Starship Krupa

I think that the way it's supposed to work is that the cleanup just gets rid of the old dll's (both .dll and .vst3) before installing new ones. If you opt out of the cleanup, the old ones get overwritten. I usually just go with the quick cleanup because it takes about 2 seconds, and it seems like the installer is kind of nudging me to use it. There's no difference in amount of disk space at the end of it. The MDrummer/SoundFactory files don't get touched by the cleanup operation. I suspect that the only people on Windows who this installer is "working" for are ones who opt out of the cleanup. Check the dates on your .vst3 files and I bet that they will be from earlier than August. It's not really working as intended, it's installing the new "engine" in ProgramData and leaving the old dll's in place. Who knows if this will work....

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The Windows install failure has been brought up by several people on the Meldaproduction forum, including me. Confirmed that it only "works" if you tell it to skip the clean-up. Which results in the previous versions you had installed staying in place, although the UI says that they are 16.08. That's probably due to the Meldaproduction core not being a part of the .vst3 files. It's a mess, and it's uncharacteristic of Melda to fail to address it within 24 hours. It's an installer, that ain't rocket science.

One of the things that has put me off from the company is the apparent "in your face" snotty locker room bro attitude. Naming the company "Cockos?" Calling their plug-in language "Jesusonic?" That indicates (to me) limp high school rebellion. People are supposed to outgrow that crap. I have a hunch that you won't find many women working there.

He was kidding, hence the laughter emoji.

The bakers actually recommend nVidia over AMD. I've been on "Team Green" for over 25 years, going back to when I was doing desktop support for Windows systems. nVidia's drivers worked well with Win 95 and made things a lot quicker. Many years later, a friend gave me his old Radeon 5770, a very nice card, which I installed in my main DAW system. I was using Mixcraft at the time, while they were transitioning from 32-bit to 64-bit. I had them both installed on my Win 7 system and the 64-bit version was unusable. Switched to an nVidia card and 64-bit Mixcraft ran great. The difference was astonishing.

Sure. I also remember that the people who came up with those UI's revised them to look better, to keep up with the times. The appearance of the tools I use to create audio and visuals is important. It affects the amount of enthusiasm I feel for using the tool and my mood while using the tool. This is true for instruments, software, etc. If I have to shield my eyes from a program that looks dated/ugly, I'm less likely to want to use it. I definitely don't mind functional UI's; my favorite plug-in house is Meldaproduction, but they have also made many changes over the past several years to their UI's, based on customer feedback. They're never rude about customer suggestions. If they don't like them, they dismiss them politely or just stay silent.

You have a truly astonishing background! Please forgive my musiciansplaining 😊. I went back and watched/listened to a couple of your CBBTV videos and your voice is GREAT. It gave me an opportunity to hear your vocals as recorded. So I gotta question, even more now: why are you applying Melodyne to such a beautiful instrument? Your raw takes I would consider "perfect" if they happened in my studio. I have the same astonished feeling I get when beautiful women of my acquaintance mention that they want to get "work" done: why would you pay someone to take a knife to one of the prettiest faces I've seen? Human voices do vary a little in pitch. IMO, at least, that tiny variation is something that our ears like. It makes a sound more interesting if it varies a little from "perfect." But in matters of taste, I suppose. You must be of the opinion that music like you want to make needs to have vocals that are as perfectly in tune as technique and technology can make them, and if that's the sound you're going for, I'll leave you to it. One last suggestion: maybe you've hit the point where Melodyne is unable to improve upon what you already have.

