Starship Krupa

It's the same subscription pitch as ever. 30-90 days free, and then a large enough percentage of people who try either stick with it because they dig the content and think it's worth it or they just forget to stop it. My ADHD-ridden brain is bad with these things. Many such subscription services have gotten a month's payment out of me because I was late to cancel.

Sigh. I fully understand that attitude about the analog modular synth nerd thing. I was first exposed to the culture and got to know some of the people involved back when I was getting my stompbox company underway. Mid 00's. I thought that all the toys were cool, of course, and a logical reaction to the path in big company synth design that had started 20 years earlier with the DX7. But the music that came out of them was....well, Ms. Bella Donna (and if you watch it and think she's just a Vangelis knockoff, she switches into a higher gear about 6 minutes in) is miles ahead. They'd hook them up and it was basically, well, a sine, square, saw, or triangle wave with a filter. I understood the impulse to have lots of cool knobs and wires and all that, granular control of what modules you wanted to mix and match. We were a few years into the boutique stompbox phenomenon (my company was kind of second wave on it), and going the other direction from things like rack mount all-in-one guitar processors. But unlike the difference I could hear with the stompboxes, there was nothing (to my ears, anyway) that this stuff could pull off that you couldn't get in a larger all-in-one synth. Even a budget synth of yesteryear like a Roland SH-101. Still, it is true that especially with synths, different gear will lead you in different creative directions. There was more than a whiff of model train layouts. Getting all excited because you found just the right locomotive to go with your passenger car, freight car, caboose, etc. Which I have no problem with (I do it myself with plug-ins), but if it's going to ostensibly be music gear, how about making some....music with it? At least Lisa Bella Donna here actually put together a finished piece (which, unfortunately doesn't start to sound interesting until you've sat through 6 minutes of the sound of '74). It raises the question: is the music inherently interesting, or is it only interesting because it's all boutique modules and vintage keyboards? If she were sitting behind a scratched up Dell Latitude with stickers all over the lid, making similar music, would we bother?

Nice. Naming their record Ceremony is definitely showing their hand. I've recently been re-experiencing Siouxsie and the Banshees and realizing what a freakin' musical genius she was/is. Underrated in that respect. Her arrangements with all the tuned percussion were just crazy even from the start with "Hong Kong Garden" with the xylophone. Didn't hurt that she put monster players like Budgie and John McGeoch in the band. I've probably listened to "Cities In Dust" a dozen times in the past week. Before that my vintage tight rotation was selections from the first couple of Tears For Fears albums. Post punk/goth/darkwave is one of the things I'm proudest of my generation (1955-65 births) for having created/innovated. Something about having been a child during the hippie years and then what followed it can send you in that direction I guess. 😆 Here's a guy who's local to me; when I heard him on the college station in my car, I thought "when did Curt from Tears For Fears team up with Trent Reznor?" (maximum Generation Jones icons there) His production is quite the ear candy, too: Here's something I heard on SomaFM's Beat Blender that you and your new squeeze might like (and congratulations on finding a lady who can introduce you to new music, that gets so much more difficult the older we get). It's from 2006, but to me, if I never heard it before, it's "new":

I feel the OP's pain about things getting selected that I didn't want selected, and the ramifications of that when exporting. I, too, still check all the seatbelts and then cross my fingers when I do an export, and still, from time to time, I get silence. One thing has made my time with Cakewalk less of a headache in that regard, which is to bind my "~" key to Edit/Select None. I know that the default binding is Num 5, but that doesn't work too well on my laptop. As for the sometimes oddball key modifiers, that too. Although I understand that Cakewalk dates back to a time before those key modifiers became industry standard, and the company prioritized the comfort of their existing user base. As for the rest, got no answers except that since I (and others) don't seem to have the rage quit level issues with automation nodes, there must be some way to avoid them.

My project templates have this set up. I call it the Output bus. It's downstream from my Export bus. The OP (what's up with that avatar photo?😄) maybe needs some help setting that up. Even if that's not what they meant, Cakewalk probably has enough routing flexibility to make it happen. I have different buses for headphone mix, speaker mix, master, exporting....

