Starship Krupa

Hmm, maybe #3 means "why do they always happen right before I do a #2?"

Thanks for bringing it up, abacab.

Gee, since I always tell installers not to install AAX plug-ins, I naively thought that I didn't have any installed! Turns out that's not any more reasonable than expecting not to find any newly-installed 32-bit plug-ins on my system. I clean those out about monthly.

My haul of freed-up SSD space was 1.5G

I loved the background music  for Myst. It was almost as important and beautiful as the graphics.

Well the licensing's changed since you hung around, but the devs have remained and they've turned around.

Welcome back, welcome back, welcome back.

Little-known fact: Californians have over 100 words for "earthquake."

I went in there and said "hey, 1978 called, it wants its attitude back!"

On 7/5/2019 at 3:46 PM, S.L.I.P. said:

Unfortunately, the thieves came from a very poor, run down, and bad area of the inner city, and never learned to Reed...

In Lou of that, they had to play by ear instead and ended up being Out O'Tune.

Fortunately, one of them, whose straight job was as a radiologist in a hospital, was nabbed when a woman we had both dated, a police detective, came in for a mammogram.

Yes, they were caught when they started to Isotope Our Ex.

On 7/5/2019 at 1:32 PM, InstrEd said:

Hmmmm....................................

How could it be stealing if Audacity is free🤔

LAME

12 hours ago, TheSteven said:

I'm not saying that you're accusing me of such

Of course I wasn't, I knew you weren't.❤️👊

Please excuse the ranting of a NAIVE Californian. 😊

We get so easily triggered, y'know, oh my GAWD, my therapist says I need to set like, boundaries, y'know? And I'm like, that's so not easy for me, because y'know, my family of origin, nobody ever had any at all. So I've had to like, learn to make amends when I encroach on someone else's, y'know, and that so doesn't come naturally, my parents were too busy trying to catch the perfect wave or riding their mountain bikes to like, teach us anything about boundaries  or making amends. 😉

7 hours ago, TheSteven said:

Reminds me of a bumper sticker I once saw:
Welcome to California!
Now go home - and take a friend.

Well, although I am a native Californian, I don't care for such sentiments. The belief/attitude that people who colonized or inhabited a place first have greater claim to it than those who arrived later or whose ancestors arrived later than other people's ancestors has done so much horrible damage to humanity in the past that I recoil from it. I think it's poison, and that bumper sticker is rude and unfriendly.

Notice I "reveal" the actual  numbers behind the "secret" when I make that joke. This is so that our beloved state can continue to attract people who are good at math, probability, and statistics. Anyone who is smart enough to realize that it's highly unlikely that they will be harmed by an earthquake will be welcomed by me. So will anyone else for that matter. Once they "survive" a couple of quakes and notice that nobody else is freaking out they will calm down like the rest of their fellow Californians. 😊

The first state that I noticed making a big deal about the "native" thing was Colorado, during the '80's (surprise). My mom moved there around '81 or so and I noticed all these bumper stickers that had the green and white motif and mountain outline of the Colorado license plate, and read "NATIVE."

Then  I started to see other ones in the same style. The first one was "ALIEN," which I thought was a good start, then there were a variety of obligatory geek ones like  "HOBBIT,"  "JEDI,"  and "VULCAN," and then "WHO CARES?" which became my favorite. Then. Finally. I saw the winning entry, the one I had been thinking of myself, the one I would actually put on my own bumper, which was "NAIVE."

4 hours ago, craigb said:

Of course there have been very few casualties, the last time there were earthquakes like this week's was 1994 and before!  I knew people who were killed during the Northridge quake when their apartment complex pancaked...

My bad, 25 years. I was thinking Loma Prieta and forgot about Northridge 5 years later.

Sorry to hear about your friends. That's awful. That style of apartment building is (or was) common around SoCal when I was a kid, I can't tell you how many school friends lived in them. Not seen as much up here, but they exist.  3 stories with a 2-story overhang up on steel pipes over a carport.  Sturdy as long as the force is all straight down, but I guess crap if it starts moving side to side. Nothing to stop  the 2-story section from just falling off the pipe poles.

Was there ever a good retrofit designed to prevent that or do they just not allow architects to build them?

2 hours ago, Kaustub M. Joshi said:

I was intending to make the story telling up close and personal, but it appears that wasn't a great idea.

No, I got exactly what you were trying to do! That came across, and it is a clever idea and works for the piece. I really liked the idea. Just if you try it next time, I wanted to suggest taking more care to put the "narrator" or lead vocal voice in a similar sonic landscape as everything else.

It's why mentioned the bit about being able to making individual elements move to the front. You can still do what you were trying to do while making your voice sound as if it's in that lush magic mystical space.

Maybe I'm not describing what I mean well enough. With a rock band or a folk ensemble or an orchestra it's easier, because their music also exists outside the studio and we can say the band should sound like they're in the same room (or coffee house or concert hall) playing even though we're recording them an instrument or section at a time in a studio or even more than one studio. But we do tricks to make it sound like the singer, drummer, guitarist, bassist, and keyboard player were all there in one room playing at the same time.

