Starship Krupa

Indeed, my everyday dark and light themes are M-Spec and Boston Flowers.

Having started on my own theme before M-Spec came out and made it unnecessary 😊, I got a taste of how much work is involved, and I must thank the themesters for putting in the effort to make our Cakewalk experience so much more fun and pleasing to the eye.

20 hours ago, Cactus Music said:

real keyboard players

The thing that baffles me is what happens between steps 1 and 4. 😂

Am I just kidding myself about the results of step 1? Is it performance anxiety?

8 hours ago, Cactus Music said:

it was because of my attempts at recording my Roland GR 50 to make bass parts. It also comes in handy with my Yamaha DTX drums as the hi hat pedal is glitchy

For me, it's more like:

1. Practice keyboard part until I flow like Liberace sans candelabra

2.  Arm MIDI track

3. Press R

4. Stagger around on keys like a sedated kitten for 3 or 4 takes until I realize it's not going to get any better

5. Quantize

17 hours ago, Larry Jones said:

Long way around in describing this, but it was a good read, so you're forgiven.

Thanks. I was having fun, and in good humour, having found a way out.

And thanks to Mark and Craig for the reminders of how many ways there are to hammer MIDI problems in this program.

4 hours ago, Noel Borthwick said:

I pulled the 15 second mixdown ad injection feature that I was working on for the next update as well 🤣

That would have at least answered the (seemingly) eternal question "how are they supposed to make money from it?"

Clever idea, though, if one were nefarious. Render time is otherwise time when the program is just kind of sitting there. If you strobed some subliminal ads for SSD's, RAM, Wave plug-ins....hey, waitaminit!

17 hours ago, Larry Jones said:

Meeting women is the whole reason I got into music in the first place.🙃 Thanks, Bandlab!

If this is a precursor to adding this feature to the program itself, I am so in, so to speak.

18 hours ago, Ernie Tamminga said:

Do I have to explicitly CREATE/INSERT a Master Bus?

Not if you start your project with one of the many handy templates in the Start Screen.

You do when starting a project completely blank, but that is what I call doing it the hard way. If you're new to Cakewalk, don't do it the hard way. Even (especially) if you're not, don't do it the hard way.

As far as Buses being visible in the Track View, you have to click on the little arrow down at the bottom of the Track Headers.

1 hour ago, msmcleod said:

Defraggler is clever enough not to bother trying on an SSD

When pointed at an SSD, Defraggler has an option called "Optimize." It will warn if you attempt a conventional defrag on an SSD that it won't do much good and will only wear it out faster.

I don't know what "Optimize" does.

I'm overdue for updating my CM cornucopia. It really is astonishing what you get in the way of plug-ins for a $5 copy of that magazine.

In itself it has enough editorial content that I can't realistically finish it in a month.

I bought my copy years ago and some of the plugs are still in my go-to bin, a couple of them got me to shell out for the big brother version (most notably Unfiltered Audio G8), some of them turned me on to the manufacturers, and others aren't available anywhere else.

It's a cheapskate's paradise, it is.

7 hours ago, Matt R said:

The flaws in my setup up are:

1) I'm using a laptop (first and last time I'm wasting money on one of those)

2) It's only an i5 (I thought battery life was a valid concern but I only ever use it plugged into the wall so oops)

3) The sound card (Realtek) is just a chip on the motherboard (i.e. a toy)

4) You're using obsolete, unsupported software

Seriously, just go get Cakewalk. It's better in every way, and you can still use all of the premium stuff that came with your Platinum suite.

Then go to www.piriform.com  and download Speccy. Run it so that you can tell us how much RAM you have, whether your disk is an SSD, a 5700, 7200, what speed and generation that i5 is, etc.

Just to let you know, I have a fairly ancient Dell Inspiron i5 notebook that ran Cakewalk like a champ with 4GB of RAM, since upgraded to 8GB. 7200RPM HD, soon to be upgraded to an SSD just because I can get one for $30.

That Realtek chip is not "just a toy." It's rudimentary, but I've gotten some good work done with it. It's fine for mixing and monitoring, and if I connect a mixer to the input, I get decent captures. I have a Midiman UNO, and the system is a nice little porta-rig. It hasn't choked on anything that I've started on the main i7 system.

Make sure to defrag. Piriform has a nice defragger, too, called Defraggler.

Download the FREE versions of these utilities.

I've disabled AdBlock on this site just to see if I saw any of these ads, and nope, nada.

Amusing given my diligence about disabling the Windows 10 firewall and Windows Defender realtime scanning.

