Starship Krupa

That's their thing, physical modeling. Objeq Delay even involves physical modeling somehow although I'm not sure exactly how. I think it's as if you're sending your signal through a physically modeled pipe or drum or whatever, then it's delayed and mixed back in. I kinda get the concept but it's hard to describe. I suspect that all of their instruments use the same engine, which is how they can do Swatches/Player. The fact that Player can play soundpacks from any of their instruments suggests this. Those aren't samples, they're the actual patches being played by their engine, which is why sometimes A|A|S Player can bog my laptop down. A|A|S Player trick: limit the number of simultaneous voices to 8. They often have very long tails. Strum (and the Strum-based soundpacks in Swatches/Player) has 3 different modes of operation. Loops, where you trigger strummed loops, Chords, where you trigger chords, and finally Notes, where you trigger individual notes. Chords and Notes modes include articulations like damping, squeaks, etc. So to do what you want, you should try it in Notes mode. If you're using Swatches/Player, each Strum soundpack lists the different modes and you just select which one you want. The articulations use the same key triggers as Strum and Strum Session, so if you look at a manual for one of those, you can figure out what keys do what in Player. At first I wondered why anyone who didn't own Strum would want a Strum soundpack that only played via Player, but then I sat down and figured out how to do it. Their programming for the Loop and Chords mode is pretty good, probably better than I could do manually. I think their stuff sounds more authentic than the actual sampled guitar libraries I've heard, but I'm no expert. I don't know how, but maybe their methods allow for more flexibility than just playing back a recording of someone playing a note or chord. They can have their engine respond to velocity more accurately, maybe. Once you start throwing in the articulations (damps, scrapes, etc.) it sounds pretty cool. Even though I'm a guitar player, and my pride probably wouldn't allow it, if all I needed were some funk chirps or the occasional ambient nylon string chord or something, Strum would do a fine job.

The thing where they install the dll's for every T-RackS processor whether you have a license or not is a pain, but I have a folder called "T-Racks bullpen" on my computer that is not in a VST scan path. I drag the dll's of the ones I don't own to that folder until such time as IK has another giveaway. Then I drag only that dll back to the scanned folder and all is well. This time with Comprexxor is the first time that Product Manager was able to handle the registration by itself without my needing to invoke Authorization Manager, so I congratulate IK for that achievement. Such high quality stuff. My IK Multimedia products definitely survived the recent plug-in purge.

To get a taste of physically modeled guitar (and a ton of other useful sounds), go to A|A|S and download Swatches. It's their 560-patch fully-functional demo of all of the patch sets ("soundpacks") for their excellent line of physically modeled instruments. Their guitar product is Strum, and there's a lite version of it out there that can sometimes be found for anywhere from $10 down to free, depending on promotions. Mmmmm, yeahhh, but there's a tradeoff, which is that physical modeling, especially as it gets more realistic and/or complex, is more "expensive" in terms of processing resources than sample playback is. (surprised Dave didn't bring this up) In most cases, I'd rather have to wait a second or two for a library to load than have the audio engine pack it in as my project gets bigger. I know I can freeze, but that doesn't suit how I create (I swap instruments and FX a lot while putting together the sound of the project). As much as I LOVE the sound of A|A|S' instruments, I've resisted purchasing the full version of Chromaphone even at 50% off because some of the patches bog down my laptop. Admittedly it's kinda old, but it does have an i7 in it, and it runs most other things pretty well. This doesn't happen with SONIVOX Companions or Orchestools, both of which are sample-based. Of course, if you're on a rocket sled, processing resources are less of an issue. As Jim pointed out, NVMe M.2 drives haul booty compared to SATA SSD's, and they have a comparable price:storage ratio. If your mamaboard is out of M.2 slots, you can get PCIe adapters that will allow you to install multiple NVMe drives. I hacked the BIOS in my Dell Optiplex 7010 to allow it to boot from such a drive. Fortunately, new #1 system has an M.2 NVMe slot built in. Oh is it quick. Still, even on the new system, loading from the onboard NVMe drive, MSoundFactory's Monastery Grand takes a while to load.

