Starship Krupa

Happy to hear about BandLab's robust presence as well as Anaheim Convention Center's adding a new wing. The last time I attended a NAMM Show, participation was falling off due to the rise of the www as a primary means of product introduction. I was hoping that would be a temporary glitch and that participants would see that there are enough other benefits to appearing in the industry's largest trade show.

Welcome! As mentioned, this topic has been discussed ad absurdum in the old forum. If you can work out how Google can give away their Chrome browser for free, Google Drive for free, Google Voice for free, GMail for free, all they give away for free, and yet become one of the richest corporations in the world, then you'll have solved the puzzle.

Now that I've delved more deeply into performance settings in Cakewalk and Windows 10, your #2 question puzzles me as well, not only for that, but for a couple of other settings as well. There are buffer settings that would seem to have very little "cost" in terms of memory that result in smoother performance. Memory was once a rarer commodity so I suspect that some default settings might need to be updated. When I saw the option for plug-in load balancing, I found it difficult to envision a condition where I wouldn't want that enabled. A few ExtraPlugInBufs seemed to make my system breathe easier. One big thing to consider that I see people failing to ask a lot of time in these discussions is what type of recording you are doing, audio or soft synth? That really affects resource usage. You can get a rough idea of how Cakewalk is using cores on your current system by using Task Manager and Resource Monitor. Right click on your "start menu" button and run Task Manager, then click on the Performance tab, then down at the bottom, click on Resource Monitor, and it will launch a tool that will show you how busy each of your cores are. Click on the CPU tab.

I couldn't tell from the screencap if it was part of a group, but if it's part of a group, and the group is selected, you won't get the Rename command in the context menu.

Yea, lest doom prevail. Is that not the way with all processors of signal, good Sir John? Even the Fader of Level and the Pot of Pan hold danger for those who wield them unwisely! It may have gotten buried in there, but my point, as a user of Ozone and admirer of iZotope's technology was that "Ozone" is a suite of well-integrated tools with a bunch of presets and a couple of wizards. It's not a magic wand, there's no knob for "more Ozone" and "less Ozone," nor is it a Pandora's Box of horrors that can somehow irreparably ruin an otherwise perfect mix Surely a determined fool could do as much harm to a mix armed with no more than ProChannel modules and the Boost11? I was ruining mixes long before I got a license for Ozone, I can tell you that. Pull them faders down! In my lowly version of Ozone, Elements, all I get is the limiter, the spatializer, and the EQ. My guess is that it's their Maximizer (the limiter) that is the cause for concern and calls for restraint. Indeed, that's the element that I find myself tuning most of all, as it's most critical. When I have run the Mastering Assistant, I usually liked its suggestions for the EQ (I've run it and had it come out almost flat, haw yeah), but I like to putz with the Maximizer and the Imager. The wizard never adds any Imager. Maximizer has some settings that I like to tune that deal with transient handling and stereo independence as well as our friend loudness. I've found that it's not too outrageous about loudness though. Maybe earlier versions got a bad rap (no pun). Those who fear the Ozone may be pleased/surprised/unsurprised to know that 8 Standard and Advanced come with a module that I would love to have that's dedicated to referencing your mix against other tracks. Typical of iZotope's stuff, it's got a next-level outside the box idea or two. https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/products/ozone/track-referencing-in-ozone-8-what-it-is-and-how-to-use-it.html

Oh noooooo! Actually, Larry is the mouse hole aggregator. Good reminder to keep an eye on him. It'll be around when it's around. And when it is, He Who Seems To Never Sleep will no doubt be on it. I take this as a good sign. If they're loss-leadering it at B&H, then their loss-leader program must be paying off for them, and they'll be keeping it up. The challenge is getting to be finding $1-$5 things to buy at Pluginboutique. I already own most of the Soundspot FX (much of which is actually pretty useful stuff, nice GUI's) and have multiple licenses for Hybrid 3 and Vacuum Pro.

