Starship Krupa

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.

I'm a Mixcraft fan from way back, like v5. It was my main DAW before CbB, but when I got a look at Cakewalk's Console vs. the one in Mixcraft, I was gone. When I mixed in Mixcraft, I did it using the Track/Timeline view because the mixer was so lame. It has some very convenient features that I miss in Cakewalk, but it also lacks many that now seem essential to me, like collapsible lanes. If you have multiple takes on a track and want to reclaim the screen real estate, the only way to do it is to put the track in a folder and then close the folder. I can get things done faster with Mixcraft's workflow, but Cakewalk's features are so much greater. The way that folders=submixes in Mixcraft is brilliant. Drag all your guitar tracks to a folder, boom, instant submix.

I'm not sure what happened this time around; I don't seem to have an August voucher floating around my Inbox. Is the minimum buy for a $25 voucher still $75? If so, I probably deleted it. It's gotten to the point with PA that I'm so confused about their promotions that I've just been waiting for them to settle down. There are a couple I'd still like to get from them (Shadow Hills Mastering Class A, Black Box HG-2MS). If anyone's looking for gems during the current sale, Unfiltered Audio BYOME and TRIAD are on deep discount.

It does seem like the OP is going to a lot of trouble. Irony aside, if the top-level goal is to teach oneself how to sing in tune, it's not necessary to reinvent the wheel. I'm not down on him for trying to find something that works, but as someone who taught myself how to sing in tune, I'll offer another suggestion. As others have alluded to, it's the feedback circuit between your ears and brain and vocal cords that you need to calibrate. Having a visual graph may be helpful for seeing whether you've hit the note, but it can only tell you after you've sung it. Then what do you do? Tell yourself to sing it a few cents higher or lower next time around? If you had that much precision, you wouldn't need to be training your voice. It's like watching a video of yourself losing a tennis match. You can see what mistakes you made, but the only way to learn how not to make those mistakes is to get out on the court and practice. For learning how to sing in tune, it's better to sing along with a guide track, then play it back aside the guide track and listen to hear whether you're in tune. Wherever you hear yourself go out of tune, find that note and hold down its key on your MIDI controller. Sing a note along with it, raising and lowering your pitch until you hit it. You can do this even with just a simple scale. The voice is like other instruments. The way to get good at it is practice. It doesn't have to be drudgery, try what I suggested for 10 minutes (or more) a few days in a row and you'll be amazed at how quickly you'll be able to sing in tune. It trains you to make instant corrections using feedback via the ear-brain-voice circuit.

I was wondering if it was that. I haven't heard the term in decades. I'm always interested to meet someone else who's been online for a long time.

Welcome to the forum and to two of my favorite hobbies: using a computer to make music and discussing it on this forum. Curious though, "thanks for the ad?" IMO, this falls into the category of "for now" advice. The OP should take notice of the "as a rule" caveat. Also "ultimately." I'd also precede it with "technically, no, but...." The reason to use the rule/convention that Steve mentions is that it anticipates that we'll eventually mix the tracks we're recording. As you learn more, you'll discover how much smoother things go the better you are set up for the next stages of the process.. There are exceptions to the rule that you may eventually discover. For instance, when I set up a headphone cue mix using sends, those usually bypass the Master bus.

I always go direct with bass. The tone I'm trying to nail right now is B.B. Dickason's on War's "The World is a Ghetto" (and "Cisco Kid" from the same album). The attack, the low end growl when he launches into the chorus. I suspect that it's a cranked Ampeg B15, but I'm not sure. It's difficult to find a plug-in that will do the low end growl very well. the best results I've gotten so far are with elysia mpressor first to get the attack, then Bass Professor Mk II for some multiband compression, then Black Box HG for the growl.

