Starship Krupa

Kinda goes hand in hand, I think. "Do we update these to include VST3 and Apple silicon support?" In the case of Focusrite, they were probably developed on contract rather than in-house. They probably see it as a loss-leader that gets attention for the current versions. The loss-leader model for commercial plug-in developers has become more common since the days when it was pretty much the MeldaProduction MFreeFX bundle and ReaPlugs. I just recommended to someone on the Cakewalk Reddit whose trial FX had started inserting noise and silence that they check out the MeldaProduction and Kilohearts Essentials bundles. I realized that between just those two, they'd be getting over 70 FX to use for free. And those aren't just mixing FX either. The MeldaProduction and Kilohearts bundles include creative FX like reverser, tape stop and modulated filters, as well as in the case of the Melda bundle, tools like signal generators and analyzers (and the somewhat overlooked MNotepad, a favorite of @John Vere for scrolling lyrics, IIRC). The Plugin Alliance free bundle includes a really good all-in-one mastering plug-in, so just about everything is covered. Add to this these "legacy" offerings, and that's quite a haul of free plug-ins from commercial developers. And there's, y'know, that BandLab company who offers a full-featured Windows DAW for free....

For anyone who missed it, Cakewalk by BandLab was released 5 years ago as of April 4th. BandLab has owned the program longer than any other company since Twelve Tone Systems sold to Roland, and it has really thrived under their stewardship. Better than it's ever been. Thanks to the Bakers for making such an amazing program, thanks to the beta team and Early Access adopters for helping them keep the bugs out, and thanks to Meng and BandLab for seeing the potential and caring enough to come to the rescue. And, for heaven's sake, making it available for free! Also, thanks are due to the helpful people in the user community. Always ready to help.

I really like UltraChannel's new UI. They went to a darker, flatter theme, and the ability to resize it is really great. This may put it back in my rotation. It does some classic Eventide tricks, most notably micropitch. Back when it was introduced, I snagged it as a freebie, and since my plug-in arsenal was much smaller, I used it a great deal. But as I got more FX, it got shunted to the side. The UI was dated and small, and this fixes it.

@GreenLight, nice work on finding a solution. I, too, hope that as you say, there isn't a catch. Hmm. I wonder if this is one of those things like bit-perfect playback that some people are more sensitive to than others. When I discovered the difference between listening through the Windows mixer and Windows Media Player and using a player like Music Bee or AIMP that does bit-perfect playback, it was stunning. I sat up all night going through my favorite albums just grooving on all the detail I could hear. But it's hard to find anyone, even among musicians and audio engineers, who knows or cares about this. But even Neil Young, with his shot to hell hearing from playing so loud, can hear the difference. The same things he says are true, I experience as well: there's a greater emotional impact. And yes, I am very familiar with the wireless test. I worked in the engineering department at Nady Systems back in the mid 80's (when every metal band had to have Nady wireless rigs).

I don't recall this being an issue here, or if it was, it might just not have bothered me. Anyway, I too am a MComplete Bundle licensee, so my MeldaProduction referral code is now safe from the taint of personal benefit. Well, except by anyone who uses it while making their first purchase. Really, though, PM someone who doesn't have an MComplete license and get their code. Not public, so no harm to the forum.

I must say, the transition to Apple silicon has been a boon for Windows users in the form of these "legacy" releases of plug-ins that the developers can't be bothered to update to work on the latest Macs. I've lost track of how many we've seen. Audio Damage and Tone Boosters are two that come to mind. I know there are others.

Maybe Philip was running X3 using (a) different location(s) to install plug-ins. I've had to blast through changing permissions on my Programs folder and it was not a walk in the park. Usually I've had to take ownership, then sit there while Windows grinds through changing ACL's on however many dozens of GB of executables and support files. I got it to work okay, but I have a lot of experience as a Windows NT admin. I don't know if most people who use Windows (or Macs) even know that there is such a thing as folder/file permissions, and I don't blame them if they don't.

As far as I know, this kind of thing is handled by the individual instrument, not Cakewalk.

I try to avoid installing plug-ins under any specific host’s program directory structure, because who knows, I may not always want to use that program. C:\VST or D:\VST usually work and are easy to find.