Success! Thank you, Mark.

It got all of them but one that has a duration of 0 and a velocity of 80. I can pick it off manually.

For future encounters, I think it will do exactly what I want if it just looks for (== Note.Dur 0), but I have no reference for CAL of course, and I don't want to take chances with a script that deletes notes.😊

Does that pair of ampersands in "(&& (== Note.Vel 0) (== Note.Dur 0))" mean that both of those have to be true in order to execute "(delete)"?

I notice in the other scripts that there are a lot of doubled-up ampersands, but I can't quite figure out what they do.

Thank you Mark.

Now I just need to figure out what to do with that elegant bit of code!

I've yet to run a CAL script. This will be my first. Good opportunity.

I went and did it again.

Every so often, not often enough it seems, for me to remember how to get myself out of it, I create a MIDI Black Hole. A spot in the Piano Roll from which no sound can ever emanate.

There's a note on the grid in the correct place, I can right click on it to get its properties and there's nothing about it that indicates anything weird. I can delete it and re-enter it and still, no sound. I delete the previous note to make sure it's not the note-off screwing things up. If I nudge the note a little late it will happily sound, but then it will sound too late.

It's a cursed spot on the Piano Roll, a place of no velocity, no note value, no sound, just silence. It sucks sound in and none comes out.

But aha! This time I think to look in the Event List, and yes! It shows that in addition to the note I have entered, there is also a Zero Zero at that same start time, appearing right before it in the list. Apparently in the MIDI spec, in the event of such a collision, it's like a 4-way stop, the first note there wins.

So I zoom and I zoom and sure enough, eventually there's a little speck visible at the leading edge of my non-playing note. I delete this and all is normal and no more MIDI Black Hole on my Piano Roll.

I post the above for the amusement and education of anyone who has suffered from the same phenomenon or may in the future.

Also: combing zero-length (and/or zero velocity) notes out of a project seems like a useful task for a CAL script. Does anyone know of such a script or where I might look for one?

Or maybe there's already an easier way to ferret them out than by poring over the Event List, then zooming in and zapping them?

Okay, sorry, it happened again, I misunderstood. I fully agree that using lanes that way is logical when we're talking multi-timbral instruments or the same instrument playing different parts. What I was referring to was an audio track with multiple takes.

That's why I asked "MIDI or audio."

The way I do it is with a single instrument track with multiple MIDI tracks feeding it, but I haven't gotten as far as trying crossfades with that method.

Where I trip up when discussing Lanes with people is that they work differently, but more importantly, as in your case, the goals can be different, when the medium is MIDI rather than audio.

When you said "record," I assumed audio, but of course one records MIDI as well.

How does the Trackman Marble play with the ZX81?🤣

I have a ZX81 down in the basement, my first computer, built from a kit.

Here's my review of The Fantastic Music Machine for InfoWorld, December 19, 1983.

Guess I go back 36 years with computer music software. Hadn't thought of it that way.

On 3/3/2019 at 1:37 AM, Johnbee58 said:

"Amish rake fight".  I like that!🤣

It's a vivid image, isn't it? Hats falling off, white shirts getting muddied....

A couple of people from a tightly-knit supportive nonviolent community coming to blows over a common task. I think it describes forum flareups pretty well.

"Jebediah and Ezekiel are at it again out by the silo! Someone take the scriptures out there and talk some sense into them!"

Regarding Bark of Dog, you can still download Bark of Dog I from Boz' site, and the installer will install the ProChannel module.

Mark, was this streaming from a rust drive?

12 hours ago, mettelus said:

FWIW, Jim built Noel a machine a few years back

That is worth a great deal, as it means that the actual code that makes up Cakewalk was probably written or at least tested and debugged on that system.

Those of us who roll our own tend to be people who are okay with the possibility of spending hours on getting all the components optimized and working together correctly. To me, it's actually part of the fun, believe it or not. All of my computers are ones that my former Silicon Valley cronies have given me for free as hand-me-downs. They were being tossed out or sold for peanuts at work because some bigwig wanted the latest impressive thing or they stopped booting properly and were deemed to old to bother with fixing. So hey, free i7 system for me! Free i5 notebook, free Core 2 Quad as secondary shop system. Others I give away.

I've put faster processors in them, Firewire cards where need be, upgraded them to Windows 10, SSD's, etc. Sometimes I've spent entire days reinstalling the OS, one OS upgrade kinda hosed my Cakewalk setup, but fixing all this taught me a lot more about Windows 10 and Cakewalk.

