Starship Krupa

On 3/22/2023 at 6:11 AM, Quick Math said:

He looks like a speedrunner.

[WR] Mephisto Waltz any% (no glitches)

Excellent.

One of my pleasures in life is watching speedruns of games where the whole point of the game is to take your time and let the story unfold, like What Remains Of Edith Finch, Eastshade, Gone Home, No Longer Home, Firewatch, etc. It's just so wrong.

"You can skip through the conversations with the Esc key...."

Her rendition of Peaches' "F*** The Pain Away" (look it up on YouTube) is a modern classic.

On 3/28/2023 at 2:06 AM, PeterWalker87 said:

According to the release notes, the last update made a fundemental change to the way the Audio drivers are utilised in Cakewalk. In my experience, big changes in software like this cause unforeseen problems. The point was that the development team work on the reported bugs and get some updates released. This won't be the only one.

I've championed Cakewalk and Sonar for years and like the user friendly interface and simple easy to use structure. I just want it to work.

To that end, I suggest you roll back to the previous version of CbB. I think there's a description of how to do that in the Early Access subforum.

If that solves it, then let the devs know, I'm sure they'll want to know that some change in the last version borked your setup. There is a beta team, but they probably have newer and/or higher end interfaces.

I agree that if an interface works with all of your other audio software and not with Cakewalk, Cakewalk needs to be examined.

If rolling back doesn't solve it....yikes, maybe something else changed on your system around that time.

18 minutes ago, Dave G said:

Is there a way to do this in Sonar also?

That feature hasn't been changed in the 5 years that Cakewalk by BandLab has been around.

And I'll add to the chorus: it's past time to install CbB and join the fun. There's no risk to your current SONAR installation. You'll get a TON of new features (CbB was originally comparable to the Professional version, but with many features added since 2018) and a program that runs much better in performance and stability.

2 minutes ago, Keni said:

Do you remember which years were the Roland years?

Naw man, I'm a relative newcomer. Used SONAR for a couple of years right when it transitioned from Pro Audio to SONAR, then not until Cakewalk by BandLab.

Let's see what Wikipedia says....according to the Cakewalk, Inc. entry, 2008-2013.

BandLab have been in charge of the software longer than any other parent company since Twelve Tone Systems. Even the Gibson period is ancient history in computer years. We're coming up on the 5th anniversary of the first issue of Cakewalk by BandLab in a couple of weeks.

BTW, on "Livin' In The Wind," is that a real Hammond, a hardware emulation or a soft synth? You got a great sound with it. My current go-to for Hammond sounds is AIR DB-33, but it sounds kind of brittle. I used to have an M3, but sold it because I wasn't playing it.

On 3/27/2023 at 11:28 AM, pulsewalk said:

Don't the DEV's have tools for opening CW project files and look at construct of them?

Indeed they do, and it may be of value to them for you to wrap it up as a .ZIP or .CWB and get it to them. I think if you send it to BandLab/Cakewalk support and notify them that it's for the devs, that will close the loop.

While they probably won't be able to figure out the initial cause, they might at least look at how it is now and get some idea of how to prevent it. They can also possibly slip you a build that has error reporting triggers in it that will write to a log file. Their call.

I'll emphasize this because a few years back, I had one project that exhibited multiple issues with sluggishness, and submitted it to the devs. As it turned out, it exposed multiple issues with Cakewalk due to some uncommon settings I was using. So the devs wrenched on the code and it resulted in multiple improvements to things like drawing speed and input response. This was across the board, whether someone was using my settings or not. This kind of error reporting can help all users.

On 3/27/2023 at 11:31 AM, pulsewalk said:

Also, is there no tool/function to check the health of a project? Corruptions or whatever? There are such things for Indesign, for example, where one can check problems with the document and let the software auto correct it. Same for Adobe PDF files and so forth.

Whoa, that is an excellent idea. Even if it just did an integrity check. I'm sure the support staff would love it.

But really, except in your unfortunate cases, corruption is, unlike in other human endeavors, relatively rare.

@rfssongs, the OP mentioned that this is happening across multiple computers, which would seem to rule out hardware issues like disk sector or RAM flakiness. Seem to. ? With this level of oddness, anything is possible.

39 minutes ago, Byron Dickens said:

Cakewalk is Windows only

I think you missed:

1 hour ago, Keni said:

after weeks of work getting this machine dual bootable

That said, I would suggest to Keni that you make your topic title something like "Installing on dual boot Mac Pro" or something. As it is, it just looks like you're having issues with a vanilla install. I believe that there are others here on the forum who have gotten Cakewalk to work on dual boot Macs.

