Starship Krupa

Happily, using SSL's ASIO driver isn't the "workaround," it's best practice, so good on ya for finding that solution.

🤦‍♂️ "FL ASIO" is another WDM-to-ASIO wrapper like ASIO4ALL. From the FL Studio documentation: "If your audio device does not natively support ASIO, the FL Studio install includes FL Studio ASIO and ASIO4ALL...." In other words, if your audio device does support ASIO, as in an ASIO driver made by the company that produces the device, don't use FL ASIO or ASIO4ALL." And if it doesn't, WASAPI Exclusive is a better option than ASIO4ALL or "FL ASIO" or "Magix Low-Latency driver" or whatever other color of lipstick they've put on the pig. In the case of an SSL audio interface, yes, the best driver will be the SSL ASIO driver. And really, the only time to even use WASAPI is with a computer's built-in audio CODEC chip (usually Realtek), because nobody should ever buy an interface for use with a DAW that doesn't have its own native ASIO driver. If you want your different Windows programs to be able to use the interface at the same time, then WASAPI Shared is the right driver mode.

A DAW that requires fiddly tuning, a specially built and optimized computer system, and a "tiptoeing around" workflow, when similar projects don't need any of that in competing DAW's is a DAW that's losing the race. And the payware race is much less forgiving than the freeware race. Cakewalk does what I want it to, but I don't use other DAW's enough to make a comparison in regard to engine performance. None of them challenge my system in its current state. I will say that when I first started using Cakewalk, 5 years ago, the engine did a lot of stopping. Coming from Mixcraft, which would just gradually start to have pops and crackles when I overloaded it, this was weird. I'd never used a piece of software that had an "engine" that would abruptly stop, announce that it had stopped, and then needed to be restarted like a lawnmower or outboard. And this happened a lot, so I stuck with Mixcraft and took a wait-and-see approach. If I had been evaluating SONAR Professional against other software in that price range, it would have been eliminated straightaway. Fortunately that paid off, as Noel apparently started working on engine efficiency like it was a cure for cancer and even by the second update it had improved a great deal. I used to be able to get it to stop just by adjusting the location of the loop markers while playback was running. It could handle about 2 relocations, then it would fall on its *****. Over the years, I've found Cakewalk's optimization options to be needlessly obtuse. The documentation usually describes what the benefits might be and just says to back off if it causes "trouble." What I would like to see, at least in the documentation, are descriptions of what the advantages and possible disadvantages of changing those settings might be. I suspect that a lot of them were created when having two cores and 8GB of RAM was a top end system. So if the disadvantage of adding extra plug-in buffers or whatever is that it eats up more memory, I don't care. My system has 16GB and rarely gets to the point of using over half of it. Likewise with cores. The documentation refers to having a multiple core system or not. Nobody who's using Cakewalk doesn't have at least 2 cores and probably 4 virtual cores to play with. My system weighs in at 10/20. Does that mean that I should be using model 3? If so, could there be a system profiler utility like many games have that surveys the users' system hardware and makes performance suggestions? Playback and recording I/O buffer size? I have no idea. The docs don't say what the drawbacks might be, so I don't know how high I can crank them. If as I said earlier it just uses more memory, I have way more of that than my projects usually need. So, I'd like to see better default settings out of the box that take into account systems that people are likely to have in 2023. A profiler would be the next better choice, with the best being the adaptive thing that @Misha suggests. "You need to learn how to use a DAW or go buy a different interface" helps nothing and comes off as condescending. I've been giving CbB a lot of slack over the past 5 years because it was freeware. But now that Cakewalk Sonar is going to be trying to compete in the payware world with such competitors as Studio One Artist at $99, REAPER at $60, Mixcraft at $79, they're going to have to up their game. People who step up and point out how they think things could be improved, especially in comparison to other DAW's, should be encouraged. I've heard people say that it's so hard to compare performance between two DAW's, but I disagree. Start with a project on the DAW that's having dropout problems. If it has audio, drop the audio tracks into the competing DAW. If it has MIDI, transfer that. Then put all the plug-ins on. If they don't use internal plug-in managers, twiddle their settings (doesn't have to be exact) and hit play. It's not trying to create a masterpiece mix in the other DAW, just seeing how it handles a similar load.

I've bought several replacement laptop batteries. Always from Amazon, always made in China. I'm not sure what Amazon UK's policies are, but in the US, they have a pretty good return policy. I've yet to have a problem with any laptop batteries purchased in this way. Amazon has another advantage in that you can look at user reviews.

