Starship Krupa

22 minutes ago, Jim Roseberry said:

I'm old, but I loath Cloud Storage for anything but small files.

I'm assuming you mean the deal where you have a folder on one or more systems that is automatically backed up to the cloud? Like Dropbox?

I was into it for a while around the time Dropbox first came out with it, thought it was cool that my files were showing up on all my different systems, but these days I find myself turning off the local sync part of the services and just using them on an ad hoc basis, where I drag and drop files to the server, and then if I want them, I download them. Having a folder on all these different computers that stays in sync seems kind of meh.

I like the Google Docs way of doing it where the app itself is browser based and if I want to work on it, I can do so from any computer that can access the site. This works well in situations like mine where I have multiple computers at home, for basic office suite type apps. I haven't messed with it much, but I guess BandLab's DAW is like this too.

Where the cloud storage services shine for me these days is for collaboration. Throwing rough mixes or stems up on MEGA or Box or Google Drive for transfer is great. If BandLab wind up positioning themselves as the go-to site for musicians who want to collaborate, I think that would be a good place to be.

3 hours ago, Steev said:

For instance, did you know that until you until you specifically configure your Microsoft Account and One Drive to stop receiving Boot records and drive images your whole desktop config is being backed up in your cloud storage? That alone is an enormous sized background operation going on.

 And every system change and tweak you make "Hits the RESET" button for uploading the brand new Boot Records to your personal free cloud storage, which you may want to go and delete large files you no longer need and clean it out because you only get a few Gigs of free storage.

 I have a very strong feeling you are going to find your buddies Cakewalk project there, even if he did specifically choose to have it sent to his Avid iCloud account which if he's a Pro Tool user, I'd be willing to bet he did...……. And I'm not even a gambling man. I'm a Pro Tools user and that's exactly what I would do, because it would be stupid not to, because it's actually the best way to import .wav file from Cakewalk to Pro Tools.. Thumb drives?????? We don't need no stinck'in thumb drives... 😍🤩DaShitBeOnAutoPilotBrov.

I didn't know that, but I have all of my Windows systems set to log in with local accounts, not Microsoft accounts, and I turn off OneDrive, so it's probably not been happening.

I either do it manually or have command line scripts that I run before DAW sessions that shut down all of my cloud storage services (along with crap like iPod Service and iTunes Helper and Adobe Updater and all that) before I start DAW sessions, so again, no Avid iCloud upload. I export his stems and put them in a folder on Google Drive and he imports them into Pro Tools. I guess to you his way of doing it is "stupid," but it gets the job done. Also, we use FLAC, not WAV, for faster file transfer.

2 hours ago, Steev said:

DUUUUUUUUUUUUUDE! Windows 10 ships with what you consider to be malware???????????????? Come on bro,,,,,,,,,,,, now that's just to far way over the line of conspiracy theories..

😍🤩 I would highly recommend you sign up and becoming a member of the Windows Insider Program and learn how Microsoft uses and what telemetry actually is. Windows Defender doesn't do anything any other virus protection doesn't do, and one of the reasons you can't refuse Windows updates is because that's where you get updated virus definitions as well as coordinated patches and fixes.

 

Dudicle, duderino, dudecahedron, I said nothing about telemetry or conspiracies or any of that.

I agree that Windows Offender acts like most other virus protection rackets except that without special knowledge, you're not allowed to turn it off.

My tongue is somewhat in my cheek, but I consider a program that runs on my system without my permission that I can't disable and that slows everything down, nervously scanning my sample libraries while my DAW loads them to make sure that they don't contain viruses, to be malware. It impedes the usefulness of my computer while doing nothing useful whatsoever. Nothing useful for me, anyway. I'm sure that it was The Answer for people who can't handle downloading and configuring AVG Free and Malwarebytes.

2 hours ago, Steev said:

Microsoft is actually trying their best to "help" the average users by automatically fixing problems the average user simply doesn't understand or doesn't even know exist.

And there you have it right in a nutshell. They finally caved to the "average user's" inability not to click on every piece of crap that someone forwards to their inbox.

My protection against viruses and trojans and hijacks and ransomware since I first started using computers has always revolved around "being smart about not running things that stand a chance of infecting my system." I don't click on random things that people send me via email, I scan things I download on an ad hoc basis, and I schedule system scans to run when I'm asleep. The last never finds anything wrong.