And dang, Keni, that is one nice setup to be gifted. I would rock the snot out of a Mac like that! Once you do get Cakewalk to work, mmm, dual Cinema displays, 16 cores....

6 hours ago, Marina said:

Where are now the Waves advocates of our forum to tell us the tale about the Angry Minority ™

Yes, he's gone silent since his estimated angry 20% of the userbase were actually listened to. ?

I will say, I can forgive Waves management for the move now that they've changed course and issued an apology. For management to pull a take-it-or-leave-it move like that and then admit that they screwed up is unusual. I have respect for a good apology and making amends.

Of course, despite having licenses for many of their products, I've only ever obtained them via freebie offers, never spent a dime except for one round of WUP.

After my latest system rebuild, only two remain installed, MetaFilter and Elements 2. I found one cool preset in Elements 2 and used it on a song and I have a thing for rhythmic filters.

It's funny, 5 years ago on the old Cakewalk, Inc. forum, people recommended Waves plug-ins so often that I put a joke in my sig that if anyone ever recommended one to me I would "relentlessly troll them" or words to that effect. On the current forum, which started about 3 years ago, I don't believe I've ever seen someone outside the Deals sub recommend one. Instead, I've become the annoying one, recommending MeldaProduction ad nauseum.?

That suggests to me a decline in popularity/loyalty of Waves' stuff. Maybe their policies (single seat per license, having to buy WUP in order to get updates) finally wore people down. Especially the single seat. These days, everyone seems to have a tower system in their studio and a laptop to haul around.

47 minutes ago, Larry Jones said:

That little box in the Windows sound settings had to be unchecked.

Whoa. I didn't know what that checkbox did, 'cause I've never tried checking it. Thank you so much for posting the solution. Would never have occurred to me, and yes, A.J. gets the Man award.

I can understand when you were having trouble getting the thing to put out sound, looking at that panel and thinking "heck yeah I want to listen to this device!"

With a complex interface like my Saffire Pro, which has 8 stereo outputs plus 2 headphone jacks, Mix Control was initially daunting. But once I figured it out the routing options, now I find it very useful. There are still aspects of it that baffle me. It sure looks like they let the electronics engineer design it rather than the audio staff.

You have direct monitoring turned on.

Not sure exactly what the setting is (I have a Saffire Pro 40, which comes with different software), but it's in the Focusrite Control software that comes with the interface. It's an internal routing that sends the input directly to the output for zero-latency monitoring.

3 hours ago, Larry Jones said:

I have a policy of not concerning myself with why something didn't work.

As do I. For the most part. Sometimes I want to take note of how I boogered something up for future reference!

4 hours ago, Larry Jones said:

The best free guitar amp simulator I ever had was Guitar Rig 3, which must have come with some old version of SONAR. It came along for the ride to the new machine, but as a limited time demo version, wanting to be activated with a serial number. I have no idea.

I think the latest, albeit "lite" version of Guitar Rig is included with NI's free Komplete Start package.

You know about the "Favorite Freeware" topics in Instruments and Effects, right? You'll find all the plug-ins you need there. Buying plug-ins these days is optional.

12 hours ago, smallstonefan said:

Like it or not, subscription is the future.

It's not mine, for reasons already stated. Audio software is tools I use in a hobby, just like my woodworking tools. I wouldn't own a miter saw or circular saw under subscription, nor would I own a guitar under subscription, because I want them around as need arises and inspiration strikes. And yes, with the advent of maker spaces, it is now possible to have access to such tools under a subscription model. It's just not going to happen that I'd pay for a subscription to anything that I might not use for weeks or even months at a time, and/or given my current financial situation, I could lose access to if I don't pay the fee.

As it is now, if I have a rough month, all I need to do my #1 hobby is the headphones and interface I already own, including the computer, and the perpetual licenses I already own. Those things, plus whatever food and shelter, and my life could still be at least livable and my creative outlet would still be 100% doable.

12 hours ago, smallstonefan said:

I'm guessing I'm the only guy on this board that took a perpetual software company to a subscription model - this is a topic I'm absolutely a subject matter expert on. I'm also rather proud that we navigated those waters successfully without institutional investment (thought we did almost run out of cash).

Wow, cool! Great to have this perspective. I myself am a veteran of the consumer and business software industry, as well as IT. So I have industry experience on the manufacturing side and consuming side of both.