It’s unfortunate that you had those issues, but it is unusual (obviously not unheard-of). The SONAR-to-Cakewalk migration is designed to go as seamlessly as any other SONAR update and usually does.

At 44.1K/256 buffers, the delay is about the same as being 6’ away from a sound source, just factoring the speed at which sound travels. MIDI itself has its own delays. My system is based on an i7-6950X and I have no special issues with latency delays, but I also have even older systems with even less CPU power that also have no trouble. The code that makes up the heart of Cakewalk goes back many years, and itself tends not to challenge older hardware. The most punishing use is hosting plug-ins. The thing to watch out for is individual plug-ins that induce further latency. I find that to make a more perceptible difference than where my buffers are set (as long as they’re 768 or under). If I want to have “comfort” FX while tracking (as opposed to ones I want to print), I make sure to use FX that don’t add latency (the Sonitus suite is light on CPU use, as are the Dead Duck FX, Kilohearts Essentials, and MeldaProduction FreeFX bundle processors, all free to use) and I add them to individual tracks, not buses. Then I can use whatever I want when mixing and latency is not an issue. I can track live guitar through VST FX just fine, but not all VST FX. The ones that are made for processing guitars tend to induce less latency delay. No “trash can slap back” unless of course I want that. 😄 So if you’re getting audible latency that affects your ability to play in sync, and that latency goes away when you bypass all effects, try re-enabling them one by one and take note of which one(s) cause the latency. (And be sure that you stop and start your transport each time you disable/enable an effect to give Cakewalk a chance to recalculate delay).

Is this in Track View or Console View or both? To make it visible again, Track Manager is the answer. It's in the Tracks menu in Track View and Strips menu (🤦‍♂️) in Console View. Tracks and buses can get hidden by accident, hitting the wrong keys.

Can you explain further? Is the issue that when you use SONAR to record you get distortion? Or is it when you open an older SONAR project in Cakewalk by BandLab and record you get distortion? If it's the first, the solution is to record using Cakewalk by BandLab. Cakewalk b BandLab can open older SONAR projects for further recording. If it's the second, are you hearing this distortion as you record or on first playback? Have you tried creating a new track in the older project (new, not by duplicating) and recording on that? I would carefully examine every setting on the tracks in the new and old projects, especially Gain (not fader volume, but the Gain control), but also any ProChannel module settings. The ProChannel has effects built in that can cause distortion (it's supposed to be intentional, but if the modules have gotten switched on by accident it will happen). And of course, any 3rd-party plug-ins. The settings may be getting messed up somehow going from SONAR to Cakewalk. It is not common, I'm just guessing.

I guess you missed: Which is indeed the most likely solution. Since this question is a very basic one, it indicates that the user is likely new to DAW's in general, but certainly Cakewalk specifically, and will really benefit from knowing where to find some fundamentals. Cakewalk's online documentation can be hard to navigate, and as with anything written from the perspective of a high level of understanding, explanation of basics can suffer. That's why there are so many tutorials and supplemental information on the basics. If I know that my issue isn't a basic one, because I've already tried several things, if I don't want people replying with basic answers I list the things I've already checked and tried. I can't expect the people offering the answers to manage my feelings. And in the vast scale of possible emotional injuries, having a stranger on a forum underestimate my DAW skills is pretty survivable.

Realtek is the maker of the onboard sound device in most PC's. Some Realtek driver installers include an ASIO driver for the Realtek chip, which if it worked correctly would be a great thing, but it usually gets the kind of result you are seeing. You don't want to use your onboard sound chip anyway, so follow scook's instructions:

I've never seen it before. How/where does one bring it up?

So after doing this, you are now able to run Cakewalk as a user (not "Administrator") and drag and drop audio files from Windows Explorer to audio tracks? If so, I'm glad you found a solution.

Yes, I'll wait a year for when Larry posts the same topic but with "Humble Bundle" appended.

I dunno, looks like it got a bunch of people here talking about the products and fired up to maybe get some.

Frustrating issue I am sure. Fortunately it sounds as if it was a unique occurrence, only in this one single project?

I can play Outer Wilds on my 2017 notebook with the onboard UHD620 (although not optimal, it's playable) so my guess is that your system as-is, with onboard graphics, would have no trouble at all with Quern.

