Starship Krupa

Well, to be clear, when I said "all" and mentioned those manufacturers, I didn't mean that I've Pokemon'd all FX from each of them. I have the 3 processor Lindell channel strip thingie and elysia master and mpressor. Expo Nimbus and R4. I have the Melda FreeFX, Essentials, and MixingFX bundles. I have 9 T-Racks I got as freebies. I also kept Trackspacer, because nothing does Trackspacer better than Trackspacer. I'm still thinning out the collection. Yesterday I waved goodbye to Slice and Carve EQ's. They're great, but other FX in my collection are just as great and don't have the drab UI. We all have our zone when it comes to collecting/hoarding/utilizing. My plug-in browser isn't a museum, but I do find attractive (elysia, TRacks) and elegantly high tech (Melda, Unfiltered) GUI's inspiring. If something looks cool, it makes me want to learn how to work it. On the other side, with the kHs freebie package, they're so stripped down that they are great to grab when I want the simplest possible thing. The limiter is great to use on a track where I'm auditioning presets that might suddenly blast. They're like little one-trick stompboxes. When is enough "enough." At one end, there are people who probably don't even know or care that there are processors other than the ones that came with their DAW. At the other end is...Bapu. Who wouldn't love to have Ed's collection of audio software? No limits. My issue with my DAWs' built-in FX is that they're usually tied to the one DAW in one way or other. The Sonitus FX, while sounding great and having good high tech (but tiny and pale), UI's, are DXi. Only Cakewalk can host them. Studio One's are DAW-locked, as are most of Mixcraft's. Same with Live. If I'm developing skills using a given set of plug-ins, I want those skills to carry over from DAW to DAW. The MFreeFX bundle is a good virtual "ones that came with the DAW" collection (and then some) for people who want to stay in the "only what I actually need" zone. I'm still a magpie for sound design FX. I also kept most of my restoration/turd polisher FX. Whenever I jam with people, my iPhone is sitting on the table recording it. I also take outdoor videos and use in-camera audio.

This is certainly proof: They get it. Plug-ins as Pokemon cards. I'm subject to this too. Maybe it's a "spectrum" thing? This. When it comes to mixing FX, I agree. There are new ones that feature "AI," ones that analyze a track and put an instant results whammy on it, but for compressors, limiters, clippers, transient shapers, de-essers, EQ's, console emulators, saturators, delays, modulation FX, analyzers....they've been done to death. Everything in this area that comes out touts "analog mojo" or another faithful emulation of an old piece of hardware. I'm not down on people who get stoked about these types of FX. If someone wants every possible flavor at their fingertips and can remember how to use them, that's beyond my capabilities. If you read my post from when I built my new DAW system....I got rid of hundreds of mixing plug-ins. Keepers: all my Meldaproduction stuff, the kHs freebie snap-ins, elysia and Lindell, some other PA odds and ends, some bx stuff, all T-Racks, all iZotope Exponential Audio reverbs. Still a pretty deep bench. The only new FX that pique my interest at this point are the wacko sound design-y ones like Unfiltered Audio, Glitchmachines, Freakshow Industries, Valhalla, Venom and Sphere from W.A. Rhythmic filters and glitchers like Stutter Edit. Objeq Delay, Sigmund. Also spatial FX. I want to do 3-D sounds a la Telefon Tel Aviv and Tipper. Now when I open Cakewalk's plug-in browser, it's a relief not to see all the mixing FX that didn't make the cut. I felt some weird responsibility to "give them a chance." Maybe it'll be magic on some track. No, it's just another damn EQ, it cuts and boosts frequencies. I'll try to get good at using the handful I kept. My poor brain can't keep track of too many mixing FX. That said, if you're into sound design and can dig a modular workflow, BYOME and TRIAD by Unfiltered Audio are must-haves at $25. G8 is also the best gate on the market, although the version you get in the CM bundle has about 90% of the functionality of the PA version. There's nothing in the current PA catalog I'll want until the next Unfiltered Audio thingamabob.

