Starship Krupa

Well done!

Maybe through empirical observation? The built-in hardware CODEC in my laptop works great for monitoring and playing virtual instruments using WASAPI Exclusive. Realtek haven't been asleep for the past 20 years, the PC component market is driven by gamers who also want to have the clearest audio at the lowest latency possible. Are musicians are the only computer users who care about latency and audio quality? Not even. A lot more game software is sold than DAW software, and the people buying those games won't put up with laggy, gappy, crackly, noisy audio. A lot of gaming is done with the user wearing headphones, which are even more revealing of audio flaws. It's when someone wants to record audio that they'll find that they need an external interface with decent preamps, phantom power, etc. If they're building songs out of samples, loops, and virtual instruments, I don't know that the audio advantage of an external audio interface is going to outweigh the fact that you probably won't be able to take it with you to the coffee shop. The external interface with its own ASIO driver is still the ante for being able to capture audio, to be sure. People who want to have the very best as far as jitter and DAC quality should still invest in an external interface. But it's not a requirement for all audio production tasks.

Actually, it says at the top "the use and integration of plug-in instruments and effects in Cakewalk by BandLab." I've never taken that to mean only the ones that come with CbB/Sonar, but rather all plug-ins that one may use with CbB/CS.

Is there a feature comparison chart for Sonar vs. Cakewalk by BandLab? For instance, I see Cakewalk LP equalizer and multiband compressor in photos/screenshots on the BandLab website. Do they come with Sonar? I can't tell, because I have a SONAR Platinum license, so I have all of the SPlat goodies.

"Posts for competitive products will be removed."

Led Zeppelin were the biggest plagiarists in rock history. Well, maybe until Oasis came along....😄 They lifted the main riff of "Stairway to Heaven" from a band they opened for (Spirit), covered "Dazed and Confused" (with altered lyrics) by an artist who opened for them (Jake Holmes) without giving him credit, and ripped the lyrics of "Whole Lotta Love" from Willie Dixon. In all these cases, Zeppelin only compensated and credited these artists after the artists brought suits against them.

I also refer to my own empirical experience: in twenty years of downloading and using installers and individual plug-ins from all manner of developers large and small (I am a freeware maven), I have yet to get any malware on any of my computers via a plug-in installer. IMO, not only have malware threats been exaggerated by malware protection companies and media in order to further their own ends (fear sells!), malware is more of an issue inside larger organizations where a lot of computers are connected to each other inside the company firewall. I don't like to cop a position of authority, but I am a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer and used to be an IT professional at a security company. That said, if installing a program that has triggered what is obviously a false positive on one malware scanner out of 75 will keep you up at night, don't do it. The latest version of a plug-in company's installer shell is not critical path software. Unless MeldaProduction have added anything to one of your bundles that you're really hot to check out, v. 16, with its legacy installer works just fine. So no compelling reason to jump at v. 17 anyway. MCenter is a useful tool if you have material that has its low end information that is too spread out. We've somehow managed without it up to this time. The advice from MusicMan to wait a while and check it again is excellent.

You may have just given me the key (no pun intended) that could unlock the door. Truth is, I rarely have occasion to use it these days. The only vocalists I'm likely to be dealing with have taken serious training and would never submit a performance that wasn't absolutely where they wanted it, and me. I need the practice, so I'm happy to do a dozen takes until I get it right. That's part of my problem with gittin' gud with it: I don't use it often enough to learn it well.

I wasn't suggesting you use ASIO2WASAPI with Cakewalk. What I mentioned was that if you have other software that can't use WASAPI (such as Ableton Live), ASIO2WASAPI is a better bet than ASIOALL. As you have seen yourself, Cakewalk works great with WASAPI. IIRC, Cakewalk, Inc. worked closely with Microsoft while WASAPI was in development, so no surprise there. For interfaces that don't have their own native ASIO drivers, such as my laptop's internal Realtek CODEC, WASAPI is absolutely the best way to go for software that can use it. But there is software that can't use it, even though it's been around for an eternity in computer years. I don't know what Ableton's problem is. Considering that Live! must be rock solid in order to fulfill its intended use as a performance tool, continued failure to support WASAPI boggles my mind. The time to explore ASIO is when you grab one of those Mackie interfaces. I've seen them as Amazon Refurbished for about $30.