This is even more so for people like me who are one man indie rock bands. I have to make it sound like I am 4 or 5 people all plugged in and mic'd up on an idealized stage in an idealized fantasy nightclub, and not call attention to the fact that every single note, drum hit, word sung, everything on the recording is all me overdubbed.

In the case of ambient/EDM/electronica, it goes off script, but since humans live in a reverberant world, humans still want to hear reverberations and ambiance in our recordings, and our ears still like it when we hear reverb even as an exaggerated effect. As a matter of fact, our ears are so good at it, because they have to be in order for us to survive, that we are also good at detecting when reverberant spaces, even artificial ones, aren't quite "right."

So as we find out, even completely synthesized music wants all of its sonic elements to sit in a comfortable sonic space. They're still instruments at the end of the day.

You ever go into a dorm room or new home before your family or friends move in? They just sound and feel too "live" and it maybe feels a little uncomfortable? There are too many surfaces causing too many reflections to hit your ears at slightly different times because there's no furniture and carpeting in the place to deaden it. It actually drives me kinda nuts. I feel on edge in places with nothing up on the walls.

The same thing can happen with a mix if you put on competing plug-ins, where one has its reflections set to one set of time constants and others have theirs set to others. They clash, and the sense of a coherent space is lost.

Of course, to the extent that this is a rule, it can be deliberately broken to interesting effect. Benny Benassi likes to make his "Macintosh System voices" dry so that they really pop out, and it works.

In the case of your piece, maybe you used a different plug-in, different settings, or just too little reverb or delay for my taste, but that's just my taste, and it's also one sonic element on a great sounding track. I change my mind all over the place with my mixes.

Anyway, I did want to get across my idea of "painting a picture," where I close my eyes and I "see" your musical tracks kind of going out in all directions with a certain soft gauzy texture, and any elements that come to the forefront should pop to the forefront, but they should still have that same soft texture. I listen to mixes with my eyes closed a lot to "see" what pictures come to mind, if it "looks" coherent. I see them with my mind's eye as well as listen with my ears. Try it?

I'll reveal a Californian secret: we play up the earthquake thing because it's one of the few things that keeps people from the rest of the country from flocking here and making the housing crisis even more unbearable.

If you look at the statistics for injury, death, and property damage, ice storms, tornadoes, floods and just plain nasty weather are WAY more destructive, by an insane factor.

In the past three decades in California earthquakes have killed exactly one person, who died of a heart attack because they were afraid of earthquakes.

But all it takes is a little shake that knocks a picture off the wall and relatives from the East Coast (where dozens die each Winter in ice storms and car accidents caused by bad weather) phone up wanting to know if we're okay, despite the news reports saying that there were no injuries.

We actually welcome these smaller tremors because they mean  the plates are releasing energy. The longer we go without an earthquake, the more of our gold records and Oscar Awards fall on the floor when the next one finally happens.

Yep, huge cracks opening up and swallowing cars all over the place! It's horrible! Oh, the humanity! 😎

So sorry to hear this. Glad to hear that she passed peacefully. Most sincere and heartfelt condolences.

I hope that music and community will be a comfort to you in the coming months.

Lovely indeed. I really like the guitar.

This is my first commentary in the Songs subforum, so I don't know how welcome mix suggestions are.

If they are not welcome, I apologize. If they are, I concur with the earlier comment about the ambience processing on your lead vocal. The music and backing vocals and the higher vocal that comes in later all sound like they exist in the same ambient mystical "space," but your voice doesn't quite, if you get what I mean. On my own mixes, I either use a reverb send or use similar settings on the individual track reverbs so that it all sounds like it's in the same space, glued together.

I can still make individual elements come to the front by varying the amount of reverb or using compression, but they sound like they are in the same space.

I got Gatey Watey on the introductory free deal and it's been on every kick and snare track since then. Its competition in my plug-in collection is the Unfiltered Audio G8, which is quite a gate, and there's never a contest.

It makes it so easy to get hi hat out of a snare track and snare out of a kick track that it feels like cheating.

Have you gone into Preferences/VST Settings and added the path to your plug-ins folder to the VST scan paths?

There should also always be one for c:\program files\common files\vst3

The licensing model of plug-ins or libraries has no bearing on whether Cakewalk will freeze or crash. Cakewalk has no way of knowing how they are licensed, and as we know, Cakewalk itself is licensed via a free subscription.

Freezes and crashes from plug-ins come from buggy (or just incompatible) code, and they exist in both free and pay licensed plug-ins. As a consumer, one has to take care whenever using anything, check forums to see if other people have had trouble with the thing, take advantage of free trials and demos, etc. While it's true that free plug-ins are more likely to be coded by one person working alone in their studio, that may also be true of ones we have to pay for as well. A couple of my favorite and highly respected plug-in houses are one-man coders (Boz, Melda), and I have never heard of anyone having trouble with their software (and both of them  give away free plug-ins!).