On my i7-3770 system (similar to Mark's), I found that when I had Console or PRV on a second monitor, sometimes when I switched back and forth, I'd get slower redraws. It didn't really affect my use of the software, it just led to a janky feeling, like I was trying to get more out of it than it was really capable of. When the i7-3770 came out, I suspect that performance wasn't a big thing for Intel with the integrated graphics, more just a way to make systems cheaper for business users. In subsequent generations, Intel have really upped their game on integrated graphics, so I'm not surprised that the UHD770 graphics would be great at 2D applications like video editing. My current system has no integrated GPU to test against, the CPU was targeted to hardcore workstation users who would have high end nVidia Quadros. But in general, with the trailing edge hardware I tend to use, a secondary discrete GPU makes a big difference. Also I do play some lower-requirements non-AAA games and it's nice to be able to crank the video quality up to ultra.

Not in my opinion. The UI's have a similarity (which I like), but only ANIMATE is similar in function to something you might find from Soundspot, a multifunction widget to "pump up" your track/mix. The rest of the line features a bunch of analysis tools and what seem to be iZotope-ish mixing/mastering tools. They'd also have to go on sale every 6 months for 1/4 list price, which they don't (unfortunately, because I wouldn't mind updating my version of EXPOSE). LEVELS is on every custom template of mine. The flat, neon-on-black animated UI, the "instant recipe"/"I don't know how it works but it makes it sound better" design philosophy, the deep discount pricing structure, those were the similarities that I was referring to. Although WA Production has plenty of products that don't fit that description, they have several that do. BTW, it was with a Soundspot plug-in that I noticed that due to their not using OpenGL to offload animations to the GPU, some of those pretty animations are expensive in terms of processing. Not all of their stuff is like that. The answer to the topic title is probably "we should have started staying away from Soundspot around the time W.A. Production hit the scene." Cyclone is still nice if you're into mid/side compression because it puts all the controls and metering on the front page, and it leaves no parameters out. Attack, release, knee, gain, saturation, threshold, meters, everything's right there X2. The parameters can be locked to each other or used independently (which is how I use it, in mid/side mode). That and Voxbox are about the only SoundSpot products I still use.

Congratulations! The upgrade with the biggest impact is going from a spinning drive to an SSD for your system and projects. In recent months I've taken systems with as old as a Core 2 Duo in them and made them run acceptably, even for a little bit of audio recording, just by swapping in an SSD for their spinny system drives. My main system is an i7-6950K with 16G of RAM, and yeah, it can handle anything I throw at it, with aplomb. The Core 2 Duo system with 4G of RAM (maxed out!) was less perky, sure, but it wasn't agonizingly slow. No way was it going to handle a DAW project with more than 8 audio tracks and a handful of plug-ins, but for web browing, lightweight office stuff, it was fine. The difference, for me, these days once you pass the SSD barrier, the difference that a newer more powerful system will make isn't so much in general perceived speed of the computer system, it's in how complex a video or audio project or game you can run on it. And there are plenty of games from a dozen years ago that still look great and run great on older systems. Portal, which I think has great graphics, lists Core 2 Duo as a minimum system requirement.

Soundspot has a few gems, but nothing that you can't get elsewhere for free or cheap. They've always been kind of a weird company. Missing manuals on the website, no contact info. W.A. Production is kind of the "new and improved" Soundspot. They have deep discounts, appeal to fledgling producers and have cool-looking GUI's. The quality of the processing is typically better, too.

Tesla automobiles now come with a built-in DAW. I am not making this up:

My post is tl/dr (as usual) spells it out, but at least Ozone Elements and RX Elements were quite useful. RX came with the full RX7 editor. Great beginners' tools for learning mastering and restoration. Ozone came with their parametric EQ, compressor, maximizer, and imager. Since the maximizer is the key to the famous hyped Ozone sound that the kiddies like, it was a heck of a deal for someone who wanted it to sound good now.