Based on how many times I see people repeating this piece of Steinberg ad copy, I'd say that it's one of the biggest misconceptions about the VST3 spec. The VST3 spec doesn't require or guarantee that this feature will be implemented in any given VST3 plug-in, and so far, I've seen exactly one plug-in manufacturer implement this feature (Meldaproduction), and they also have the same feature in their VST2 versions. The same much-repeated Steinberg blurb also trumpets that the VST3 spec now supports sidechaining, when I think we all know that sidechaining was possible for years with VST2's even though it wasn't part of the spec. I think the only plug-in maker who use the VST3-native sidechain feature are Waves. The VST3 spec is just that, a specification. There's no magic hand that comes out of the sky and forces developers to implement all the features that are outlined in the spec. And since even now many developers still ship their products in both VST2 and VST3, the code used to build both versions doesn't implement the "advanced" VST3 features. Since I actually have plug-ins that do the silence=sleep thing, I have to say that during mixing, it makes little difference. Plug-ins generally only eat resources when they're processing audio. Check Cakewalk's Performance meter. You can throw on 12 instances of iZotope Neutron and as long as you don't hit Play, the Performance meter will show that few resources will be eaten up. Hit Play, and that's when you better have a rocket sled computer, or dropouts happen. So the thing about it being something great that plug-ins go to sleep when they're not processing audio is kinda snake oil. Maybe @Byron Dickens could weigh in on this? 🤣 I will humbly suggest that if it's your own vocals that regularly "need" Melodyne, yes, learn how to sing in tune. It's not a mysterious innate talent (even I can do it). Your singing voice is an instrument, and the way to get better with any instrument is...practice (duh). Put Cakewalk into loop record mode and sing a verse 5 times in a row over your instrumental track. Then play back each take. Listen for where you're not hitting the notes and take a mental note. Sing the bad notes a few times in tune to wear a groove in what being in tune sounds like. Let your voice rest for a spell, drink some water, then repeat until you get diminishing returns. Do this for a few days (doesn't even have to be in a row) and you'll find substantial improvement. You'll get to the point where subsequent takes will be so on pitch that you can have a choir of Rexes all singing in unison. Melodyne, IMO, is for fixing performances that you don't have control over, like tracks brought in by other people, and/or singers that want to sound professional without doing the work it takes to learn to sing in tune. It's much better if you don't have to fix anything in the first place. As I said, I'm able to do it, and I've never had a voice lesson in my life. I just used the method I suggested (stumbled on it, actually) and it worked a treat. Part of what you're doing is teaching your brain how to hear a note and then direct your voice to create that note. Our brains love learning new ways to better control our bodies and will happily comply, working the problem even when you're not actually practicing. It's actually great fun. Once you're comfortable with hitting the notes, your voice will relax and you'll get performances with better feel. If this doesn't work, then re-record the lines where you missed the note(s) and comp. It takes much less time than farting around with Melodyne, and there's no concern about unwanted artifacts and such.

See my previous post. Dead simple, really. Put the plug-in in the FX rack of the track that whose dynamics you want to control. Make a send on the track you want to do the controlling and choose the name of the plug-in as the destination. Tuning it is more complicated. In the case of compression, the level of the send on the controlling track will affect how the plug-in works. Obviously, the harder you hit it, the more it's going to squash the target track. It's pretty much the same result as adjust the threshold control on the plug-in. I usually leave it at default and adjust it using the plug-in's threshold control.

I was inquiring about MAutoDynamicEQ, not Trackspacer. I've never used Trackspacer on a full mix; the more things you're ducking with it the more likely you are to hear it working, which you aren't supposed to. The way I see its job is to reduce collisions between instruments rather than to carve out a space for one instrument in a full mix. I use it on things like guitar vs. synths, where I have one or more synths that are stepping on the guitar(s). What I do in that situation is that (if I don't already have one) I create a bus for Synths. Then I insert Trackspacer in the FX Rack of the Synths bus. On the guitar track (or bus, depending), I create a send, with Trackspacer as the destination. Then set the large center knob on Trackspacer for the amount of ducking I want. A good starting place is to apply it until I can hear the process of the synths being ducked, then back off a bit and finalize. (that took way longer to type than it does to actually get Trackspacer set up) That is a fine concept for a mixer who can choose his bass and kick sounds from an endless menu before he starts trying to get them to fit together. For people who are working with "a 22-inch cylinder with a plastic membrane stretched across it, hit with a felt hammer operated by someone's foot, recorded with a microphone" vs. "a steel wire plucked by someone's finger exciting a magnetic transducer," there will more often be situations where the sounds will overlap and become indistinct. If I'm creating a song from the ground up with complete control over what sounds I'm using (synthetic), I'll usually just pick and choose the source sounds so that they won't interfere with each other. I hadn't thought about it, but I guess my compositional brain kind of does that automatically. I imagine that Mr. Mau5 works the same way. In electronic genres, you can have way different kick and bass sounds on each song. If it's a rock song with guitar, bass, keys and drums, and the band have a signature sound they want to get across, it's a much different process. Trackspacer is a problem solver. Of course it's best to avoid problems as far upstream as possible.

I think I had the Free/Pro bundle upgrade and MModernCompressor. It was like having bought a sedan and then having the dealer drop off an inverted hovercraft to get me interested in future vehicles. Oddly enough, it worked, although I struggled at first to "get a handle" on MSpectralDelay rather than just tossing it on a letting it do its thing. Something I find is that unlike with say, Glitchmachines or Unfiltered Audio, Meldaproduction's "lab equipment" look encourages me to look at their FX as surgically precise tools, while the truth is there's plenty of weird sound-design-y warpy wibblly wubbly fun to be had there, even in the FreeFX bundle. Throw MComb on a drum mix some time with one of those presets with the moving filters.