I think my troubles with it stem from the fact that I look at it and it seems like it should work one way, but it actually works the other way. It presents these blobs strung together on a grid. And to me, the blobs are notes, the horizontal grid lines should represent a chromatic scale referenced to A=440. The vertical lines would be beats and subdivisions. Then you drag the blobs up and down (and/or left and right) and they snap to the grid lines, or you can nudge them a bit one way or the other. You would also be able to use a different reference pitch if you wanted to. That's how it looks to me, like it should work that way, but it doesn't and I guess I can't get my head around why it doesn't and how it actually does work. It would be so simple if it just worked that way.

I ain't all that seasoned with Melodyne, although I am fond of text manuals over any other type of tutorial or instruction. The issue I had with Melodyne in the past was that the manual was written for a higher version of the software than I was working with. They may have remedied this, I'm not sure. In any case, I've seldom been able to get it to do what I want. Maybe I'm asking too much of it, or asking the wrong thing of it, or maybe it's just that Melodyne and I are just not cut out for each other. It's fine, as a fan of MeldaProduction's products, I know that "not everything is for everybody." 😄

Nothing wrong with Behringer interfaces in general, except that their very bottom of the line (the UM2) doesn't have an ASIO driver. ASIO gives best performance (monitoring latency, timing accuracy) when overdubbing. Until you get something else, be sure to use WASAPI Exclusive, which is the closest thing to ASIO you'll get with the UM2. If you happen to use software that supports ASIO but not WASAPI (as I was astonished to learn is the case with Ableton Live 12), you'll get better results with ASIO2WASAPI than with the ASIO4ALL driver that is sometimes recommended. Very nice headphones, BTW, I really like my Beyerdynamic DT880's. So comfortable.

It looks like you're having trouble getting your Mac to talk to the SC-88. If you are able to make that happen, as long as the SC-88 supports MIDI Thru, and you connect MIDI out on the SC-88 to MIDI in on your PC's interface, it should work. For help in getting your Mac to communicate to the SC-88, perhaps whatever support for the MIDI software you're running, or support for the SC-88, would be the best places to seek it. However, since you say that you want to connect your Mac to the SC-88 via USB, but also say that the SC-88 lacks a USB port, I suspect that you will find that....difficult. What is your top-level goal in all of this? Do you want to be able to send MIDI data from your Mac to your PC? If that's all you want to do, you don't need the SC-88, what you need is USB-to-MIDI interfaces on each computer that connect via 5-pin DIN MIDI connectors. If the audio interface on your PC has 5-pin MIDI jacks, then you only need a USB-to-MIDI interface for your Mac to be able to speak MIDI between them. Then you simply connect a MIDI cable from the MIDI out on one system (presumably your Mac) to the MIDI in on the other one (presumably your Windows PC). You can even do it in both directions. Decent USB MIDI interfaces are inexpensive. I have one similar to this and it works flawlessly: https://www.amazon.com/Cable-Upgrade-Professional-Converter-Keyboard-Recording/dp/B092QLPST8/ There are cheaper ones on Amazon, but they are best avoided. I tried one and it suffered from stuck notes. The ones you want have a clear window on them with LED's to show MIDI activity. The one to avoid has an ovoid black plastic body with LED's imbedded in it. If you want to play notes on your computer and have the SC-88 make sounds, then you would connect the 5-pin MIDI cable to the SC-88.

Well, FWIW, I have it installed and you can add Windows Defender to the list of anti-malware software that doesn't think there's a problem. If you think there's a problem, I suppose you can wait for MeldaProduction's next release and see if that one anti-malware service still thinks it's suspicious.