So sorry to hear this. Ozone Elements was a very valuable learning tool when I was first learning how to set up mastering chains. The day when I finally John Henry'd it was a fine day indeed (note to non-Americans, John Henry is one our folk heroes, a railroad worker famous for beating a steam-powered drill in a tunneling contest). The presets and mastering assistant were great for instantly making a rough mix sound good. iZotope probably decided that they were giving too much away with Elements and cannibalizing sales from Standard. They did this same thing years ago with Nectar Elements. The version I got was this dumbed down thing with 4 sliders for the "amount" of each effect rather than a collection of 4 fully-adjustable processors. I bought it based on how useful Ozone Elements was to me at the time and it was useless poo. When I first got it, there was nothing else I knew of that did the all-in-one mastering plug-in except for those crazy Terry West things that looked like Las Vegas slot machines from the 70's (which I found amusing). Unfortunately, Terry never updated them to 64-bit, but they did sound surprisingly good (surprising given the crazy Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas UI's; using them always reminded me of Hunter Thompson, "we were somewhere near KVR when the drugs finally began to take hold"). Since then, brainworx came out with bx_Masterdesk (in its many forms) and even started giving it away for free. IK Multimedia came out with T-Racks One, which was also a freebie at one point. They don't have the mastering assistant, but IMO, the presets are just as good (once you locate them), there's decent parameter control, and they aren't the freakin' resource hogs that most iZotope FX are. So I guess Masterdesk Classic will now be the first rung on the ladder when it comes to single plug-in master FX. Good to know.

Whoa! Just from hitting the spark plug boots with D5? I must try that. Best practice on for sure would be to pop the lid off whatever you're working on and hit it with a blast of compressed air to get rid of whatever crud has landed on the innards (both from your cleaning operation and just from falling out of the sky. Most electronics can take a little dust, and the stuff (dirt and oxide) we're disturbing is non-conductive (or we wouldn't be removing it). The barrel brush or a loose spiral of 1000 grit shouldn't take any conductive metal from the inside of the jack, and the DeOxit will do the rest. If you have an intermittent jack, it's worth a try. I had a guitar amp repair shop for 15 years and never hurt anything with my barrel brush. Slide in, rotate, remove.

https://store.steampowered.com/ Some really deep discounts on great games. @cclarry, I know you really liked The Talos Principle, and if you haven't played the Talos Principle DLC Road to Gehenna, I highly recommend it. If you're interested in similar games, ask and I can recommend several. Anything on the list below that says "Portal-ish" will satisfy fans of Portal or any other game so described. They're all kinda similar in a good way. I like indie games; open worlds, great art, world-building, (challenging but non-miserable) puzzles, exploration, fallen civilizations, detective and storytelling walking simulators. Game deals that I've either demo'd or played and personally recommend: Portal and Portal 2 bundle: $1.48 (the originator of the action/exploration/puzzle/platform style that so many others like Talos Principle, Superliminal, Turing Test Outer Wilds $14.99: (open world space exploration adventure. Not perfect, but those who love it really love it) Sable $9.99: (open world exploration adventure/platform in art style of Moebius, currently playing it and loving it) The Talos Principle $4.49: (Portal-ish platform/puzzle/adventure) The Talos Principle Road To Gehenna DLC: $2.99 The Turing Test $9.99: (Portal-ish platform/puzzle/adventure) Lightmatter $6.99: (Portal-ish platform/puzzle/adventure where the player arranges light sources and reflectors to make paths) Firewatch $4.99: (walking sim/storyteller/open world, player is manning a fire watch tower in a national park performing tasks and running into mysteries) Quern: Undying Thoughts $7.49: (great MYSTish puzzle/adventure, seldom goes on sale) Obduction $8.99 (Cyan's spiritual successor to MYST, from 2018. If there are any Cyan games you've....um, missed, their back catalog is all in this sale for peanuts) Superliminal $9.99 (Portal-ish puzzle/adventure that depends on adjusting objects for size depending on POV) FAR Universe Bundle, includes Lone Sails and Changing Tides $9.99 (side-scrolling platform puzzle with a land and sea-going vessel, good world-building) LIMBO+INSIDE Bundle $2.68 (side-scrolling puzzle platformers with very dark humor, you play zombie boys who need to avoid all manner of gruesome trials) ReThink $0.99 (Portal-ish first person puzzle/exploration using lasers and reflectors) Journey $7.49 (exploration of lost civilization, player has limited flight ability, interesting online multiplayer feature, you might be joined by another player with whom you can't verbally communicate. I play it when I'm feeling down and it seldom fails to lift my spirits) Abzu $6.99 (Journey underwater from the same designer) Flower $1.88 (you fly around at ground level restoring color and light to a fallen civilization) The Entropy Centre $12.49 (Portal-ish puzzle/platform) Zof $10.04: (MYSTish puzzler, if you like challenging puzzles, this is the one for you) All of these ran like bats out of hell on my system with its passively-cooled GT 1030. I'd say that if you have a GTX 550Ti or better, most or all of them will fly. I play with a PS4 Dualshock 4 controller these days, but they can all be mouse/keyboarded. Some that I want to check out are The House of DaVinci, Copoka, Planet of Lana, Hyperbolica, Return of the Obra Dinn, Kentucky: Route Zero and Red Dead Redemption 2 ($19.79, considered one of the best games of all time). PS: remember that MYST Online: Uru Live is an updated free-to-play version of The Uru Chronicles with an optional online multiplayer element and user created ages, some of which are excellent. I drop in there from time to time (handle: Superabbit, neighborhood: Musicians Guild).

