Starship Krupa

Spoken like a Meldaphile. That was one of the things that made me sit up and take notice of what Vojtech was up to all those years ago (seven years it's been). He posted on the Meldaproduction forum some of his philosophy about why he wasn't interested in baking "analog mojo" into his processors. He said that if there's noise or distortion, then the processor is deliberately adding a flaw to the sound. If someone wants that, they can add noise and distortion themselves (using a couple of the freeware bundle FX), but he wasn't going to design it in. I thought that was a refreshing attitude, especially back then. Nothing wrong with hiss, flutter, distortion or whatever, but the compressor doesn't need to be the thing supplying them. I have nothing at all against vintage flaws; I bought the industry standard effect for adding hiss, rumble, wow, flutter, etc., RC-20, just so that I could make my dialog samples sound crappy. Apropos Freeware FX, Bertom EQ Analyzer is another great analysis tool. You use two instances of it, the generator and the listener. They automatically find each other and the listener displays the curve. Here's an example of it taking a look at T-Racks EQP-1A with a traditional Pultec kick drum setting: Bertom also have 3 other pay-what-you-want FX and utilities, including an "air" EQ, a stereo image tool and a multiband denoiser.

I'm not into the mainstream first-person shooters and environment builders where you go around acquiring things. I like pretty graphics, exploration and puzzle-solving, the sort of thing that MYST pioneered. If it has a cool story, so much the better, but Pneuma doesn't and I liked it well enough. BTW, with Pneuma, the narrator is incredibly annoying, and gives no useful information, so it's okay to mute him. Although I played Quake back in the day, I've lost my taste for first-person shooters. Look into the other games I mentioned. Portal and Portal 2, The Turing Test, Lightmatter, and Pneuma. They all seem to be descendants of Portal. The jump platforms, cubes, etc. Lightmatter is kind of if The Talos Principle were only the light beam puzzles. It was my first taste of this style of game.

Whoa, VR version on sale for$8.99. That game would be a trip in VR. Any VR people out there who can give me a recommendation for a rig compatible with Steam's offerings?

I'll put it through its paces with Plugin Doctor and MAutoequalizer and get an idea. Thanks for reminding me about the psychoacoustics feature.

Who knows what the perceptions are. REAPER doesn't do paid advertising, but they're almost always on the supported lists. Maybe because REAPER users will mailbomb any developer into the stone age if it's not? 😄 Cakewalk is freeware, so maybe there's a perception that people who choose it are broke/frugal sorts who don't like to spend money. While that is doubtlessly true in many cases, with plenty of us, we spend the audio software money we save on the DAW on plug-ins. More, probably, if they're reading this forum. After all, BandLab's Cakewalk Forum is host to the far and away best discussion related to deals on plug-ins anywhere on the 'net. If you can't find it here, it ain't no deal.

I've been in the market for one of these headphone correction plug-ins, and HoRNet's is certainly the price leader. Unfortunately, the Beyerdynamic DT880 Pro is not on the list of supported cans. I wonder what all of these are actually doing. If it's just an EQ curve, I can make quick work of that with MNoisegenerator and MAutoEqualizer (and there are presets in the Online Exchange that have cloned the curves from these other plug-ins). Sonarworks claim that it's not just an EQ curve. Maybe Plugindoctor can shed some light.

Yes. Thorough QA testing costs money. I used to do it and made pretty good bucks at it. Host/plug-in compatibility is fraught with issues. Witness the current state of CbB. If it's crashing on you, 90% or more of the time, it's a plug-in compatibility issue. CbB still has bugs (as does all software), but they're in the realm of features not functioning correctly in certain cases rather than crashing all by itself. It doesn't even necessarily mean that they didn't test with a given host, it could be that they don't want to commit to guaranteeing support for it. The more hosts they guarantee support for, the greater the likelihood that they'll need to revisit the code. Mixcraft, Waveform, Mixbus, Bitwig, MuLab, Audacity, Cantabile and MAGIX Movie Studio are also missing from the list of supported hosts. Whenever this issue is raised, there are always plenty of other hosts that are omitted. It's life with a DAW that's not widely advertised and covered in the magazines.

