Starship Krupa

There are multiple plug-in houses that have recently put discontinued products up for free download and use. Audio Damage, Tone Boosters....

Yes. More and faster. According to the people who make the video editing software, the more RAM you have on your graphics card the better. You can do 4K with a card that has 2G but the recommendation for 4K is 4G or more. An operation where those CUDA cores shine with video work is when you go to render. nVidia's higher-end cards have an onboard hardware CODEC for this kind of rendering. As with all things like this, it depends on the makers of the video editing software to take advantage of this. nVidia promote it via their NVENC developers' kit. For strictly DAW use, when I used the onboard graphics of my i7-3770, things in the Multidock would take just a little bit longer to Initially appear if I had it on monitor 2. When I was able to switch back to a card with 2G of GDDR, that went away. I experience smoother playback of full screen video on monitor 2 with the more capable cards, and I imagine that if I were using a DAW to do scoring, that would also be true. Having said all this, for video and DAW use, I don't know that there would be a noticeable difference between the latest GTX 3060 and a previous generation high end card. But if you are building a cost-no-object future-resistant rocket sled, why not go with the absolute top model and not even have to think about whether a single Windows program will run on your system, regardless of "system requirements?"

I tried a GT 720 and it was....not great compared to my old GTX550Ti. nVidia got kinda sleazy about their product naming for awhile. There was actually a version of the GT 1030 that uses DDR4 that is absolute poop. Same name, same price, hard to claim that it was anything other than an attempt to mislead consumers. Shameful. Having worked in multiple corporations, I suspect that the ploy worked in thousands of cases. IT department submits a purchase order for a dozen GT 1030's to upgrade the set of Dell towers they're buying for the design department, purchasing department finds the lowest possible price....which turns out to be a wretched dumpster of a card. The design department never notices because their new systems are at least faster than the old ones, and they blame AutoCAD for any sluggishness. As long as nobody stays late to play games on their work computer, they'll never know the difference. Some twerp at nVidia probably looked at the results of some research that indicated that most of the video cards that they were selling to Fortune 500 companies weren't getting anywhere close to their actual performance limits. Opportunity: sell them a "premium" card at the same price that they'll never notice is a slug. Give it the same name. I suspect that the whole GT 710/720 thing came from a similar place: hey, what a deal on a "700 series" graphics card. Except that it's not until you get to the GTX 750 Ti that you have a 7xx with the expected performance. If their products didn't work so well in the array of applications I use, this sleazery might be enough for me to look elsewhere. But they do work well, and they at least pay lip service to excelling for applications other than gaming. Plus, I like the way their drivers make things look with Direct X (no, the AMD drivers don't look exactly the same). I found the performance with Cakewalk (and Vegas) to be noticeable between the GT 720 and the GTX550Ti, but not so much between the GTX550Ti and the GT 1030, which may confirm my suspicion that what really matters most in those applications is how much and how fast the GDDR5 memory goes. Despite being old, the GTX550Ti has 2G of DDR5, and I think that makes it so it still hauls at 2-D tasks. The GT 1030 eats its lunch at gaming because newer, faster processor.

As part of my quest to build a quiet PC (that will still allow me to do 3-D adventure gaming and NLE work), I recently got a passively-cooled nVidia GT1030. Couldn't be happier. It even runs the GPUAudio FIR convolver. Only draws 30W at full tilt. It runs any of my games (MYST Online Uru, Event(0), Manifold Garden, Obduction, etc.) in highest quality, and works a treat for 2-monitor stuff. The GTX 550Ti it replaced ran its fan constantly, even when not using the 3-D engine. If the only thing I were doing with my system were DAW work, anything with 2G DDR5 would be fine. For that alone, there's no performance difference between the 550Ti and the 1030. I didn't try it with the i7-6770's onboard video.

I've encountered multiple objects that go black when I make them transparent.

