Starship Krupa

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.

I got Diffuse as a freebie many years ago, and kind of forgot about it until a few months ago. Loaded up the latest version and it's pretty damn cool for sound design-y things. In the Valhalla Supermassive vein.

One with the Exponential engine(s) in it for sure.

The ONE thing? When REAPER has such an abundance of things to get bugged about? 😆 In defense of theming, which you can see from my sig I like to do, and have spent many happy hours doing, would you make the "use it to make music" comment about someone whose guitar hobby included putting custom paint jobs on their axes (um, something else I like to do)? Many if not most people love to customize their music-making tools. The fact that Cakewalk has the Theme Editor is a big plus for me. Cakewalk looks and works better for me with my custom themes. I get to share them with others, just like I do with my music. Well, more so, because I've finished and released more friggin' Cakewalk themes than I have songs lately, no fault of the themes. 🤨 It's a fun thing to do when I'm not feeling the music, and it's also a really good way to get familiar with the dusty corners of the DAW I might not otherwise explore.

That's a big "if," and a very conditional "should." These assume that the plug-in spec is perfect, which it's not. There are 3 pieces at work: the plug-in, the host, and then the standard that lets them communicate. One of the problems with the VST spec from the start is that it's at the mercy of what Steinberg think is important. Error handling, memory management, thread scheduling, inter-plug-in communication, code sharing, I don't believe any of them is covered by the VST specs so far. This leaves it up to the individual plug-in developers to come up with their own ways of handling it. The looseness and gaps in the VST spec mean that plug-in and a host can each be "compliant" but still not work well together. In my experience, the Cakewalk developers and most plug-in developers are cool about coming up with solutions to interoperability issues.

Maybe asking over at the Presonus forum?

As others have alluded to, it very much matters what type and how many tracks you anticipate using. It should work fine for "new & aspiring," but you may outgrow it as you try to do more with it. How quickly that happens depends on what type of material you're creating. As you learn more, you'll probably want to do more, and you'll eventually want a more powerful system, but there's no harm in starting out with this one. Swapping the HDD for an SSD and stuffing in as much RAM as it will take are inexpensive upgrades that will have great payoffs in performance for the whole system, and when you upgrade to a more powerful system, you can take the SSD with you. If you want to record audio, you'll need an external interface with mic inputs. The things that tax a system these days are plug-ins, either FX or virtual instruments, so it really matters how many and how resource-hungry the ones you'll use are. I can do a decent level of audio production on the system where I'm typing this, which is my kinda elderly Dell Latitude notebook with 8G of RAM (maxed out). But it is getting to the point where a couple of the plug-ins I use on my main system won't run on this one due to its lacking later versions of the AVX instruction set. Doesn't make it unusable, but it means that I have to watch it. Whatever system you use, it's always a good idea to optimize it for use with audio. There are several threads on this forum with suggestions for how to do it.

Really? I got a killer synthwave drone bass out of it in just a couple of minutes. Do you mean "where does it fit in in the type of music I want to make?" So far it seems more of a good Synthwave machine than the "House Essentials" they describe it as. As far as user-facing controls, the synth in my collection it most resembles is xPand!2, although I think I saw that you have sworn off AIR's products (that's kinda too bad, because xPand!2 is a real powerhouse of a ROMpler and Hybrid3 is my #1 go-to). It also resembles several Kontakt Factory Selection synths. You have a main sound/sample, then a few controls for tweaking it. Resembles a ROMpler, although I don't know if their waveforms are samples or generated by the synth engine. However the waveforms were/are generated, it sounds pretty damn good. It doesn't hurt that one of the main effects is UJAM's own Finisher. I don't think there's a way to start from scratch and build up your own patches, rather it's always start from a factory patch and adjust it to taste.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/512790/Quern__Undying_Thoughts/ 50% off. I'd had this in my wishlist. Played for about an hour and a half and can say that if you liked MYST, Riven, Exile, etc., you'll like this. Yes, it's very derivative of MYST, and to me, that's a very good thing. Also, if you liked MYST, remember there's a free version of one of the MYST sequels, Uru Live, available to play for free: https://www.mystonline.com/en/ As with Cakewalk by BandLab, you don't have to get into the "online" part (although for me it adds to the fun). 😄

You could try selling them on CL. Or elsewhere. I like to build computers. PM me how much you want for them. It's a pretty easy ship in a USPS Flat Rate box.

Um, guys? Guys? I just followed the "Doctor iZotope" link at the top of the thread and it worked a treat. Got the MPS 5 Universal for $149. 😮 Along the way to confirming the order, I don't remember seeing anything about needing a qualifying purchase, so I just kept a-clickin'. iZotope has my money, spent directly to them, and I have my licenses. Jumpy to the point of installing the ones I was most interested first in case they "caught on." But everything is authorized and works. Pinch me, I must be dreaming. I didn't have any of the plug-ins included except a couple of the bx ones. I know, I know, I said no more mixing plug-ins, but this....good lord. Ozone 10 Advanced? VocalSynth? Stratus/Symphony? Neoverb? Neutron 4? RX 10? I'd regret it forever. I agree that iZotope's business practices are often gripeworthy (really, I need to keep 3 versions of Neutron on my system just so I can open older projects?) and their plug-ins are resource hogs, but they do sound very, very good. (and thank heaven, it justifies my acquisition of Audiolens 😂)

Looks like UJAM are doing the A|A|S thing with Usynth. A single engine repurposed in multiple different flavors.