Maybe we're still settling into the technology, even though it's been settled into its current form (by which I mean DAW-with-plug-ins) for over 20 years? Venus Theory on YouTube is one of my favorite people who philosophizes about the psychological aspects of this matter of everyone having access to a high level of music production technology. When possibilities are endless, when we "know" that there are no logistical penalties for working on a song "forever," when we can fully realize complex musical ideas without having to put together a band, get financial backing, spend money to hire a fully-staffed recording studio, the pressure that once existed to finish things is relieved. It's too easy to fall into a trap of endlessly polishing something as our skills continually level up, our collection of plug-ins levels up. But as you describe, there is a penalty. I can open projects from 10 years ago, but back then I was using iZotope's Elements series, Kontakt Player 5, a whole bunch of plug-ins that if I wanted to fully revisit them, I'd need to reinstall a bunch of stuff I'd rather not have cluttering up my drives. When I got back into working with a DAW, the host I was using was just transitioning to 64-bit and VST3 support. I was having issues with the 64-bit version, and their VST3 support wasn't fully dialed in, so my projects from back then have some dependencies I'd rather not depend on. My expectations need management; I need to work knowing that I will want to revisit projects in the future, and that my DAW system will have changed. I suspect that it may not change as much in the next 5 years as it did in the previous 5, due to my collection of mixing (and instrument) plug-ins having leveled up. I stick to well-supported stuff like Brainworx, Meldaproduction, and iZotope, but there are never any guarantees. My MIDI tracks sometimes make use of things that only Cakewalk supports, like the built-in arpeggiator and MIDI FX, which are DXi. Not many hosts still support DXi (Cakewalk and REAPER do). Cakewalk will likely support DXi plug-ins for a good long time to come (they still ship them), but what is "a good long time?" As you point out in the case of the same instrument plug-in from the same manufacturer, Dimension, things can change under the hood. Maybe it's time to either get into the Venus Theory practice of finishing things whether I think they're perfect or not, and also work with the idea of future-proofing in mind. Knowing that I'll likely want to revisit things in the future. Bounce everything to individual tracks, both with and without FX, etc. I already save every plug-in installer, but there are probably a few that I no longer have due to system rebuilds, disk cleanups, etc.

Oh boy, if I could go back in time....🙄 I created my own (unplanned) scenario for this. My thing is that when I got back into the DAW thing about 10 years ago, I didn't have the budget (or didn't allocate it) for plug-ins that I had later, and of course I didn't know about the wonderful resource that is The Coffee House (kudos to Larry, King of Plug-in Deals). So I relied heavily on free and very inexpensive plug-ins, such as those from Soundspot and W.A. Production, the Computer Music collection, etc. Soundspot and W.A. have a lot of beginner-friendly "get a phat sound NOW" style plug-ins (in the case of W.A., some very interesting sound design plug-ins), and at the time, W.A. had crazy low prices. I also made use of the Meldaproduction FreeFX bundle, which helped set me on my way to a better understanding of how mixing processors work, and what more "professional" processors can do. Fast forward to today, and I have leveled up my skills as well as my collection of processors, so I'd like to revisit some older projects. Fine, but the issue is that when I open one of them, the DAW complains about the old plug-ins that I since deleted, and I would actually like to have the mixes in original form to see how much better I can do (if at all!). That means that in order to do this without the DAW throwing a fit, I have to keep all of my older, less-capable plug-ins installed. Don't like clutter on my HD, don't like the DAW having to scan so many plug-ins on startup, so this is annoying. That said, I haven't yet had any of my older plug-ins stop working, which is a blessing.

Don't hate me, but I live in Alameda, CA, USA, which is the home of Peet's. I regularly get free bags of the stuff via people who work there.😮 My big gripe is that plain Monterey Jack sliced cheese has become a rarity. It's my favorite for sandwiches, and all you can get, it seems, is pepper jack, which is great, but I don't always want it.