Thanks. Archiving. Time for me to hit the manual. I've seen archiving referred to. That's the thing I do with takes that I want to keep around in the project for comping, but have no immediate use for....got it.

This is why I love forums. I didn't even know Cakewalk could Zoom at Cursor. I also didn't know about being able to zoom with the mouse wheel. So handy! Now, because of Chris grousing about a bug, I will be zipping around at twice the speed. I didn't know about the option because of one of my grouses, which is that settings and options and preferences are spread out all over the place, and I have not been able, after 9 months of using the program, been able to find anywhere in the documentation that lists all the options in one place. Mouse wheel action is kind of sad around here because I prefer a Trackman Marble for pointing, but there are so many cool things that one can do with a wheel that I've sidelined my beloved Marble until I can sort out the issue of being able to use the ball as a wheel. Some clever lad has come up with a utility that allows one to hold one of the small buttons and wheel with the ball, but I haven't set it up yet.

First let me say that this is absolutely correct, your mastering efforts, nay, ALL your efforts are doomed. As a matter of fact, his efforts, my efforts, and the efforts of everyone reading this are doomed. These words mock us much like the twin trunkless legs of Ozymandias, standing 30' tall in the desert, the lone and level sands stretching far and wide with nothing else around but these words on a pedestal beneath, "Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!" But Ozymandias of Egypt did not have a copy of RoomEQWizard 5.0. Nor a copy of Ozone 8 Advanced, which you apparently do, if you're discussing CODEC Preview, you lucky dog. Merry Xmas indeed. I only have Ozone Elements 8, and I kind of hate it in a way, because I had just gotten to the point where I was really liking the way my masters sounded, with all my plug-ins tuned just right, and then Pluginboutique put it on sale for something in the neighborhood of $30 and I couldn't resist. And I tried it on a song that I had just gone back and applied my newly-acquired mastering wisdom to, slapped it right on the Master bus and started going through the preset collection and was like....oh no. This thing. Oh no. And I decided to try their wizard, whatever it's called, that analyzes a bit of your song and twiddles the knobs a pops out a suggestion, and I think I did a literal🤦‍♀️. Because a lot of them sounded really good, like as good or better than what had taken me months of struggling and sounding like refried poo and being discouraged and thinking that I was never going to "get" this whole mixing thing (especially figuring out how to set up a compressor). And just as I had crested the hill and was feeling confident, along comes this Lite version of a mastering suite that's somewhat derided for having autopilot features anyway, and lo and behold, it does, and they work. Of course, I've made my peace, the settings it suggests are that, suggestions, and I always have to adjust them, and it's never the only thing in my mastering chain, and I can master just fine without it, thanks. I treat it as a collection of very nice-sounding plug-ins with some very nice presets and good-looking UI's. It's also great for "quickie mixes" for when I've just recorded a jam with friends and everyone wants to hear a playback and I have the length of one joint on the porch to make a rough mix. To get to your issue: I think what you're asking is how to properly use Ozone Advanced as a mastering suite in conjunction with Cakewalk? Specifically where to apply the dithering. Ozone's has some cool dithering algorithms and you want to try theirs when doing your MP3 and AAC and FLAC renders. Dithering is just this fancy noise that is added to your audio so that the conversion from 24 to 16 doesn't leave weird sounds in it. It only matters during that conversion process. If we were recording at 44.1/24 and rendering to the same, no dithering need to apply. But since MP3's and CD's are 16-bit, we must dither about. Since Advanced comes in both standalone and plug-in forms, you don't have to do it the way you did, doing all your mixing in Cakewalk, then exporting a WAV file, importing it back into Cakewalk with Ozone on the Master bus and exporting it again. You have a couple of choices. 