Starship Krupa

On 4/25/2019 at 9:53 AM, user6918071215191927 said:

It comes packed with a wide range of virtual instruments, effects and thousands of sounds.

In every way except that, Cakewalk by BandLab blows its doors off, and I could get you most of the way to the functionality of the bundled stuff with freeware I know about, and even further if you give me $50-100 to play with and can wait a few weeks for things to come up on sale at Pluginboutique.

Hey, thanks!

Now I'm wondering how my clips could have gotten partially muted without my having invoked the Mute tool. I suspect that it has something to do with me having been using the Smart Tool, which can morph into many different implements depending on what and where one is clicking.

Maybe since some of my clips wound up on top of one another in the mayhem, maybe some muting was applied automatically? Is that something that happens?

I had some comping issues, stuff going on with grouped clips being dragged around by accident and somehow wound up with a few clips that have their audio muted for certain parts of them.

I've tried messing with clip gain, but that didn't help.

It seemed to come about due to dragging edges around, clips overlapping at some point, and happened while I was untangling the mess I had made by forgetting I had a whole bunch of grouped clips in my take lanes while I was editing.

What is this and how do I undo it and just get it back to a normal bit of audio in a clip?

Here's a link to a screencap of it on my Google Drive:

Clip with a hollow center

As you can see, the silent part of it shows a full waveform, but sort of with the center hollowed out. I couldn't find any reference to this condition and how to cure it in the online or reference manuals.

10 minutes ago, Martin Vigesaa said:

Also, my understanding was with BandLab I would lose many of the 'free' 3rd party plugins that came with Sonar Platinum like TruePianos and Session Drummer.

No, Cakewalk installs alongside Sonar Platinum and any plug-in that works with Sonar Platinum will work with Cakewalk. The way you do it is just keep your working installation of Sonar, install Cakewalk, which won't affect your Sonar installation, and then you can use either of them. And they'll both be fully-enabled with Session Drummer, Melodyne, every last 3rd-party and Cakewalk supplied plug-in.

Of course be prudent as you would with anything involving your working studio and wait until any time-sensitive projects are finished, just as you would with any major software install.

Hundreds of people have made the upgrade with no trouble other than sometimes needing to go into Preferences and tell Cakewalk where the Sonar VST's are installed. If you run into any problems with Cakewalk, you will be running a program that is in active development with active tech support rather than one that has stopped development and has no support.

(please, the sticky, the sticky, ease their confusion)

On 4/23/2019 at 12:01 PM, msmcleod said:

if you can match the EQ (preferably using your ears rather than a tool) of your own mix to the reference track, this might mitigate some of the effect of hearing loss, or even badly matched monitors/room.

This. As a veteran of many live stage performances and shows, I definitely have rolloff, and it's never completely quiet, but I keep my ears "tuned" by having close listening sessions with favorite well-produced albums and songs. Later Radiohead is some very well-produced music with deep and wide soundstages, good instrument separation, etc.

What others have said about the bass, can't add much except maybe to say if you have synths that are taking the roles of "bass" and "kick," let the kick take the lower end and carve those frequencies out of the bass track, assuming you still have access to the mix and aren't just mastering in Cakewalk.

I always remember that I listened to top 40 radio through the speaker of a small transistor radio when I was a kid, and I could still hear all of the instruments on that 2" made in Japan driver. David Essex' "Rock On" sounds killer no matter what you play it on, and most of the song is Herbie Flowers' double-tracked bass. So perception of "bass" doesn't necessarily depend on hearing the booooom, although it should be present when played on a full-range system.

On 4/23/2019 at 4:45 PM, Martin Vigesaa said:

I'm using SONAR Platinum.

Why? Cakewalk by BandLab is better.

For anyone intrigued by the idea of getting 87+ plug-ins that you mostly can't get anywhere else and heaven knows how many loop and sample packages, I found a place selling the latest single issue for $3.99.

https://pocketmags.com/us/computer-music-magazine

Oh, and you also get to read the magazine, which, as pointed out earlier, is typically packed with enough interesting and useful information for a year's worth of bathroom breaks, train rides, waiting rooms, etc. This includes tutorials (with videos and downloadable audio files) on the plug-ins themselves.