I don't like being forced to run a program that inflicts needless loads on my CPU and disk access just because other people lack computer smarts. It's fine, there's still a way to turn it off if you know what to do.

Thank you, gentlemen! Come on baby, let's heal the splits....

Not sure what the logic is behind it, with my workflow it has resulted in automatically comped tracks containing my first take up to a string of flubs! That is until I sort everything out.

I do think the documentation page could be clearer on what the user will get with the various options selected, and which ones should be selected for various workflow styles. Obviously, not everyone works and thinks in the same way.

It might benefit me to work more like Grem and break my songs down into smaller pieces rather than try for full length takes. It's probably just that I started with cassette 4-tracks 30 years ago and am only now learning other ways. I think of a song as something that I play all the way through, and isn't it nice that we have so much better ways of chopping up different takes and stitching them together.

It doesn't occur to me to record the verse part as many times as I need to until I get the take that does it for me, then the bridge 10 times until I nail it, then the chorus, etc. and comp all the best takes together. But there's no reason it shouldn't.

After this long discussion and my own ongoing testing of different modes and options, I'm curious as to who uses Overwrite mode, and what their workflow is. My own experience with it was sort of like the ending to Avengers: Infinity Wars.

You can only become an EMT of recording once you've learned the lexicon.

I'm also looking forward to the influx of new users with new issues that the wise oldtimers can help whoop.

4 hours ago, Dreamer said:

Do I have to use that online BandBlah thing?

No.

I must admit to surprise that with access to the old forum and its many posts explaining it, there are still some who don't understand that Cakewalk is a standalone program, just as Sonar always was.

Sonar had integration with various online platforms, Cakewalk by BandLab added integration with BandLab. You may use these features or not.

The features for using it with BandLab are, not surprisingly, becoming richer.

Just as with Sonar of old, there is a small app that downloads and activates the software. Since you already have a BandLab account, all you need to do is download and install the app from the BandLab site and it can download and install Cakewalk.

It works great. Better than Sonar. Enjoy!

BTW, mdiemer, you've mentioned before that you've set CbB up just like 8.5. Have you ever posted the recipe for doing that? If you were so inclined, that might be a great kindness for the people who really love their 8.5 and are apprehensive about upgrading.

With use of Resource Monitor, one can find out many things. I'm keeping it running all the time since the Windows 10 switch.

Of course, when you disable or mute a plug-in, it doesn't completely remove it from the project, because in the mixing process, we want to be able to instantly turn an effect on and off to compare.

The option in Cakewalk to always stream through plug-ins has an effect.

As far as Windows Defender goes, it's no longer an issue. I hit it with the registry setting to turn off realtime protection racket, and it worked, and it did improve disk performance, not only with Cakewalk, but across the board with Windows 10.

To quote Han Solo, "It was a boring conversation anyway."

Just watching the disk activity graphs in Resource Monitor, the difference is stunning. Defender was hitting the system drive constantly. Now I get the thing about the SSD's. You need them to compensate for the realtime protection racket.

There's a bunch of other random nonsense that seems to be going on disk-wise, but Defender was the biggest offender.

Ugh, how's this for nastiness. Windows 10 ships with what I consider to be malware.

The thing I described earlier about using Resource Monitor to see what Cakewalk and other processes are up to?

I tried it on Disk Activity with MsMpEng.exe during a Cakewalk project load, and Windows Defender's realtime protection racket was furiously scanning every plug-in and audio file and synth preset that Cakewalk was loading.  You know, to make sure that my Hybrid 3 synth presets and WAV files haven't been infected with malware.

Which seals the deal, Windows Defender's realtime protection racket is hereby disabled on all of my Windows 10 systems, 'cause that is BS. Microsoft does not get to decide that every file my DAW loads, including my synth presets, sample libraries, and recorded audio, has to run through their malware checking engine before the DAW can use it.

Once again I find that a "virus protection solution" is worse for my computer than the thing it's supposed to be protecting me from. And it's one clever piece of malware, it actually ships as part of the OS itself and can't be disabled without getting into Group Policy Editor or RegEdit.