Because no malware test is perfect and they are tuned toward the side of aggressiveness, thereby resulting in false positives. Malware scanners all seek to be in the position of catching threats that their competition miss. They work by matching patterns, and there's no guarantee that their pattern matching won't occasionally identify a pattern as malware when it is actually benign. Again, what do you imagine would happen if you were to run the v. 17 MeldaProduction installer? Do you believe that MeldaProduction have broken bad and coded malware into their installer that is so stealthy that it can fool 74 out of 75 malware scanners yet still deliver a harmful payload? To what end? Do you believe that MeldaProduction would go to these great lengths to ruin their reputation by coding something into their installer that harms their customers' computers or compromises their private data? Yes, it is "fishy" indeed, but what is fishy is the assertion by one single scanner (out of 75 reporting) that MeldaProduction's installer may contain malware.

I recently became aware of ASIO2WASAPI, which as the name suggests, is a wrapper to provide an ASIO interface for programs (such as Ableton Live) that support ASIO but not WASAPI. (Seriously, Ableton, this is 2024. Vista came out 18 years ago, WASAPI has been part of Windows ever since, you've had plenty of time to figure out how to get your very-popular-on-laptops DAW to use it🙄 instead of recommending ASIO4ALL) I've been trying it for a while on my Dell notebook computer and found that it works quite well in the programs where I've tested it. The advantage of using it over just plain WASAPI in CbB and Sonar is that I can leave the driver mode set to ASIO and just select different output devices when I want to switch between my notebook's internal CODEC and my PreSonus Studio 2|4. This is less disruptive than switching driver modes. It also of course works a treat with Ableton Live Lite 12 to drive the onboard CODEC. Just wondering if anyone else had been trying it out. It seems to operate more smoothly than ASIO4ALL and neither CbB nor Sonar gripes about it. It even has its own ASIO control panel.

I have been trying off and on for years to make "rollin' the golden turds" work for me and it just isn't happening. I've successfully used it exactly once, to correct the pitch of a single flubbed bass guitar note by half a step. For the amount of time and trouble it cost, I could have copied and pasted the note from elsewhere in the song or just punched it in myself much more easily. If it ever comes to pass that I need a pitch corrector, I'll look into RePitch.

What do you imagine would happen if you installed v. 17? VirusTotal says that out of 75 companies who make their living screening for malware, 74 gave the MeldaProduction v. 17 installer a clean bill of health. 1 of them flagged it using a criterion that commonly yields false positives.

At the risk of opening a can of worms, I have a theory about that. WoW and Hulu are entertainment. Sonar is an instrument. I think a lot of people see their music software as an instrument. I know I do. At the moment, for a variety of reasons, I am not playing my physical instruments such as guitar, bass, and drums, so the DAW is it. Musical instruments are personal things that we cherish as the tools for our creativity. Musicians may rent instruments in certain situations, but it's very unusual for a musician not to own instruments. As such, we have a deep-seated desire to "own" our music (and in my case and your case, video) software. Whether it makes sense financially in the long run, given paying for upgrades, etc. That's why I would love to see a "hybrid" Sonar subscription, where after the first year, the user is entitled to a perpetual license if they choose not to continue their subscription. Such a plan has the double benefit of exposing the subscriber to the extended benefits of the subscription, while still providing the security blanket of entitlement to a perpetual license should the person decide or become unable to continue with the subscription. I know I'm walking in a minefield here by discussing licensing models, but it's not in the spirit of a raised pitchfork complaint. Merely musing on why some folks may be uncomfortable not owning a perpetual license and expressing hope for the future of Sonar licensing. So please don't anyone jump in with grumpiness about the current licensing plan. We already know that there are many people who want a perpetual license, many people who will only accept that licensing model. No need to rehash that. What we have now is what we have now. Cakewalk by BandLab is free and Sonar is only available via a paid membership. Time will tell if the situation is permanent, and there's nothing we can do in this forum to influence the outcome.