To quote Starsky and Hutch, "Do it."

Great-looking theme! The ProChannel elements especially look fantastic.

The non-destructive normalizing is BIG. I don't understand how normalizing got to be destructive in the first place. I'm used to everything being non-destructive.

The adjustable selection is something I would use constantly if it were available.  Audacity, Vegas, they are both a joy to use because of this feature. Makes editing go so much faster. In my mind, it would work similar to adjusting the Loop markers.

Thank you Mariano.

6 hours ago, Wibbles said:

apart from the ancient ones (mostly 32 bit only)

They're not giving access to the oldies anymore? When I did it, there was a folder kind of tucked away labeled 32 that had some older ones, not all of them 32 bit.

When I did it, I got access to all of the plug-ins and utilities that were custom made for CM. I didn't get access to things like Cakewalk Home Studio or Bitwig or whatever one-time giveaways came with only one single issue.

You can use Memorymoon and ME80 wherever you like, and as a matter of fact very few of the bundled plug-ins are locked to Mixcraft.

I think the tonewheel organ clone is, but I don't care much for it anyway. AIR's DB-33 is a much superior alternative that may be had for $20 on sale. There is an antique version of Lounge Lizard Session that is also locked, but Dead Duck E-Piano whips its butt as well and is freeware.

I have Pro Studio. I love Pianissimo, their grand piano, so just getting that is great, and the Studio Drums can be used in Cakewalk and elsewhere.

Another of my favorites is the g-Sonique Psychedelic Tape Delay, which must be heard to be believed.

The MIDI recording and editing may appeal to some compared to Cakewalk, and with MIDI it's easy to do work in one and transfer it over. Mixcraft is Rewireable, as far as I know.

Just buying a single digital issue of CM gets you an amazing cornucopia of plug-ins, loops, and articles for under $5.

The lite version of Unfiltered Audio's G8 is excellent, so is the Meldaproduction CMHarmonizer, and the issue I bought was something like 3 years ago, so that's tons more content since then.

And yes, if one were to try to read the articles from just one issue, it would take a year, the articles are great and would no doubt advance the way I approach recording and mixing if I'd ever get around to reading them.

Now Cakewalk does not work for Scott, Beserkir!

Plug-in settings are all shot, Beserkir!

Now we have tempest in teapot Beserkir!

(with apologies to Clerks, and to everyone else)

It puzzles me when people spar on word meanings when dictionaries have existed for centuries to settle such issues.

"Rant verb: speak or shout at length in a wild, impassioned way."

By that definition, I do not believe that Scott was "ranting," as his demeanor in the video, while in my opinion, "impassioned" was not "wild."

Unfortunately the discussion about the video has descended to ad hominem attacks unworthy of the gentlemen involved.

Scott, I would like to point out that some of the original criticisms of the gentlemen in the forum (which included the triggering term "rant") were based upon the false assumption that it was you yourself who had posted the video here. Once they realized their mistake, most of them, being gentlemen of honor in my experience, simmered down considerably and even sided with your complaints.

It would be great if we could get back to the common goal of improving the program we like via feedback.

A representative of BandLab is here soliciting such feedback, so let's use that opportunity.

Note: to address bug squashing priority, the settings reset bug has come up because a prominent veteran user has brought it up and others on the user forum have chimed in to say that they have also experienced it and are willing to help squash it. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. That's just the way it goes. If these problems were in the developers' faces all the time, they would have fixed them already.

One of the tools that a QA staff have for finding tough doggies like this is interaction with and feedback from users who are seeing it, so they need to know everything about the users' projects, systems, etc. Which plug-ins they are using and how is obviously going to be of utmost importance because the bug involves plug-ins.

And BTW, I, as a veteran of the software industry, can say that if anyone thinks they can tell a programmer "all my plug-in settings flat-line when I exit and restart the program" and they open the code and start looking for the bug, that is NOT how it goes. A programmer, or really, anyone else who is trying to fix something, is usually going to approach fixing it by observing the defect in action.

One of the BIG reasons for this is that when they start trying to apply fixes, they need to be assured that their fix worked. With intermittent problems, that is really difficult.

Scott has something valuable to the QA process, a system/project that exhibits the defect regularly. If they could send him an instrumented build or something that would probably really help, but at this point I think he'd not be up for it.