1. You may export your original mix as a WAV from Cakewalk, then load it into the standalone Ozone 8 and do all your mastering work in there, either using only the modules that come with Ozone or including 3rd-party ones, as Ozone 8 Advanced supports that, too. Then you can render to the file formats you want directly from Ozone, using the dithering and CODECS that they supply. So Export from Cakewalk at whatever you Rate/Depth you record, let's say 44,100/24bit. Apply no dithering. Then load that file into the standalone Ozone 8 Advanced and have at it. When seasoned to taste, export away. It is at that point ye shall apply thine dithre. 2. You may do as you said you did earlier and proceed as in 1, except after you export the WAV file, start a new project in Cakewalk, install Ozone as a plug-in on the Master bus of Cakewalk and import the WAV file back in. Once you have something you want to pop out, set Ozone's dithering options, then Export/Audio from Cakewalk's menu, choosing "None" in the dialog for Dithering, because your audio is already going to have the dithering sprinkled on it before it gets to that stage. Then you can extrude the usual file formats you wish right from Cakewalk. About that last: my workflow may be different from others', but when I am finished with mixing and mastering (which I do by myself, of my own material, ITB, which breaks a bunch of rules right there and could earn me a coolerful of Haterade dumped on my head) I export one single file from the mastering program in a lossless format, either WAV or FLAC. That lossless file gets a treatment from MP3Tag, which I use to embed tagging information such as artist, song title, copyright, year, genre, album, etc. I also embed whether the file is a rough mix, because those have a way of "getting into the wild" by being sent to significant others, friends, etc. and the tagging can make that easier to see if it shows up on the player's screen as "Song for Babs-Rough Mix 1." Then for creation of various compressed format distribution files, I use an external program called MediaHuman where I have profiles set up for the various formats I want to distribute. These days I keep it to FLAC and higher-rate AAC. Everybody's phones and players seem to support M4A files and the quality seems best to me of the lossy formats. Usually if someone gives me their stuff in M4A format it's a sign that they are paying a little closer attention. As far as people on forums hatin' on Ozone, they're probably envious. It's a box of really top-notch tools that work well together, and a wizard that you can use if you choose or not, and a bunch of presets like every other processor has, and you are fortunate to have the opportunity to be working with such a suite. I think with Advanced you can even use the FX as individual plug-ins, and I would surely do so if I were able with the Elements Suites I have, which are Ozone and Neutron. The only down side of using them is the latency they introduce during tracking, and they do represent a suite's worth of processor resources. I'm waiting like a cat at a mousehole for Pluginboutique to let loose with a deal on RX Elements. I've learned much from having Ozone Elements around and running the wizard and seeing what it comes up with, seeing if I like it or not, checking the results. Heck, if you apply a preset or run the Assistant and find that the Maximizer squashes your mix too much, nobody forces you to keep the results. Go in and click on it and pull back on the slider and un-squash it, just as you would if you had a buddy who was an Oasis fan who kept trying to get you to brickwall everything. Pitfall avoided.

