Starship Krupa

It wasn't even a question. It was an answer with no associated question. Odd.

Not financial as such, but for other reasons, mostly that I've "topped up" my collection. I exceeded my desire/need to own any more FX when I leveraged up to MComplete in the last Melda 65% off bundles sale. Prior to that I had gotten the iZotope MPS5 in the glitch, and at that point was confident that I was not going to be slowed down from anything I wanted to do for want of tools to do it with. The way I am with tools and instruments and so forth is that once I'm confident that money can take me no further, I pretty much stop (and move on to the next project that involves shopping!). I know it's a truism that if you know what you're doing, you can do a great mix with one good each compressor, EQ, delay, and reverb, but it's nice to have a wide variety to choose from (as long as it doesn't lead to being frozen due to too much choice). Virtual instruments are the more slip'ry slope, but even with those, I'm beyond my own capacity to make use of the ones I have. I have MASSIVE, Chromaphone, MSoundFactory, MDrummer, and MPowerSynth. I think my bas(s)es are adequately covered. I'm not going to be sitting thinking "I just can't find an appropriate sound." Every once in a while some trinket or other will catch my eye, and I'm usually up for checking out interesting freeware. I'll confess: I do crave the dopamine squirt that I get from acquiring some new trinket or other. But I do get to the "enough" point (when there is one).

Just have to vent. F'n with me is right. Last week, I ordered some replacement woofers for a couple of pairs of my beloved Radio Shack Minimus 7 speakers, from Newark Electronics. Nice aluminum cone replacements that get good reviews in this app in the hi-fi enthusiast forums. Newark has 'em for $11 each so I ordered 4. Eager to get going on them since my studio monitors are in storage awaiting my big move and I'm down to listening on these paired with a subwoofer. First FedEx says they'll be here today, the 19th, a week from the ship date. Fine, I chose the budget ground shipping, so I'll wait. Then a couple of days ago I check, and, happy day, they say they'll be arriving a day early, on the 18th. Great, I can get started on the project, which will also include upgraded crossovers I got for cheap on Amazon. But yesterday, no show, so I check again today (the original scheduled ship date), and the shipment is now due tomorrow. The extended tracking says that the bar code was messed up when it arrived in the distribution center in Stockton, so they had to put a new sticker on, which apparently delays things by an entire day. This is all before it even gets into the hands of a delivery bozo. I'm fine with waiting, I opted for the cheap shipping, but don't tease me. Now I'm wondering if they're going to show up at all. The struggle is indeed real.

Climb Ev'ry Mountain, P Any Plug-In.

MEssentialsFX gets my vote for the best bang for the buck (providing you already have the upgraded FreeFX bundle). With the discount, I guess it would be about $80. MTurboReverble alone is worth that, throw in MTurboDelay and it's crazy, add MAutoDynamicEQ, MAutoAlign, MLimiterX, MCompare, and MSpectralDynamicsle and it's the proverbial no-brainer, and then there's MTurboComple, MAutoVolume, and MSaturatorMB. This isn't a "starter kit" of their stuff (the FreeFX bundle is that), it contains their heaviest hitters. For anyone concerned about what they're missing with the "le" part of any of them, I don't believe I've done anything with the hidden features except to open them to see what they looked like. Which was "a set of parameters way over my head."

No, it is not. However, as Tim said, you could certainly change the colors and button images to match, and use the Workspace feature to hide elements that you don't wish to look at.

For those who haven't played Road To Gehenna, the DLC for The Talos Principle, I can vouch for its excellence.

Pretty sure that even BandLab-in-a-browser would blow its DAW(s) off.

Line it up against a Tesla and I bet you could blow its DAW(s) off.

I don't know what everyone else is doing, but I have a LOT of plug-ins (over 700) and the VST3's on my laptop's C drive take up 13G. Cakewalk itself is about 1G. Most other DAW-related files may be moved to other drives. As others have mentioned, if space is getting that tight, a larger C drive is in order. They're getting pretty cheap, not worth worrying about.