I know, right? I get 🙄 when people show up here wanting to use Cakewalk to augment their musical capabilities. A DAW should be nothing but a way to record audio. Pitch correction? Learn how to sing for heaven's sake. Sonny and Cher didn't need Autotune to sell millions of records. Overdubs? How about learning some social skills and getting your musical chops together so that whenever you have a musical idea, musicians who want to play with you will be at your place within minutes? Did Prince have 2 resort 2 such things? Automatic double tracking? How about learning how to sing well enough that you can record two actual vocal takes? Would John Lennon take shortcuts like that? Compression? Learn how to control your dynamics when you play and sing. Did the great Motown hits use compression? EQ? Learn how to set up your instrument and mics, learn how to treat your room. If it needs EQ, you're doing something wrong when you're recording it. Comping? Learn how to play your instrument or sing so that you can actually get through a 5 minute song without screwing up. Do you think Fleetwood Mac or Boston or the Beach Boys resorted to cutting the best bits out of multiple takes and stitching them into a single "performance?" Fleetwood Mac had better things to do with their razor blades than cut and splice recording tape. Staff editing? Capture an egret, pull out a quill, and whittle it down with your pen knife. How much hand-holding do you need? Piano roll? Scott Joplin didn't need to edit his piano rolls, he just got good enough at playing so that he could play them right into the punching machine without screwing up. Don't get me started on "quantizing." Virtual instruments? How about getting some good-sounding real instruments? Mixing? Learn how to play it at the right volume so that it fits with the rest of the instruments in the first place. Recording itself. If you want people to hear your music, why not pick up an instrument and play it for them?

The Piano Roll View has its own Snap Settings controls: When they are active, they override the settings in the global module. To activate them, click this button:

You can no longer get a serial number from Sennheiser that will allow it work in Kontakt Player. I don't know if that's true with full Kontakt. If you managed to snag a serial number back when it worked with the Kontakt Player you're good, but otherwise, probably not. If you're looking for an acoustic drum kit for free, there are plenty of other options. The free bundle from NI includes a plethora of free drum kits, including vintage drum machines. Same with Sampletank.

<Nigel Tufnel>These have the buttons lit when the feature is active.</Nigel Tufnel> I understand that convention, and the business of "normal" being the state that fades to the background, and "not normal" being the eye-catching one. It just suits my own ADHD brain to have it glaring at me. I can glance up and see that all the stuff that I want to be "on" is lit up. That's the beauty of being able to make custom themes. We can have our Cakewalk and eat it too. I don't think there's any danger of los panaderos adopting the Colin/Krupa Conventions. But we can have it our way if we want. And if someone wants to use my themes with the stock conventions, it's an easy dance with Theme Editor to switch those button images. Ya gotta admit that the "Pre/Post" and "1X/2X" things are cool. I encourage anyone to take whatever button images they want from my themes. So you can have your own Tungsten or Mercury with just those button changes. It's easy enough to do.

I did switch to CC mode. I putzed around with the ACT Control Surface and yes, it did help. I don't have great luck with Learn so far, rather typing in the controller number works best. Since I have the attention of @msmcleod, the dev team's control surface top doggie, is the dev team aware that the Cakewalk Arpeggiator doesn't respond to Control Surface messages? The buttons' appearance changes, but the actual functions don't work. @User 905133 has an extensive post on this, and I can confirm the behavior. Being able to control the arp is pretty important for live performance and improvisation.

Your memory serves you well. @Colin Nicholls was the first themer I saw actually improve upon the iconography by doing things like this. Matthew White deserves mention for making his FX rack bypass buttons less ambiguous. I think a couple of my themes might still be using FX bin bypass buttons I swiped from Matthew. If you check out any of my themes, they all have less ambiguous buttons wherever applicable. Colin got there ahead of me on most of these things. My upsampling button toggles between "1X" and "2X." The "Pre" buttons for sends in my Console View toggle between "Pre" and "Post," and so on throughout the program wherever I could find something. It started with using the "MIDI jack stuck to a keyboard" icon for Instrument tracks, which are....a MIDI track bound to a synth track. The stock themes use the plain "keyboard" icon for that, which is just plain backward. Also weird, and potentially more troublesome IMO, is a Mix module where brightly colored buttons for Mute, Solo, Input Echo, Dim Solo, Automation Offset and Plug-in Upsampling mean "this thing is active," and buttons for Plug-in Delay Compensation and Global FX Disable/Enable mean "this thing is turned off." Colin and I took on a project to add our iconography to Mercury and Tungsten, for people who want to stick with the stock colors but still enjoy the benefits of not having to stop and remember whether the PDC button being lit up means that PDC is enabled or disabled, whether FX being lit up means that all FX are bypassed, etc. You can find the download link to Tungsten RS in my sig. Mercury RS is in Colin's. They address all this stuff, and touch up the buttons in various places to be more descriptive and/or visible. Mercury, with everything in default mode: Mercury RS, same state: Mercury RS with all FX bypassed, PDC disabled, automation read disabled, and plug-in upsampling enabled: Straightforward, eh? If it's lit up, that means it's working/enabled, if it has a slash through it, that means it's turned off/disabled. The Mute button might be considered an exception (by someone even more pedantic than I), but "bright 'M' = muted" was an industry standard before there was such a thing as a DAW. Naturally, both Colin and I think that our other themes improve upon the stockers' aesthetics as well as legibility, but if all you want is the revised buttons, check out Mercury RS and Tungsten RS. They have all you're looking for. I also have a version called Tungsten RST that debuts my new Studio One/Ableton inspired transport buttons: If that ain't enough to make you flip your lid, I also include a custom color preset that does things like make the grid lines in Track View more visible. As a general suggestion, for anyone at all dissatisfied with Cakewalk's look (if you prefer flat over gradients, definitely check out my themes), go to the UI Themes subforum and look around, ask if you like. Multiple people have put many many hours into making Cakewalk easier on the eyes. Mine are done by and for someone with vision issues. I try to make my buttons as big as possible and I like contrast. Even if you just want to amuse yourself by customizing Cakewalk a little, there are some great-looking themes available.