Then ye needs ter expand yer reach of streaming services, lad. The only platform I use is Bandcamp, which allows your customers to download their music purchases in FLAC form. Their playback CODEC sounds excellent, way better than the Other services I've listened to. And you know from your other topics that I listen critically. I was pleased and surprised to discover after I bought Big Thief's "Contact" on Bandcamp that the FLAC I downloaded was 96K 😮. That song deserves it, too. Great dynamic range and killer production. Bandcamp lets you keep most of the loot from your sales, too, which is another reason why musicians and lovers of high-definition audio like me check Bandcamp first to see if a song or album is available there.

If you (or anyone else reading this zombie thread) are interested in stochastic methods for composition, you should check out my tips regarding Cakewalk's built-in support for this:

I stumbled across this review of SONAR X from 2011 while trying to find cites for the Cakewalk by BandLab Wikipedia article. It's interesting to read the impressions of a reviewer seeing what later became Cakewalk by BandLab for the first time. Also, in typical Cakewalk fashion, I picked up a handy tip from a review of the 11-year-old first version of the product. I've mentioned the value of explicitly switching tools rather than trying to figure out how to make the Smart Tool do everything I want. The Smart Tool is awesome, and it is very smart, whoever worked out what it does in all those different contexts did a great job. But if, like me, you sometimes find yourself fighting it a bit to get exactly the results you want, if you're doing a bunch of complex, tricky editing, switch to one of the 4 flavors of the Edit Tool (but if you just want to Split a clip or note, hit the Alt key). If you're drawing MIDI notes or automation, there's 8 flavors of Draw Tool for that, and you don't have to double-click or drag to lay MIDI notes. If you've never figured out how to use it, the Pattern Tool is crazy useful for duplicating selections of MIDI notes or automation nodes. Spend 10 minutes and try it. It only ever has to save you 10 minutes to be worth the effort. Right-click usually takes care of the Erase Tool, but there's a Mute Tool under F10 as well. Soooo, if you're trying to get in the habit of switching tools with the F5-F10 keys, wouldn't it be nice if right after you used one, it could automatically switch back to the previous tool you were using (presumably the Smart Tool)? Well, Cakewalk can do that. All you have to do is press the function key that switches to the tool you want to use, but don't release the key until you're done with the tool. Then, when you lift your finger, Cakewalk will switch back to the Smart Tool (or whatever you were using before you hit the switching key). This means that you can treat them as 5 different modifier keys that return to the Smart Tool every time. (if you have trouble remembering which F key goes to which Tool, all of my custom Cakewalk themes show the keys right there on the Tools module)

Fundamentally, yes. But there have been some changes in that area. Since they're not big front-facing features, we sometimes forget about them. They're things that we think of as always having been there, because in most cases, they should have always been there. A couple of differences I can think of offhand are the (important) fact that Cakewalk now scans the system's VST3 folder under all circumstances (it doesn't have to be explicitly listed in the VST scan paths), and the flyout menus for adding plug-ins are much improved. Also, when you replace a synth, the new synth's UI is displayed. VST management (like forced re-scans and sandboxing options) has migrated from Plug-In Manager to Properties (although Plug-In Manager still works). Even something as mundane as adding or replacing a plug-in....it's improved in Cakewalk. Someday, I hope, we'll get the oft-requested "Replace Effect" command. 😄 BandLab has now been developing and publishing Cakewalk by BandLab longer than Gibson owned Cakewalk, Inc. As far as I can tell, BandLab has done more with Cakewalk than Gibson did with SONAR in terms of development.

Good to see you, ChuckE. Through this discussion I have been wondering why you don't want to just put whatever plug-in you want to use first in the FX rack.

This. Cakewalk by BandLab is light years ahead of Sonar X3.

I'd start with the PC 2A Leveler, which is an emulation of the Teletronix LA/2A compressor. YouTube abounds with tutorials on how to use an LA/2A on vox. The PC76 U-type also has some vocal presets.