6 hours ago, marled said:

This is exactly the reason why I do not like the preference setting "VST3 Migration - Replace if Possible on Project Load", i.e. I always disable this. In general I feel that all these sophisticated automatic features in software do cause more trouble than benefit for the users.

Hmm, I might start doing this. A better solution might be to just go into the Plug-In Manager and exclude the VST2's that have corresponding VST3's.

More tedious, but perhaps more bulletproof. I have to do it anyway for some plug-ins that don't follow the spec and show up twice in the Browser.

On 4/16/2019 at 3:42 AM, msmcleod said:

My guess is it's a timing issue, where Cakewalk is restoring the settings before the plugin has fully initialised itself. The plugin then initialises itself to its default settings overwriting the settings Cakewalk has just applied.

That is an interesting theory. Like a "race" condition in programming?

One of the things that I've run into time and again in my software QA career, both as a pro and as member of various beta programs, is that developers invariably test and repro on their own incredibly high-spec systems, whereas we mere mortals are still using Core 2 Quads, or maybe a spinny drive, or we're tracking projects with 10 drum mics or whatever.

Yes, Noel is a recordist, he goes into the field and does projects, but not with clunker hardware that he's saving up to replace or upgrade a bit at a time. And is he recording metal like Scott? Does he have a friend like I do who likes to hit the vape stick, put on the cans, and literally, loop 20 takes on drums until he finds his groove?

That resulted in 80 clips, all of which he kept sitting in the lanes until comping time rolled around, in case we needed something from one of them. Which was his right.

On QA teams, they always put the new person in charge of "low-end testing" where they would have to maintain one computer at the lowest advertised spec and go through the agonizing process of testing the program on it. And then be present for the product manager's arguments with the programmers about whether or not we should raise the lowest advertised spec. Programmers: yes. Manager: no.

But that's one cause I have observed for bugs like this happening in the field more than in the office. Diversity of hardware.

Thank you for developing your opinion more and giving some background.

I suspect you are correct, Scott is probably bitter.

It looks like with his videos and even a demo song included with the early versions of CbB, he figuratively and literally had invested a lot in Sonar only to be faced with the Gibson announcement in November 2017.

I encouraged him to give CbB another try after he ran down a list of what he considered "killer" bugs, some of which I knew to be long gone. I don't know if this fiasco happened after that, if these were new ones he found or what. If so, I suppose I'm partially responsible for this.

Whatever, if Cakewalk were to work satisfactorily for him, he would probably endorse its use, no hard feelings. People who let their anger out tend not to keep it seething inside.

On 4/14/2019 at 12:49 PM, Moxica said:

What does this even mean:  "Click the Track Name control in the Track Inspector"?

This threw me for a moment when I was reading this thread, but then I tried what you were doing.

I hadn't realized it, but in the Inspector, the Track Name does more than just display the name of the track, it is actually a button. When you click on it, it pops up a context menu that lets you select which track, bus or hardware output you want to display in the Inspector pane.

This is kind of trippy to me, I thought the Inspector always showed the track you had selected in Console or Track view.

You may also lock the current track, bus, or hardware output in the Inspector pane so that it can't be overridden by selecting a track elsewhere.

I can see the problem, though, he doesn't label it in the illustration as the Track Name Control, so when you read it, WTF?

So much to be learned by reading other people's questions and answers here on the forum.

On 4/15/2019 at 5:55 PM, Grigorios said:

What's more disturbing is the possibility of encountering these problems myself.

If you're worried about the lost plug-in settings issue, one bit of insurance is to save the plug-in settings for the project as Cakewalk presets, which I understand may be tedious or not even be practical.

One data point here: I've been using Cakewalk for a year and have never had it fail to save my plug-in settings. This issue is apparently obscure enough that they're having a hell of a time being able to reproduce it just so they can see it in action and come up with a fix for it.

15 minutes ago, puddy said:

That guy should just go away...

I disagree. He's seeing issues with the software that are preventing him from making good use of it. He's not a whiner, his critiques are well thought-out even if there is some anger visible in his delivery. I think he's a helpful critical voice.