There are big differences in the markets for consumer and business software. For software that is in the critical path of a business' moneymaking operations, subscription/leasing is the way, and has been for a long time. From an accounting standpoint, it's better for companies to lease what they can, as well as, for publicly-traded ones, I think analysts like you better the less infrastructure you own.

12 hours ago, smallstonefan said:

With predictable revenue from subscription we were able to staff up and increase the pace of releases - creating a LOT of value for our clients.

This. Subscriptions have the potential to be better for the product itself. Way back, 30 years ago when I was working in consumer software, I had the sudden insight that the way the traditional (non-subscription) consumer software business was set up, it actually worked against software quality as measured by program stability and the addition of annoyance-relieving smaller features that the veteran userbase often prefer. I think there has since been at least one book written about this, but at the time, it just popped into my head.

The bad thing is that stability and smaller features are not what made money for these companies. What made money (in the form of attracting new and upgrade licenses) was new features. All coding costs money, and since coding for bug fixes and convenience features doesn't make any, they get shunted in priority. Build me the new features, then we'll revisit the longstanding bugs if there's time.

Back then, release cycles were timed to important trade shows, and product managers were given bonuses for delivering the next version of the product with the latest features in time to make the deadline. I was a QA engineer, and my job was to find things wrong with the software. So the better I did my job, the greater the chance that I would cost my boss her bonus money by slowing down the process. This is one of the reasons that I had to stop doing QA. It was killing my soul.

A subscription removes this disincentive mechanism. Revenue is ensured, so bugs can be addressed and features that the subscribers request can be added. The goal becomes retaining existing subscribers and attracting new ones, and bug fixes help retain subscribers. The howls of agony from the veteran users on their 3rd release with a well-known bug still present are more likely to go away.

That's if the company is smart. It it's not, then "hey, the cash rolls in whether we improve it or not, so send the coders home."

And, note to Cakewalk users: the license for Cakewalk by BandLab is a subscription. It says so in Wikipedia, so it must be true (I know, I wrote the CbB entry?). Seriously, it is a subscription license that must be renewed at least every 6 months. The difference with Cakewalk is that BandLab is paying for our subscriptions.

Veteran Cakewalk/SONAR users can see the obvious benefits of being freed from having to grub for perpetual licenses: the program is as stable and smooth and fun to use and versatile as it's been since the X series came out, and maybe before. That's what it's like having your favorite program backed by subscription.

So I fully admit that it is (potentially) better for the product while still sure that I really, really don't want to buy a subscription for any audio software, for reasons already mentioned.

12 hours ago, smallstonefan said:

Something else everyone here misses is that most businesses are valued on a multiple of their EBITA (ie profit). Software companies are usually valued on a multiple of their recurring revenue. So, a traditional business doing $10 Million in revenue with $1M in profit might be worth 3x or 4x their profit - a valuation of a $3M-$4M. The same company that does software with that $10M being subscription revenue (what we call recurring revenue) is worth closer to $30M (a 3x on recurring).

Which would you choose if you ran a company?

The reality is that a CEO's #1 job is to increase shareholder value. PERIOD. If the shareholders of Waves are thinking about a company sale, then moving to subscription is absolutely the right course of action.

All software companies over time that want to have a big exit....

This, again. I won't go into my beliefs about how stock market analysis is the scourge and poison of capitalism, but yes, this is all true. And after that insight that I had about the disincentives for quality in software manufacturing, I had another one, and swore to myself that I would never again work at a publicly-traded company.

What you describe is the reason. When a company goes public, its focus changes from providing goods and/or services that they can sell for a profit to increasing shareholder value, which is entirely based on what a bunch of people in New York who know nothing about your business think your company is worth. Analysts don't care how many employees at what salaries are needed to make a quality product, they only look at how many you have and how much you pay them, and less is more in both cases.

This is why a company whose stock is flat will get a new CEO, who immediately, without checking to see what impact it will have on operations, orders 10% in layoffs and elimination of all contract employees across the board, in every department from product development to facilities management. After which the stock price blips up (and upper management cash in a bunch of options). The employees at the company who don't know any better look at each other and think "we already didn't have enough people to do the work, we also lost some of our smartest people. This company is going to go into the toilet. How can the stock price be going UP??" And the new CEO is a hero to his bosses, despite the fact that he (and yes, it's still most often a "he") may have doomed the company's long term survival.