I'm in the middle of playing this, and if you're a fan of Portal-style platform/problem solver games like The Turing Test, Pneuma and Lightmatter, you'll love it. I find this type of game to be good "brain pushups." Edited to refer to a better deal found by @abacab.

It has a "Performance" test, which measures the processor's "efficiency." To best understand what Plugindoctor does, this review by our own @bitflipper is the best way to understand the product (in addition to demoing it). I'd consider it a must-have for anyone curious about what their processors are actually doing. Especially in cases of vintage hardware emulation, you can instantly objectively compare and see that for multiple products that claim to be emulating a piece or hardware, it's amazing how far off they really are. For people doing round-up reviews, very helpful to gain technical insight.

It's right there: because he's "not interested in the new BandLab stuff." That's why I asked him what "new BandLab stuff" he was talking about. Such things wouldn't occur to you and me, who know that while Cakewalk includes a couple of features that enable interoperability with BandLab's site, it's easy to forget that they exist. There are still veteran SONAR users who are confused about the relationship between Cakewalk the program and BandLab's other DAW's. He also said "the Cakewalk people have abandoned me," which suggests that he might not know that there are no "Cakewalk people" anymore, and haven't been for over 5 years.

I've built part-o-casters and many Frankencasters (parts from various guitars built into one). If you're buying a body and a pre-drilled and fretted neck from one place, and a high-end dealer at that, it should be a walk in the park. Put it together and you're good to go after setting it up. It shouldn't even need a level and crown, but if it does, my essential specialty tools include: The notched straightedge like this one: https://www.ebay.com/itm/373639203226 The radiused block: https://www.ebay.com/itm/363678676926 This is a nice little kit of specialty items for crowning: https://www.ebay.com/itm/363052995555 The beam, for the actual leveling: https://www.ebay.com/itm/185606270424 The tape, to stick to the beam: https://www.ebay.com/itm/304590906458 All together, those will set you back about $60. What I do for fret leveling is get it as flat as I can with the truss rod, using the notched straightedge, then tape off the entire fretboard with low-tack tape (like the "board tape" used in studios or low tack painters' tape). Then color each fret top with Sharpie. Use a steel straightedge (like a rafter square) and the fret rocker to find the high and low frets, then level away to my heart's content. Go slow, and the Sharpie will tell you what frets aren't yet being touched by the beam. One very, very important element in setups for me is string height at the first fret, which is a matter of nut slot height. Since I have damage to the tips of my left hand index and pinky fingers, I prefer low action, especially down around the cowboy chord area. Most guitars in my experience are set up with the nut too high. Just about any guitar you buy new as from the factory will be set up on the high side, because the biggest sin a brand new guitar can commit is buzzing. That's why so many shops throw in setups on new instruments. But those freebie setups often omit the nut slots, so you get nice action above about the 3rd fret but exert needless force to make 1st position chords. The string height at the 1st fret doesn't need to be any higher than what you'd have at the second fret after capoing the first fret. Are you going to use their finishing kit? Finishing is where many, many otherwise excellent woodworking projects go into the ditch. After trying multiple techniques, my favorite is still using a Minwax water-based stain on the bare wood, with a dozen layers of Tru Oil over it. Tru Oil is great. Wipe it on with a rag, wait a couple hours, wipe on another layer, keep doing that over a weekend, throwing on another layer whenever you think of it. Depending on whether you want a matte or glossy finish, you can hit it with some ultrafine Scotch Brite in between coats, or just buff it after you get enough build. After it's done, you have a durable, attractive finish. I've done them in red, black, and green. A friend of mine said "it reminds me of Tinkertoys." Thereafter it was called "Mother of Tinkertoy." I think one of the J Mascis Signature Jazzmasters sports a purple Mother of Tinkertoy finish. That 3oz bottle will finish many guitar bodies. It's amazing how little of it goes a long way. In your area of the US you should be able to get it at Wal-Mart or a hardware store. Around here, I depend on finding a gun shop that carries it or ordering from Amazon.