What happened is that while BandLab does support Cakewalk, apparently "support@cakewalk.com" is a broken email address and therefore not a good way to contact them. Looks like the way to get help from the company is via https://help.cakewalk.com/hc/en-us/requests/new instead of support@cakewalk.com Support@cakewalk.com is referred to several times on BandLab-owned websites as being a valid way to contact support for Cakewalk, so they should either get rid of that or make it a valid means of contact.

I'm still here, and my system has settled down and gotten perkier. I'd say, just offhand, that right now it's almost back to where it was under Windows 7. That was a Windows 7 system that had been tuned and tweaked for years to wring every last cycle and millisecond of performance out of it, so the contrast was going to be stark. The draggy system issue was down to a combination of things. It got me to roll up my sleeves and re-familiarize myself with system monitoring tools that allowed me to find out what was going on, such as certain processes that were flogging my hard drive while Cakewalk was trying to stream audio from it, services that were running that I didn't want, the usual cruft. Windows 10 has a whole bunch of stuff to turn off. XBox things, Game Mode, all these things I learned about. It didn't like my graphics card at first so I was relegated to using the onboard HD4000 instead of my Quadro. My wireless Logitech mouse also chose this time to start getting some kind of interference on its frequency, so I thought for a while that I was having other UI responsiveness problems that turned out to be coincidental. I put the nVidia Quadro FX580 back in and it's currently running both my monitors, and I've got my fingers crossed. The video looks so much better with this thing. I even at one point got Windows 10 to permit me to run one monitor from the nVidia and the other monitor from the HD4000, not that I want to keep it that way. I want to have the dedicated graphics card doing its job. The transport lag issue is still a thing with the Cakewalk. I've been working it, analyzing it with Resource Monitor. I've always had issues with the audio engine being sensitive to moving the Loop Markers around. If I move a Loop Marker around a few times, the engine will fall over. It seems to be related to spikes in disk usage, but I can't see anything odd there, my project disk is a SATA 7200 that's separate from the system drive, so there are not data bottlenecks in the setup. And no, it's not because of my Firepods, I have 3 systems and they all do the same thing. One uses an M-Audio Firewire Audiophile and the other its onboard Realtek. Cakewalk seems to stream audio files even when the Clips and Take Lanes that refer to the audio files are muted (as in currently unused takes and clips), and I'm not sure if that's right. Seems like it should leave them alone. I need to bring it to the devs, who have their attention on the NAMM Show right now.

Good heavens. When did computer users become such nervous nellies? I guess it was the onset of GUI's. This idea that "Microsoft didn't include a big colored button and a Help file to tell me how to do it so it must be a license violation or downright immoral." When I first got a computer, the only way to install things, even run them, even use them, was via a command shell just like the one I used to enable the Group Policy Editor that was already installed on my Windows 10 Home system. Windows 10 Home comes with a feature, and I can turn the feature on or off if I want, even if Microsoft doesn't give me a nice Fisher-Price GUI to do so. There are certain features of Cakewalk that require editing of a raw text file to enable and configure. Having to enable or install features from a command shell happens all the time in other OSes such as Linux. I know of nothing in my Windows 10 Home license that says I mustn't enable Group Policy Editor nor disable realtime Defender scanning. If anyone can cite language that states otherwise, I will stand corrected. Besides, I think people should "walk on the wild side" every once in a while. Back when upholstery had those tags that said "not to be removed under penalty of law," I used to just rip them right off and gleefully toss them in the trash. I got away with it, too. They never caught me. I don't know if there's a statute of limitations on that, and you know what, I don't care. Don't do the crime if you can't do the time, and I'm prepared to pull a stretch for the tag-rippin' I did in my youth. I had my fun.

Professional-looking. Eager to try it out.

At this point I have about zero interest in gaming. I'm not saying that won't ever change, but I guess if it does, I can always save up and buy a swoopamatic 3-D card. One thing that has always befuddled me is how the graphics card companies sell cards of similar specs and architecture as "workstation" cards or "gaming" cards, but the "workstation" version will be 5-10X the price. I guess what I want for my uses, DAW, video, photo editing, and general desktop, is a solid workstation card, and it doesn't need to be anything magic. The HD4000 built into my chipset works fine, but the quality of the graphics is just dire. Blurry. Fuzzy and indistinct compared to the AMD on my other workstation and the nVidia in my notebook. I'll give the Quadro FX 580 another chance before I buy another card. Now that TELEMETRY!!!! has had a chance to work its mysterious magic, maybe it will work, who knows. It was an optional upgrade to the Optiplex when it was new, so it should be compatible with the hardware. It worked a treat under Windows 7, I even had one monitor plugged into the HD4000 and the other into the Quadro at one point just to see if it would work, and it did.