That was a loyalty perk. When they released it (has it been 5 years?), anyone who had a license for any Meldaproduction product got an NFR license for MSpectralDelay added to their account.

With sidechaining enabled, I take it? Tell me more about how you set it up. As much as I my policy is usually "try to do it with my Meldaproduction FX first," there are exceptions, and Trackspacer is one of them. I have every effect that Meldaproduction has ever made (also, eventually, ever will make 😋), plus iZotope Music Production Suite 5, and nothing (so far) touches Trackspacer for fast, good-sounding results. Attractive, clean UI in standard mode, just the right amount of access to advanced parameters if you want. It's so easy and quick it still feels like cheating after all these years. 😄 There are some plug-ins that are industry standards for good reason, and after demoing them, I ended up setting aside "I can do this with my existing collection of plug-ins." XLN's RC-20 is another one.

Have you noticed that over the years, in reviews, writers seem to hit Cakewalk/SONAR/Cakewalk/Sonar for being "Windows-only," but give Logic X more leeway? Is that just my perception as a Cakewalk user?

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That is only true for the very bottom of the line stuff. Once you take a step up from the bottom, they do have "real" Asio drivers. Another case of Behringer shooting themselves in the foot by further messing up their reputation.

With as much as he does, It's not the worst thing to see him take a break, esp. if it's in the service of burnout prevention.

MacOS only.

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Do you use a separate graphics card or the video that comes with your CPU? Is your graphic card AMD, nVidia? Can you give us the names of some of the plug-ins that are having the problem and some that are not?

It's been discussed by the Cakewalk devs, and believe me, they would love to be able to trap errors before they take down the whole DAW. According to them, the issue isn't that it's "difficult," it's that it adds overhead. To "sandbox" (keep their operations contained) plug-ins enough to trap errors before the errors can crash or corrupt the host requires so much overhead that it would increase latency and of course resource usage. Think of how long it took Microsoft and Apple to get their OSes to be able to trap application errors and recover from them without the whole OS crashing or becoming corrupted. Windows had its Blue Screen of Death and I forget what the Mac equivalent was. Part of this was because it was, yes, hard to do, but another was that processors had to get fast enough and RAM had to get cheap enough for the overhead to be acceptable. And those conditions haven't been 100% eliminated. Remember when if one program crashed, best practice was to restart the computer entirely, even if it didn't take the whole thing down? Anything that happens between a program asking a CPU to do something and the CPU doing it (such as considering whether what it's just been asked to do will mess something up), takes time (latency). And as far as computer applications go, DAW stuff is some of the most critical as far as latency. Whatever it is that REAPER is supposedly doing, where I see so many people claiming that "I tried it in REAPER and it didn't crash," coupled with REAPER's reputation for being able to run at low latency, I'm sure the other DAW companies would love to know what it is. One of the things I dislike about the situation is the perception of finger-pointing it leads to in situations where you're trying to help someone. While it's true that "99% of the time it's a plug-in," it isn't true that it's the plug-in's "fault." The VST spec is loosely enough written that it's quite possible for both a VST host and a VST plug-in to be completely compliant with the spec, yet still not work together.

I disable the nVidia HD Audio device using Device Manager.

For me, the big advantages to doing the FreeFX upgrade are getting access to the multiparameters/modulators, the internal oversampling, and the styles (I really like to customize the colors). Access to the internal preset manager is not a big deal if you have a host like Cakewalk that has its own preset system. It's nice to be able to access their Online Preset Exchange, but not essential. That Melda feature is one that I think has a lot of potential that isn't being used enough. Also, if your host can oversample plug-ins (Cakewalk can), you're taken care of there. By design, their stuff doesn't exhibit much of the kind of stuff that oversampling is supposed to eliminate in the first place. They're designed not to color the sound except when you tell them to color the sound. They are "mojo" free. You can sidechain MCompressor without doing the upgrade. So we're left with cosmetics, and multiparameters/modulators, which, although I really like the idea of, I have yet to take much advantage of for my own presets. The always visible red nag bar is a little too obtrusive for my taste, but it didn't bother me that much. I used the FreeFX bundle for years before I dropped $25 on the upgrade. I don't consider them "crippled" because the features that get unlocked are advanced ones unique to Meldaproduction that most people don't use. Maybe we use them, but we're advanced users.