Because the people pulling his strings don't care about quality product or long term viability or employee well-being or marketplace prestige or anything else but having that stock price go up. It's about "the big exit," (which happens when the stock gets attractive enough for another company to buy the place out and the early investors can cash out as multimillionaires).

In modern times, especially in high tech startups who want to benefit from younger employees donating labor (in the form of working more than the agreed 8 hours a day, 5 days a week), companies give employees stock options so that they in effect become "shareholders." So their focus also shifts from "selling quality product" to "doing whatever drives up the stock price." The actual product or service is at that point no longer "the product." "The product" is the stock price.

Cakewalk Inc. wasn't dissolved because SONAR and its other products were necessarily failures, it was dissolved because Gibson's stock price was in the toilet and they wanted a quick boost. Burn the division whose removal will result in the best effect on the stock price. Merry Xmas, stockholders.

Note about the publicly-traded thing: A company doesn't have to be publicly traded for this scenario to play out. If they just want to sell the place, the same analysis criteria go into deciding what private companies make good acquisitions. They're also used when private companies seek loans.

Explains a lot of unfathomable corporate decisions, don't it? ?

In light of the above, it could be that Waves are just looking to sell and don't care about what happens to the company or its users after the first big quarter when the analysts put them on the "buy" lists and the owners' shares become worth a fortune. They might not give a hoot about its possible impact on the future sale of Waves' plug-ins. The new owners (or even the current ones) could decide that the real assets are the licensing partnerships with other manufacturers and sell the plug-in business.

1 hour ago, dumbquestions said:

I guess my confusion comes when i hear that people who frequently use waves plugins and value them dearly have spent thousands on their collection, but then willingly go and update their computer fully knowing the consequences of not being able to use them ever again now.

To whoever wants to answer: what are your reasons for upgrading OS

For one thing, at least at this moment, the current release of Waves products are fully tested, certified and guaranteed to work with the latest version of every OS they run on. So the risk at this moment in updating your OS to Windows 10 or 11 (or whatever the latest Mac OS version is) is nil in regard to Waves plug-in compatibility.

Since you're a hobbyist, I assume that you use your computer for things other than running a DAW with only Waves plug-ins? The longer you stall updating your system, the more painful it will be when you are inevitably compelled to do so. Have you frozen every piece of software on the computer at a single point in time? Anything else you want to update will at some point stop working under an older OS.

If all you do is DAW stuff on this system, and you have frozen it in time at a certain point, and you're happy with it's current capabilities, then, sure, whatever, run the wheels off of it and when they do fall off, build a completely new system and start over.

For most other people, it's a cost:benefit ratio. There are definitely risks to continuing to run a computer system on an OS that is no longer supported. And while we have all heard the hearsay about "the latest Windows update broke my whatever," I've had a Windows update negatively impact my system exactly once in my 30 years of using Windows, and it had nothing to do with my DAW or any audio software, and was addressed in the next hotfix. How many times have you heard (and I mean directly from the person it happened to) from someone that a Windows update broke a plug-in? In my observations, the only things that Windows updates ever break are drivers. And those issues are typically addressed quickly by the hardware manufacturer. Again, I've never had an application negatively affected by a Windows update, and I once took my DAW system from Windows 7 to Windows 10 when the Cakewalk devs informed me that Windows 7 was no longer officially supported. As is typical with new Windows 10 installations, it needed about 48 hours of sitting and sorting things out before performance was back up to speed, but after this, performance was better than under Windows 7.

I also had more than one piece of old hardware laying around that had long since stopped working on XP or Windows 7 that started working again with Windows 10. So it went the opposite way: upgrading Windows fixed driver compatibility and saved me from having to dumpster a perfectly good flatbed scanner.

But we all have comfort zones, part of mine includes keeping my system updated. Over my years of occasional use of Waves plug-ins, they have been rock solid across their updates and Windows' and all of my plug-in hosts, and some of mine go back to v.10. If I had fears about Windows updates, Windows 10 Pro licenses can be had for about $6 and will let you stop updates indefinitely.

I once tried collaborating with someone who had frozen their lovely Mac Pro tower on an earlier version of MacOS despite it being compatible with (at the time, current) Mojave. He was a Pro Tools user who was in (not uncommon at the time) Pro Tools terror at updating anything because Pro Tools was (rightly) known for getting bricked by MacOS updates. So he was stuck on whatever the Pro Tools version was before they switched to AAX. I was forever sending him files and links to freebie plug-in and other audio software deals only for him to tell me that they wouldn't work on his system. Stuff like 24bit FLAC's and MediaHuman Audio Converter.