A month and a half in, The Sword That Was Reforged is cruising right along. I got a good enough deal on a passively cooled nVidia GT 1030, and I'm pleased to say that it will run all of my (not cutting edge) games at ultra quality. As a bonus, the GPUAudio Fir Convolver is compatible with it. Not wanting a political discussion on GPUAudio, but I think it has promise for computation-intensive tasks like convolution. Anything else....I dunno. Maybe physical modeling. It appeals to my frugal nature; having all of that power just sitting there picking its nose seems wasteful, and the engine isn't doing that much with DAW work. The biggest generator of fan noise is now the power supply, an EVGA White 500W. It was touted as having a quiet temp-controlled fan, so I dunno what's up with that. It's 10 bucks to throw a Noctua or Be Quiet in it, but I'm kinda wondering what's up with the stock fan and whether an aftermarket one would even help. Silence is addictive; as I get things quieter in here, it's tempting to go further. One of the oddest annoyances is with spellcheck. I participate in multiple online forums, and use company names and tech terms a lot. The Sword's spellchecker dictionary doesn't have the terms entered into it that I had spent years entering. I had no idea that I had such an extensive personal dictionary....

Old post, I know, but if you haven't enabled hyperthreading in your system BIOS, that will help a bunch. As an experiment, I tried the same project on my aging laptop with and without hyperthreading enabled, and it played fine with and ground to a halt without. Good on ya for rockin' that vintage system! I'm all about squeezing the last bit of use out of whatever computer I own. And ever since Sandy Bridge, that's been very possible (I even just built a DAW for a friend around an old Core 2 Quad, and he loves it). Before you start overclocking, at minimum, get an air duster can and blow the dust off of your CPU cooler. I would also re-do the paste on the CPU cooler. After 11 years, it might not be working as well as it once did. If your case has room for another fan, those are good to have as well. Silent ones are under $10 on Amazon Prime. I've had good experiences with Be Quiet and Noctua. I like HWINFO for monitoring temperatures and fans. You can watch what's going on with rising temperatures, see if your system is going into thermal throttling under load, etc. It helped me get my antique Dell Latitude laptop running way better. You don't say what graphics you are using, but despite what some say, I have found that a more powerful (doesn't have to be a rocket sled, just an nVidia that supports OpenGL) card does help with Cakewalk. Especially if you run 2 monitors, the mixer on monitor 2 draws faster if you have more and faster video memory. Some plug-in manufacturers (Newfangled, Meldaproduction) make use of OpenGL in their GUI's, which takes some load off the CPU. I just installed a used passively-cooled nVidia GT 1030 and am happy with it, even for gaming.

Fortunately that leaves you with many good options at good prices. The extra buttons took a lot of getting used to. Even with just the differences between the Marathon and the Anywhere, I'm still getting used to it. The switch for unlocking the freewheel on the Marathon is in the same place as the "middle button" on the Anywhere, and to unlock the wheel on the Anywhere, you press the wheel itself. The wheel IS the middle button on the Marathon. I'm still getting used to this function swap. Also, the side buttons are kinda stiff, they take more pressure to activate, and holding both down for Ctrl-Alt is a little trickier. They are in a good location to avoid accidental activation, and yes, @Kevin Perry, they are set back just above where my thumb naturally sits. Really, there's not much substitute for going down to Office Max and trying the display mice. They all have subtle differences. I took a chance with the Anywhere 2 because I trust Logitech. Fortunately, it worked. If you can get a programmable mouse with the extra buttons in the right place for you, it is really good for Cakewalk with all its key modifiers. Heck, I'd like to have another button I could program to Shift. Also, can't say enough good about programming the middle button to double-click. It helps so much when browsing presets on plug-ins that require a double-click for that.

Please post what make, model, and year of car. Electric, hybrid, ICE? Are you using regular or premium unleaded? With ethanol? Are you in California? We can't help you unless we know the specs.

If you're recording audio, yes, absolutely. Onboard hardware CODEC's and associated hardware have come a long way as far as playback, but not so much as far as recording. Interfaces make no difference whatsoever in the rendered audio that Cakewalk produces, it's only in the quality of recording and playback on your system. That said, the better monitoring you can do, obviously, the better you can mix. But there are many EDM artists who use nothing but the onboard chip for playback on their laptops. Get a Presonus Audiobox or Studio 2|4 and a pair of Kalis, and guaranteed, you'll find mixing to be a more pleasant experience.