Why is there no emoji for blushing? I do pride myself on being a good shopper, and I have kissed many a frog, especially in the reverb department. For anyone considering it, HoRNet's is best avoided if what you want is a spring reverb that actually sounds like a spring reverb. Not even the mighty MTurboReverble could satisfy my spring reverb needs. Where they usually fall short is when you really crank their input to get a washy sound. I'm a fan of 60's garage rock and pop, which often used spring reverbs in the small studios where they recorded. To get that sound you have to really push the spring. Convolutions don't do it because AFAIK, a single impulse can't model all of the different modes you get depending on how hard you push it. Softube's nails it.

That's a really good thing to do from time to time. You could probably go all the way down to 1000 grit and still get the same benefit. My preferred way was/is to use a metal gun barrel cleaning brush. I can't remember off the top of my head which gauge was just right for 1/4" jacks (I've only purchased two for this use in the past 20 years), but obviously you'd want it just a tiny bit larger than the hole. They come made for each standard gauge of firearm barrel. I spotted them while in a (rare these days) gun shop in the SF Bay Area to buy some Tru-Oil for guitar finishing (another miracle product). It has the added benefit that if you stick it in until you feel it just touch the tip connector, then give it a twirl, it will clean that as well. Pull it out and see how much crud comes out, which can be surprising😛. Follow it up with a shot of DeoOxit red/D5 and it will be fine for decades to come. I've used it to fix Fender Twin Reverbs that had been in constant service for 50 years that came in for "bad jacks." It's not a bad thing for anyone who owns audio gear that connects with 1/4" jacks to have in their toolbox, because those jacks do get dirty, even/esp. when not in use. The one thing it doesn't clean is the connection between the tip connector and the ground shunt (in jacks that ground shunt when you pull the cable out, basically all guitar amps). For that its your 1000 grit or a purpose made contact burnisher (even for diamond ones, under $5). The symptom of that is that you'll hear buzz in the amp that sounds like having a cord plugged in with no guitar plugged into the cord. It grounds the tip when you pull the cord out. Pretty much every Fender over 15 years old got the above treatments "whether it needed it or not." I fixed amps that literally had no sound going through them using no tools other than DeOxit and these cleaning tools.

I've tried multiple reverbs that claim to emulate a spring, only one actually sounded like one was Softube's.

Do check out WA Production's Loop Engine, if you haven't yet. I think it's still in its introductory period and under $30. When I demo'd it I didn't really know what I was doing (still haven't figured the whole thing), but managed to get a nice set of changes. It's great for "I just need something to get the ball rolling," not so much "I hear a song in my head."

This is why I really don't like jacks and controls that are only physically held in place by their PCB solder joints rather being fastened to the panel. The Fender Blues Jr. I am looking at you.

Period-correct P-bass! (the "modern" style P-bass came out 2 years after he died).

Rick is one of the few critics who gives Christopher the guitarist props he deserves. (UNDERRATED!😄). I think Rick did a video on something that I experienced when I first got Christopher Cross on CD: crank up the fadeout on "Ride Like The Wind" to hear Cross tearing it the fsck up.

