Starship Krupa

The clanking sound when you walk, does it disturb the neighbours? 🤩 This validates my thinking about the antique Dell Inspiron 1545 laptop I recently reanimated for a friend. He was going through his stuff and found this laptop that someone had left at his place. It had Vista on it, so I wiped it and put Windows 10 on it and managed to find a 128G SSD in my spares pile and got the memory up to 4G (from the stock 3G). He had shown it to the "IT guy" at his last employer, who told him it was for the dumpster. To me, that's like waving a red flag at a bull. If it boots, it's usable. Even if it's going to run one of the light Linux builds. He's a musician, a bandmate from 35 years ago, and I've been wanting to get him started with recording and mixing using a DAW. He has experience with 4-tracks. Of course I put Cakewalk on it, and y'know, it works just fine. I put A|A|S Swatches on, plugged in a MIDI keyboard, and played some fake guitar for him. He was suitably impressed. I think I may even have an old Firewire interface and Firewire PC card kicking around somewhere. Or it could also give me a chance to try recording into the onboard line in using a mixer in front of it. I've always wanted to try that. I don't think the processor is even a Core 2 Duo, although I found out that the laptop can be upgraded to a Core 2 Duo. $11 on eBay. Sooooo tempting.😄 Some might question why I would spend any time at all or even consider $11 on this zombie computer, but it's a hobby for me. It's fun doing more with less. There's a few more years of use left in that laptop. He just wanted something he could check email and watch YouTube on, but he's ended up getting his first DAW.

I sounds really interesting and I hope there's a way we can hear it when it's done. Also interested in hearing about what method(s) you eventually use(d) to get past this hurdle.

This is very good. With that, you can use one of the de-noisers that sample the noise and then nuke it. I know that several fancy ones have already been mentioned, but I agree with what @mark skinner said about ReaFIR being very effective. It lets you sample the noise(s) you wish to remove, and then lets you adjust the strength, how drastic you want it to work. The UI and workflow have a bit of a learning curve unless you watch or read a tutorial, but in the end, it's simple (use the Ctrl key when adjusting!). ReaFIR is an unsung signal processing powerhouse. In addition to noise removal, you can also set it up as a very surgical EQ, compressor, dynamic EQ, and frequency-specific noise gate. With all of the degradation your signal has gone through, starting with being recorded on cassette, the highs might start well below the usual, so you might experiment with low (and high) pass filtering. Turn it down/up until you can hear it having an effect on the recorded audio, then dial it back a notch. Cakewalk's built-in Quadcurve and Sonitus EQ's can handle that with no problem. As for actual de-essers, no, this is not what they're for. De-essers are designed to help when you have a singer or speaker who uses a lot of sibilance (lispy sounds). Recording and reproduction hardware and our ears are sensitive to sibilant sounds, and they can stand out in a mix in an irritating way. A traditional de-esser is a combination of EQ and compression stuck together in a single plug-in for ease of use. Some plug-in houses have over 100 FX in their product line and no de-esser, because it's really easy to build that function into a compressor plug-in. They have their uses, I have a friend who sometimes uses one on cymbals to tame the harsh high end. If you want to try one, Lisp is a freeware favorite. There are also de-essers that use a different process to accomplish sibilance reduction, like Airwindows' DeEss and DeBess.