Finally in frustration, I researched the situation for hours and sold him on the idea of updating both Pro Tools and the OS, because from what I could make out, Avid had finally gotten their act together. He bought a 3 terabyte backup drive so that we could entire clone his current setup and went forth. Not a hitch. Not a single issue, and both the computer and PT worked so much better that he was overjoyed.

For Windows systems, one of Microsoft's biggest selling points for Windows is backward compatibility. They sell tons of licenses (maybe the bulk) to businesses who can't afford to have their legacy apps break. And by "can't afford," I mean it could be disastrous in some cases. There are companies who depend on software that if it had a single hour of downtime, would cost them millions. This isn't "I booked a session with an important client and had to cancel because Manny Algae's All-In-One Vocal Effect was on the fritz," this is "we lost our scheduling program and now 5000 banks won't have security guards until it's fixed."

Long answer, but that covers it.

On 3/25/2023 at 7:37 AM, John Vere said:

Sonitus suite seems to have all the important features and in a format anybody can figure out with out a manual. And it is clean.

Every DAW needs a suite of stock plug-ins, and they really are pretty nice. Given BandLab's penchant for giving things away, it wouldn't surprise me if someday they do port them to unlocked VST3.

The devs are frying larger fish at the moment, I suspect.

On 3/25/2023 at 7:37 AM, John Vere said:

It seems better suited to compressors and eq type effects.

Indeed it is. Once you figure out the curve and attack/release views, it's great for seeing what a vintage emulation compressor, and/or one with quirky controls is really up to. MTurboComp is one that kind of baffled me, with its different models that have all the standard settings for attack, release, threshold, and ratio, but then also have a knob for amount of compression. Isn't that what ratio and threshold do?

Quirky EQ's are another one, and in all cases, it's useful for checking the effect of a plug-in's internal oversampling (for those that have that feature).

And if you want to clone the characteristics of your favorite vintage emulations using your more precision tools, it's great for that.

Some compressors also induce changes in frequency response, and it will reveal that, and some EQ's also include some compression to add to the vintage mojo.

5 hours ago, Carl Ewing said:

customers were choosing Creative Cloud over CS at a ratio of 4:1 prior to their move to pure subscription. In other words - the angry minority were completely overshadowed by the majority of customers.

So does this mean that if your product sells 100,000 copies at $200 each, and you make a change in the way it's sold that 20% of your userbase vehemently dislike, the opinions of 20,000 customers are not worthy of serious consideration because they're outnumbered? You're just going to write off that $400,000 in gross revenue.

I wonder why, if that 80% of the userbase was already paying for a subscription license by choice, Adobe even felt the need to force it on the ones who were so "completely overshadowed." I mean, if they're that insignificant, why not let them throw their pittance at you in whatever manner they prefer?

I'm sure Serif and any number of other companies would have gladly absorbed 20% of Adobe's userbase.

You suggested that this is "probably a welcome change for the vast majority of users," but since Waves already had the option to license via subscription, why would starting to force it on everyone who wants to use their products be a welcome change? Why would anyone care what license model another user is allowed to use?

People don't complain about it because they dislike that subscription licensing exists, they complain about not having an alternative.

28 minutes ago, MusicMan said:

There's a lot of old dinosaurs mentality where they still think they're king and haven't reassessed the current market and competition which is definitely a recipe for running the companies into the ground.

There's also plenty of "new blood" upper management who believe because they've worked in a similar position at another company without completely ruining it that they can stroll in and "take things to the next level." With a similar lack of understanding of what has made the company successful, what the company is really about. See Carly Fiorina at Hewlett-Packard 1999-2005.

I have many personal stories from when I worked in IT that I won't go into. But here's one: there was a VP of IT at one well-known software company who I drew the short straw to run over and help them drag their email child window out from behind the parent program's main window. When I did so, and then, by way of showing them how to quickly and easily get themselves out of the situation, dragged the window back behind the main window, the person literally cried out because they thought I was "breaking" it again. This was not the VP of accounting, marketing, sales, HR or any other "soft" department, this was my Big Boss, the VP of Information Technology. Freaked out at a program's child window going behind the main window.

