Starship Krupa

Well, the big problem, of course, is real estate. Those controls would have to go somewhere, which would result in being able to display fewer channel strips. One of the advantages that physical mixing desks have over computer screen ones: the physical ones can be 5' wide, where my computer screen, not so much. That's why the ProChannel is such a great idea: the controls are still right there on the desk where you want them, but they get out of the way when you want to have more strips on the screen. Odd, though, I have a friend who stopped using SONAR partially because he hated the ProChannel. Aside from the fact that I think it's a great feature, gee, if someone doesn't agree they can just leave it closed, right? But he wanted the knobs and stuff that I guess used to be in the SONAR mixer strip before the ProChannel came along. The biggest enhancement I can think of for the Console View would be for the fader section to resize depending on whether the rest of the strip is occupied. There's a lot of space at the top of the strips above the Gain knob that could be used to give more throw to the faders. Also, there's not really a reason for the Sends rack to be full size when no sends are in use. I'm sure that as monitors increase in size and resolution, these things will be addressed.

If you mean the ability to adjust EQ settings without popping open ProChannel, you can already do that. Try clicking and dragging in the EQ UI with the ProChannel closed. For the rest....well, that's what ProChannel is for. It's always a click away.

The marker enhancement that I'd like to see is the option to see "tails" on them that run down then entire height of the Track View. I love the feature in Mixcraft, it makes it so much easier to line up clips and areas of a waveform (when you're trying to do manual phase alignment). Cakewalk does have the Aim Assist Line, which is awesome, but I'd still love to have those marker tails. Both are great, both together would be crazy great.

Hey, watch it, I'm a Californian! 😄 I like to reduce the impact on the natural environment wherever practical, I think it's good for everyone. One of the things I like about TruOil is its negligible toxicity and environmental impact. It's made from natural, renewable resources and you can wipe the stuff on with your fingers if you want to (although not recommended, it's kinda sticky). The idiocy around TruOil likely comes down to how it's distributed and marketed rather than some clueless person targeting it specifically. Someone somewhere in the supply chain had to classify it, so they put down "firearm care" or whatever, and whoosh, it's "gun paraphernalia." And therefore dangerous, OMG🙄. And/or possibly the retailer and/or shipping company having a policy (at the request of law enforcement or otherwise) of taking note of whoever they send anything gun related to. So they can profile people who might someday take their Mother of Tinkertoy Tele to school and start bonking people with it. A note for guitarists on further usefulness of gun paraphernalia: when I was doing amp repair, I went to a gun shop to buy TruOil for a guitar finishing project and noticed that the wire brushes used for barrel cleaning would be perfect for cleaning out dirty 1/4" amp input jacks, and output jacks on guitars. At the moment I can't recall which caliber works the best, a bit of research would do it. Remember that the sleeve diameter of those jacks is greater than 1/4". Otherwise, it's really tough to clean the sleeve. A spin with the barrel brush and contact is restored. Try it on a dirty jack and see if it helps.

Looks like the neck isn't drilled according to the instructions. They suggest you have a fretting hammer so you can tap in high frets? They should take care of that before it's shipped. Well, I suppose you don't have to buy one of their hammers. As for fret crowning files, I have a set that I got on eBay that do a decent job. Being a frugal dude, I shy from the prices that Stew-Mac charges for their tools. If I were a pro and getting paid to do it, they'd save enough time to make it worth it, but I can do a good job with what I have. I'm a cheap guitar maven, though. I have exactly one "nice" guitar, a 25-year old Martin D1. The rest are Frankencasters or distressed in some way or other. They play great because I've learned how to work on them. Perfectionism and the DIY impulse are at odds with each other (in me). I have learned to make an instrument play well, but I'll never be as good at fretwork as Gary Brawer's Plek machine. For an instrument that I wanted to be the best possible, I'd take it to Gary, have his crew put stainless steel frets in it and then put it on the Plek machine. Anything I do myself is going to come up short of that, so then it's just a matter of how short is acceptable.

That actually serves one well when doing fretwork. One reason I'd never do it as a job. I take too long with it, so it's only my guitars and friends' that I'll work on.

Yup. I've never actually checked mine against another straightedge, but I get good results with it. Flattening a piece of metal like that isn't a difficult task. They probably have a machine or two set up to crank them out by the thousands. Insert stock, cut notches, lap edge to ensure flatness. Still, do let me know if you find that yours isn't flat! If it isn't, it can itself be leveled. Perhaps in your line of work you know a machinist or two? Or if you get one of those bars, it would work as well on the straightedge as it does on the frets. Really, though, I'll bet that it'll be just fine as it is. Are you thinking of putting a color stain on first? That's a nice look. 🤦‍♂️ I think that's why it's so difficult to find here in Northern California. I wonder if I've wound up on some "gun nut" list for buying the stuff. Great detailed advice, @mettelus. I tried it on the second guitar I finished and would now use nothing else for a natural finish. It's just so easy and it gets such great results. I had the idea years ago to clone the stuff and market it as a guitar finish or even a general woodworking finish. As you say, the biggest part of it is linseed oil. I think they put it through a reduction process (heating in an oven with no oxygen), which is what helps it to cure quickly. I looked into it with the help of a friend of mine who is a coatings chemist. Many compounds you can learn a lot about from reading their Material Safety Data Sheet. Heck, Birchwood Casey themselves should market a guitar finish version with different packaging so that it wouldn't be associated with firearms. Not that I personally have any problem with that, but I wonder how much of it is going on gun stocks vs. musical instruments these days. Call it TruGuitar or something and sell it via musical instrument distributors. I've not gotten around to experimenting with putting dyes and pigments in it, but I thought about that as well. So many ideas, so little volition. 😥 The stuff is so easy to work with. Wipe it on with an old sock, let it cure for a couple of hours, repeat until it looks excellent.

I believe the Dr. goes on sale periodically. If it were anything over about $30 US, I wouldn't have bought a license. Really, for the performance meter, I just use it for comparison and trust that the scale on the left is some indication of the performance. It's the scale on the left that I think you should concentrate on when using it. And make use of the ability to load 2 plugs at once. I bet you can also figure out the Dynamics analysis. Important note: there are two modes. One applies a rising amplitude and shows the curve, the other applies a pulse and shows you an interesting graphic that makes it easy to see what it's doing as far as attack and release. Really, with the help of those two graphs, I'm pretty confident I could make approximations of a lot of "vintage" compressors using a versatile one like MCompressor, using the draw-your-own curve. One interesting thing I learned regarding MCompressor: It's not as "precise" as I thought. According to Plugindoctor, after it kicks in, its default curve goes through a change at the top end. This may contribute to how well-liked it is.

Odd coda to this tale: I just sold the ASRock motherboard on eBay for $43 plus shipping. After I gave up on it I tossed it on the pile, where it somehow got a few bent CPU socket pins, but then I remembered the "for parts only" sales on eBay and put it up there. Cuts into the cost of the replacement motherboard by almost 50%. When the i7-6800K also sells on eBay, I'll be back in the "free motherboard with CPU" zone.😄 The build is cruising right along with the Gigabyte board. I have to say, though, after getting used to the excellent tuning and fan control utilities on my ASUS motherboard, the stuff that comes with the Gigabyte is kinda poop. The ASUS doesn't even have an unlocked CPU in it. The Gigabyte won't let me spin the case fan down to zero, which the ASUS did. Speaking of fans, even with a passively-cooled GPU and a notoriously hot CPU, I'm running with a single case fan and the CPU and GPU temps never get above 65C when running games or benchmarks or anything. I think it's that mid tower case. I was going to put a couple of fans in it, but one seems to be more than enough.

The Dead Duck FX package has a delay, as does the Kilohearts Essentials bundle. BTW, I'm interested to know what you find out when putting Acustica plug-ins to the Plugin Doctor performance test. I tried some of their freebies many years ago, and they were such resource hogs that I've never touched them since.

So what? Who's going to consume that theoretical song? So someone can press a button and create a song. Who's going to pay to listen to it or own their own copy? If the answer is "people who would otherwise have paid for my music," well, pardon me, but if I'm putting out soulless crap that can be bested by a robot, I deserve to be put out of business. It's no skin off my nose if someone can push a button and make a song. Doesn't affect me in the slightest. I've never cared 2 plugged poops for what mainstream music consumers want. It's been almost 50 years since I gave a rat's hiney about the Billboard Hot 100. My thing in the 80's and 90's was indie labels and college radio. My deal in this century is SomaFM and Bandcamp. I have fringe-y tastes and I like it like that. So slick saccharine overproduced crap-pop can now be created entirely without human involvement? The music in the top 10 already sounds like it was created by algorithms. Why not take it all the way? Elvis. The Beatles. Disco. Punk. Rap. Synthpop. Rave. All spelled "the end of true musicianship." All were bellwethers of an imminent musical apocalypse. Doomsayers will be doomsayers.

If the responses I got on Vi Control when I mentioned that MCompressor was the compressor that lit the lightbulb of understanding about how compressors work are any indication, there are many people who had a similar experience. It's that display, with the vertical line bouncing back and forth. Simple, uncluttered, nothing that doesn't need to be front-facing. Incredibly, it's the only compressor in the Meldaproduction line that features that display without also exposing a whole bunch of other stuff. This is MDynamics, the flagship precision compressor in their lineup, as simple as I could make it: It has the display we like, but all of the stuff at the left takes up so much real estate. TurboComp is similar. I've been lobbying Vojtech off and on for years to replace or revamp or augment MModernCompressor, (aka The Forgotten Compressor) to be able to use that display instead of that distribution graph that nobody but him seems to understand. Either that or create "MCompressorDeluxe" that has the Dry/Wet control and fancy detectors from MModernCompressor and the much-loved display and ability to design your own compression/expansion curves from MCompressor. There's a spot in the MeldaProduction line for a compressor at the $50 level (one that will sell and be used more MModernCompressor).

Ah, just wait a couple of months and the upgrade price will have settled into the realm of sanity. Software companies just do this. The initial announced upgrade price is whatever they think they can get from those who must have the latest versions of everything. I get that, I used to be much more that way than I am now. I think Vegas Pro was what got me to realize that I don't necessarily need to upgrade a program that already does way more than I'll ever learn how to use. After a product like that matures, the new features are so up in the stratosphere as to be way beyond anything I'm currently doing or even likely to do in the foreseeable future. "HD video" around these parts still maxes out at 1920x1280.

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?"