I'm impressed by your 197 tracks! That's about 175 more than my most complex project to date. There's something very important (and reassuring) to understand: Cakewalk (and most if not all other DAW's) is a non-destructive editor. What this means, in simplified form, is that it leaves any original recorded or imported audio tracks intact no matter how much you cut, split, copy, move, delete, fade, or whatever with your clips. Clips are just references to a section of the original audio files. When you hit Play or export the project as audio, the DAW assembles all of your edits in order, without changing anything. If you have a single measure of drums that you either copied and pasted 150 times or Groove Clipped it out for 150 measures, Cakewalk just plays it back over and over, 150 times. The exception to this is that you can perform certain "destructive" operations that will alter underlying audio files. "Normalize" is one. "Bounce to Clip(s)" is another. "Reverse" is another. Most operations done from the "Process Effect" menu also bake them into the audio file. I'm not 100% certain, but I believe that even these don't actually alter the original file, but rather make a copy of it with the destructive processing applied. It's like "bounce clip with effect applied." Others, correct me if I have that wrong. Non-destructive editors are pretty careful about adhering to the "non-destructive" term. It gives us a lot of freedom to go crazy with editing without concern for "messing something up." Video editing software like Vegas Pro and Adobe Premier also work this way: they leave your original video footage intact. Believe me that I've taken so many wrong turns with editing a project that it wound up being easier to go back and start with the recorded audio files than undo the mess I'd made. There has been much abject despair when someone accidentally deleted a large number of audio clips, followed by elation when they learned that the audio they recorded was 100% intact even though they deleted the clips that referred to it. There's no "oh crap, I deleted the best take (or sample, or loop or whatever), it's still there, sitting in your Project/Audio folder. Might take some hunting to track it down, but it's there, and in one piece. Now. I finally figured out what you're trying to do, and there's no setting or option I can think of that will easily insert measures without affecting all clips (including ones that straddle the insert point). But I found this out by accident: if I have only some clips selected, Insert Time/Measures will scoot them over and leave the unselected ones alone. If you can figure out a quick and easy way to only select the clips you want to shift over, that might be one way to do it. Other than that, I like Bristol's idea about letting it split them, then slip editing (dragging out the right edge of the clip) to restore them to intact clips (remember, editing is non-destructive, so the clip will just fill in with the rest of the audio in the file). Again, it probably requires a lot of selecting (with or without clip grouping, which is very helpful in situations where you need to edit a lot of clips at once), and then slip editing clips that you didn't want split in the first place. I get that you want prevention, not cure, but I just don't have one.

That is odd. I have had several nVidia graphics cards, and no issues that I can recall with LatencyMon. Wow, searching for "RTX 3050 audio latency" turned up this nugget where the problem turned out to be what I call "tech support question #1." Makes me want to go around and check all my HDMI cables, maybe hit them with DeOxit.... On a serious note, there do seem to be multiple users on nVidia's support board seeing issues (and solutions) with 3000 and 4000 series cards: The first one is practically a call to arms, and the person lists a whole bunch of Reddit discussions about this issue: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/forums/geforce-graphics-cards/5/508819/high-dpc-latency-rtx30004000-series-cards/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/forums/geforce-graphics-cards/5/507156/high-dpc-latency-caused-by-nvidia-driver-file-nvld/ It looks like the fix is the first thing I thought of, setting it to favor Performance over Power Saving (or Adaptive) in the nVidia Control Panel. But really, that should be a "hot rodding" tweak, not a necessary setting to keep your system from wildly glitching audio. Dang, nVidia. Their cards are the most recommended for audio work, and it looks like maybe they did something to break that. I guess because I'm a trailing edger who's back in the 1000 series I'm not going to see this. See also @Promidi's GTX960. Multiple people in those threads mention switching back to their Intel integrated GPU's for audio work, just like @Sal Sorice did. @Jim Roseberry, system integrator extraordinaire, have you heard anything about this?

I think we're seeing a result of the Soundwide amalgamation. The new management likely want to get the bx-made plug-ins available in a store where their other brands (like iZotope) already sell well. Plugin Alliance/brainworx are a company that makes plug-ins and also sells plug-ins from other manufacturers like Unfiltered Audio, Dear, and Lindell. Brainworx themselves make Shadow Hills, elysia, Maag, SPL and other brands under license. Brainworx/PA are part of Soundwide, but the other brands like Unfiltered Audio are not.

That's pretty huge for a "dot" release. Kudos to iZotope.