Yes, you're right. It was definitely under lateral stress as the train passed by. I guess what I was getting at is that when the crack opened up, when the lateral stress came, it fortunately shifted so that the secure ledge was resting on the broken end. They got lucky. I just went back and ran it a few more times and I think you're right, it is/was welded. But maybe the weld didn't open up first? From my amateur perspective, the design flaw might have been in how the parts were put together. It looks like they may have cut a notch into the upright support in order to butt-weld the 45-degree brace to it. This would have weakened the upright, leading to a failure right where you'd expect it, at the thinnest remaining piece, after which the weld to the brace also failed. If they considered it at all, it might have seemed like cutting into the upright was the better choice because it would be under compression, whereas the brace would have the lateral stress. But the upright was also taking lateral stress, as you pointed out. There are other ways to join cylindrical sections together at an angle besides butt-welding them. There's a lot of technology from fluid pipelines. Some kind of sleeve fitting over the whole thing? Not my area of expertise, but I can see where things went sideways (pun intended). Always easier to see it in hindsight. They probably tested the integrity of the joint design using way more stress than they expected it to be under in actual use, but the problem with that is that in actual use, it would be subjected to smaller stresses over time that add up. Like Titan, which was fine the first half dozen times it went under. Hence my rant about periodic inspection. And yes! Sensors are cheap these days. And cameras. Even an off-the-shelf home security camera system could have caught this if they put the cameras in the right places. 😄

I think he showed his hand when he said "this is gonna blow up the Internet!!" 😄 And really, who "rates" The Edge? While he was an innovator and sound designer with his use of FX, I think we all knew that if you hit bypass on his delay he wouldn't have been all that. Doesn't matter of course, he got a killer sound. With my tastes in guitar playing, I could probably outdo him for sheer generation of outrage. What does "rated" mean when it comes to musicians anyway? I think "overrated" means "I can't see what other people like so much about this person's playing." "Underrated" means "this person doesn't get as much attention and approval as I think they should." So in the case of "overrated," well, just because I can't hear it doesn't mean it ain't there. And "underrated," well, whatever. We've all seen guitarists in local bands performing for a dozen people whose playing knocked us to the floor. Speaking of which, I used to go see Michael Hedges, now considered a stone cold freaking legend and innovator of the acoustic guitar, in the early 80's when he was playing for the dinner crowd at the New Varsity Theater in Palo Alto. People were eating and chatting and laughing and I was watching the Hendrix of the acoustic guitar performing as background music. He didn't stay "underrated" for long, though. Imagine trying to concentrate on eating while this is going on 5 feet away:

I've never used smart:limit. Couldn't say. "Better" is such a subjective term, especially when it comes to bread and butter mixing/mastering FX like dynamics processors and EQ's. Like a magazine reviewer's multiple point categories system: Ease of Setup, GUI, Metering, Extra Features, Configurability, Character etc. From the looks of it, smart:limit has some auto-setup built in. Probably wins the Ease of Setup category, but then I tend not to care as much for "AI-powered"* FX as some people. Part of the fun of this hobby for me is learning how to use the tools. Not everybody is like that. Plenty of people just want their music to sound good by whatever means. I can appreciate that, and have my share of "it just works" tools like Trackspacer, but I'm also interested in what's going on "under the hood." The best situation for the automatic stuff is when it allows you to take control of all parameters if you like. That's how I tend to use Ozone (when I use Ozone). Ultimately, the answer is that the "best" effect is the one that lets you get the sound you want in a way that feels best to you. With pro-level tools like smart:limit and MLimiterX, it's really about what you yourself are looking for. If you want to decide, the best way is to try them. smart:limit has a 30 day trial and MLimiterX a 15-day trial. And speaking of what works best, one of my favorite limiters is Sonic Anomaly's Unlimited, which is freeware. My path into high-end FX like MeldaProduction, iZotope, brainworx, etc. was to start working with what I could get for free or under $10, then once I learned what the tools were for and got an idea of how they worked, I opened my wallet a bit more. For years it was freeware/freebies, Soundspot, WA Production, and Ozone Elements. No slam on any of these, I still use plug-ins from Soundspot, WA Production, and of course some freeware ones as well. WA Production are great for weird sound design-y toys and simple control FX that get results fast (good looking UI's, too). Soundspot are a mixed bag, but there are some gems as well (Voxbox, Cyclone). *(I am starting to really dislike the term "AI-powered" being used when what it really means is "automatic." I have a transmission in my car that senses speed and RPM and automatically changes gear to adapt. Is my car's automatic transmission "AI-powered" because it monitors multiple parameters and adapts its settings?🙄)

An odd thing is that if you ever do level up to even the MEssentialsFX bundle, it comes with MAutoDynamicEQ, which renders this one superfluous. It will be credited toward MMixingFX, MTotalFX, and MComplete, though.

Exactly. Responsibility lies with the person(s) who is running the show, whatever the show may be.