As far as preamps go, I'm kinda surprised to see all this weenie waggin' over built-in ones. I thought that the "common wisdom" was that you never track anything critical with just the interface's built-in preamps. If you don't stick a Manley or a boutique clone of a Neve strip or something in front of it you might as well not even bother, right? Something with tubes, a transformer, preferably both? Of course, that's also "common wisdom" about stock plug-ins, and Cakewalk comes with such good-sounding ones that I can't resist using them! I do hope to one day build a nice mic preamp for tracking vocals. I assembled one for a client from a kit and the thing sounded amazing. Transformer and JFETs.

One would think so, I know, I know. And go ahead and write me off as an audiophool for what I'm about to claim, or say that it's placebo effect, BUT. I was setting up VLC Player on this plastic RCA tablet I got at Wal-Mart for $40 that has one built-in speaker for playback, and fiddling around with the deep settings and found this one that said OpenSL ES, and I don't even know what that means. But I selected it, and restarted the playback, and the difference in what came out of this ridiculous recycled cigarette pack wrapper cone 1.5" speaker, not to mention what has to be a pretty nasty DAC wasn't even subtle. Clearer, better transients, more intelligible, rounder and tighter bass.... Speaking of which, I've also been dismayed to notice differences in playback quality between different music players on the danged thing. This is using my cheap bedroom Sony headphones. Best so far is Black Player. All I can figure is that they are just really good at getting those ones and zeroes to the DAC in an orderly fashion without doing anything to them on the way and that the other players I tried are less so. I am a skeptical person and believe me I wish that it were not this way, I would much prefer to have listened and come to the conclusion that all FLAC's played on my $40 RCA tablet into my $20 Sony headphones sounded just the same through any music player, especially that VLC couldn't be topped. Long way to get there, but my point was that the "bottleneck" idea doesn't apply to audio. A well-played, well-recorded, well-mixed, and well-mastered record is still going to sound better through the tin(n)iest little speaker. The Beatles took over the world 55 years ago making records that sounded great through really crappy reproduction equipment. Japanese transistor radios, when Japan's manufacturing quality was, in general, worse than China's is today. "Nights in White Satin" blew me away on my friend's clock radio in 1972 hearing those soaring strings and wailing backing chorus. This all came across on a single nasty 3" speaker in a plastic enclosure that also contained an electric clock mechanism. I know that the fact that the Moodies' recording was so good to begin with made a difference, even down to using great tube mics to capture the vocals.

Josephine Blowsephine is happy editing video with Vaguest 7, which runs just fine on her system. Tragix offers her a free upgrade to Vaguest 10, telling her that it will run just as well on her system, but be more secure and have more features, and besides, they are ending support for Vaguest 7. Josephine says what the heck and downloads the patch that will upgrade her system to Vaguest 10 and fires it up with some anticipation. Only she finds that it doesn't run just as well on her system, it's incompatible with one of her video cards and weirdest of all, her housemate and kids start complaining that Netflix and Amazon Prime aren't streaming very well, although her flat has Gigabit fiber. Josephine hits Google and finds out that Vaguest 10 has a feature where if it finds a fast enough Internet connection, it will go out and attempt to form a processing farm with other Vaguest 10 systems to share rendering duties. She also finds out that Vaguest Pro 10 has an extra admin control panel that allows the user to disable this feature, while plain Vaguest 10 does not. She also finds a procedure that will allow her to enable the extra admin control panel on the plain Vaguest 10 edition. She performs the procedure, enables the control panel and uses it to turn off the new, unwanted feature that is messing up her system and preventing her from getting full enjoyment and use from the software. Should she feel "relieved," "3733t3," "legit," or "2legit2quit?" Or is it better if she works on being less concerned with how she should feel and just feels?