This is a good analogy. Study up and learn what things really make a difference (my votes go for tires, brake pads and occasional throttle body cleaning 😁). In the case of the DAW, and sample rates and whatnot, it's free to experiment. Don't even trip on whether it's a "placebo effect." If it sounds better, it is better. Anyone who does this long enough will eventually have the experience of spending 15 minutes dialing in a compressor plug-in only to discover that it's bypassed (or actually on a different track). If you read about it, try it. See if it makes a difference. There's no authority judging us for subtleties in sound fidelity. How many people who listen to our music will listen to it as critically as we do? Probably none, but since I make music primarily to please myself, it has to sound good under the audio microscope. Grainy reverb tails, harsh (in a bad way) synth notes, my ears pick those right out.

If it has anything to do with actually finishing songs....well, I'm working on that. 😄 As for what bitrate you record at, 88 or 96 isn't going to hurt anything (unless you find that you run up against processing power and disk space), but accepted wisdom these days is that if there's any sonic difference, you'll perceive it on mic'd up acoustic performances with a lot of space and minimal processing. For the pop and rock and electronic stuff that I think most of us do, probably not. You're a pro, though, and I'm a hobbyist. If I were earning money from this, I'd probably invest in a faster computer (I did recently spend $250 to build what would have been a screamer half a dozen years ago 😄). As for the 64-bit double precision....not all plug-ins handle it well, IME. There's a very nice freeware compressor plug-in called Leveling Tool, modeled on the LA/2A, that has a huge volume drop when 64-bit double precision is engaged in Cakewalk. As for upsampling individual plug-ins at render time, a thing to be careful with is if you have songs that depend on a virtual instrument's internal arpeggiator and FX like rhythmic delays. The timing of those can get thrown off by upsampling, so that if you're mixing with the upsampling disengaged and then flip it on for rendering, the song will sound different. Plug-ins don't all do their math in the same way based on the same timings. As I said, I did some listening tests and experiments when I released "Sensation," and what I determined was that leaving plug-in upsampling off and rendering at 88 (or 96) yielded the best-sounding (and most faithful) results. You can listen to "Sensation" on my Bandcamp page and hear how much it depends on the arp and delay timing to be just right. My favorite sound design (and even compositional) techniques involve rhythmically-sync'd delays and modulations, so this is critical for me. Not so critical when I'm using a bit of slapback and chorus to fatten up a vocal. Rhymes with "you rip a'dese."

Have you tried any of mine? They're designed by/for someone who don't see as good as he usedta.

I haven't take a Spanish class in 40 years, so I want to thank this thread for giving me the chance to use what I learned. ¡Mas vale tarde que nunca!

Ya-hoo!

I suspect that with Cakewalk the formers is seldom true, but the latter, often. I rarely run with multiple projects, and when I do, it doesn't exactly ruin the experience for me to see the old Aero look. I liked the Aero look, I like rounded corners. But I do understand that it contributes to the impression that there are many areas of Cakewalk that continue to party like it's 1999.

A workhorse freeware, cross platform audio format converter. I've been using it for years to convert for distribution formats. Simple and effective. The biggest visible change is that there's now a "dark" theme available. https://www.mediahuman.com/audio-converter/welcome.html

I'm in the same state as probably 1.000.000 other producers of electronic music: sitting here trying to find a path to releasing another actual song from one of the several dozen of (really good, IMO) song ideas I have on my computer that are 50-75% "there." One of the problems with the genre, and it's the reason that multiple books and articles on this subject have been written, is that it has no fixed set of instruments and sounds. The forms are loose, the sky's the limit. It's easier to know when a 4-piece indie rock song is ready for final mixing. All parts have been nailed, takes have been recorded. But with electronica, there's always some little bit of ear candy that can be dropped in. It's a hobby, I consider my songs messages in bottles. I wrap 'em up, toss 'em out there, and maybe 100 years from now some hipster will be digging deeply into early 21st century bedroom chillout and thrill their friends with the totally obscure stuff they found. That's the level of success I aspire to. But....no deadlines except my own death, which should be upcoming in 3 or 4 decades (although I'm rooting for being a brain floating in a jar on a shelf who can control soft synths with my thoughts). The depression and anxiety that have been my emotional wallpaper for almost as long as I can remember don't help at all. But one of the things that can put me in a rare state of giddy joy these days is coming up with a great new set of changes, sounds, and rhythm. Making it into a 2-minute snippet I can listen to on repeat while I drift off to sleep. "I made that! It sounds awesome!" I'd like to be able to share more of it, though. The thought of helping someone to feel happy, get closer to an emotion, relax, or however they connect with music seems to me to be part of my answer to "what's it all about."