If there aren't critical voices around, a product runs the risk of becoming moonieware, where there's never anything wrong with the product, only with the way someone's using it, or their unreasonable expectations of it. And I really, really don't want to see that happen around here. I witnessed some of that attitude at the old forum. It doesn't seem to have been transplanted, thank heaven.

Workarounds are fine to a point, but are not a substitute for bug fixes.

Cakewalk has bugs. Ones that have been in it for some time, ones that affect common operations that people do with the software. Fortunately, the people in charge of such things seem interested in correcting them.

Not FAQ's plural, just this FAQ. And added to the top of the main Cakewalk section. We already have one about the fab new PDF Reference Guide.

This matter appears to still be a point of confusion for legacy Sonar users, and stragglers still wander in here all confused. Some of them don't even know that there is no longer a Cakewalk Inc., that there is no more Sonar, that they don't have to pay for upgrades....how they make it as far as creating a BandLab account and posting on this forum without learning that must require real determination.

Having a big sign in the main parlor telling them what they need to know about upgrading to Cakewalk by BandLab would be a nice courtesy to them and  to those of us who like to answer questions and would rather not answer these same ones over and over again.

1 hour ago, Larry Jones said:

But you'd still have to buy a new PC every so often, to keep up with new technology.

And to keep you from being vulnerable to the latest security threats!

1 hour ago, Larry Jones said:

You could bounce your comp to a new track, archive the comped track (which would archive the lanes, of course) and use the Track Manager to hide it. 

'preciate it. My favorite workaround right now is to duplicate the tracks en masse, archive them, and delete the currently unused clips from the "surviving" tracks. I guess that's sort of like your idea. 😊

But that doesn't take a load off during tracking.

Or Cakewalk could just refrain from streaming through muted clips, but that might cause problems when people suddenly unmute them on the fly. The matter for me is that I and the people I collaborate with sometimes like to keep several alternate takes around well into the comping and mixing process, and certainly during the tracking process.

It's not always a linear tracking-comping-mixing thing, and if you're not discarding "bad" takes as you go, they build up really quickly. Having an option to not stream through muted clips while tracking would take a big load off, I think. I calculated it out at one point and it doesn't take very long for a standard multitrack rock band recording project to accumulate over 100 audio clips if they are doing multiple takes. If the drum kit has 4 mics on it and you do 5 takes, that's 20 right there, before you even get to anything else.

I mean, what do people do to prepare for the eventuality the vocalist coming back 2 weeks later and deciding they want to go with the 2nd take instead of the 4th take? Do you studio owners just leave all of the takes sitting there? Does it not cause a performance hit on your systems as it does on mine?

I usually consider all takes "fair game" until the project is mastered, and even then, they'll stay part of the project. Storage media are cheap. Regrets that I didn't keep that crazy wailing guitar solo that the band decided not to use are expensive.

I haven't seen the "track done gone bad" issue in a while, but I do know that I find it necessary to occasionally "sacrifice a chicken" to a MIDI track to get it to work again. I won't go into it in full detail, but it's a set of seemingly random flailing steps that I take that make the track start working again. If all else fails, I do what you do and just duplicate the data.

One chicken sacrifice is to close the project and reload it, another is to exit Cakewalk, start it again, and reload the project, etc. It might be to assign a MIDI channel where none was previously necessary. Or to set it to "Omni."

My only explanation/theory is that Baron Samedi demands a tribute in order to deliver my softsynths from the land of the dead back to the land of the living.

6 hours ago, John said:

That is if it is turned on. If it is off it does nothing.

Oy vey. Another "protection" (racket) from Microsoft that does more harm than the "threat" it's supposedly trying to "protect" me from, because clueless ding-dongs can't resist clicking on every "You've just hit jack pot!!!" and cute cat animation that shows up in their Inbox appearing to be from their friend at aol.com.

Is this feature enabled by default? I see that it is not on any of my systems. Perhaps it will be another year or so before I will have to find a policy or registry hack to disable it.

Thanks for bringing it up, synkotron. There seems to be no lengths to which Microsoft will not go to prevent people from being able to make full use of our computers.

The ultimate endgame is if they prevented users from logging on entirely, so the computer could just sit there computing away, not doing anything for us, but perfectly safe from viruses, malware, and ransomware.