Have you considered the possibility that your song actually doesn't suck? 😊 Philosophical spew time: I have an old saying, which I came up with after working at multiple companies that were going under: The Company Is Not Your Friend. This goes for consumers as well as employees. Companies, ultimately, exist to make money. How they go about that, and the ethics they adhere to, vary widely. But especially during a period where one is in danger of going under (as Cakewalk, Inc. under Gibson was), or gets sold to a company with management who um, "think different" about how they treat existing customers (as Apple did at the time of the eMagic purchase and still does), that ultimate reason for existence gets shoved to the front. The owners may just love their employees and customers like family, but when things come down to the company's survival, or the owners going broke propping up a failing business....they will choose their own, and their company's, survival before all else. Not cynicism, just reality, and something to remember when being an employee or customer, which we all are of some company or other. Nothing is guaranteed. My favorite plug-in company is Meldaproduction, I really dig their products, their policies, their business practices, everything but their documentation 😄. The owner is a cool guy and a genius developer. I have a lifetime license for their entire line of products, which I was able to afford due to making good use of their referral bonus program. If Vojtech sells the company (Image Line already owns a chunk of it) entirely, or it shuts its doors, there go my "lifetime updates." But that's really all in the game. There are no real guarantees. It's always at least a small gamble. You buy a $50,000 car with an extended warranty and the manufacturer goes belly up in 6 months, oops. Maybe another company will see a value in picking up the product in a way that will retain the current customer base, and maybe not. SONAR users got some of the best luck I've ever seen. Program reissued with a free license, cream of the development staff rehired, development model switched to developer-driven. Wow. Still, there were resentments about how the world could now get for free what they had paid for. When I buy a software license, I know I am buying the software as it is on the day that I bought it. If the developer improves it and shoots me free or cheap updates, excellent! My biggest purchases, iZotope Music Production Suite 5.5 and Meldaproduction MComplete Bundle, work great today. Due to the license terms, I'm entitled to "dot" releases from iZotope, and of course everything that Meldaproduction ever release. If both companies decide to shut their doors tomorrow, I still have my money's worth (and then some, considering how little I paid out of pocket). Both companies are well-known for selling excellent products, both suites work flawlessly. I am also an iPhone user. I love my iPhone. I also have a drawer full of iPhones that Apple, IMO, forced obsolescence on in ways that were unnecessary. But that's part of the game: I don't buy an iPhone expecting it to have a long life.

@azslow3 is a hero, to be sure. I don't use REAPER, but for people who do use both REAPER and Cakewalk, his utilities are invaluable.

Cakewalk has a very powerful built-in arpeggiator that (I suspect) is one of those Cakewalk features that people either don't know about or forget about. It's slightly hidden, in order to access it you use Track Inspector, the pair of strips over to the left of Track View. If using a MIDI track, it's right there, if using a simple Instrument track, in order to see it you click on the MIDI tab down at the bottom of Inspector. In its presets, there is a large variety of guitar strum patterns that sound pretty realistic, which is often a problem with keyboard players trying to imitate guitar strums and picking. W.A. Production also sells a plug-in called Instachord, which generates full chord arp patterns using just two fingers, one to select the chord and the other to select the pattern.

They are included because they are part of the "back end" to the ProChannel Style Dials. @JohnnyV: SONAR Professional, the version of SONAR that Cakewalk by BandLab most closely resembles, included the Style Dials, but not Vocal Strip, Percussion Strip, or Tube Leveler. Nor of course did the versions below it on the feature list, Artist and Home Studio, all of which had the Style Dials. I suspect that anyone who bought SONAR Home Studio, Artist, or Professional back in the day would have been able to use Plug-in Manager and enabled them just as we do. Unless they came with a hobbled version of Plug-in Manager, which I doubt. I stumbled upon them years ago when messing about in Plug-in Manager ("hmm, Show Excluded, what does that do?") and wrote up a tutorial for how to enable them. Others have done so as well, notably Craig Anderton in Sound On Sound, Mike Enzo in one of his Creative Sauce videos. People pointed out that since using them isn't "officially" supported, they could have been taken away at any point, but they're just regular VST's (they work fine in other hosts, I've tried it), and we always back up our VST's, don't we? 😉 Also, if they had ever been eliminated, seems like Style Dials would have stopped working. PX and VX are really nice plug-ins that for some reason I tend to forget about, so thanks for reminding me. People ask about the best de-essers, vocal doublers, compressors, expanders, EQ's, saturation and all that, but those are all right there in those plug-ins. Cakewalk, Inc. only allowed full access to them in the Platinum package, so they must have considered them to be premium. Maybe I have some resistance because in the back of my mind I think they're supposed to be only for the program material in their names, but obviously, they'll work on any program material. 🙄