With all the dialog samples I like to use in my 90's ambient-influenced stuff, I jumped at $19 (at least I think it was that low, in any case whatever I did pay, it was worth it and helped me finish a song faster). It's a relatively easy one to wait for, it's really a collection of FX in one integrated GUI. Anybody reading this, can, I'm sure, duplicate what it does with a handful of freeware plug-ins and samples. But if you regularly have the need to turn pristine audio into distressed audio, it's the best tool I've tried (although I've not yet tried LO-FI AF). It's nice to have all the processors in one place.

To spell it out for those not already familiar, if you're a new MeldaProduction customer, making a first-time purchase, using Brian's code will get you 20% off. And if you sign up for their newsletter, you get a 10 euro credit. Brian will get credits in the amount of 10% of your purchase. So for instance, let's say you wanted to upgrade your MFreeFX Bundle to the "pro" versions (which is very much recommended; if you like what those pups can do in their standard configuration, the pro upgrade is when you start really being able to enter Meldaville, with access to the modulators and multiparameters). With the newsletter credit and a referral code, you'd get the 37 plug-ins in pro form for about $11. Brian gets a credit. Even these small ones add up. For the MEssentialFX Bundle, doing the math....which, BTW, my math on this tends to come out overestimating the cost, maybe due to the euro/usd exchange rate....you'd pick up the bundle for just under a hundy. $98 or so. And Brian gets $10 in credits. Then once you have an account, you can start sharing your own referral code if you want. Right now, I feel like (a modern day) Tom Sawyer when he was trading his classmates for the bible verse tickets: a few weeks ago I idly checked my credits balance, not expecting to find anything, and found that someone (probably at VI Control) had used my code to the tune of 99 credits. Now, during the sale, my price to upgrade to the MComplete bundle, which includes everything that MeldaProduction makes or ever will make, is $118. So I'm less than $20 away from never having to pay a cent for a MeldaProduction plug-in again, ever. Another genius marketing move from Vojtech: get your users to ***** the product. Thing is, you'll notice that there's no financial reward for me posting this rundown. I just think their stuff is great, and want to share the joy. While MEssentialFX says that it includes 10 FX, it actually goes to 11, because MTurboDelay, which is an insanely deep effect, also throws in MTurboDelayMB. MAutoAlign was one of the first Melda FX I bought, MSpectralDynamicsle can do a whole lotta stuff (see @bitflipper's review in SoundBytes), MLimiterX sound great, especially when I switch it into M/S mode. MTurboReverble is among the best-sounding reverbs I've heard, which is a small group consisting of MTurboReverb and the Exponential Phoenix/Nimbus/Stratus bloodline. Try the Bricasti clone device and you'll hear what I mean. MAutoDynamicEQ is a go-to, a dynamic EQ with the ability to analyze for resonances, and also analyze another track via sidechain for collision elimination. If you've had issues with the spartan GUI in the past, know that especially in the Turbo line, this issue has been addressed with custom "devices" that include nice graphics (although you can switch over to the "nuts and bolts" UI if you want to get under the hood). Also, and I can't stress this enough, go into the Style preferences and look through the available styles. Then when you find one where you like the graphics, go into the color preferences and set them to something you find more attractive. As follows, maybe not so homely after all?

Yeah, a couple of Megs of .aax is nothing compared to what an A|A|S Player installation used to spew around, which was into the GB. Still, I do like to keep a tidy system.

With these 5-year-old indie exploration games that don't really need high FPS, a used GTX 1080 or even GT 1030 (which is what I use) will run them lickety-split. My GT 1030 is even passive, for extra-quiet PC operation. The only one I've played where I would like to have a little more under the hood as far as GPU is Outer Wilds, which is a space exploration game. One in which I have been immersed for weeks. And I'm not even sure how much it would help, because I get similar results even when I turn the graphics quality down. The rest of them go like the proverbial flying mammal exiting Hades. I've even been able to play some of them on my 2017 Dell Latitude with its built-in Intel H620 GPU. That's one of the fun things about "catching up." With any indie "walking simulator" or puzzler from a few years ago, even my not-leading-edge systems run them well. Kinda like Cakewalk. When a lot of its code was new, the idea of having 16G of RAM and a multi-core CPU that can clock up to 3.9MHz was crazy. And since Noel And The Gang have been optimizing the engine and graphics, I find that it keeps running better, even on way too old hardware.