Whoa, this really reduces my contempt for the song "Rock 'n' Roll Band." I always took it as them making a claim to having paid dues that they never actually paid. Which it probably is, but still, knowing that there was an actual band before Boston with some of the same personnel makes it seem different. That was supposedly a dig at a review of their first album that described the sound as having a "great use of synthesizers," mistaking Brian May's layered guitar sounds for synths. They wanted credit for coming up with something different. They didn't much care for the sounds that the synthesizers of the day were capable of. As for the "rock music with or without keyboards?"

What do you mean?

You could put a dozen instances of it in a project and watch Cakewalk's Performance Module. I finally just broke down and bought DDMF's Plug-in Doctor. A delay feature you didn't list but I find essential is modulation of the delay time. That way it can be used for chorus or flange.

The most clamored-for major feature right now is, I think, an integrated sampling instrument. No matter how many good ones are out there, even for free, a DAW these days should have that. After that, the chord track seems to be the next most requested. I'd like Cakewalk to get a chord track because I have no idea what one even does. Maybe I'd find it very useful.

I wanted to update this because Eusebio posted a link to it from the Deals subforum. A|A|S finally cleaned up their act and now have an installer that lets you choose versions. So it's no longer necessary to go around and delete the 15 extra copies of A|A|S Player every time you install a soundpack. They made this change a couple of versions after I sent them a polite email message describing my issue with their installer, so I like to think that my .02 helped push that along. Meldaproduction similarly retooled their installer to allow you to select which formats you wish to install, so they no longer deserve to be called out. I was also a vocal advocate for that move on their forum. The only sin their installer still commits is installing a few products I don't have licenses for, like TurboReverbMB. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to this, they just keep giving me a demo copy of TurboReverbMB. I do have a license for the rather excellent MTurboReverble so maybe it's somehow related? I dunno. That leaves NI from the original hall of shame as the only one who still wants to force 32-bit versions on you. I still go around this list of directories every once in a while to see what's been left behind. Waves always does VST2, 32-bit, and AAX, so those go into the trash (and I've never had any problem occur as a result of this purging). Now my #1 gripe with plug-in installers is how many of them ask you to specify locations for 32-bit and VST2 before then giving you the choice of not installing those formats....

We don't have to like it, but it's been going on since humans started using technology. Every increase in the efficiency of producing goods or services has put people out of work. How many can we think of in the music field alone? Composers used to employ personal assistants to transcribe their compositions into sheet music. In order for an orchestral composition to ever be heard by anyone used to require the assembly and training of a large group of already well-trained musicians. Having drums on your song used to require either playing drums or hiring a drummer. Before the use of multitrack recording (thank you, Les Paul), recording a full band song required having the band being able to nail each part in one take. Being able to overdub lowered the bar. It even made it so that you no longer needed a band. I myself eventually learned to play every instrument that I wanted to use. Guitar, bass, keyboards, drums, even learned how to sing (and yes, @Byron Dickens, I learned how to sing in tune with no need for pitch correction😄). With the advent of movies with sound, having musical accompaniment to films no longer required hiring a band. Heck, with the advent of the player piano, you no longer needed to hire a pianist to play at your bar. Jukeboxes. Recorded music itself. All along the way, musicians out of work. The creation of music requiring less musical knowledge and skill. We're already past the point where entire songs are stitched together out of canned loops. DAW's have chord tracks and there are plug-ins so that an understanding of harmony is no longer required. Being able to sing in tune long since stopped being a requirement for being a slick pop vocalist. In the end, though, these are just tools. They require some kind of intervention from a human, even if it's just curation of what comes out. I am demoing Loop Engine from WA Production, and was skeptical at first about whether I could use it to make music that sounded like "Superabbit." I fed it some info, clicked on some buttons, not even understanding how to use it, but chord changes started coming out of it. Nothing special, but I kept pushing buttons, and finally got something that made me think "hey, now that sounds kinda cool." And with my choices of synths and processing, damned if it doesn't sound like me. Was my process there that much different than if I had picked up a guitar, started noodling around and trying chords, and in 15 minutes had come up with something I liked? In one case, I'm using a program to suggest chords and in the other one, I'm relying on my own limited catalog of chords (as well as my moving shapes tricks). I keep throwing it at the wall until something sticks. The skill has been maligned by old dudes, but there are artists who headline huge festivals to play music recorded by other people. And they are legitimate artists. I'm resigned to the fact that I will never be able to get 10,000 festivalgoers to leap into the air simultaneously, but DJ's do it all the time. And all they are doing is curation and presentation. If what is being curated and presented is the creation of an AI, that curation and presentation still must be done by humans, even if it's humans creating an algorithm. And y'know, even with all these innovations and shortcuts and whatevers, here where I live in the SF Bay Area, you can still go out every night of the week and watch and listen to excellent jazz and rock bands. Every single night. Dozens of them. The existence of technology-produced music doesn't eliminate the demand for live music played in real time by a collection of humans. It might reduce it due to it not being the only way to consume music, and emergence of new genres, but it doesn't eliminate it.