On 1/10/2019 at 6:54 PM, BRainbow said:

I am beginning to hear the inexorable chants of the Cakewalk masses across the globe, rising steadily and surely in the background, as if unable to bear any longer this long and tragic forum post, urging you to end your long-suffering and valiant but vain attempts to avoid the inevitable.

I hear them calling, I hear them now, louder, louder, louder . . .

 

"CLEAN INSTALL, CLEAN INSTALL, CLEAN INSTALL . . . !"

on into the dark of this cold and moonless night.

Wasn't that a hit for The (English) Beat back in the '80's?

"Now that you've installed it you must deinstall it, then you do a clean install! Clean install, clean install, clean install!"

Before that they had "Mirroring My Hard Drive?"

Thanks, Mark, this is fab.

Is the ProChannel the greatest thing to happen to mixing since the invention of the pan pot or what? No, of course it isn't, but it's still pretty fab.

6 months ago I had a friend come over to track some demos, one of my first new projects started fresh in CbB. We were in a hurry and neglected to rig the proper pop screen and wound up with a few plosives on his vocal tracks. Big Godzilla stomps.

Since I was so enamoured of the ProChannel and the QuadCurve, I rolled up my sleeves to see what I could come up with and found out just how many of its parameters could be automated, which was basically ALL of them, like if you decide you want to turn the "Gloss" off for one phrase, you can automate that.

I wound up killing the plosives rather handily by automating the frequency of the HP to jump up right when they occurred.

When I selected my "Erik's Mix View" lens to get my mix on and hit Play, I was delighted to notice the tiny curve display on the collapsed channel strip swoop up and down along with my automation. How cool.

I've been thinking about challenging myself to mix a song using no effects but ProChannel modules, maybe even just the ones that ship with CbB (I have CA-2A from the 2016 giveaway and Bark of Dog I from Boz). There is a gate amongst the much-maligned Style Dials.

15 hours ago, David Baay said:

hat's unusual. If 'Create New Lanes on Overlap' is enabled, CbB should put the whole new take in a new lane. I played around, and was unable to make it do otherwise, regardless of where a 'stub' from a previously aborted take started and ended.

But if you don't intend to keep partial takes, you can just Ctrl-Z to undo the aborted recording, which will delete the partially recorded lane and heal the splits in previous takes.

I've found that to be true, from what I recall, that if Create New Lanes on Overlap is selected, it will put the take in the new lane, however, it will also create a split in the new take just at the previous take's boundaries.

And yes, you can delete your aborted takes, but you don't always want to, sometimes you were doing okay before you trainwrecked and want to keep that take for possible comping.

I'm assuming I abort a take, but keep it for whatever reason. And I may abort at different (and arbitrary) places at several different points in the process, so each time, I wind up with these splits that are there for no reason.

I'm sure there's an easy way to get rid of the splits in the clips that I just haven't learned yet, but I would like to turn off the action of putting in splits where I don't need them to begin with.

I'm interested to see if there are other behaviors that will change along with Noel's good news.

5 hours ago, abacab said:

Conclusion: If you are running Windows 10, you need an SSD. 

Before anyone suggests a Waves plug-in, my favorite reverb is already Waves TrueVerb, so don't even go there.😊

Actually, based on my observations so far, I am inclined to agree with you on this. My test system has a 120G SSD as a system/boot drive, and while it's only a Core 2 Quad, the transition from Windows 7 to Windows 10 did not seem like the drop in performance it did on the main system and the notebook.

I've been researching people's experiences with SSHD's as system drives on Windows 10 systems and the verdict is still out for me. What do you think? It looks like they have some kind of adaptive algorithm or some such.

14 hours ago, Steev said:

Perhaps your problems are merely being caused by the changes in the different and improved ways v10 handles audio could be incompatible with the older Firewire 400 card, or maybe even the FirePods themselves, and or all of the above.

I have said multiple times in this thread that Mixcraft 8.5 has no trouble at with my FP-10's under Windows 10. Transport starts, stops, pauses, records, no hesitation, with projects of similar complexity.

I would never, ever have switched to Windows 10 if I had seen any forum mentions anywhere in my extensive Googling that indicated that it wouldn't be able to deal with my FP-10's. Everything I saw indicated that at worst, someone had to install the driver by Run As Administrator before getting theirs to work splendidly.