Cakewalk Product Center is the installer program. I have to agree, I had a hell of a time finding it. https://downloads.bandlab.com/cakewalk/ProductCenter/latest/Cakewalk_Product_Center_Setup.exe

I'm glad it works for you, Rex. Actually, investigating it on your behalf helped me to "fix" the exact location for my own use. I've generally found that Sonar's picky behavior about clicking isn't due to sloppiness, it's more in the other direction. It demands more precision than I want to give it.😄 Of course, until I take some time to figure out why I keep getting different results when I perform what seems to me to be identical operations, it feels clumsy and weird. Check this out from the Reference Guide, a diagram used for explaining what will happen when clicking on a clip in one of seven different places: Further down the page, it lists them and all possible combinations of modifier keys, so there ends up being about 15 different things that will happen depending on where you click (and drag) on a clip and what key you were holding when you clicked. Of course, once you learn this, you can go like a bat out of hell because everything's right there rather than buried in menus, but until you do, it's frustrating, because similar clicking and dragging actions have such different effects. It was months before I realized that this was the case. When Cakewalk by BandLab was first release, the Reference Guide hadn't been published, and the web-based documentation was....difficult to navigate.

Yes, Sonar is so particular about where it expects you to click for a given action. It's taken me years to get used to all of the different hotspots on the different types of clips in the Track View and I still do it wrong often enough. While you are waiting for your wishes to be fulfilled, here is the safest spot to click when all you want to do is just (for God's sake) position the Now Time: Anywhere inside the vertical space inside the ellipse. That is, between the top of the numbers on the reticle and the top of the Arranger Track. It's actually a decent-sized piece of real estate once you know where it is. If you click between the top of the numbers and the top of the ruler, you get the magnifying glass that I, too never use (I use combinations of mousewheel and modifier keys to zoom in and out). Click too low and you'll get nothing, unless the Arranger Track is open, in which case the Now Time will reposition where you click. If you really need a humongous target, you could even add an empty Arranger Track and just click in that when you want to move your Now Time. Hope this helps. My suggestion (as a gamer) is to spend a few minutes with an empty project and practice clicking along the ruler in that space in order to put it into your muscle memory.

Oh how nice that would be. Especially if they keep the policy of not charging existing license holders for the update.

Its buttons are not programmable at all. It has two that send program changes and then three that send Start, Continue, and Stop. Full disclosure: it's one of those Rock Band keytar controllers. I spotted it at Salvation Army at $6 and noticed that it had a 5-pin DIN connector to go with its two octave full size keyboard. A bit of research revealed that in addition to being a wireless Rock Band controller, these things are also full-fledged velocity sensitive MIDI controllers. You can shift the octaves on it, handy for playing bass parts, and it has a pitch bend ribbon controller. My guess is that there were people on the design team for it that lobbied hard for it to double as a real MIDI controller and got their wish. Kudos to them. It has one potentially challenging quirk in that it expects to see the diode drop from the original MIDI spec's optocoupler. So if your MIDI interface doesn't have that, the keytar won't realize that it's plugged into a MIDI interface. Easy enough for me to solve by soldering an LED across the line in my MIDI interface, but a potential stumbling block in some scenarios. I recently fired up MIDI-OX to find out whether any of the buttons was sending MIDI, and that's when I saw that it was sending these MMC commands. According to the Cakewalk documentation, it looks like Cakewalk is supposed to respond to those when something else in the MIDI chain is set up as the master clock. Despite my doubts about the stability of whatever clock my Rock Band keytar could supply, I tried it and Cakewalk just wouldn't respond. As you say, @Promidi, Sonar can be set up to respond to MIDI note events easily, but I want to use those transport controls. As much as I see MIDI as one of the musical equipment industry's great triumph, and love what I can do with it, it sure has its quirks. If I could find some utility that can translate MMC commands to note events, that would do it.

I go there infrequently. It used to be called "Pro Tools Expert," hence the residual focus on PT. They had one of the earlier lists of freeware plug-ins, so I found them early in my DAW journey and looted their list. Due to the PT focus, many of them were AAX or RTAS only, but there were still enough that were available in VST2 form. I don't check it out much these days, I've found sources of expertise that I prefer.