12-sided Dude! Now we're talkin! I didn't know that Pricewatch was still around. Party like it's 1999. Buying graphics cards for my trailing-edge systems has been my achilles heel. It's always about "will it play Halo?" I, too am a Vegas baby, still light up my copy of 10 Pro from time to time, so if you say that this pup works a treat with Emily's Optiplex and Vegas and Cakewalk....this info is GOLD. My main system is an Optiplex 7010. It has a Gen 2 Pci-e slot for a video card. I need to drive a monitor with a DVI port and a Display Port and another monitor with an HDMI port, so the card you showed me would work with my Display Port to HDMI adaptor. I lean toward nVidia cards rather than AMD because of past troubles with Mixcraft and general lore in the DAW world. However, if you have empirical first-hand knowledge, that counts for a great deal with me.

Craig, what are your thoughts on group delay? I recently had an experience where I replaced my Alesis RA-100 with a vintage Crown D60 that a client had given me in trade as credit on an amp repair. The Crown came out of the production studio at a radio station and wasn't working when I got it, the 2N2055's in the output, which you're supposed to buy in matched pairs from Crown, had been replaced heaven knows how many times with whatever was in Radio Shack's parts bins, and I put in a new volume pot that didn't seem to have the same taper as its mate on the other channel. I didn't have high hopes for it, but it looked really cool, and I figured what difference is a workhorse solid state power amp going to make anyway. The only issue might have been the lower rated wattage of the Crown. I turned it on and played my favorite test song through it, Radiohead's "Everything in its Right Place," and was floored. I immediately hollered for my housemate, also an audio repair guy, and he listened, was also blown away, and we took a closer look at the service manual for the Crown. It had a description of the design theory, and it included the fact that they had paid special attention to minimizing phase shifts and group delay issues. I've not studied the schematic for the RA-100. For all I know it could have a couple of chip amps in it. Given Alesis' reputation and philosophy of delivering value for the money, it probably does.

Drag. Maybe "j" will take pity and give you a refund on the license? Or credit it toward https://jstuff.wordpress.com/cmah/? Are there still new DAW's that don't come with 32-64-bit VST wrappers? I got in the habit of avoiding 32-bit plug-ins unless absolutely necessary because Mixcraft's wrapper incurs a lot of overhead. There are some, though, that are irreplaceable. Mostly in the VSTi category. What was a bummer was that one of the most popular tool for small plug-in developers, Synthedit, would only build 32-bit plug-ins, so I would see some free or low-cost plug-in announced at KVR only to discover that the neato cassette tape harpsichord or whatever was built with Synthedit and therefore 32-bit.

'cab, the PDF is out of date in that it doesn't include the last 8 months' features, right? I'm trying to think of anything that works differently. Double-clicking a MIDI clip now opens the inspector by default, that's all I can think of. Something that I find odd is that the online documentation still tells how to enable offline help, down at the bottom of every page, even though it doesn't work, at least on my systems.

I haven't yet, but I did hit the button that turns off all the effects. What I am doing is systematically deleting those lanes and watching what happens with the response and with the Resource Monitor action. As I say, still working on it. Thanks for the idea on freezing, I'll have to go back to an early version of the project and give that a try. It would be interesting to see what happens. If the problem really is that it's dragging around too many unused takes, if freezing affects it. Geoff is a take-a-holic, that's for sure. I have sat him down at the kit and gone back into my shop to work on amps and he's bashed away, I go back in and there are 25 takes of drums piled up, and he wants to keep them all "for comping." That's 100 lanes! Good thing I only use 4 mics! But people like that are great for testing the limits. I'm forever asking him "can I delete these??" It was a real hoot with Mixcraft, which doesn't have collapsible lanes.