That list-y pane that should pop up on the right side of the Cakewalk UI when you hit "B" on your keyboard. You didn't recognize it from the screenshot? Among other things it does, it provides you with a list of installed/recognized plug-ins. Which may be organized in 3 official ways and one undocumented way.

Cakewalk doesn't require any "uploading," nor does it have any feature called "Mix Editor." Cakewalk is the name for the latest version of the software that was once called SONAR. If you want to work with old SONAR files, you need to download and install Cakewalk, or as it's known by its full name, Cakewalk by BandLab. The relationship between Cakewalk and BandLab is that BandLab is the parent company. They have an online DAW, also named BandLab. The online DAW can't directly open Cakewalk/SONAR CWB files. If you want to work with those you need to download and install Cakewalk, which is free. Cakewalk is able to export files in a format that the online BandLab DAW can open if you later wish to work with the online DAW, but Cakewalk is a standalone program. You don't have to do anything with the online DAW unless you want to.

"Please note that while most Sequencers / DAWs are VST 2, VST 3, AU and AAX plug-in format compatible, only those listed in the chart below are officially supported." Cakewalk is not on the list, but it would be very unusual for a plug-in to function perfectly in those 13 other programs but not in Cakewalk. Not impossible, just unusual. I suggest asking Soundsonline. BandLab will just tell you that Cakewalk is very compliant with the VST specification (which it is). Before you buy, get their word that you can return the license for a refund if it doesn't play nice with Cakewalk. It's easy enough (free) for them to get a copy of Cakewalk to test their products with.

Not to worry, Justin, this issue comes up often and is one that I struggled with for a while. By default, Cakewalk takes the export from whatever hardware outputs you have enabled in its settings. That's what "entire mix" means in Caketalk. So what this means in effect is that you can have a nice, hot level at the Master bus, but if you have your Cakewalk "Hardware outs" set at 50%, your exported mix will be at only half the level as you're metering. What to do? Well, you can crank your hardware output sliders up to zero, but depending on your setup, that can be hard on the speakers, headphones, or ears. Also, if you have two sets of hardware outs, let's say for headphones and monitors, all of what's coming from those outputs during playback goes to your exported file. What I do is just create an extra bus called Export and route my Master bus to that, then route the Export bus to the Hardware outs. That lets me still be able to control playback volume with the Hardware out sliders without interfering with my export levels. Then in the Export dialog, I choose to export my mix only from that bus. This Export bus also has my preferred loudness meter plug-in on it. This may seem like an extra, unnecessary step, and it probably is for some, but it's what finally let me get all the level I wanted in my Cakewalk exports.

Thanks, Larry, for alerting me to the Cyan bundle in this forum. One point I want to clarify: MYST Online: Uru Live doesn't share any content or puzzles from the other 5 MYST titles, except for supposedly at the finish of one of the ages, you put your hand on the book and are transported to good ol' MYST Island. I don't know if the puzzles that were on the island can be played in this one, but you can walk around using the newer 3-D engine. Also, I played realMYST: Masterpiece Edition, which came in the Humble Bundle. That is the original game remastered to use newer graphics and their 3-D engine and it looks great. Still fun 27 years later. Still made me reflexively want to "click" on things in the real world to see if they had hot spots. "Sorry, I was tapping on the refrigerator to see if it had a hidden panel that would slide out."