I was an AMD fan waaaaay back in the 386-class years, when the 386DX offered about twice the performance at 2/3 the cost of the equivalent Intel (of which there really was none). They made Intel realize that they couldn't sit on their asse(t)s, that they had a lunch that could be eaten if they didn't watch it. Then ATI were really quick with optimizing their video drivers for DirectX when Windows 95 came out. I was doing system builds as an IT person at the time, so that was very important. I had to transition a multimedia software company (Macromedia, now Adobe) full of legacy Windows for Workgroups 3.11 systems to Windows 95. If the system had an ATI card, I breathed a sigh of relief, knowing that the user would get a pleasing performance boost. I spec'd all new systems with ATI cards. More recently, though, with DAW work, and being more engaged than the average user (beta tester for multiple DAW's), I've noticed that most developers' personal and build systems are Intel Inside. I was also having issues with excessive latency that vanished when I swapped my AMD video card for an nVidia. nVidia seems to be on top of the content creation market, with their Studio drivers and NVEC. As recently as 5 years ago, I couldn't find information on 2D performance about any video card. nVidia get big props for paying attention to that segment of their market. Gamers aren't the entire market. I'm sure the aforementioned devs have AMD systems for testing, but that's different from a daily driver. So my armchair impression (as incorrect and outdated as it may be) jibes with the one attributed to @Jim Roseberry. AMD if you want a ferocious gaming rig at a good price, Intel (and for me, nVidia) if you're optimizing for DAW and NLE work. However, I see that Jim's "Red Dragon DAW" model has an Ryzen 9 5900x under the hood. Maybe since I cited him, he'll weigh in on this thread(ripper).

Sounds like a thing I'd like to be able to use. I wonder if it belongs to Roland. Looking at the product history, it seems to have dropped out around the Gibson acquisition?

Like most commands, especially menu commands like this, it can.

You're buying future capacity and the freedom to throw anything musical at it you can imagine without a second thought of whether it can handle it. I get this. I started playing drums a dozen years ago, started with a dumpster rescue Taiwanese kit. After I decided that I was serious about sticking with it (no pun), I started checking Craig's List for vintage pro-level kits. I wound up getting a 1970 Slingerland set. I wasn't "enough drummer" to "need" such a drum kit, but once I got it, any concern that the instrument might ever hold me back was out of the picture. I have a kit just like the ones Gene Krupa and Shelley Manne and Nigel Olsson played. It can do more than I will ever be capable of asking of it. I'll never have a nagging feeling that maybe I need a better drum kit. If I can't get a sound that I love out of these tubs, it is only due to limitations on my part, not theirs. That's a good feeling. I've dug some Celtic music in the past. One evening a long long time ago I was honored to have a beer with Alain Stivell after a brilliant concert in Santa Barbara. I was friends with a dj who was friends with the promoter.

Some people "just want/need it to work." Look at the popularity of Apple's systems among content creators. If you want to use a Macintosh computer, you have no choice but to buy it from a systems integrator, Apple. They take it to another level by creating both the operating system and the hardware it runs on.

He's too busy with the new 'puter to answer?

Wow, Tom and Mark, that is an excellent endorsement for Jim's products. Buy the best and just forget about it for the next dozen (or more) years. And when it's time to retire it, you have a silent case and power supply to give to someone building a quiet gaming rig. I managed to get my latest build, Narsil (the sword reforged) down to about 32dB with the iPhone dB meter next to the case. The fan from the refrigerator in the next room is louder. But I can still hear the power supply fan. I'm already wondering if I could get it quieter by swapping in a $10 Be Quiet or Noctua. That kind of fiddly-tinkery stuff is something that I enjoy, but it's something you haven't had to think twice about in a dozen years. A DAW system that remains viable across 3 presidential terms is pretty danged tasty. IMO, it's also a testament to the Cakewalk dev team, who have made the SONAR/CbB code more efficient in the past 4 years. The first release of CbB was kind of a slug on the i7-3770 I had at the time, but it runs great on that same system now. See how many times "various audio engine optimizations" and "UI drawing" appears in the release notes.