Surely possible. Unfortunately, with some monitors, when they go to sleep, they shut down enough that the OS can no longer detect that the audio device is present (which the OS doesn't care about, but Cakewalk seems to). So if you walk away from the computer for what gamers call a "bio break" (eating or other bodily functions that unfortunately get in the way of the computing experience 😄) long enough for your monitor to sleep, you get the annoying message. Also, and I'm not sure about this, but maybe if you tell Windows to allow applications to have exclusive access to the audio device, they might be doing just that and kicking Cakewalk out. Since Cakewalk is probably speaking ASIO, whereas Windows doesn't know ASIO from a hole in the ground, this might happen. Anyway, @Ted Franklin, I'm not sure this will work, but it's something to try: Cakewalk has a setting under Preferences/MIDI/Devices for "Warn About No MIDI Devices." That should not be checked. Really, though, I think this is a feature request. Cakewalk shouldn't complain about not being able to see audio devices you're not using anyway.

TH3 comes with many presets, so as with any other plug-in, that's a good place to start. Classic rockers didn't have access to amplifiers with built-in distortion, so to get their tones, they usually used either Fender or Marshall with a boost or overdrive stompbox. This signal chain is available with TH3. Presets that use the Bassface, Darkface, Overange, Tweed Deluxe, and Rock models of amp are appropriate. If you want to roll your own, one of those, then the Tube Nine overdrive would be a good place to start, with your choice of cabinets. The RSS Compressor is worth a look, too. A phaser pedal is an effect that many of them used. With stompboxes and modulation effects, they would always have to go in front of the amp, so try that first. Of course there are no rules except "if it sounds good, it is good." Each of the classic players in those bands worked for many hours to craft guitar tones that they liked. Now that you know where to start comes the fun part, experimenting and finding out what inspires you. And don't necessarily stick to trying to emulate your heroes (although that is a solid place to start). Tone is part of the electric guitar's voice, and things sound better (IMO) when we sing with our own voice. With your DAW rig, it's easy to import a track from our favorite artists, then listen to it while we work on the tone. As John is implying, the way that those players got their sounds was/is from playing through a physical electronic amplifier, usually using tubes, into a wooden box with one or more paper cone speakers, mic'd with a variety of microphones (condenser, dynamic). While emulations of this are getting better, it's still hard to beat an actual physical amp for sounding like....an actual physical amp. It gives a better monitoring experience for the player as well. That said, I'm an amp designer myself and I still use emulations sometimes. If it sounds good, it is good and all that.

It's a compromise, of course. With all of them, and I have RX 10, ERA, and MSpectralDynamics, I always have to fiddle with the balance between how much reduction I get vs. gurgle. Plain old gating and/or editing is something I often forget about when doing restoration work. The film and TV industry used to rely on that before we had all this computing power at our fingertips. But if the program material is loud enough, it can mask the underlying noise pretty well. Of course, my attention is drawn to the fancier solutions (smile). It sounds like an interesting project. I'm curious about what you're planning to do with the sounds you record.

No idea about its accessibility, but Cockos' ReaFIR is free and works very well. It's one of the ones that samples the background noise and then cancels it. It has a very simple UI, so maybe good for a screen reader.

Good thing we have Cakewalk by BandLab, which does work, and it works better.

Anything that helps for people with eyesight issues, I'm for it.

Hw are broadcast wav files different from regular wav files, and why would they be preferred for import to a different DAW?