Actually, in my experience with the Windows 10 system that I upgraded the same way months ago, it's been kind of weird to see that older hardware like my Canon scanner and my ancient Radio Shack scale that I could barely get to work in Windows 7 have no problems with Windows 10. Really plug 'n' play.

Of course, I have yet to see a single instance of "would you like Windows to search for a driver" to yield a driver, that perfect record has been maintained through Windows 10.

Don't anyone fret about the state of my computer's OS installation. I'll get it to work, it will haul arse, and when it does, I'll know how to squeeze every last drop of performance out of the trailing edge hardware that I usually have around, and what to steer clear of. I've been taming and tuning Windows boxes for 25 years.

Having Cakewalk's transport sit there and pick its nose for a few seconds when I tap the "R" key just means that I don't need to do a boring metronome count-in before I sprint across the carpet to my drum throne to start doing takes.

Anyone who's needed to restart between running REAPER or Mixbus and Cakewalk, try this for fun (since I have yet to see anyone but me mention Resource Monitor): before you exit REAPER or Mixbus, go down to Search and type in "Resource Monitor" and run it, and click on the CPU tab. Then under Processes, find mixbus.exe or reaper.exe or whatever, and tick the checkbox next to it. Find as many processes associated with the DAW as you can and check their boxes.

Then go down to where it says Associated Modules and click the down arrow to open the list and you can see all the .DLL's that each executable is calling. All your plug-ins, all that stuff. Other processes too.

Then when you exit the program, check out how long it takes for all that stuff to disappear from the list. Interesting, eh? Try it with Cakewalk.

You can do it with the Disk tab, too, and watch the VST loader suck up all your plug-ins on start-up, then watch as Cakewalk streams your tracks and sample libraries from your disks.

If you keep doing this, you will never have to record another note of music as long as you live! Try it! 😂

On 1/10/2019 at 9:11 PM, Lord Tim said:

In the time it's taken to get to this point, a clean Win10 and a complete software reinstall could have been done, with far less chance of some other hidden thing you might have missed popping up later to cause you headaches.

Yes, I could have gone into Settings at any point over the last 2 weeks and run Fresh Start; that was the first idea anyone (you) replied with (I am one of the few on the Internet who still possess and wield the mystical power of Reading The Preceding Thread).

It's also much faster and easier to put on a YouTube video of someone playing Joy Division's "Shadowplay" on drums and turn it up really loud than it is to spend two weeks trying to figure out how to do it myself when both will accomplish the same task of annoying my neighbors.

Seriously, if I had a critical path project I would long since have gone down that road. I've just been fiddling with it here and there as I've had time and felt like it. Part of the DAW hobby is messing about with the software and hardware I use.

I used to be a professional Windows server engineer, so it's fun to see what they've been up to with this latest version of Windows. I have used the opportunity to familiarize myself with many Windows 10 settings and options. The aforementioned Fresh Start option, for one. Very interesting.

My apologies if anyone was under the impression that I have been spending all my free time working on my DAW computer terribly frustrated struggling tearing my hair out or something. My original post was intended primarily as a warning. I just figured I would chime in. My system went sluggo, and now I'm having to sort it out.

I was also interested in any Windows 10 tuning tips specific to DAWs in general or Cakewalk in particular. I was not interested in having everyone or even anyone try to remote troubleshoot my specific Windows/Cakewalk installation. Never asked for that. I guess some people just assumed.

Now I suppose, some people are assuming that because I haven't said "Hey guess what? I did X and now everything's great!" that my system was still "broken."

Well, the thing is, it was never "broken." Read the thread title. Performance suffered. My system was running like crap. It needed tuning. I've been tuning it.

There's never been a great "huzzah" moment, probably because that's often how tuning goes. You fire up your tools, see what unnecessary processes are running, find the bad drivers, etc.

Resource Monitor! It is the Windows system tuner/troubleshooter's friend.

From my viewpoint, this is a general thread about Windows 10, not about one guy needing help with a specific computer problem. I've been reading about things here and there and posting about it as it interested me, NOT saying "oh man, I tried this and my system's STILL broken!" Sorry for any confusion. 🤣

Most of the things I've been messing about with haven't had much effect, but, sorry, that's how it goes with tuning, and it continues to be more so, as it seems that Microsoft and Apple either don't leave much performance on the table or don't give us access any more.