Indeed. I'm handing down a system to a friend to use mostly for college class work and other web browsing-ish things. It has a Core 2 Quad Q6600 and 8G of RAM. He's also a musician, my age, but never gotten past Garage Band on his phone (and he's come up with some cool stuff). I also loaded it up with every bit of freeware music software that I think he would like. DAW, Cakewalk of course. This was my shop computer for many years, and I've always had Cakewalk on it, just in case an idea popped into my head and for confirmation testing of bugs. I've tested this system after the rebuild and it works fine with Cakewalk, Audacity, etc. I think he'll be able to make good use of it. Over the past 4 1/2 years, Cakewalk has only gotten more efficient, and I suspect that goes back a long way. It wouldn't surprise me to find out that it runs better now on this system than it did when it was well within the official requirements. It used to be that as computing power increased, developers (who tended to always have the latest hardware) would immediately take advantage of that power. This left systems behind much more quickly than they are now. These days, developers seem to be more invested in efficiency, maybe because people keep their systems longer and are more likely to upgrade their software if it will still run on their older system. Mark McLeod, one of the Cakewalk developers, uses an i7-3770 as his main studio system. Also, as I've progressed with my DAW skills and FX acquisitions, I've noticed that my expectations of what the system will do have expanded. Where I used to be more conservative with my use of FX, now I throw the things on, multiple instances, etc. Curious, Tim, what kind of projects do you do? When we have these topics about new builds and processor and RAM needs, I'm always curious about the kind of projects each person weighing in is doing. High/low track count with many/few FX? Orchestral with huge sample libraries? ITB electronica using synths and sound design FX of varying CPU needs? This is key to decisions about how much computer I need. The first question is what am I using it for? My projects are either low track count indie rock, or the aforementioned ITB electronica. I'm also dabbling in orchestral composition with smaller sample libraries. Most of my projects run okay on my 12-year-old Dell laptop with a 2nd gen i7 and 8G RAM. So with my main system, it doesn't even need to be the i7-6770 with 32G of RAM. I'm just putting RAM and processor generations between my DAW and eventual obsolescence. Upgrading before I need to. No matter what processor my budget computers shipped with, they eventually end up with the fastest thing that will fit their socket. I can't give a credible opinion outside those parameters beyond "maybe last year's hot processor." Knocking bucks off the cost of the CPU allows for that much more powerful video card or a fancy mouse (something I just got). "Low track count" these days probably means "under 24" to most of us. See how our expectations increase? 30 years ago, semi-pro studios were doing just fine with a pair of 8 track ADATS connected to make 16. We thought it was a luxury after doing our demos on 4 track cassettes. Now we want our retired office box Dell computer to be able to handle 3X that track count with as many FX on each track as those studios had in their entire racks. While also emulating multiple synths that would have cost $2000 back in the day. And make pro-level videos for YouTube. And play Warzone at maximum FPS when they're not making music with it. 😄 One of the criteria for whether a plug-in will make it into my rotation is how well it uses resources. It's part of why I'm such a Meldaproduction fanboy, they tend to be more efficient with the CPU than other companies' similar plug-ins. I love the way Chromophone sounds, and was almost ready to spring for it at $89, but with it, I was limited in how many other plug-ins I could insert before hitting the wall. Yeah, freeze, bounce, I know, but as part of my composition process, I change synth sounds and FX sounds as I go along, as the sounds themselves suggest changes to the arrangement. Things get different and weirder when you're treating the DAW as one big sound sculpture box. (I'll toss in here, for those doing audio projects: if you're doing multiple takes, and want to save the takes for alternate versions or in case you notice a flub later on, don't keep them around in muted take lanes or clips. Put them in other tracks and archive them. Cakewalk streams every audio file in every clip in a project regardless of mute status. I found this out using Windows Resource Monitor. A drum session, 4 mics, 6 takes. That's 24 tracks streaming away every time you hit Play. For one instrument. 8 if it's stereo mic'd guitar.)

I posted a while back about using my Logitech M705 Marathon Mouse with Cakewalk. It has two extra mouse features that I've really come to love: the scroll wheel can be switched to freewheel mode with the press of a button and it has 2 extra assignable buttons on the left side. I have these assigned to Ctrl and Alt, which means that I can perform clip and note splits with one hand as well as drag copy and paste and wheel zoom. Those are actions that happen a lot at my house, so those buttons come in very....handy. Issue though: with its 2 AA batteries, the thing is heavy, almost twice the weight of the standard little $10 Logis that run off a single AA. I had reason to swap one of mine in for the M705 and was struck by how much lighter and zippier it was. I've been doing a touch of gaming on the computer recently, and this really illustrated it. It's also kinda big, but that can mean better comfort if you lay the rear of your palm on it. So I went in search of a lighter Logitech (it's Logitech for me) with the extra buttons and the speed scroll wheel. Didn't even have to be wireless. Turns out that the combo of features and weight that I want all came together in the Anywhere MX 2. They're up to Anywhere MX 3 now, and those are kinda outta my price comfort zone for mice, and the 2 is lighter. It's micro USB rechargeable, the only drawback being that the battery is not a generic NiMh AA. Still, I'm a handy guy, so when the day comes that the battery stops holding enough charge, I can replace it. It came today and I am digging it. If you haven't tried a mouse with extra buttons, as long as they are fully assignable it makes working in Cakewalk, with all of its key modifiers, faster. Being able to zoom in other programs with Ctrl-wheel is nice, too. The Logitech lets you set up custom assignments for each program, but that seems like too much trouble. The Marathon, the Anywhere, and a couple more models have them, although if you also want the speed scroll function that narrows things down.