In the PC world, there's a reason people are willing to pay a premium to buy prepackaged systems from Apple, Dell, HP, Acer, whomever. It's because the integration of all the components has already been taken care of. They ensure that everything works together.

Jim and others like him do the same thing, but aimed toward a specialized use.

The cutting edge fast systems from the biggies tend to be aimed at gamers. Their other ones are aimed at long term stability at the expense of speed and upgradeability and versatility. My Dell's BIOS won't let me overclock the CPU or drop in a faster chip. It was made to run Office really well and make Skype calls and watch Netflix and then be handed down to do homework on. The idea of rendering multimedia files never entered into it.

I put a faster graphics card in it, set the processor to never spin down, a Firewire card, all this stuff. If I don't bend the case cover a little, it'll rattle from the fans being on all the time and you'll hear it in my vocal takes. But it was free and it runs Cakewalk and Vegas like a bat out of hell. It's a little like a Millennium Falcon to me.

If you want a quiet, reliable, fast DAW computer, get one from Jim or another audio-oriented integrator. Jim is well-vetted by Cakewalk users.

Okay, I think I see. It looks like you've maybe sometimes been using Take Lanes to record different elements that you want to hear simultaneously.

If you're working with different musical elements that you want to have playing at the same time, that's not really what lanes are for. Lanes are where different takes (or versions) of the same thing go so that you can cut and stitch them all together to make one finished track.

For instance, I have a Snare track, and I could have 3 Take Lanes, all with clips of stuff I'm stitching together to make my eventual Snare track. Those clips in my case have the recorded audio of my own drum performances, and in the future if I start working with this stuff they could also be audio loops or samples. But I don't have things in there that aren't the snare track, I don't put in synth stuff or hi hat or whatever. Those belong in other Tracks of their own.

If you want to work with several different things that are playing at once, take your clips and drag them to their own new Tracks. That's the paradigm difference. Lanes are a workspace where you have the elements of whatever is going to make up a finished Track (in the form of Clips). Once that track (and the other tracks in the project) is assembled, you proceed to the mixing process.

Used as intended, there's rarely a time when you'd want to hear overlapping sounds in Take Lanes.* That's why the Comp Tool automatically mutes the other lanes. It's because in normal use, you'd not want to be hearing them. It's set up so that the clip that you're working with is the one that plays, and if you want to hear the stuff in the other lanes, it's probably time to give them their own tracks.

While tracking, you might record two takes of rhythm guitar or lead vocal that sound great and want to use both in the final track, but in order to do that, the practice is that once you've decided on it, to take one of the clips and move it to its own track. That way, everything can be panned, have its level adjusted, etc.

*As a mixing engineer, I sometimes,as a joke, will unmute all 12 take lanes of the lead vocal and then Solo the track so that it sounds like Satan's Barbershop Quartet, but then I'm kind of odd. Normal people don't act like that.

Whatever happened to the comedy genius that was @Steev?

Amidst all his SOUND AND FURY he had some good information, caused me to update my information on the price:performance ratio of AMD processors for audio and video work.

That's my one tidbit: yes, an 8th generation i7 processor will haul your donkey around, but don't neglect the AMD Ryzen stuff.

John and John, c'mon, no need to get into an Amish rakefight over how people answer some dude's questions about an old soundcard and old version of Sonar.

Viewed from the window of a space liner returning from a 3-year visit to Mars, does it seem significant whether some guy with a joke handle like "Starship Krupa" takes this guy's efforts seriously?

And what, pray tell, would someone stand to gain by pretending to have an issue with Sonar X3e on a computer that has an Audigy card? To go to all the trouble of registering a new Bandlab account and then coming up with a fake .INI file and all that?

I already tossed my best advice: lose both the antique shoot-em-up card and Ye Olde Sonare X3e.

One BIG thing: an old PCI card like that could possibly be affecting things on the bus, so when I said "pull it," I meant physically remove it from its slot and enable the onboard sound device. Don't just leave it in and then keep trying other things. If you're testing another interface, you don't need the card in there anyway, so simplify things as much as possible.

If you mean the Q&A subforum, no, it doesn't seem to be very active.

Please give some more context.

When you do this, have you recorded multiple audio takes, or multiple MIDI takes, or assembled an arrangement from loops, or what?

Do you have clips in groups?

My understanding of the way the Comping tool is supposed to work in this mode is that whatever you've selected with it becomes unmuted and everything else gets muted. So it should be a matter of deselecting whatever clip(s) you accidentally selected.

I just tried it a bit and the selections seem to respond to Ctrl+Z, so give that a try.