It was and is fully documented. Are you aware that in addition to the online (and now offline) help, there's a huge, detailed, free book describing use of every one of Cakewalk's features in detail? The days of freeware Cakewalk are different from the days of payware Cakewalk in multiple ways. One of them is that there's no reliance on adding and promoting new features as a way to sell licenses. Therefore it's on us to pay attention. Take a look at the new features lists. See if something pops out. There's a TON of good new stuff you may be missing out on in addition to the prior fulfillment of your extensive feature request. It's up to us to pay attention more than it's up to BandLab to clonk us over the head. The Arranger Track of course does everything you request and much more. I even figured out a couple of days ago that not only can you color the sections, you can use emoji. So a vocal intro can display a microphone, etc.

Welcome, Dan. Most of the veteran users of SONAR aren't (or weren't) interested in the "new BandLab stuff" either. It's a feature that you can use or ignore. Maybe if you said what you want to avoid by using an old, buggier version of the program instead of the current, much improved version, we could reassure you. Most of the people who would chime in on this thread used SONAR before we upgraded to Cakewalk by BandLab. The universal agreement among veterans is that the current program is night and day more stable and has better performance. Also, there are 5 years of useful feature additions. The "new BandLab stuff" in regard to Cakewalk by BandLab amounts to: A new licensing model, which is a free subscription that renews automatically every 6 months. Your system needs to connect to the internet at least once every 6 months to validate the renewal, otherwise it's fine to leave it offline. A function within the program allows you to transfer projects and finished mixes to BandLab's site for personal use or collaboration using their other DAW's. It goes 2 ways, so you can both upload and download projects. This is a manual process. Nothing is automatically synced. The newer product is actively supported. The "Cakewalk people" didn't choose to abandon you, their parent company liquidated the division. Another company bought the SONAR code and hired the core development team. If you have trouble with Cakewalk by BandLab, there's a Cakewalk support staff that answers email inquiries. If you have trouble with SONAR X3....well, it's been abandoned. That's pretty much it. There's a new module in Control Bar called "Export" that allows more direct access to the BandLab transfer functions, but that is easily hidden. Hide that module and there will be no sign that Cakewalk by BandLab has anything to do with BandLab except the splash screen and Help/About. There is no risk involved in trying it. It's free and it installs right alongside your current SONAR installation(s) so that if you can't take the BandLab cooties you can uninstall it or just decline to use it. If you do that, though, I'd be curious to know your reasons why. If you had an active Cakewalk, Inc. account when the company was liquidated, BandLab support can reset your password and restore the account. They do this as a courtesy. But it sounds like maybe you didn't? Anyway, a much better DAW awaits you.

I like the assortment better this time in the MAGIX Humble Bundle. The previous ones (I've been buying them for about 5 years now) came with Vegas, Sound Forge Audio Studio, and then Vegas Movie Studio, which seemed redundant. Why bundle the junior version with the full version? Samplitude seems to complement the other titles better. I won't be picking it up, 'cause the last bundle already had Vegas Pro Edit 18 and Sound Forge 16 and I'm not that interested in Samplitude.

I always check my final master against presets (and reference tracks) MAnalyzer. It at least gives me a visual reassurance that I'm in the ballpark as far as tonal balance. Part of the legendary MFreeFX bundle. The bundle also has other useful analysis tools like MStereoscope, which I use to take a look at the stereo energy balance on my buses.