This person's flagship project at the company was setting up a unified contact and sales management program for the sales department. This was a media company in the mid-90's, and it was traditionally a MacOS company that had only recently ported its software to Windows. So it had become a "dual platform" company where every employee was getting two workstations, one Mac and one Windows. Of course, for 90% of the workforce, this meant that one of those was "their computer" and the other one was a box that sat there in case someone forced them to look at something on the other one. And, of course, I don't even need to tell you which OS was most people's preference, and by preference I mean like being on one side of a rabid sports rivalry. People had posters up in their cubicles making fun of....I'm not going to say which platform because I don't need to.

So what was the infrastructure of this grand project going to look like? Every salesperson would get a brand new shiny....Toshiba Tecra Windows 95 laptop to carry with them wherever they went. They would use these to dial into a bank of modems. When I say that the delivery of these (very nice and expensive for the time) laptops to the sales staff were welcomed as if someone had delivered a horse turd pizza and told them they would be forced to survive on it, I'm only exaggerating a little.

There were scenes, and people swearing that they would have nothing to do with it. Although my preference did and does lean toward using Windows systems (although I like my Macs just fine), I fully sympathized with the salesforce in question. Although I personally think such partisanship is silly, I do acknowledge that it exists and that for the people who feel that way, they just do. They likely took a certain amount of pains to get jobs at a Mac-centric company, and now suddenly not only was Windows starting to look like a bigger threat in the multimedia content creation market, they were being told they would be using it daily for a mission-critical task.

All because this twit, who had been VP of IT at some financial company who if they had any Macs in the place, they were certainly in the art department, was oblivious to a huge aspect of the corporate culture. They probably weren't even aware that there were people with a passionate preference for one computing platform over another. To them, a computer was just another business machine like a FAX machine, and who on earth worries about what brand of FAX machine they use? But this was a consumer computer software company, and the people who worked there, even the ones who were not programmers, were, duh, passionate about computing. Computers weren't just business machines, they were constant companions that you poured your creativity into.

The project rolled on, investment well over a million on it. The Big Boss gave presentations at the supplier's conference about how successful their implementation and rollout was going. I hated it because every time some issue involving it came up, it turned things into panic mode. OMG, one of the database programmers can't connect to the server, run over there immediately and DO something!! No I don't know if they tried rebooting! it's a 4 alarm emergency!! We were busting our butts to deliver something to people who were prejudiced against it before they even saw it in action. At the direction of people who were blissfully unaware of or in deliberate denial about what an enormous turd they were laying. What....fun. How....fulfilling.

I could say a lot more, but I'll just mention that I checked back in a couple of years after I had left the company (which I did by bouncing my pager across the conference room table at my boss, who had been dressing us down for not wearing our pagers when we were off duty-not part of the job description. I told him I wouldn't do it because I didn't trust them or the big boss to correctly judge what constituted an "emergency" and said, "y'know, what, you can have the damn thing." Pewwwww.). A few years later I asked a friend who was still there whatever became of the big flagship project, and he told me that while it did go online, nobody ever actually started using it. There was one person they had hired to enter data into it, and she kept doing her job, merrily entering data into it that nobody ever touched. Over. A. Million. Dollars. In 1996 money.

I'm with Peter on B2B being a way different market than hobbyists.

One important thing about a business paying a monthly subscription fee is that the business can look at hard numbers and judge the value they are getting as a percentage of revenue. It's an equation, and a monthly subscription fee just goes along with other fixed monthly expenses like janitorial and rent. It even makes it easier to budget for. The money is for something that is used every day as a tool to make more money. Because the function of a business is to make money. If paying every month to use Pro Tools or Photoshop makes the business enough money, it's worth it, no question.

With hobbyists, on the other hand, the hobby of producing music with a computer may be something we only engage in a few days a week, or even less often. It may be only a small part of our overall music hobby. Someone might mostly play live, but once in a while put together a single or album or demo on their computer. And the function of a hobby is....to have fun. There is no equation. Subscribing to anything for fun brings with it a monthly assessment: did I get $15 worth of entertainment from my Netflix/HBO/Showtime/Computer Music/Sound On Sound subscription? Is there something else I could do with my $15 that would bring me more fun?

BTW, I don't remember who it was that chalked the trend toward software license by subscription up to kids these days with their Netflix subscriptions, etc., but subscriptions are not some newfangled thing. HBO turned 50 last year. Cable TV by subscription is older than that. Consumer computer software is a relatively newer thing, so it's been relatively more recent that companies have started considering subscription models for licensing. The model has been around a lot longer in the business computing world. I think 50 years ago, IBM (and their competitors) made you rent the whole computer along with the software that ran on it. It's an old idea that's being applied to a newer market.