Remember to breathe, eh? My bad, I guess. I went to a site for a program called Ultimate Vocal Remover, where the only description of what the program does is "The best vocal remover application on the internet...." and no hints that it does anything else. I came away with the impression that what it did was....remove vocals. I stand corrected. GitHub....GitHub is an awesome platform, we owe it much for the service it provides programmers for sharing code.....when I suggest that maybe programmers who do supply precompiled executables with their projects could make the download links more prominent, some folks push back as if I had insulted their grandma's cooking. Not only do I RTFM, in some cases I have written TFM, I have created build systems in my home just for fun, I am no stranger to having to put effort into understanding things. What I don't like is having to put needless effort into hunting for things on a website. If someone's trying to sell or, bless their heart, give away a program and there's not something near the top telling me how to purchase/download it, that creates needless effort. With the other 2 sites you posted, I spent about 15 minutes on each of them hunting for whether and where I could download compiled binaries, or whether the project was a Python script or what. Then I had to admit defeat. Are there programs there that one may download and run? I've seen GitHub repositories that were well-organized and had reasonably prominent links to precompiled binaries (if they existed), so I know it can be done.

What I meant by the 1:05 (or close) was that I was seeing 1:05+/- 5 seconds, and the date stamps on the dll's on you computer tell me that you live somewhere in the Eastern US Time Zone. I live in California. Windows' timezone settings affect how dates appear on Windows systems. As for the incomplete downloads, I've seen this before on MeldaProduction release days. Wherever they host their downloader gets overloaded. With this one, where the Windows installer would either result in a loss of all the dll's or a mismatch between the dll's and the engine, no surprise they're getting pounded.

Okay, can confirm that the installer is working correctly as far as I can tell. If you don't tell it to clean up it overwrites the .vst3 files, if you do tell it to clean up it deletes the old ones and installs the new ones. The date/time stamps on the .vst3 files are 8/10/2023 1:05 (or close, depending on when they compiled them), so if the dates on yours are earlier than that, you have an incorrect installation and should download the newer, larger installer. This means you, @TheSteven and likely @Philip G Hunt.

I did try there and it says it's a "vocal remover." I'm interested in instrument isolation. Specifically, I want to be able to hear nothing but the vocal sometimes for the purpose of figuring out lyrics. Other instruments, too. I'm familiar with GitHub and yes, I know that (theoretically at least), many projects have ready to use installers. Trying to figure out whether or where a project has pre-compiled binaries with or without installers is the needle-in-a-haystack proposition. GitHub has much in common with Linux and REAPER, in my mind. You don't have to be a programming freak to navigate them, but programming freaks have an easier time with them (and can't understand why other people don't😄). I've had people tell me before that GitHub's function isn't to be a place where you download programs, and hey, I have to agree that they have done a great job of keeping to that, but then why do people post GitHub links as a way to obtain this or that program? I'm not going to compile binaries myself. The last time I did that was almost 10 years ago when I decided to see if I could build Audacity on Windows with ASIO support (I was eventually successful after a few days hacking at it, although I realized that if I wanted to stay current on Audacity-with-ASIO, I'd have to build it again every time Audacity came out with a new release). I'd also rather not have to install a script interpreter on my computer.

Yes, before August, and 16.08 came out on August 8. On the system where I opted out of the cleanup, the plug-in UI's say 16.08, but the .vst3 dates are 6/27/2023 8:38 AM. I've done it on 3 different systems now, with similar results: if the .vst3 files are not already on the system, the Meldaproduction installer won't put them there, and I'm pretty sure it's not overwriting old ones either. I'm not going to trust it 100% until we hear from Meldaproduction that it's been fixed. Running with dll's from a previous version and an engine from the current version may appear to work fine (and it may even work fine), but it can't be intended behavior from the installer. I don't know if everyone went on summer vacation the minute that 16.08 shipped, but they rely heavily on people being able to download and try their plug-ins (and using the mighty FreeFX bundle). If Windows users haven't been able to do that for a couple of days, that's potentially lost sales ("I downloaded their installer and I guess their stuff won't work on my system").

Ah, GitHub, the place where the hope that you'll be able to just download a program goes to die. I still fall for it, though, because I can't resist the temptation of something free. Gave up in this case, like many others. Is there actually a downloadable program there somewhere or is it just code that people can incorporate into their own programs?