I got a set of memory foam/velour earpads for mine and they really improved the comfort. They're still kinda clamp-y, but at least my head isn't being clamped between 2 pieces of vinyl.

So you want to use the Browser to load sample files from a NAS box? Steve's correct, mapping a drive letter will work fine. After you do this, your NAS box will appear to your DAW system as the F: (or whatever available drive letter you map it to. The Browser will treat it just as it would any other drive. mklink would be for if you wanted the NAS box to appear as a directory. I find it easier to keep track of where things are if it's a mapped letter.

Depending on budget and amateur or pro status, I find that the price/performance sweet spot is often "last year's latest and greatest." I kick back and wait for the next gen to come out, at which point enthusiasts won't be interested in it anymore.

Specs or it didn't happen! Tell it all. What was the old system (whenever I see someone give the specs of a system they're retiring from DAW use, the specs are usually a system that would be a significant upgrade for me 😁) If you're an IT person, you must have preferences in input devices as well. I got a new mousie today myself. Logi Anywhere 2.

Focusrite, Presonus, both inexpensive, and sound great. I have interfaces from both companies.

It's a plug-in, and free to use at that. It's part of my favorite freeware FX package, the one I install first on any DAW system I set up, MFreeFX Bundle. It's a good introduction to the world of Meldaproduction's processors. You can upgrade the package for $60 to add some features, but those features aren't essential to their operation. The package includes other utilities as well, such as a polyphonic tuner (with a pitch to MIDI converter!), noise generator, signal generator, oscilloscope, loudness analyzer, stereo image analyzer, and more. That's not to mention the huge gift bag of audio processors, from EQ and compressor through an AutoTune-alike vocal pitch corrector, crazy filters and a spectral panner (whatever that is). Excellent sounding stuff and very light on system resources. The rest of the Meldaproduction line follows suit. A few times a year, they have a sale where all bundles are priced at 50% off. This includes the FreeFX Bundle upgrade. During these sales, you can get the upgrade for around $10. The recipe is: sign up for their newsletter, which gets you a 10 euro credit. Use my referral coupon, MELDA1923165 which gets you 20% off your first purchase, and is applied after the 50% discount. Of course, if you take a look and decide you want to snag a more expensive bundle when they come around, sit on the referral coupon, because it can only be used once. Unfortunately, the tempo information only goes one way: the plug-in can get it from the DAW, but not the other way around. So you have to tap out the tempo and type it into Cakewalk's tempo box. Kinda clumsy, but takes only seconds.

I don't get along so well with Cakewalk's tap tempo function, so I asked Vojtech of Meldaproduction to please add a tap tempo button to MMetronome from the FreeFX Bundle and bless his heart, he did. So when I just want to work out a tempo without messing about with the Tempo Track, I add MMetronome to an audio track and use it instead. You'll find 36 other FX and utilities in that bundle as well, many of which I consider essential, some of which I consider best in their class.

I'm just curious: how many, while trying out PSTFO's "Bombastic Basses, wound up playing the intro to the "Dragnet Theme?" Just the facts.