Curious: when you buy a software license, do you expect to be able to keep successfully installing and running the software forever? No matter what changes are made to your operating system of choice or what happens to the company who sold you the license? If so, IME that's not realistic. At some point, it will cease to function. That happens to all software. It's a good policy to be able to transfer important projects (if you're not willing to pay to keep your version current, which, given we don't know what BandLab intend to charge for Sonar....). Usually with Windows it's safe to expect that a program will keep working for at least 5 years. If something catastrophic happens, like the parent company being dissolved (as in the case of Cakewalk, Inc.), then all bets are off. The company that created and licensed SONAR has been gone for almost 6 years. The fact that another company stepped in and has kept their licensing server running for all this time is very fortunate, and not something that was guaranteed. I only have one product licensed by Cakewalk, Inc., the CA-2A compressor. As soon as I found out that Gibson was halting everything and dissolving the company, I made sure that I had the offline registration process set up. My guess regarding your current crash issue is the same as Tim's: misbehaving plug-in. Given that you seem to be attached to trying to keep using very old software, my suspicion is that there is a plug-in or two that aren't playing nice with CbB. CbB still supports use of 32-bit plug-ins, but any plug-in that hasn't been updated by the manufacturer to 64-bit is now long out of date and no longer supported by the manufacturer. Plug-in hosting is the most difficult task a DAW or NLE can do, and it's asking a lot of CbB to play nice with older 32-bit plug-ins. If you're inclined, the thing to do to sort it out is to switch off plug-ins one at a time until you find the one(s) that are not getting along. Then substitute something newer.

Cakewalk. "Cakewalk" is the audio software brand. "Catwalk" is where the guy in Right Said Fred did his turn back in the 90's. From the documentation: You can add both MIDI and audio effects directly from the Track view. Cakewalk adds these effects in real-time, preserving your track’s original data. To add an audio effect in the Track pane Do one of the following: In an audio track, right-click in the FX Rack and choose a plug-in from the pop-up menu. Click the Insert Plug-in button at the top of the FX Rack and choose a plug-in from the pop-up menu. Use the FX Rack to add real-time effects You can also drag plug-ins from the Browser (B) to an FX Rack. To replace an effect with a different effect, right-click an effect and select Replace Audio FX, then select the desired effect. From YouTube: A great place to start for using Cakewalk in general is @JohnnyV's set of video tutorials.

By jove, I think you've got it! I wonder if it has a Steam client as well.

The goalposts were set at "proper DAW" by the person who posed the question. Waveform and Logic Pro are a couple more that don't "cost somewhere around [$250] for updates."

Apologies, Swatches isn't actually a ROMpler, although I use that word to describe it. It doesn't derive its sounds from samples, it's a playback-only collection of presets for A|A|S' line of modeling synths. I call it a ROMpler because the user has no way of altering any of the parameters. Apparently, A|A|S use the same core engine for all of their synth products, so the same player works with presets for any of them. This means that you can buy only a sound pack (collection of presets, usually over 100 of them), and all of them will play using the A|A|S Player. So Swatches is really a selection of about 10 presets from each of A|A|S' preset collections, which span their entire line, Chromaphone, Strum, Lounge Lizard, Ultra Analog, Multiphonics, and String Studio.