Whoo. Glad you dig Tungsten. Don't forget Cockos' ReaDelay. As with some other of the ReaPlugs, it's way underrated. Also kHs Delay and kHs Dual delay, and Valhalla FreqEcho. Oh, and Glitchmachines' Hysteresis, for utter madness. One that I have been having fun with is CRMBL, which has a Freakshow Dumpster Fire-ish UI. I like it except for the fact that it doesn't sync. But with a UI like that it's staying. The developer has a total of 9 plug-ins that can be used in either free or paid (Patreon) form. The free version just has a small scrolling beg banner along the bottom.

That was my thought as well. And as Mark suggested, memory could be a thing. An area of memory that doesn't get touched until you run something that eats up a lot of it. That could be RAM, or maybe there's paging going on to a disk that has bad sectors. Even with 32G of RAM, Windows will allocate page file in case it needs it, not necessarily as it needs it. First thing I'd do is reseat the RAM sticks. Then run a memory stress tester. It could also be other components, any of which can be stress tested. I like Kombustor for graphics. There are others for CPU, which can flush out problems with cooling (dust on the cooler fins, dried out paste, etc.). The K suffix indicates that it's got an unlocked clock and it will turbo up to 4.9GHz. Are you overclocking it (I would, for sure😄)? DAW work tends to be very heavy on AVX operations, which can really cook the CPU. Omnisphere, I would hope, is probably making a lot of use of AVX, so it could be heating up the processor to the point of protective shutdown. My favorite tool for monitoring heat, fan speed, etc. is HWINFO64. Start that, look at the CPU and graphics temps and processor speed, then start Cakewalk up with Omnishpere and keep an eye on it. If the CPU temp climbs fast, you might be in for some blowing dust off your cooler and/or putting new paste between the cooler and the CPU.

I tend toward avoiding trying to pin the blame on the plug-in (or the host). There's a form for these complaints: 1. OP asserts that since it works in REAPER (if I were a DAW manufacturer I would pay a fortune to get hold of the code they use for their seemingly ironclad plug-in hosting), the problem must be with Cakewalk. 2. Person replying says that it's also known to have problems in other DAW's, therefore the problem must be with the plug-in. In my view, it's just a "conflict" or "compatibility" issue. Both parties should be informed, and then they can either adjust their software to play nice with each other or they can do the finger pointing or just blow it off and say that it's not important enough for them to be compatible with this host or plug-in. But they can't make that decision if they don't know there's a problem. It's the work of minutes to dash off messages saying "I and others can't use your product in Cakewalk" and "this plug-in crashes Cakewalk." Then it's up to them to sort it if they wish. The plug-in dev doesn't even need to request an NFR license for Cakewalk, because it's free. This can benefit Cakewalk users because chances are if the devs choose to look into it and adjust the code, it will make some aspect of plug-in error handling more robust. This might explain why REAPER is so bomb-resistant about plug-ins. They have a very engaged user base. Plug-in hosting is fraught with pitfalls, there's really no way to predict how every plug-in is going to operate. The host can be the most compliant with VST (which the Cakewalk devs claim is the case with Cakewalk, informally blessed by none other than Steinberg's engineers), and still have problems with a plug-in that also conforms to the spec. The spec doesn't cover everything. And if they don't conform to the spec, then bets are off. I suspect that with all it does, Wotja is doing some uncommon stuff, likely not covered in the VST spec. I know that you already know all this, abacab, I'm posting the geeksplain for the lurkers. 🤓

Ever wanted to have some kind of graphical indication of which plug-ins do what, or which ones you especially like? Or however you'd like to visually categorize them? Most areas of Cakewalk allow entering emoji via the Windows method of holding the Win key and then the period key. Unfortunately, few of them display the actual emoji, instead replacing them with boxes. There are at least two exceptions to this. First is the Browser, specifically plug-ins: See my cute "bus" emoji for FX that are oriented toward buses? And the "fire" emoji for one I especially like? It works in Arranger, too: Thanks to @Lord Tim for piquing my curiosity about this. I haven't checked everywhere, just a couple of ones I had a hunch about, so if you find more places where it works, please post them here.