rendered irreparably unreadable forever. That's it, no magnets, no spikes, just pop the lid off and it instantly destroys it.

The issues with this is that new users, especially ones who are new to music production in general, won't know about freebies and how to find them, and won't have "hundreds of plug-ins." Think back to when you started working with a DAW. I'll guess that you used the FX and instruments that shipped with the DAW and little else.

Anyone remember H.G. Fortune? They managed to be uncanny before the A.I. craze.

Although the promo page for Cakewalk Sonar shows at least the LP EQ's in use, no mention has been made of possible 3rd-party bundling relationships. This is understandable due to the confidential nature of such negotiations. I was thinking of which ones might be valuable to include, and my frugal mind goes to ones that are already being distributed for free by their manufacturers as loss leaders. My number one suggestion is Kilohearts' Essentials. Over 30 FX, from bread-and-butter things like the simple Limiter, Compressor, and Transient Shaper to more exotic and advanced things like Tape Stop, Reverser, Pitch Shift, Ring Modulator, Comb Filter, Ensemble, etc. This would, in one swoop, take care of a huge swath of FX categories that are currently missing from CbB. They are sonically excellent, simple to use, have scalable UI's, and don't beat the user over the head with Kilohearts branding. This would give Sonar multiple effect categories that its competition (Studio One, Mixcraft, Waveform) don't have. From Kilohearts' perspective, since the package is a loss-leader freebie to begin with, they'd probably be happy to have such a relationship. It could even come with a demo license for Snap Heap, which is their effect chainer that these plug-ins are designed to work within. After that, Plugin Alliance's bx_masterdesk Classic is another loss-leader freebie. Mastering plug-in that sounds great, good for slapping on rough mixes as well as finished projects. As far as instruments go, unless plans for Sonar include resurrecting the old Cakewalk synths, CbB's collection of instruments is pretty sparse. I'd like to see a return to bundling the A|A|S Sessions package. Including A|A|S' (free) Swatches would sweeten things even further. What plug-ins do you think would go well with Sonar?

I haven't figured out a way to do this in Cakewalk with interfaces that don't support it with a loopback function. What I use when I want to sample things like TV and movie dialog are 3rd-party programs like MAGIX Audio Cleaning Lab.

I get it, if you're using orchestral libraries, you're trying different articulations, etc. Similar for ITB electronic music. Composing, sound design, they're all part of the process. It's not the same process as sitting down with a song already in mind, and your task is to turn your song into a recording. It's more recursive. I've not done commercial scoring for pay, but I've composed music to go along with short movies that I made myself. I've done the rock band, singer-songwriter thing, "write" a song on guitar or piano, and I've done it the other way, too. These days mostly the other way.

A quick Google search took me to AMD's page on the processor and they say it doesn't have onboard graphics, so your question is moot. If it did have onboard graphics, no, there's no danger in running it with onboard graphics when you intend to install a GPU later on. Matter of fact, it can even be a good idea down the road, because Windows will have the driver for the onboard graphics ready to go in case you want to take your GPU card out for any reason. As it is, though, you'll be waiting for that 1660.

Why, when the more feature-rich and bug-fixed supported Cakewalk by BandLab is available for free? I'm always curious about this.

SampleTank 4 MAX is currently on sale for $100. It comes with Miroslav Philharmonik, a comprehensive orchestral instrument. If free is your bag, the Winds instrument in this line has clarinets: https://musictop69.wixsite.com/orchestools/orchestools-two

In the past year, I acquired A|A|S Chromaphone 3 and VS-3. I really love A|A|S' engine. I wish they'd do a drum machine based on it.

Really? Nothing wrong with Syntronik 2, I own it myself (as part of SampleTank 4 MAX), and it has great sounds, but as a synth? Isn't it basically a ROMpler? Even if the criterion were best deal, the mighty Chromaphone 3 and String Studio VS-3 are on sale for 50% off.

Wow, no love for Sonarworks?

Validation of Cakewalk is and has always been good for 6 months from the last validation. It was part of the initial announcement thread, if memory serves. It cause a huge splash amongst the community of people who create CbB tutorials, because it will eventually make their tutorials less relevant.

If you're not part of the solution, you're insufficiently dissolved in the solvent.

I remember reading it as part of the statements about the upcoming changes. But memory is a funny thing.

The reason they are so vocal about begging developers to port their apps is of course that the platform lacks so many apps. A Linux loony who's trying to sell you on switching to the platform will go on and on about how Linux can do everything a Windows or Mac system can do, and how the FOSS apps that are available are the equal or better of anything available for those systems. Then they'll beg commercial developers endlessly to port their products to the platform. If the former were true, why would the latter be necessary?

I just went to Epic and searched for it.

The indication of very high power usage isn't necessarily cause for alarm in the DAW world. It probably just means that Cakewalk is keeping all the cores lit up and running, rather than letting them park or sleep. Not a bad thing, unless it leads to temperature throttling. The power usage stat is useful in situations where you're trying to figure out what's sucking down your laptop battery or making your system overheat. Your 850W power supply is probably at least 100W more than is necessary to run a system like yours, so you have plenty of safety there. Steev makes a good point (although your system isn't a "clusterturd," not wanting to freeze tracks isn't a sign of arrogance or laziness, and Windows has supported Thunderbolt since Windows 7 on Intel-based systems like yours. Older AMD motherboards and CPU's are another story as Intel made it difficult for AMD to implement the technology). Overclocking an i9-9900K isn't necessary for DAW work. Leave that for your gaming sessions. I game on my DAW system, so I do overclock, but the games I play aren't AAA titles, so they would probably run just fine at stock clock. The most demanding one I have is Red Dead Redemption 2. For DAW use of that system, that much overclocking just makes it more likely that you'll send your CPU into thermal throttling, which you do NOT want. A good tool to have for monitoring possible system issues is HWINFO64. It will let you see if there is any thermal throttling going on, monitor CPU and GPU clock speeds, fan speeds, etc. I completely understand not wanting to freeze if I can avoid it. I'm constantly trying different instrument sounds, patches, tweaking patches, adjusting the synths' internal FX, etc. when I'm composing with virtual instruments, so freezing just doesn't fit that workflow. Especially with scoring work like you're doing, when I'm using orchestral sounds a big part of the process is swapping different sounds in and out to see what fits best. Do I want a sax or a trumpet? Flute or clarinet? Bassoon or trombone? Cello or viola? Brass, Woodwind, or String section? That said, for a project with 60 instrument tracks, there might be a few you could freeze whilst you fiddle with the others? And if KONTAKT is your main sample player, might it be more efficient to use its multitimbral capabilities to minimize the number of instances? I know that this helps for some instruments but not others. SampleTank is said to use the same amount of resources whether you have 3 instances of it or use one instance with 3 different ST instruments. Also, try to exit other apps like Chrome when you're doing a project of this size and complexity.

As John said, on the front page it will give you its opinion of whether your system is in good shape. If you want to see what's limiting your performance, the best place to look is the Drivers page. That will show you what driver(s) are chewing up system latency. That's how I spotted my bad NIC driver, I saw that NDIS.SYS was clobbering my system. NDIS.SYS is a driver for network operations, so I started looking into it.