What @Byron Dickens said about learning to trust your ears goes for sure, but at first, we all started with recipes and visual feedback. Especially with compression, our ears need to be trained to hear what's going on. EQ is easier, of course, but there are plenty of subtleties to that as well (I'm still amazed by the effect that changing EQ on one track can have on another track, even though I understand it intellectually). When new with this stuff, I think it's better to take advantage of the more "precise" tools that are available these days. My personal favorites are CbB's built-in QuadCurve/ProChannel EQ and MeldaProduction's free MCompressor. Both give excellent visual feedback as well as sounding great and being versatile. CbB's Sonitus compressor also has good visual feedback, but I find it a bit more complicated, and the display is kinda small. Things like the SSL console strip are for later, after you've absorbed what all of these processors do, what effect their settings have, can hear what they're doing without needing as much visual feedback, etc. They emulate the old analog hardware workflow, which can add character to your sounds, but had/has limitations (especially in the area of visual feedback and precision) that we're no longer bound by. Parametric EQ that displays your EQ curves with a spectrum analyzer built in?? Back in the hardware days it would have seemed like a miracle device. The MeldaProduction Free bundle also comes with MAnalyzer, which I like better than SPAN. It comes with preset curves that allow you to overlay your own mix to compare spectral balance with that of songs from various genres.

@Mike Palmer: please change the friendly output name so as not to give us would-be helpful forum people hissy fits about ASIO4ALL. 😂 Who knows if Microsoft changed something about OneDrive that boogered it up? It's best practice to pause operations like OneDrive and other file sync while you're doing DAW and NLE and other demanding work anyway. Run checkups on any associated drive(s), set OneDrive not to sync while you're mixing.

There are plug-ins you can put on your final bus that do frequency correction and room simulation (be sure to bypass it before export!) HoRNet VHS is one, only 4 euros. What headphones are you using? You can get some well-respected cans for not much over $100. If you're on a budget, I'm a fan of the Superlux 681/Samson SR850. In Samson form, $35 from Sweetwater. There is a profile in HoRNet VHS for these headphones. As for your challenging room, anything you can do to kill reflections will help. Hanging blankets on each wall. Bookcases make amazingly good sound traps. As mentioned earlier, whatever you use for monitoring, it's vital to listen to your favorite music using the same system. Keep those cans on your head and listen on your phone. When you're working at the computer, keep a radio station playing on your monitors. In general, to get mixes to "translate," once you get it to a certain point, listen to it against a reference track, a song in a similar genre that you think is well-mixed. Play both your reference track and your own track on as many different systems as possible. MeldaProduction's FreeFX bundle includes (among many other goodies) 4 tools that will be of great help to you on your journey: MCompressor, which is the compressor that many have cut their teeth on, due to its very informative display; MAnalyzer, a spectrum analyzer that comes with presets for a variety of genres so that you can compare your tonal balance; MOscillator, a tone generator that you can use to "sweep" through the audio spectrum at your listening position and find out what frequencies are over and under-emphasized; and MEQualizer, a 6 band EQ with a built-in spectrum analyzer. When you're running compressor setup tutorials, there's nothing better (that I know of) than MCompressor for following along and getting visual feedback to go with what you're hearing. Eventually, of course, you'll let your ears take over, but visual feedback is important when learning.

Whoa, I didn't know that. That is indeed a crock. I mean, I have upgraded systems several times since first purchasing PA product, which makes me wonder if I'm in danger of bumping up against this limit. Has anyone here ever run afoul of it? How do Plugin Alliance respond to pleas for clemency? In encouraging news, I have updated BIOSes without losing PA authorization, so I wouldn't bother with wasting a deactivation on a BIOS update. You can still deactivate offline systems. Still, that is one harsh policy.

If you'd rather get Baby Comeback, Pluginboutique also has it for $35. I'm giving it serious thought just to get an upgrade for EXPOSE. Wouldn't hurt to have an extra LEVELS license either.

My favorite freeware ROMpler, A|A|S Swatches, has been updated to include sounds from their new Ice Crystals sound pack. It's now up to 680 sounds. 10 hours of fun just to spend a minute apiece auditioning them. And you will find something useful in there.

If they didn't have a few nice freebies, I'd say all they wanna do is take your money:

Am I the only person who gets this mental picture whenever I see "MacOS Ventura?"

I've never had any occasion to call upon their support. My thoughts are "What issue is Chris having that he needs to contact PA support about?"

I'm more than a little curious about what tech support issue(s) you're having with a Plugin Alliance product. I have a rather large collection of them myself....