I heartily endorse this course of action. Its baby sister, Instant Delay, is a hidden gem as well. It sounds from the name that it might be just a stripped down version of Sandman Pro, but it has its own tricks up its sleeve. The thing never to neglect with Unifiltered Audio's delays is the amazing options for modulating any control.

Indeed. Love the steampunk look. I'm a fan of the Shadow Hills Mastering Compressors' UI and these remind me of them in a good way. The UI can most definitely affect the way a track sounds by making me more or less likely to use the FX and features in the first place. I'm thinking of Shadow Hills Mastering and elysia alpha. Great looking UI's that make me feel good when I'm using them. Unfiltered Audio BYOME is one that I'm more encouraged to use due to the amazing look of the UI. Whoever did the UI, I'd sure like to see Crystal get a skin from them.

Would you say then that you need Ashampoo? 🤔 No insult to the company intended, I just suspect that it prevents some people from taking them more seriously than they might otherwise. I did download and install this program, and at least in regard to it, I don't need Ashampoo at this time (I have Sound Forge and RX). At some point in the future, I may give Ashampoo another try.

Man, they really need to change that company name.

I was a Mesa player, back in the 90's. I've owned an SOB, a Dual Caliber, and a Mark IIb+ with all factory mods. Later the Studio Preamp. Been over to the factory a couple of times, met Randy Smith. Growing up in the 70's, Mesa was the amp to HAVE, the first boutique amp. When I got my first one, I felt kinda "pinch me, I must be dreaming." I love the "Mark" distortion sound, those 12AX7's sizzling away. Was less enamored with the more snarly "Rectifier" sound, which the Dual Caliber had. I don't know what kind of deal Randall Smith worked out with Gibson, but we know Gibson's history of handling legendary brands. Look for "Boogie by BandLab" in half a dozen years! It's encouraging to see on Gibson's site that the support number is still 707, the Petaluma area code, and that the address is still the same, with a photo of the factory.