Yes, it's not a problem in general with Cakewalk. Cakewalk needs to be given, in Preferences/File/VST Settings, the correct location of the folder(s) where you have installed your 3rd-party (non Cakewalk) plug-ins. I install my VST2 plug-ins tin C:\VST64 and use the default C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3\ directory for VST3's.

I've found some great pads and happening basses among the presets. As far as learning how to craft my own sounds, I can get about as far as turning off the internal reverb (which is important to me). When I've watched people do tutorials, it looks like they're scribbling in the little blue window or something? I couldn't figure it out. I have so many synths that I can always find a sound that fits in the factory presets of one or the other of them. When I dig more deeply, it's not into something as idiosyncratic as Iris 2 Just like Chromophone and bx_oberhausen and other CPU-hungry synths, if you cut the # of voices down, things get a lot better, and I usually can't hear a difference. I don't play 2-handed chords with lush pads anyway. Those pads have some looooooong release tails.

I've only ever felt the need to have Elements, and I came close to spending whatever pittance it was to upgrade to the RX9 Elements license back when they announced that 10 would be coming out. Am I glad that I held off on that. RX10 Elements eliminates the standalone audio editor, which I happen to like. 🙄

I tried to use the "@" to tag you but it didn't work.

I wonder if it's had a financial impact on the music software industry.

Are you waiting for the behavior to change back to the way you preferred it? The longer you wait, the more changed and new features you'll need to learn if you want to stay proficient. Also, if you stick around and keep an eye on the forum, you can raise a voice of dissent to changes you don't like. These changes happen because a lot of people chime in with things like "I accidentally held Control when I meant to hold Shift when I moved the fader and now my entire mix is off." Despite pleas from myself and others, fader moves are still not Undo-able changes. So I like it the way it behaves now. Put in a feature request to make the old behavior available via editing an .INI file or whatever.

Late reply, I understand, but maybe you recorded with loop turned on? Open the take lanes on the track and see if maybe there are extra clips

One of my favorites, it's definitely in the "with a twist" category, is ATMOS2. Scroll down. It's free, too. Ambient drone for days.

The gameplay in Manifold Garden is not MYST-like. It's kind of the ultimate platform game, but instead of jumping, you switch the direction of gravity and fall. While you're falling, you can use the nav keys to direct yourself to another platform, etc.

It's one of those "now that I've heard it things," right? I've spent a lot of time listening to the first time B.B. launches into it before the vocals join the chorus. My guess is Ampeg B15, and it's a combination of playing through a 12W tube head into a single 15" speaker. Some of the growl may be speaker fart and/or power stage distortion. A hard knee compressor set to a slow enough attack to let the string pluck through. The compressor could also be causing some of that growl, I'm still analyzing it. While amp and cab sims abound, I have yet to see anyone claim to be able to model speaker cone breakup. Just because I haven't seen it doesn't mean it isn't happening, I just haven't noticed it. I don't know if that's something an IR impulse could capture?

Amazing visuals, great gameplay: https://store.steampowered.com/app/473950/Manifold_Garden/ 36 hours left in the sale....

I like Cakewalk's mixer better than Mixbus'. There are some features about Mixcraft's track view and comping I like, but Cakewalk has an edge due to better handling of clip grouping.

This. We can get any compressor or EQ to do mid-side by using two instances, MSED, etc., but I prefer having it there in the plug-in. Soundspot's Cyclone compressor is still a favorite bus compressor of mine due to its having the dual linked/unlinked sets of controls. Even though I have more chic options like elysia mastering compressor, I can dial in that thing faster than anything else.

Yeah, I passed on both of those deals; I hadn't fiddled with the standard versions enough to know whether I'd like them. Turns out I do, enough to drop $15 just to get the mid-side. Shadow Hills Mastering Compressor has the World's Sexiest Skeuomorphic GUI (TRIAD has the World's Sexiest non-skeuomorphic one). It's not like there won't be more (and possibly better) deals on them in the future; I'm keeping an eye open on them.