Beyond help? Perhaps. Anyway, I gave it another swipe today. I made....progress. This time I tried it with no control surface selected in Preferences. I was able to map the knobs and faders to various pan and gain knobs in channel strips. Not as lucky with the buttons; I can map them to trigger Matrix cells, but they seem to only be able to do momentary. I tried mapping one to a mute control and it muted as long as I held the button down, but then unmuted as soon as I released it. I also got the Assignable Parameters to respond....but they didn't actually change anything on the plug-in itself. The readouts change as if it's responding, but the plug-in doesn't want to know. Since I had thought that Cakewalk needed to be told that a given MIDI device is a control surface, this all came as a surprise. I still don't get the business about Cakewalk Generic Surface or ACT or whatever. The advantages/disadvantages of each, what they even do, given that Cakewalk will (sort of) respond to my controller without any surface set up in Preferences.

Your IT people are sharp. If each user who logs on to the network gets an H: mapping to their home directory, that means that they're using a group policy or a logon script to map it automatically. What's more, they have that folder mapped to the users' Windows Documents folder. This means that anything they drop in Documents is accessible from any system in the network and it's probably backed up nightly. So if someone slips and deletes or overwrites important classwork, they can go to the IT department on bended knee and plead to retrieve an older draft from the backup. Very nice. The look of relief and gratitude from the user when you can pull that one off is one of the rewards of being a network jockey. Most programs these days will be able to deal with UNC saves and shares, but, it's still good to have a home drive mapped in an organization. To people who have been using networked computers for 30 years, they still probably think of their network home directory as "my H: (or U: or whatever) drive."