Shoot. Late to the party here for some reason, but have shared some knowledge with Larry via messages. As far as anti-malware solutions, sure, the stock Defender seems to be a decent enough choice. I'm not a great source of knowledge regarding anti-virus software because I don't do the things that make that type of software have to do what it does. I don't open email attachments, I don't install iffy software packages. That's pretty much it. I call it using anti-malware behavior instead of anti-malware software. I've gotten exactly two malware infestations in the over 30 years I've been using PC's. One of those was when I was working at a software company and the head developer's PC had a virus that he never seemed to get rid of, and he gave me a floppy with a new build on it. It did no damage beyond making my system unbootable, and I fixed it instantly with an anti-virus program. The second was when I deliberately disobeyed my own policy of not installing software from iffy sources. This was over 20 years ago and I took the lesson to heart. Once again, while it was annoying to clean it up, nothing was lost or compromised as a result. In that time, especially in the days before Windows 10 and Defender, I did repair several friends' computers that had been rendered so slow as to be useless due to anti-virus software itself. Memory consumption, CPU resources, annoying pop-ups, slow file I/O, basically I've seen anti-virus software exhibit everything that people fear about malware with the lone exception of data loss. So I'm cynical about it. I never, ever used (and still don't) any anti-malware solution that stayed running, and especially not one that scans in real time upon file access. I run Windows 10 Pro so that I can disable Defender's realtime scanning. The thing to know about Defender is that by default, it stays running and scans every file that is read or written to disk. For people who want that level of protection, I suggest at the very least they go into the Defender settings and exclude certain folders from realtime scanning. These would be the project folders from your DAW(s) and NLE(s), C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3, whichever folder(s) your VST2's live in, as well as those programs' own folders, including any, like Cakewalk uses, that use AppData\Roaming folders. You don't want or need for Defender to be realtime scanning every audio or video file that your computer reads or writes, it's just wasteful of computing resources. I noticed that program installers are able to put in their own Defender exclusions and have suggested the Cakewalk devs do the same thing. Celemony Melodyne, a program that does a LOT of speed critical disk work, was the program I noticed putting in its own exclusions. As for the other things mentioned: that "stick of gum" form factor is called M2. Pretty much any motherboard made in the past 10 years will have at least one. There are 2 types of drive controller technology that you can plug into an M2 slot. NVMe and SATA. Of those, NVMe is the faster, but since they're both SSD's, in use the practical difference is negligible. You'd only notice a difference when running drive benchmarks. Dang, "hours" is a long time to get a class-compliant USB audio interface to work. Care to share what the issue was? I'll chime in in agreement that USB2-?USB2 does seem to work more reliably than USB2->USB3 in some cases. US3 ports are supposed to be fully backward compatible with older USB2 devices, but really, if I have a choice between plugging a peripheral into the type of port it was made for, or plugging it into a port that only supports it in compatibility mode, I'll bet on the native port. A trick I learned years ago, from helping out someone on this forum I think: if you have an older device that just won't play with USB3, and you don't have enough USB2 ports (notebook or whatever), you can plug a USB2 hub into one of your USB3 ports and plug the device into the hub. Another thing: audio interfaces are the one type of device where I would make sure to be using a high quality USB cable. No, it usually makes no difference in the function of other devices that don't rely on streaming a ton of data, but it does with audio interfaces. The less RF interference the better. USB and your interface have built-in error-correction, but the thing is, they're happiest when there are fewer errors to correct. Spring for a nice braided sleeve Belden or Monoprice cable. Weirdly enough, it can even result in your recording and playback sounding better, due to better jitter performance. This is stuff I would much rather not be true, but it is. There's so much (justified) backlash about expensive audiophile cabling and whatnot, but jitter is for real, its effect on perceived sound is real, and the less of it the better. As far as tuning Windows 10 for DAW/NLE performance, the best guide that I know of comes straight from our own (I call him that because he uses Cakewalk and sometimes participates on the forum) Pete Brown, Microsoft engineer and musician: https://aka.ms/Win10AudioTweakGuide. The Dell BIOS settings are notoriously primitive and locked down, as befits their expected operating environment where they don't want the head of accounting's gamer kid to come in on Saturday and render his parent's workstation unusable or unstable by trying to overclock the CPU and RAM. I've found that I can do a few things to optimize it for DAW/NLE use. Starting from the defaults, of course disable any hardware ports you're not using (serial, parallel, onboard audio). Then make sure that Intel Turbo Boost is enable, as well as hyperthreading and (this is controversial) SpeedStep. These actions, along with an OS power plan setting that nails the processor speed to 100%, will get your CPU to idle and burst above its rated clock. And regarding BIOS versions, there are some who adopt a "not broke, won't fix" approach, but I am not one of them, and Dell themselves recommend keeping Dell systems updated to the most recent BIOS. I just flashed a new one into my Dell notebook and it seems to have somehow resulted in improved LatencyMon readings. Basically, anything that says "power-saving" is oriented toward portables running on battery. Desktops that are always plugged in don't need that throttling. If you want to save a few dollars on the electricity you're workstation is using, turn it off when you're not using it. Now that drives are mostly solid state, the old debate about whether to leave drives spinning or turn them off is moot, and systems now boot up almost as fast as they return from sleep. As ever, run Task Manager and look for unnecessary processes and startups. Dell has a bunch of management stuff for corporate IT people that you don't need at home. Dell Data Vault and Management Console and the like. It is good to go to their website, make an account, and register your system. That way you can run their driver update checker more easily. And I have found that in a few cases, the Dell drivers for a given component worked better than the Intel or Realtek or whatever. My favorite utility for checking system information is HWINFO. Free of course, and it lets you monitor processor speed (to see if something's holding it down) and temperatures. Especially in a SFF system like yours, it's normal to get some fan blast when the CPU is really working hard. That's just the fan doing its job as it should: it blows harder when the chip gets hotter, and the chip gets hotter as it works harder. Using the onboard Intel graphics can result in reduced CPU performance, but only for a secondary reason: if you're doing things that tax both the CPU and the GPU at the same time, the resulting heat can cause throttling. If you separate CPU and GPU they don't have to share a cooling solution. When guying a refurb system, I'd probably want to reapply the CPU heatsink paste (if it's not too big a hassle in an SFF). It can eventually harden and become less effective. The smaller the case, the harder heat is to manage, so give it all the help you can, make sure there's space around the case for the air to get in and out.