My evaluation of my upgraded-not-fresh started system at the 2 week mark is: while Mixcraft seemed to handle it with equanimity, Cakewalk's performance degraded  to the point where I had to add buffering in a couple of places in its Preferences.

Pulling out my nVidia Quadro Fx 330 and going with the onboard Intel HD4000 graphics seemed to help with the general Windows stuff (not specific to Cakewalk). One of the first things I noticed after the upgrade completed was that while I could plug monitors into both GPU's under Windows 7, Windows 10 couldn't handle having them both enabled. Despite the fact that they are both Dell-approved hardware, I suspect the drivers got too stale for the nVidia.

BTW, steev, in my case at least, it was only 10 days. Microsoft only allowed me 10 days before the door slammed shut on the return to Windows 7. I got my upgrade through the "Assistive Technologies" clause, the one where if you use anything that falls under the banner of Assistive Technologies, you're still entitled to a free upgrade. So I've closed the door on Windows 7.

Winternals' ProcessExplorer is my go-to for "what part of 'end process' didn't you understand?"

End the process, the process will be ended.

Thanks for the detailed workflow description, Grem.

The existing modes and their variations might work without a hitch for me as well if my songs could be recorded entirely in bites that didn't run the entire length of the song.

You're setting out with the idea that you are making a song that will be comped together, and planning and tracking accordingly.

Where I run into problems is when I want to lay down drum or rhythm guitar tracks that go for the entire length of the song, and I want to play them like that and just do a minimal amount of comping. I might do 5 takes, but they're 5 takes of the whole song, not 5 takes of the bridge, 3 takes of the first verse, 6 takes of the second verse, etc.

I sometimes actually nail a take and don't do any comping at all. It goes right from recording to mixing, just use the editing tools to cut the lip smacks and breath sucks out of the vocals, maybe nudge a kick or snare or bass note, no "comping" as such in the sense of assembling the track from various independently recorded parts.

How I mostly do my tracking up is that I set Cakewalk up to record in Loop mode with Loop Markers that are 2 measures farther apart than the length of my song.

Then (for instance) I sit down at the drums, hit "R," wait through the first bar, play through the song, let the cymbals ring through the empty measure, then repeat as many times as it takes for me to get a "keeper."

This works a TREAT as long as I play through the full song each time and let it loop. I will end up with what I want, which is either a pile of takes with a full good one I can use, or multiple takes I can stitch together. Nice, full-length takes, each in their own lanes, pre-grouped, OH-L, OH-R, Snare, Kick.

If, however, I drop a stick 2 measures in while tracking and decide that I don't want to sit through the entire song to wait for it to start over, that's when things get more difficult. If I stop the recording, top it, and start over, it will of course leave a stub clip. And then when I start recording again and Cakewalk comes to that point in the tracking, it will stop recording in the current clip in the current lane and start a new clip adjacent to the stub clip in the previous lane and continue the recording in that clip.

Since my goal in all this is complete song-length clips, this messes me up.

I don't like to play the game of "I think it would be pretty simple to" but it doesn't seem like we're that far from having a Take Lanes mode that would make people like me happy. I think if it could work just like Sound on Sound mode, but mute the previous takes, that's how I want to record. Or a checkbox for Restrict Take To Its Current Lane or whatever.

It kinda makes sense to me. I'm not entirely sure how USB hubs work, but back at TOP I suggested that if there were a way to add more hardware buffering at the computer end that would be a good thing to try.

Since Ted has this rocket sled DAW and a steampunk MIDI interface, I had the idea that the rig was "tripping over its own feet," and float the theory that the USB 2.0 hub adds enough buffering so that the way-quick mobo isn't winding up starved.

On 12/29/2018 at 11:14 AM, John David Ross said:

I have a recording that so far sounds great until I add the bass to the mix. The bass has a sound and tone that I like when I solo the track but it makes my mix sound like garbage when I unmute it. Please share tips and tricks for bass production and mixing please.

Right away I can say that one of the most important things to get right in a rock mix is the relationship between the kick drum and the bass (whether guitar or synth). My mixing strategy (and BTW, if you don't follow a mixing strategy you should start trying to) is to first get a good standalone drum mix happening, then add the bass and get those elements working before I bring in guitar, keys vocals, etc.