Adobe and Avid get away with it to the extent that they do because so much of their customer base is the pro market, and in the case of Adobe, they have at least one unquestionable killer industry standard app in their suite, and the other titles, if they don't own the market the way that Photoshop does, they are at least good quality. Avid, on the other hand, think they have that, and enough of their users believe it that it may work for them. I have no idea how Pro Tools is doing in the marketplace these days; it sure seems to be less and less visible to me. I'm going by forum and magazine and YouTube attention. I suspect Pro Tools has very slow growth in the hobbyist market, which is of course way bigger than the pro market. And people in the hobbyist market turn into the pro market. I doubt that someone who has years invested in learning Cubase or FL Studio or Logic or REAPER is going to dump their favorite program in favor of Pro Tools once they start making money.

Also, never, ever believe that the people making the decisions at any size of company are inherently on the ball in any way. The landscape is littered with the shells of once great companies destroyed by the decisions of upper management. In my experience, if management at a company seem bright enough to dress themselves in the morning and not injure themselves while brushing their teeth, then they're above average.

In order to make this huge commitment, to go subscription-only, someone at Waves must believe they have enough leverage in the marketplace to pull it off, that enough people will think that having certain of their products is that essential. In my thinking, I don't see that they do. There are just too many good alternatives. Waves used to be considered a top-tier brand, but I don't know how true that is any more. In terms of respect, I think that there are multiple companies whose plug-ins are more highly regarded. Brainworx/PA, iZotope,  FabFilter, IK Multimedia. If I had to choose a company to subscribe to their product line, it would NOT be Waves, any of the others I mentioned would be above Waves on my list.

A question: has anyone checked out the terms to know if the subscription is the same Waves single seater? Wouldn't that be wonderful, if for your $25 a month you're limited to one computer? Go Waves. I've never bought a single one of their products except one round of WUP to get a couple updated. The only ones that interested me were TrueVerb, which was my go-to before OrilRiver came out, MetaFilter, which I've never actually used in a project due to single seat license, and Element 2, which made its way onto exactly one song. I was giving it a chance because I felt some sort of obligation to check out the shiny object.

14 minutes ago, tom said:

I put SBC in my cart earlier and it was $9.99 with code, just went to checkout after a few hours and its now $19.99? What happened?!

I was just at PA and it looks like they ended the mega sale.?

17 hours ago, chris.r said:

Hi Erik, just a small clarification. On the other thread I just gave an example with discovering recently a bug in the comping track where I think Cakewalk is not correctly saving small edits done on a comping track when saving a project, so different subject altogether.

Apologies, Chris. I got you mixed up with another person. Thanks for chiming in.

 I, too, have experienced that pop/meter slam. Both with synths and FX. The VST3 version of the popular free Acon Digital Multiply Chorus does it reliably. VST2, no prob. I reported this to TPTB, but they had bigger fish to fry at the time. It would be cool if they took a look at it. Sure, there’s an easy workaround that points directly at Acon not having their VST3 act together, but it could be an opportunity to harden Cakewalk against this sort of plug-in failure. At least handle it more gracefully.

One of the “legacy” (by which they mean no longer supported) TAL synths also did it. “Bassline” I think.

bx_masterdesk True Peak obtained for free. No more worries about untrue peaks.

45 minutes ago, pulsewalk said:

Could it be a problem with the internal "naming" or "tagging" of clips and/or tracks? When Cakewalk adds a certain ID number (or however it is done) to a certain clip or track, maybe it somehow accidentally assign the same ID to another clip in the project, which causes lots of reference problems and such?

This would explain the automation ghosting problems that I've described earlier, but also that when handling one track is affecting another, completely different, track regardless of VST's or VSTi's used.

I can't really see a connection between VST's and VSTi's and my problem considering the used ones are different from each other in the corrupted tracks and clips and what not.

If the problem only would occur with say the Serum VSTi only, or a certain FX VST plugin only, then one could say that "perhaps that specific VST/VSTi is the problem". But AFAIK there's no such connection there.

Well, as you alluded to, I too suspect that your project is getting corrupted at some point and all subsequent weirdness stems from that. A software engineer colleague of mine described it using a “cracked windshield” metaphor.

Windshield gets hit with a stone, then over months of driving, the crack spreads. But it’s all the result of that one stone.

Once you see the first sign of corruption it seems like it only gets worse after that.