I wouldn't have picked it out without forewarning. It's surrounded by synthesized sounds, so in that context it works. +1 on your Gilmoresque solo. Well done.

My guess on the model numbering is that the Mark VI took a long time in development, to the point where the eventual next generation needed to be distinguished from prototypes of what would have been the Mark VI. Maybe for in-house purposes? What I mean is that the Mark VI may be an actual nearly-finished design that wound up in the category of "never released."

There's also a new version of Swatches with some patches from Asymmetric as well as this. Just those make me really want to pick up Asymmetric next time it comes up on discount or giveaway. Regarding Strum, I've used the Strum patches in Swatches to throw in a few accents, as well as a compositional tool. I'm not so much into verisimilitude because I actually play guitar, so if I want a realistic guitar sound, I play it. But there are uses for guitar-ish sounds that are only trying to evoke rather than imitate. Kinda like a Mellotron, it falls short enough that it becomes its own instrument.

I have no problem setting the Snap Intensity to any setting. It stays put when I do that. Magnetic Test is just a convenient way to test whether you want to keep the Snap Intensity setting. I don't wish to sound pedantic, but it's best to have the terms clarified so that we can help sort out what's gone wrong.

It is, really. Especially since the retractable cupholders have fallen out of favour. Great place to stow dongles, adapters, etc.

PSU fan noise has been the final frontier on my 2nd-to-last build. I used a $50 EVGA PSU that the Amazon reviews said was quiet, supposedly its fan is on a controller, etc. For this one, I snagged a new-in-box Corsair 650. Its fan stays off most of the time, as far as I can tell, and/or when it does spin up, there's no sound to speak of. I've been using the chopstick method of finding where the noise offenders are in my systems. Sit next to them and one by one, briefly stop the fans using the tip of the chopstick. I find out straightaway which one(s) is making the noise. So far at my house, since I went on noise pollution alert, I've retired a PSU fan that was sounding like a hovercraft, 2 case fans that were doing the PWM fan death rattle, 2 fans that were spinning too fast due to being DC rather than PWM, and a CPU cooler/fan. My i7-6700's Intel cooler had developed about 10mm of sideways play in its fan bearing with accompanying snarl, so I replaced it with a round UFO/flower-shaped thing from Zalman (it was tough to find a bargain on a cooler for an i7-6700). The Zalman had such poor fit and finish that it took me about 45 minutes of Netflix 'n' diamond whetstoning on the sofa to get it flat enough not to rock when I set it atop the CPU package. The result is that I can't tell by listening when my main PC is on, and with the other 2 I have to get reeeally close to them to hear anything.

Yeah, passively-cooled graphics card and low RPM fans for everything else. I went with one of these. Only a single USB 3 port on the front, where I'd rather have a pair, but whatever, it's cheap and can take both sizes of SD card.