I've been trying off and on for years to get my Korg nanoKONTROL2 to control things in Cakewalk. I would like to use its faders, knobs, and buttons to control plug-in parameters. I would like to use its buttons to trigger Matrix cells. I'm not that concerned with controlling track parameters like volume and mute status and all that, but it would be nice to have Cakewalk respond to the transport controls. Nice, but no big deal. So far, I've been able to use its buttons to trigger Matrix cells, but that is the only useful thing that I can do with my nanoKONTROL2 in Cakewalk. I tried again tonight and it went exactly as I expected, which is to say that I remain unable to control plug-in (or any other) parameters. I can still trigger Matrix cells with the track control buttons, though. Although....that's not 100% true. I have succeeded in getting the channel 1 volume slider to toggle the bypass status of Meldaproduction's MModernCompressor and to move every visible control on whatever other plug-in has focus. I was not trying to get the volume slider to toggle MModernCompressor's bypass, but that's what I got. I was trying to map Attack, Release, Ratio, and Threshold to the nanoKONTROL2's faders and knobs. So I set it up in Preferences as a Cakewalk Generic Surface, which was what another post suggested. Then I went to Console View and enabled Options/FX/Show Assignable Controls. I did it this way because Creative Sauce had this method on his channel once and it looked like just the thing. I find the documentation to be....unhelpful on the topic. As Mike described it, it seems relatively straightforward: here is a list of 4 controls. I assign one control to be Attack. I right click on my new "Attack" control and select Remote Control. I click on "Learn." I twiddle a knob on the controller. Cakewalk says "aha, he wants to control it with that knob he's twiddling" and assigns the twiddled knob to the right-clicked upon control. Simple. Unfortunately, the instructions also want me to understand the difference between "Note On," "NoteOn/Off," "Controller," "Wheel," "RPN," and "NRPN." I think I get Note On vs. Note On/Off. You use the former for toggles and the latter for momentaries. "Controller" I also think I get, that would be a slider or knob, a continuous thing rather than a button. "Wheel" seems to refer only to the pitch wheel on a MIDI keyboard controller. I'm good so far. It would seem to suggest that the buttons on the nanoKONTROL2 transmit Note data and the knobs and sliders transmit Controller data. The Korg doesn't have a pitch wheel, so I don't have to worry about that. Then, however, things get considerably more difficult. There's the matter of "RPN" and "NRPN." The first time I encountered the term "RPN" was back in the 80's, when I learned never to borrow a calculator from an engineer. Then I saw it along with "NRPN" in MIDI implementation sheets and took it as proof that the MIDI spec was indeed created by engineers. I have no idea what the terms mean. The engineers I knew were really into RPN back in the 80's, maybe they decided that the MIDI spec wouldn't be complete without it. The documentation says "NRPN: If your MIDI controller can send NRPN data, enabling this button causes the selected control to move as the NRPN data that your MIDI controller changes." There seems to be a word missing or incorrectly used there, but I don't know. I don't know if my controller can send RPN and/or NPRN data. I'd be fine with just Note and Controller, if I could get them to work. Whatever, when I clicked "learn" and moved the first fader, it toggled the bypass on MModernCompressor. It still does that. "Learn" seems to be a one-way street. When I right click on the assignable controls, there's no selection for unlearning or clearing or whatever. This is, believe it or not, one reason that it's taken me over 4 years to even get this far: I'm afraid of assigning controls and not being able to un-assign them. The documentation says to clear it, just right click on the control and select "Disable Remote Control," but that option is greyed out on all my controls. I also notice that whatever plug-in has focus, that same fader will do a variety of things. With Softube Spring Reverb, that fader moves all of the visible controls. Same with T-Racks Tape Echo. This is what my Control Surface module looks like. Going by the text on there, is it possible that something got corrupted? Help.

Isn't podcasting "recording?" I don't think there's anything inherent to a mic with a built-in USB interface that makes it unsuitable for recording with Cakewalk. Whether it ships with an ASIO driver or not. The biggest drawback to them is that they lack versatility. They're only good for recording one track at a time. I have no experience with microphones with built-in USB interfaces. But even the cheapest, weirdest bits of USB-enabled hardware I do have, such as my 15 year old Behringer iAxe guitar, can use WASAPI at usable latency. I'm with you that we could provide better help if we knew what model of mic this is. Also that clock rate is a prime suspect. If it's doing a chipmunk voice, that's usually a 1:2 rate difference between recording and playback. Recording at 48K and playing back at 96K. The OP first needs to switch Driver Mode from WDM/KS to WASAPI if it's a cheaper mic that didn't come with ASIO drivers. If that by itself doesn't cure the problem, then go to Windows Control Panel (type Control Panel in the search bar down at the bottom), then select Sound. Click on the Playback and Recording devices tabs and then Properties/Advanced, and make sure that the rate settings for your recording (the mic) and playback (computer speakers or whatever) are the same. My guess is that the mic will perform best at 48,000Hz, but 44,100Hz may also work. Then double check that Cakewalk is also set to record at that rate and all should be well.

What you need to tell your IT crew is that the program needs a mapped drive letter. They should be able to take it from there. Depending on how your school network and accounts are set up, they might be able to do the mapping automatically, or at the least, give you a small script that you can run before starting Cakewalk. You can try it yourself by typing the command "Net use u: \\scfc\shared$" in a command prompt. That will map your network folder to the drive letter U: and you should then be able to save your Cakewalk projects to that drive. The "net use" command, typed by itself, will show you if there are already any drive letter mappings. Needing a drive letter in order to save files is an old throwback (this is the first time in over 20 years I've heard of a Windows program needing it). There are some dusty corners in the Cakewalk code and I guess this is one of them.

Pickin' 'n' grinnin'? As with any Voxengo plug-in, it sure ain't easy on the eyes. Meldaproduction gets some hate in these parts for its homely UI's, but man, they got nothing on Voxengo.