I love my Sonivox Orchestral Companions, but they have a pretty nasty incompatibility with a number of DAW's including Mixcraft, which was my primary before Cakewalk. Also FL Studio, I think, and maybe Samplitude. If you put your playback into loop mode, after the first iteration, playback  goes into this staccato mode, which made mixing a real pain in the tuchus. Fortunately the devs at Acoustica did a workaround, and double fortunately, the bug doesn't manifest in Cakewalk.

Pardon my soapbox, but I like to counter what I see as unwarranted fear, uncertainty and doubt about free licensed software. There was a TON of it in the old Cakewalk forum when BandLab came to the rescue. It can be as good or as buggy as anything else. In either case, check the reputation and be careful. Caveat emptor for any software.

As Mark said, Kontakt libraries can include all kinds of things in addition to just the samples, and Trumpette may have boogered up the scripting. And yes, if you're into stuff like Kontakt, you should probably spring for more RAM. I'm at 8G myself and long overdue. I'm tired of tiptoeing around with system resources. Your post here is a good reminder!

One of the things that can drive me nuts about contests like the first one is that the prize for it is the Abbey Road Collection, which is a great bundle of plug-ins for someone mixing projects that use live instruments and samples and loops thereof.

The "hello, 1999 called and wants its glowsticks back" Trance project you're supposed to add your personal touch to is not the kind of music that the Abbey Road Collection could really do justice to, at least the 12 seconds or so that I could stand to listen to (I don't care for Trance). Is it?

Seems to me that an EDM producer or mixing engineer would much rather have something (anything) from iZotope.

When talking about music, how else do you describe it?

"Yeah, cool, it kind of reminds me of people skateboarding next to a yacht harbor on a cloudy day. And then a fishing boat comes by and the captain waves to the skaters."

You're running UAD plug-ins on Sonar 8.5 when you could be running them on Cakewalk by BandLab at no cost or risk to update?

I'd at least give it a try.

I would not be  surprised people on the Cakewalk by BandLab forum don't know anything about dotted lines around plug-in names in Sonar 8.5. That program was discontinued almost 9 years ago. Who would remember such a thing even if they were running Sonar 8.5 back then?

msmcleod's suggestion to search in the old forum is a great idea for Sonar 8.5 issues as it goes very far back.

CJ Jacobson's suggestion to try CbB is an even better idea.😊

I'm glad he mentioned the bit about setting it to 80, because 60 (which means 30mA per tube) is kinda cold. 40mA for a DeVille is right in what I consider to be the sweet spot for idle current, 60%.

Eek, leaving the amp powered up while he's holding his screwdriver and turning and gesturing at the camera.

In most cases, I try not to have both hands working in the amp at the same time, so if I were using this method, with Fender's test point, I'd use a lead with a clip on the test point so that I wouldn't have to hold the meter lead at the same time I've got that screwdriver in there.

Most of the time when an amp is on my bench and it's hot, I have my left hand in my pocket. The shock that kills is the one that goes from hand to hand across the chest.

2 hours ago, Gswitz said:

You could also set it up so you can solo various buses to turn on and off sets of speakers.  This gives you a single click to turn on or off a speaker pair and can leave existing speakers on.

Oh, right! I hadn't thought of that, I might try it myself.

So many ways to accomplish the same task. Cakewalk is a huge beast.

10 hours ago, abacab said:

I found Aria and you can install it, but the license is actually only granted if you have a paid license for the product. It's not a freeware product, so proceed at your own discretion.

Hmm. You should have found and downloaded a file named WIN_ARIA_Player_v1.872.exe. I didn't notice any admonitions about having a paid license when I installed it, was that in a click-through that I didn't read?

I can't even remember now how I found out that it was downloadable or why I thought it was free because it uses Plogue's GNU licensed code or something. Maybe on another forum.

That sounds pretty nasty.

Seems like something's gotten scrambled in the way that CbB keeps track of plug-ins, and from what I've seen, that information, or some of it, may persist after an uninstall, so if you do try an uninstall/reinstall, make sure you do a completely clean one.

There is probably a way to clear your system of all prior plug-in settings as well, although I don't know what it is. I'm sure that by this time you've contacted support.

As others have pointed out, obviously this is not common, and things can get corrupted on individual systems. Where I get frustrated is with programs that leave settings behind that perpetuate the problems I was trying to cure by uninstalling them! Usually in the registry, but maybe in an .ini file in my user profile.

Good luck whichever way you go, with a new DAW or whatever. Ableton Live is very different from Cakewalk. It's said that with the right theming you can get Reaper pretty close. Sometimes after a period of frustration and the damn thing just not working, the impulse is to never want to look at it again, but after all, it's free to jump back in any time you want, and I certainly recommend being reasonably proficient at more than one DAW. Very much so.

BTW, I have to say that I'm pleased with the lack of aggressive defensiveness displayed by people responding.