Anyone here ever checked this site out? Sample rate conversion analysis Our favorite DAW looks pretty good. I dutifully ran all their tests and submitted the results from Mixcraft 7 some time ago but they never put them up. I will say this about sample rates and conversions and all that: just as a rule, I believe that the fewer operations performed on the material the better. This isn't yet one of those debates about "whether humans can hear the difference," but it is my belief that in the decades to come, research will reveal that there is a lot more information that we are able to take in via the sense of hearing than previously understood. Specifically that there are other kinds of perception than just frequency and amplitude. I am a huge skeptic when it comes to audiophool stuff, yet I have been moved to tears by hearing the difference between two audio sources that "experts" would say I shouldn't be able to tell the difference between. I also suspect that not everyone has the ability to hear at the same level. This would make evolutionary sense, as the ability to hear with greater acuity, especially directional and higher pitched sounds, and respond to them quickly, would be a trait that would make for a higher survival rate in environments with certain types of predators and prey. When I listen to MP3's at lower conversion rates, they sound like they "have the corners rounded off" "smeared transients," and my hearing, at age 57, after playing in punk bands.... How Sir George Martin could still make good mixing decisions well into his '80's, even though his hearing had to have been pretty shot....I can pick tiny little metallic "tings" out of a dense mix where a piece of drum hardware hit another piece, and go in and solo tracks until sure enough, there it is. I'm sure you all can, too. There's phase distortion, and a thing that I never hear discussed, group delay. There's more going on than we're measuring for today. More than we're able to measure for. It will be exciting to see, if we learn about it in my lifetime.

Steev, you should have your own subforum on here! You da MAN!!! Nobody's gonna stop that Microsoft telemetry!! The weenie wagging in this thread has been ferocious and hilarious. I've lost track of which audio interfaces are supposed to be the best and which way we're supposed to connect them and everything, but it's awesome. I'm gonna plug my Hocus Pocus by Focus Rite in to my PCIe USB3 Thunderbolt and Lighting very very frightning Galileo PC Manic Depressive fiber optic Window Pro Insider Telemetric Eccentric Octopreamp and then go into the mountains and meditate for a year while my computer stabilizes itself, and then after that my latency is gonna be so low that I won't be able to software monitor because the damn cans will be playing what I'm about to play before I even play it! I'll have NEGATIVE LATENCY!!!! It confirms my belief that I made the right decision when I bought a pair of Presonus interfaces that were already obsolete when I got them from a guy on Craig's List a couple of years ago. He dropped one of them when he was pulling them out of his storage container, so I got him to knock $20 off the price. It worked when I got it home though. They connect via Firewire 400. I use the built-in preamps. When I was running Windows 7 I could get them to go down to 2ms without going "brrrrrt." Mostly they stayed at 4ms. My system has settled down since I first pulled an older nVidia GPU that I suspect of having drivers that were too old for Windows 10, and second, turning off Defender's realtime scanning. I want to find an inexpensive replacement for the nVidia, because now the graphics look like poo. Unfortunately, graphics cards are all about 3-D performance and pay no mind to 2-D performance, which is what I am most interested in. I figure the humblest $30 card should be fine for my aging Optiplex, but I don't know what to get. As for Cakewalk I've been studying that Play lag thing in greater depth with the help of Resource Monitor. It may have something to do with my settings when I'm tracking projects with many takes like my friend Geoff was doing when he was here over the holidays. I don't want to go into great detail just yet, but this one project of his wound up with 12 tracks. However, each of those 12 tracks had as many as 10 takes that were still sitting there with their lanes muted, clips muted, whatever, in case he changed his mind about comping. When we hit the spacebar to start the transport, Cakewalk (I could see this via Resource Monitor) started streaming audio files that were only in muted lanes and clips. I'm not sure it's supposed to do that. Either that or I'm not sure that Geoff was managing his unused takes correctly. I'm still experimenting with different settings and observing the effect on performance. I will report my findings to the forum when they are more fully found.

I am also interested to see the current state of the Harmony guitar and amp lines, Teisco effects, etc. There's enough more meat on Cakewalk's bones since it was known as Sonar to earn it cover stories on the applicable magazines, and I bet there's enough interest, people want to know how it's working out under the new ownership. Hoping there will be at least a few major articles. I'm rooting for Computer Music, 'cause I like all the free stuff you get when you buy a copy.😊