In my incremental quest to achieve "quiet PC" sound levels, I think I've finally nailed it. I realized this the first time I walked into my music room and had a moment of anxiety because I thought my DAW computer had crashed. I thought this because it was dead silent. A wiggle of the mouse and the monitor lit right up. I think that when I can't even tell by listening that the computer is turned on, I've gone as far as I need to go. One big thing (literally, compared to my previous mini tower) was that since the CPU in my new build is a socket LGA2011-v3, I needed a case to fit a full ATX motherboard. This meant a full tower, and I snagged a nice Antek on Craig's List. Only issue was that being kinda older, it came with DC controlled fans rather than the more versatile PWM controlled (which can usually spin down lower). When I put it all together, I heard fan noise, and sure enough, when I stopped the Antek DC case fan, the fan noise vanished. A deep dive and some review checking turned up Thermalright fans, which among other nice features, come with silicone rubber isolation pads to decouple the fan from the sheet metal case. A 3-pack of 120mm fans is $12 at Amazon. Three fans for the price of a single Noctua or beQuiet. The build quality is equal to the Noctua fans I've used in the past, lots of blades and they're cupped for good air movement at low RPM. I see that they also have tower coolers for under $20. I would expect the same high quality. At this point, I have only one case fan, on the left side blowing in. Yep, no rear fan, no top fan, and I'm running an i7-6950X, notorious for being power hungry. Right now I have Netflix open on monitor 2 (watching Drive To Survive) and the CPU is at 28C, the graphics card is at 32C. Web browsing and watching Netflix isn't much of a strain, but when I play Outer Wilds, the GPU hasn't gotten above 70C. I'm nowhere near any kind of throttling. The Corsair PSU has really good fan control, and since I'm using the GT 1030, which has very low power consumption, the PSU fan rarely even comes on. The last piece I want to add is a front-facing card reader in the second, otherwise unused 5.25 bay. Good for keeping the Waves licenses on an SD card.

The tradeoff of building a brand new computer vs. buying an off-the-shelf pre-built has seldom been this simple for me. She had no existing components whatsoever, whereas when doing an upgraded build, there are usually multiple components that can be reused: case, power supply, hard drive, RAM if it's between generation changes, CPU cooler if it will work with the new CPU. So you wind up getting a new motherboard, CPU, and graphics card. And, I hope, giving or selling your old ones to someone who can use them in a budget Frankenbuild. Recycling/reuse of components is the true advantage of doing your own builds vs. off-the-shelf. If you have to buy 100% brand new parts, that's when I'd weigh the cost:benefit. How much is your PC building time worth? To me it's recreation time, so it doesn't factor in at all. My most recent build was around a better CPU and (really nice) cooler I got for the cost of shipping. Case and PSU on Craig's List, hard drive and RAM from Amazon, and a graphics card and optical drive I already had around. There should have been a motherboard to go with the CPU and cooler, but I never could get it to boot, so that added an eBay purchase.

Playing with fire, there. Not recommended. It's 32 bit, its manufacturer deprecated it long ago. It's a matter of time before it will simply stop working in Cakewalk, and other hosts as well. For free, you can have REMatrix or MConvolutionEZ. For pay, there's MConvolutionMB. Wait for it to come around at half price in MeldaProduction's weekly "Eternal Madness" sale. That shouldn't take more than a few months. If you're a first time buyer you can get it for under $10 by waiting for the signing up for their newsletter ($10 credit), waiting for the sale (50% off list price) and using a referral code (MELDA65032871) for another 20% off the list price. I guarantee that MConvolutionMB will give you more control over the various parameters than you could ever use. That's just how their stuff is. It's also said to be light on resource use for a convolution. Here's a shot with both a "device" view and some of the underlying parameters. I think it will address your "relatively few controls" issue:

From my understanding, what Sven is seeing is not that the Magnetic Test graphic is changing, it's the Snap Intensity slider setting.

I lose track of the CA/PC-2A permutations due to being one of the (few) people running around here who had the full VST/PC version but not SONAR itself. So from the start with CbB, I always had the PC module, way before it started to be included. I also have the installer for Bark of Dog 1, which lets you install a PC module version. Bummer that development of 3rd-party PC modules stopped with the Gibson sale. Was there something about licensing, or was it just loss of interest on the part of the 3rd-party developers?