https://mystonline.com/en/ Kinda like Cakewalk, you need a valid email to register, that's it. tl/dr: I snagged a Steam Humble Bundle collection several months back with every game Cyan Worlds has ever released (including the early young persons' games like Cosmic Osmo). I played through all of the MYST titles and Obduction. I enjoyed Obduction so much that I played right through it a second time. Their worldbuilding and art direction are so amazing.(Obduction, though, like MYST, again left me with the question of where all these people had slept) Anyway, I wasn't so sure about the Uru: Complete Chronicles part of the collection, I had read that it was the retooled remnants of an aborted attempt in 2003 to make an online multiplayer MYST game and that the production (and subsequent weak ROI) of it nearly caused Cyan to go broke. Not the most promising, but I wanted more Cyan-style entertainment. I started working my way through the Steam version, was liking it, and got curious about its commercial history/fate. Turns out that in 2010, Cyan took all of the content ever produced for the game, set up servers for free, and released a bunch of the underlying code (not the MYST franchise IP) under GNU GPL. And then I found out that the servers are still up and running. Hmm. So I created an account and hopped in. Didn't know what to expect although I was familiar with the gameplay. The first thing I noticed is that the graphics of the current online version are visibly better than the standalone version that Steam has. They've clearly done some good work on it. The next thing I noticed is that there didn't seem to be many players on the server with me at any given time, often down to single digits, and sometimes I'm the only one. Makes me wonder how long Cyan is going to bother with it, but the people who play it still have regular virtual events (including "live music," not sure how that works). The open source factor has so far resulted in some very nice-looking "Ages" and two, released a year ago, that genuinely rival the Cyan stuff as far as art/sound design and gameplay. One of them is done in a slightly different, more modern style than the usual MYST steampunk-y aesthetic, and it looks great. The other one includes two actual bedrooms AND bathrooms (with working toilets). You have control over whether your gameplay is going to be solo or cooperative, and at the start, and by default, it's solo. I've been playing it for a few days and have met a couple of people who are really helpful and fun to play the game with. Some of the puzzles are more fun with another player's help, but I also like being able to do it by myself at my own pace if I want, and that is well-accommodated: the areas where the puzzles and exploration take place are private to each player unless the player invites someone else to join them. You can start working them by yourself and then if you get stuck, go into the public areas and get someone more experienced to help, or just never go into the public areas at all (things are less frustrating if you get some guidance and orientation, but there are plenty of websites with hint guides and full walkthroughs). It can be social, but it doesn't have to be, which is how I prefer it. I'm an introvert/extrovert switch and I want to be able to flip that switch whichever way I feel like. Due to the nature of MYST gameplay (nothing to kill or be killed by) the userbase skews older than most online games, and that works for me too. Unlike MYST, you can sometimes have uncontrolled falls from lethal heights, but the game whisks you safely back to your private island lodge before you hit the deck, Each player sets up an avatar whose dress and appearance they can choose, and at least in my case, I think I was able to put together one with a fair resemblance (at least to what I looked like 15 years ago). The avatars look human without going into the uncanny valley. It's not a competitive game (although there are games-within-the-game that can be competitive), so there's no tactical advantage to having a super-duper computer system, the underlying code and graphics are 20 years old. A Core 2 Quad with 4G of RAM and comparable graphics unit should be able to run it in full resolution just fine, abut it still looks great. I've watched people play the latest shooters, and as far as graphics, they don't seem behind the technical curve at all. If you drop in, I'm Superabbit. I'm probably about 1/3 to 1/2 through the various puzzles and whatnots, so I'll at least be around long enough to finish those. I wish I'd heard about it earlier: a MYST title where you can ask other players for help in real time? And invite your friends? At my favorite price point?

Depends on what you do. For stereo mixing where you want a "natural" reverb sound, wait (usually 2 months between sales) for Phoenix or Nimbus to be on sale for $10 a seat. Nimbus is pretty similar to Phoenix (it can load Phoenix' presets), with modulation you can add to the tails. R2/4 if you like something closer to the classic hardware algo reverbs, best Lexicon or Eventide you ever heard.. Sames with R2 and R4. R4 is R2 with the ability to wiggle the tails. I'd be happy to use nothing but Phoenix until the unlikely event I heard something better. Phoenix and Nimbus sound so good it feels like cheating to use them. They ruined me for anything else I'd heard, I just deleted my reverb plug-ins and no longer paid much attention to deals on reverbs. The only reverb I've heard that can touch them is MTurboReverble, which costs $75 if you wait for it roll around in their 50% off sales (I got it in a bundle after I got the Exponentials).