Next, I can say that the solo'd tone of any given instrument in a good sounding full mix will likely have little relation to what we would consider a good sounding tone in isolation. Take a great-sounding mix with acoustic and electric guitars and vocals and hit the "solo" button for one of the acoustic guitars and you will likely be surprised at how thin it sounds compared to how fat it sounds in the mix. I roll off a lot of lows and lower mids. They almost wind up sounding like unplugged solidbodies mic'd  up.

I'd bet that yes, you have a mix that sounds good to you and a bass track that sounds good to you, but the thing is, you can't just take a good mix and plop a full-sounding bass on it without drowning out a bunch of important stuff. So you need to whittle away a bunch of stuff from your bass with EQ to make it fit in the mix without stomping on other elements, and correspondingly, make space for the bass to be heard by applying EQ to the other elements of the mix.

Neither of the two will sound as good by themselves anymore, but the bass will be filling in the missing freqs from the mix and vice versa.

15 hours ago, Misha said:

Erik, I believe you did not understand what I was referring to....  I was talking about new material being recorded on previously muted take lanes. 

That was one of the things that I was seeing, and I thought I remembered Noel saying something about how that was how it was supposed to work in Comping mode, but on the subject of lanes, there is plenty of "not understanding" on my part, so I will cop to just about anything. 😊 Mea culpa.

Maybe he said that that was how it was supposed to work with UNmuted take lanes and I misunderstood? In any case, if it's a bug, please fix it, if it's a feature, please give me a way to bypass it.

When we have a  preference that allows us to select Create New Lanes On Overlap, it seems odd to create the new lanes but then go ahead and put half of the new material in the old lanes, or it does put the material in the new lanes, but for whatever reason cuts it into clips whose boundaries reflect the start and stop points of the previous takes.

Like Fantasy Island? "You said you wanted new Lanes, Mr. Krupa. You never said anything about putting your Takes in them." (Roarke smiles enigmatically).

4 hours ago, Pete Brown said:

FWIW, I tried out the FLS Checker plugin, and it maxes out at 128.

Nice to see you here, Mr. Pete Brown,  may the sun never set on the Microsoft/Cakewalk friendship.

So the FLS checker VST itself has a similar limitation? Hmm.

It counts how many slots you are using and subtracts that number from 128. If the result is <0 it returns "+-0".

I'll guess the person who coded it didn't know how to ask the OS how many slots were available so they did the best they could (it's somewhere in <iostream>?). Or they just didn't want to bother. Nice that it handles the >128 condition gracefully.

And, good sir, you:

1. Have access to 18, 312 plug-ins on your DAW computer.

2. Which can load 4000 of them and still run Visual Studio.

I'd say it's good ta be da king!

4 hours ago, gustabo said:

Check your old store account.

Thanks, but it only ever contained my license for the CA-2A compressor VST so I don't know how it could help me with Bark of Dog as a PC module in Cakewalk.

I never had a license for Sonar.

I did write Boz a nice note asking him if he had any plans to make BoD ver. 1 available in the PC module version.

Bravo!

12 hours ago, sjoens said:

See post #2. Should be one of those but not sure exactly which. All Module's coded text are affected by one text color.

We have a winner!

The text color that affected the labels on my Custom Module was Global > Alternative Text #2.

It also affected Punch, Marker, Mix Recall, Selection, ACT, and Sync.

I actually found a VST that reports how many FLS slots are left.

I loaded it into a project I have that doesn't have all that many plug-ins and it said that I had 79 slots left.

Now I know  I don't have 50 plug-ins in this project, so some of them must be using multiple .DLL's, Cakewalk itself must use several (I count 14 .DLL's in the Core folder, if that means anything).

Very interesting, and I never heard of this limitation. It seems to be something that film composer types would run up against moreso than audio recorders like me.

Nice that Microsoft are addressing it and announcing it right ahead of the NAMM Show.

I'm hoping that we will start to see some 3rd-party PC modules again.

I have Boz' free Bark of Dog, but it doesn't appear as a ProChannel module. I've bought a few of his plug-ins; I wonder if I asked him nicely if he would shoot me a copy of BoD that had the ProChannel module enabled.

When I first started using CbB last year, the PC was the single feature I was most impressed with. I could mix with Cakewalk's console all dang day long.