 I’m suspecting a plug-in less as you describe it more, but it is true that really bad issues with Cakewalk very often come down to plug-in conflicts. So it’s worth keeping an eye on. Serum, obviously, is a very popular synth, and if it were causing problems like this the forum and Reddit would be in flames.

It’s crucial at this point to watch for the very first instance of corruption and then see if you can remember what operations you did right before it happened.

QA engineers, which I used to be, maintain a mental “buffer” of actions so that they can retrace their steps.

It’s a challenge, but not an impossible one.

When I saw a similar thing, it was in a project with a low track count, and it involved a couple of MeldaProduction plug-ins. Melda are known for having a large amount of shared code, so that might have had something to do with it. I might have been doing some sidechaining, which could also have helped.

IIRC, it did corrupt the project, but since it was a small project, I just salvaged it into a new project and the error didn’t happen again. Haven’t seen it since, so I called it a fluke. ?‍♂️

43 minutes ago, pulsewalk said:

maybe the developers are more interested in taking a look at it.

I wouldn't worry about that. They definitely don't want people to have such troubles with the software.

The tough part is figuring out how to force it to happen again in such a way that they can examine it and correct the problem.

I've been trying off and on for years to get the "MIDI track stops talking to Synth track" one pinned down. I started another topic just for that to see if we can work together on it. It's been happening every once in a while since I started using Cakewalk. Not often enough to cause real problems, but annoying when it does happen. Oddly enough, it tends to happen early on in a project, once I sacrifice the chicken to it, it's solid thereafter.

BTW, if anyone reading this doesn't already have the T-Racks 670 compressor and is wondering whether it is worth it....good heavens go and fill out the survey NOW.

It's my favorite bus compressor. Widely considered to be the best (or one of the best) Fairchild 670 emulations. Whether it is or not I don't know, but I fell in love with the sounds it gets.

I'm starting this thread because multiple people (including @chris.r) chimed in on another one saying that we've all seen similar behavior in Cakewalk. The big problem is, while this happens regularly, it's so far been beyond my ability to make it happen reliably. The developers can't fix an issue they don't see, and the only bug report that they can use is one that lays out a series of steps they can take to reproduce the problem. The only other way is if we can send them a project that's exhibiting the issue.

In this case, sending them the project might be a problem, because such is the nature of this that various stimuli can cure the condition, and one of those is (sometimes) exiting Cakewalk, relaunching, and loading the project again.

My scenario: I only use "split" MIDI/Synth tracks, that is rather than an Instrument Track. What happens is that at some point the MIDI track stops being able to communicate with the Synth Track. I don't know if it happens with Instrument Tracks as well.

I can usually see the meter moving on the MIDI track as the song plays, but no sound comes from the Synth track, nor does its meter show any activity.

There are, in my experience, only 3 actions that can (sometimes) cure this condition. First, and easiest, in some cases I can select MIDI channel 1 on the MIDI track and the synth track will start playing again. The rest of the time, I have to create the synth track again and set the MIDI track to drive it. In the past, sometimes I could exit Cakewalk and return and the problem would have sorted itself, but I haven't done that lately.

What I hope is that if enough of us look into this and report, we can figure out what sequence of events causes this to happen.  @Lynn Wilson said that it only seems to happen with VST2's, which sounds familiar, because my bread-and-butter synths, XPand!2, Hybrid 3 and Vacuum Pro, are all VST2 (as well as being from one manufacturer, AIR). It's happened a lot with KONTAKT, which until recently, was also VST2-only. So that's one place to start: when this happens, what specific synth, and is it a VST2 or VST3.

Also, does it happen for you with simple Instrument Tracks, or only split MIDI/Synth, or both? Does my method of forcing Channel 1 ever fix it for you? How about exiting and relaunching?

Nice, I've done this for a few friends who haven't done much with it yet, but I figured, "you're a musician, you have a computer, let's put some music software on it."

I'd encourage your friend to check out this forum for tutorials and advice. There is a subforum for posting tutorials and links to them, and it has a list of YouTube channels that are devoted to or at least have a series on, Cakewalk:

As for whether to install the Studio Instruments, hey, whatever. They don't take up much space. Everyone, no matter what they're doing, needs some kind of drum machine instrument.

And speaking of instruments (and FX), there are longs lists on this forum of freeware synths and FX that Cakewalk users have found and tried. Your friend might be even more enthused about moving to using a DAW if they realize that they don't have to spend a penny to get some really great stuff: