Starship Krupa

Tried all 3. Structure won't even install, keeps throwing errors about corrupt files in the downloaded libraries, which I've tried getting from multiple sources. The sage advice of @abacab to stick with Xpand!2 is well-taken. Anyone who doesn't already have Xpand!2, it's a very useful instrument, and an excellent way to get quality results fast. Snag a 2-seater on it for $5, just go ahead. It's great for sketching ideas, but plenty of the stock sounds are very useful, especially the pads and synth basses. It has some ferocious basses. Not as flashy a ROMpler as MSoundFactoryLE or SynthMaster Player, but also less cumbersome. Strike seems to be a sampled beat box. For this I have Break Tweaker. It sounds great, good samples and a comprehensive UI, but only duplicates things I already have access to. Would just be a distraction. Transfuser 2, yep, tiny, dated GUI story checks out. It has a workflow style that I don't feel I'm yet qualified to evaluate, it's oriented toward loop editing and triggering. That's something I very much want to explore more, but I don't think that Transfuser 2 is a good place to start. It's the same story as with multiple other AIR VSTi's: sounds excellent, works great, some nice features, all scuppered by any antique tiny UI.

Yes. The software industry, and especially within certain genres of software like DAW's, is a community. It came of age as employees began to be expected to move from company to company to further their careers rather than stay with one employer their entire career. I'm sure that most of the former Cakewalk Inc. now work for other software companies, perhaps audio ones. Unless one company feels that another is biting their IP, and/or they've sent nastygrams about it, then things tend to be cordial. As you say, the other DAW makers probably took at as a scary bellwether.

Thanks to Bandlab, at least you finally did get what you paid for. And it doesn't get said enough: thanks to you and everyone else who ever paid a license fee for SONAR (which included me, 20 years ago). It funded the development that's the foundation of my favorite DAW. SONAR's market share and popularity undoubtedly helped make the Cakewalk IP and brand more attractive to Bandlab. Fun fact: Bandlab has now owned the brand longer than Gibson OR Roland owned Cakewalk, Inc. I'll leave it up to the olde tymers to decide which of these owners most helped the program thrive. I may be in the minority, but I really, really prefer the SONAR X/Skylight interface to what came before. I miss it when I use other DAW's like Ableton Live!, Mixcraft, and Studio One. Take Lanes now work very well thanks to some changes made in the past 5 years, and Take Lanes are in line with industry standards. From what I've gathered in almost 5 years of forum participation, Roland Cakewalk came up with SONAR X, with the Skylight interface and Take Lanes, Gibson Cakewalk went a long way in tidying up the initial mess, and Bandlab have further polished and enhanced it a great deal. True?

This one is small, but it bugged me for a long time. The plug-in Browser icon looks like a plug rather than a Hitachi Magic Wand: Also, this is how my Tools Module is looking these days, the idea is to have the button icons resemble the cursor you get when you invoke the tools: Transport module, flat style: Give your Pan pots wings: Mix Module, note larger button text, also present in Track Headers and Console Strips: Screen clips are from my upcoming theme, working title "Blue Flat Dark." One of the driving concepts is to use as much button real estate as possible to make things easily readable (tip of the hat to @Matthew White for sparking that idea).

It's good to see this. When they dropped Break Tweaker, I was concerned that Stutter Edit 2 might be going on the chopping block.

Unbelievable price. Boom is old, but still one of my go-to's when I need a retro drum box sound. I thought it might be a typo, but I put it in my cart and from a $79.99 list price, they applied a $79.00 discount. https://www.airmusictech.com/virtual-instruments/boom.html

If you really can't get Cakewalk by Bandlab to work for you, I'd suggest taking your good money and trying some other programs out. The first one that comes to my mind is Mixcraft, which has a simpler UI and is quite reasonably priced. Very solid program, and if you just need the features you had in SONAR 7, they'll supply that and more. There's also MAGIX Music Creator.

To my understanding, what Bandlab own is the code, and the "Cakewalk" trademark and logo (and presumably, trademarks for some of the other software products that used to be sold by the Cakewalk company). They don't own all of the code or trademarks for every software product that was ever sold under the Cakewalk brand. They did NOT buy Cakewalk the company, just some of the stuff that Cakewalk the company owned. The company that was named Cakewalk, Incorporated, no longer exists. It ceased to exist 5 years ago. The only legal connection that Bandlab has to the old Cakewalk company is ownership of the trademark "Cakewalk," which it's using as the name for what was once the Cakewalk company's flagship product. Some of Bandlab's developers and support staff used to work at Cakewalk, Inc., but they now work for Bandlab (my suspicion is that a number of them do so on a contract basis). Any contract or agreement that a license holder had with Cakewalk Inc. is in limbo because Cakewalk, Inc. was dissolved and nobody bought the company (unless the license agreements somehow specified Gibson as the parent company). Bandlab only purchased some of their ideas and computers. Bandlab have no legal obligation to make the products of the defunct Cakewalk company available for download by the people who owned licenses for them. They're only doing it for the sake of good will, and they won't be doing it forever. I'm actually a bit surprised that they've kept that licensing server online for such a long time. Given the friendliness of Bandlab's business practices, I'm sure that they'll give plenty of notice before the server shuts down for good.

According to M-Audio's website, their latest driver works with Windows 11. Downloading and installing the latest driver is your best bet.

So it shows up as an available audio device in Cakewalk's Preferences? And you have set up an audio track and set its input to be whatever the name of the device is? What happens when you arm the track for recording and strum a bit? No movement on the meter? One thing to be aware of is that you won't actually hear what you're playing through your speakers/monitors unless you have Input Echo enabled on the track:

https://www.airmusictech.com/black-friday/ "Get HUGE Black November deals on AIR Plugins – including a selection of AIR Classics like Xpand 2, Structure 2, Velvet 2 and LOOM Classic for just $10! Big savings across the entire range of AIR Plugins." I was wondering if we'd ever see the 10-bucks-a-pop deals again, and here is one. BTW, for anyone interested, DB-33 is included in the $10 sale, it's just not on the page in the link. Go to all products and it's in there. Now, questions for the AIR heads: I have Xpand!2, Hybrid 3, Vacuum Pro, Boom, and DS-500. All have been very much worth the pittances I paid for them over the years and I'm wondering about the other 10 buck specials. I'm curious about Strike, Transfuser2, and Structure. Anyone have experience with them? I'm sure each one is worth $10 if someone's looking for them, but I already have drum machines and samplers and am wondering what these bring to the table. I know that trials are available for all of them, and I will be checking those out, but I also want to get opinions from the hive. (Edit: these prices are also available at Pluginboutique, which will earn you points and whatever freebie they have next month)

Funny thing, I was just messing about tonight with the free Soundpaint libraries and thinking they were the best-sounding thing since Chromophone. Then popped over here and was thinking "it'd be cool if 8Dio had a Black Friday sale." Cha-ching! Supercluster is a crazy deal at $2.40 if you're into drone-y ambient evolving sounds. I will be PM'ing you for your promo code.

I don't have the exact date, it seems that it took a few days for the press release to propagate. Wikipedia points to an article dated November 21, 2017, so I'll go with that. It's the anniversary of that upsetting announcement saying that there would be no Cakewalk Inc. no more, after 30 years in business. I don't have much to say except that while I was not a SONAR user at the time I was shocked, and sad on behalf of the faithful SONAR users. I had been using Mixcraft for a few years and I would have been BUMMED if Acoustica had suddenly announced that they were ending it all. Things eventually worked out about as well as they possibly could have, but it was 3 months until the Bandlab announcement, I would imagine those were very, very long months for some people. I know that when the Bandlab announcement came, some SONAR faithful felt like the day laborers who started early in The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard. I'm glad that some people managed to hang on, and I'm glad that some of the good folk who no longer primarily use Cakewalk (or no longer use it at all) have stuck around on the forum.

It IS amazingly handy and it exists as a 3rd-party utility: ProjectScope

I've been Firewire-on-Windows (7 and then 10) for many years. Was running a pair of Presonus Firepod/FP10's using Presonus' Windows 7 driver (installed in compatibility mode) with a PCI Via chipset FW adapter. Upgraded to a Focusrite Saffire Pro 40, using Focusrite's Windows 10 driver, using a Star-Tech PCIe card with a TI chipset. The reason for the TI chipset being a preference is that most of the interface manufacturers used TI chipsets in the interfaces, so naturally they play better together. I never had trouble with the FP10's when I tried using a Via card, but with the Focusrite, it seems to have less trouble with the initial sync with the TI card. Some have better luck using the Microsoft "Legacy" Firewire driver. It doesn't seem to make a difference for me, so I just use TI's driver. I retain a cantankerous preference for Firewire over USB 2 because Firewire was designed to facilitate 2-way communication. Trying LatencyMon on both technologies showed me that my USB driver is much busier than the Firewire driver once I started streaming audio. There may not be a practical difference past a certain computer hardware spec (my old Dell laptop's performance suffers when using my USB interface), but you can get some excellent Firewire interfaces for cheap due to their "obsolescence."

I read the manual for DeCoda, and even tried the demo of it. Nice program for learning songs. But there's a thing that has puzzled me since I started using DAW's again, which is how difficult it seems to be to find a DAW, plug-in, or standalone program that can simply analyze an audio clip and tell me whether the music in the clip is in tune (compared to A=440 or whatever), and if not, by how much. The idea is that with that information, I can get a piece of recorded music from someone, and if they weren't tuned to concert pitch at the time, no problem, I can retune my instrument(s) and play along. Given the sophistication of music analysis algorithms these days, I would think that this would be pretty easy. Also, given how many songs use sampled audio from old vinyl or whatever that might not be at Concert pitch, the popularity of mashups, etc., I have a hard time understanding how this isn't a commonplace task. I've tried to do this so many times over the years and I eventually end up noodling on my MIDI controller while using the pitch bend wheel to find out if the source material is sharp or flat, then "walking" it up or down until it sounds in tune. It seems crazy to have to do that in this day and age. DeCoda allows you to set it to Concert pitch or Hippie Nonsense pitch or whatever, and it will analyse the audio you feed it and play it back according to that reference pitch, but oddly, as far as I can tell, it won't tell you what the original base pitch of the audio was. At least it does tempo pretty well. Using the tools in Cakewalk, I've never gotten close to detecting the correct tempo of an existing piece of music. I've tried HorNet Songkey, Meldaproduction MTuner. Songkey is only interested in telling you what chords are being played, and MTuner responds too quickly. Is there some piece of software somewhere that can do this? Remember, what I want to do is find out the reference pitch and tune my instruments to the existing music, I don't (necessarily) want to adjust the clip to my preferred reference pitch.

Since those buttons duplicate the track control ones, I'd expect it to do the same thing as the one in the Track Header. Bounces the track with all FX.

Given that we're talking VSTi's here, a Freeze button might also be appropriate.

There's one plug-in I can think of that might work. MCCGenerator is part of the legendary Meldaproduction MFreeFX Bundle. It generates MIDI CC messages based on a variety of things, from built-in oscillators, to level envelope following (which is what you want). It requires a way to map the parameters of your target FX to MIDI CC's. Download the bundle and try it in free mode and see if you can get the results you want. I have the upgraded version, and the custom modulators section is readily accessible. This may not be so for the free version, as access to the modulators and multiparameters is advertised as one of the advantages of upgrading the bundle. Good news, though, for another week, Meldaproduction are having a 50% off everything sale, and that includes the FreeFX upgrade. You can get the whole bundle upgraded for about $10 USD if you first sign up for their newsletter, which gives you a $10 credit. Then when you check out, apply discount code MELDA1923165. The result of all of these discounts is that you'll get the bundle upgrade for about $10 USD. There are of course 36 other plug-ins in the bundle, so it's a pretty decent deal overall.

I like this. There's certainly plenty of room in the UI.

Waiting for the Squier version over here.

Hmm. I guess I need to investigate this further. The Saffire Pro 40 has a loopback feature, but I've ignored it. If it makes it easier to capture audio from Windows, I'm in. I do this all the time to capture dialog samples.

It may be kind of arcane these days, but would mapping the users' home directories (on the server) to a drive letter help solve the problem? For instance, if, when logging on to a system, the user had an "H:" drive that was really their network share. That way you could set up the Cakewalk project/template/etc. folders to all be on the H: drive. Are there other per-user files that Cakewalk needs to install on the C: drive? The only hard-coded folder I know of that must be on the C: drive is Cakewalk Content\Cakewalk Themes, and that can be for all users. And add me to the list of people who would like Cakewalk to become more network aware.

C'mon, you don't think that track # and artist are more important than date, type, and size? 😄

AIMP is a good one, also MusicBee.