When the products' look and typography is good (like Sitala's) it doesn't matter. I like the look of your dark mode there. I do like some color customization. I make electronic music where sometimes people project what's on the laptop screen so the audience can see what's going on. It's fun to be able to adjust the colors of my plug-ins. Okay, I retraced my steps in terms of how I got the error message: I have a number of projects on the older system that use Sitala. When saving drum kits or any other patches, I usually go belt-and-suspenders and save a native DAW patch in addition to using the instrument's own system. When I called this project up, I was using a kit I made using Oberheim DMX samples. The project loaded, and the name of the Cakewalk patch showed up in the Plug-in Properties UI , but of course Sitala couldn't find my custom kits on the new system. It threw up dialogs saying that it couldn't find the sample, so with each one I painstakingly found each sample and rebuilt the drum kit. This worked, as far as being able to play the song back, and I could save what I had put together using Cakewalk's native patch system, but when I went to save the restored kit using Sitala's preset/kit storing systems, it threw up this error. No amount of saving to a different name or location would pacify it. That's when I decided that if I were going to have to rebuild all of those kits, I wanted to put them together in a sampler that would allow me to save them in its native patch management system. Hello Speedrum Lite (or possibly TX16, I hadn't completely decided yet). I see now that this issue only occurs when I'm trying to save kits where I've had to tell Sitala where to find the samples for existing kits. Sitala's fine if I just start from scratch with a new kit. Now I know that Sitala's kit files include all of the samples, that would have made it easier, just copy over the directory where Sitala stores its kits. Which raises another question: let's say that for whatever reason, I save a couple of new kits in different directories, with a Save Kit As... or whatever. At this point those kits should both show up in Sitala's kit browser, right? I presume so. But then let's say I want to copy all of my Sitala kits over to another system. Sitala will probably show me the last folder I used to save a kit, but where the other(s) will be is a mystery. Is there some way to find out where Sitala thinks the various kits in its browser are? I guess I could search my entire C: drive for *.sitala files, but that seems so brute force. I believe the above illustrates Lao Tsu's famous warning that "no software survives contact with the user base."

Hey, Scott! I've liked using Sitala up to this point and it's good to know you care about us poor sampler-free Cakewalk users. Well, let's see....hmm, lets me Save As just fine in standalone....let's try it in Cakewalk. Huh, danged if it doesn't work now. I don't know what changed on my system, it's still new and I find myself having to go and crowbar the folder permissions so that I have Full Control on everything that I need to. It could be that the user that I launched Cakewalk as didn't have permission to write to wherever it needed to write to and I put a stop to that nonsense. That would be my best guess. If you tell me the file locations that Sitala writes to when saving kits, I might be able to remember if any of them were ones where I had to apply tough love. I know that at one point I had to remind C:\Program Files who is in charge (as in take ownership and give myself full control). Whenever I get one of those UAC messages saying that I need to give administrator privileges for a simple file copy or delete or replace, I just go to the top level folder and wrench on the permissions. Anyway, it works now. Cool! I do prefer Sitala over other pad samplers out there because it's easy to use. I can't even figure out how to change the note assignments to the pads in Speedrum Lite. 🙄 I hope that will be optional. I usually prefer being prompted to search for them manually when I know where I moved them to. Otherwise the program might snag a file from a temporary location and then we'd do the dance all over again. I do like it when software that relies on external audio files is smart enough to deduce the new path after I specify the location of the first missing file. 😄 Please please allow for color customization of the UI, or better still, custom skinning? I suspect that your REAPER pals might already have made that request. I'd love to get my theming hands on it, it looks like you're not using that many images to build the UI (compared to Cakewalk, I mean). It's a nice, sleek-looking UI, but the grey looks....kinda dowdy. At least, having a choice of a dark theme would be cool. Been having fun mining Reverb's collection of free vintage drum machine samples, creating Sitala kits from them. DMX, Linn, CR-78. They're good samples. P.S. I would have had far less trouble if I had been able to figure out where Sitala stores the resources for each kit. Then I could have just copied them all over and Sitala would have been none the wiser.

That's what teenagers do, innit? @PhonoBrainer, here's the site for the record company I mentioned earlier, the one named after Ulrich Schnauss' legendary album: https://www.astrangelyisolatedplace.com/ I forgot to mention that they, too have an excellent stream (complete with iOS and Android apps) called 9128. There's also a direct stream for the Winamp/MusicBee/foobar/iTunes Streaming Radio (NOT iTunes Radio 😄) oriented: https://streams.radio.co/s0aa1e6f4a/listen

I think musicians tend to be more open-minded about such things. We can appreciate the craft that goes into making music, however it's made or by whom. Maybe we see how they connect with their audience, and appreciate that that's a skill right there. Maybe a good song is just a good song, maybe a good singer is just a good singer, etc.