My oldest one is probably the (still excellent) Voxengo Boogex. My newest one is (claimed to be hot stuff, although, it has no cabinet or spring reverb emulations) MTurboAmp. Somewhere in there is the Overloud TH3 that comes with Cakewalk. I'm not sure how old it is. bx_rockrack, age also unknown.

I believe they are painfully aware of that. I think they want to display only the measures, no further divisions. The only help I can offer is to try some of the custom color presets that come with my themes. You don't have to use the theme, just import the color prefs. They provide for higher contrast vertical grid lines in Track View, especially on measures. They can be further adjusted to make the beat lines more difficult to see. Here's one of my dark theme color presets applied to Tungsten:

It is indeed confusing, when I don't think it needs to be. Another thing that muddies the waters is that in the Keyboard Shortcuts pref pane, there are several commands listed under Global that are specific to Track View, like ones for manipulating clips. Clips don't happen anywhere but Track View, so how is that a Global command? I'm sure some of that is down to the pre-Skylight thing where the division between main window and Track View was blurrier. There are also Global commands that show and hide Track View things like the Arranger Track. I'd always thought that the grouping of commands by view was just to make them easier to find in the list, I had no idea that it meant that the same key combos could do different things depending on which view. I have a shortcut that shows Track Manager, and I never could figure out why it didn't work for the Track Manager in Console.

You are correct in that clicking inside the Event List does restore expected keystroke behavior. I respectfully submit that it ain't me that's "going wrong" here. 😄 It would violate Windows' rules about "focus." So, if I have clicked away to the main window, then back to the Event List tab in the MD, which Cakewalk window does have focus? It's not the Main one, because its title bar has gone pale. Also, why does it work with Console and not Event List? I don't have to click inside Console to get keystrokes to work. I found another case where it works as expected: if I have Event List in the Multidock, click away to bring the main window/Track View into focus, then come back to the Multidock, click on the Console tab, then click on the Event List tab, Event List-specific keystrokes start working again. This is all without clicking inside the window. These things suggest that what you say about clicking on the tab not giving focus is not the whole story. If that were the case, then my clicking on the tab is not supposed to give Event List focus, therefore it's unexpected behavior. Something is broken among all this. Expected behavior, to me, is that if the dock has focus, and the view's tab is in the front, then that view has focus, and should accept keystrokes. Whatever, bug report submitted.

With the Event List View (and maybe others, I haven't tried them all yet, but not in the Console View at least), some if not all key bindings fail to work if a view is opened in the Multidock and focus is switched to another window and back before invoking the keystroke. Steps to repro: (test condition is that there is no prior binding to Ctrl-Alt-E) Bind Ctrl-Alt-E to Event List View/Close View Open Event View (either by Alt-8 or Views/Event List) before changing window focus to any other pane, press Ctrl-Alt-E. Observe that Event List View closes (as expected) Open Event List View again. This time, click on the main window title bar to bring Track View into focus Click on the Event List tab in the Multidock to bring both the Multidock window and the Event List tab to focus Press Ctrl-Alt-E. Observe nothing happens Expected behavior is that the view would close whenever the Multidock and the Event View tab have focus Actual behavior is that this fails if any other Cakewalk window is given focus and then returning focus to Event List View (if you also have Console or PRV open in Multidock and click on one of those tabs and then click on the Event List tab, Ctrl-Alt-E will also fail) Alternate cases tested: With other Event List commands, like binding Ctrl-Alt-O to View/Notes, and those commands also failed. With Console View, behavior was as expected. With Event List floating outside the Multidock behavior was as expected.

I've also experienced random shortcut deletion. It's very infrequent. Also, I've had it happen more than once that I'll absolutely verify that a shortcut is not working, then I'll go into Preferences to check whether it's bound, observe that it is, then exit Preferences and the binding will suddenly be effective again. I'm confused as to the Global vs. View binding thing, I need to sit down and sort that out. This is the first whiff I've had of being able to assign a given key one action in one view and another action in another view. It explains why when I assigned Alt-Shift-T to "Track Manager" it only worked in Track View. In order for it to work in Console, I have to select that view and bind it again. And then there are global bindings that should apply no matter what view you're in? I'm confused by this, or at least how it's implemented. When I choose Global Bindings, there are a bunch of commands in the resulting list that apply only to Track View, such as Unlink Clips, Clip Mute Toggle, some Scale Waveforms commands, multiple Arranger Track commands, Zoom to fit project horizontally, etc. Aha! Repro! See next message.