Starship Krupa

And I suppose that in the past quarter century of MIDI sequencer evolution, every time you've tried out something newer, you deemed it inferior because you couldn't immediately work as efficiently with it as you can with Pro 3? Your old tool has finally broken. You must learn to use a newer one. Choose a current program, and allow whatever length of time it initially took you to get that good. Cakewalk still has an Event List, and my guess is that it's the feature that's changed the least in 30 years.

I've long been baffled by people coming to the Cakewalk By BandLab forum seeking help with such things as SONAR 8.3. The OP wins a prize for taking it to a new level. Have you taken a look at this:

Well, I must admit, with the more extreme presets I use with Objeq Delay, they could be masking gaps and glitches in the audio! 😃 Also, now that I think about it, it has such a striking sonic footprint that I've never used more than one instance of it at a time. Objeq Delay's manufacturer is still around, have you contacted A|A|S about it?

We need to get you sorted on this. Both of these plug-ins work fine even on my 10+ year old laptop. You can see in my sig that even my main system is not exactly a 2022 rocket sled. Have you posted your system specs? Have a look at https://devblogs.microsoft.com/windows-music-dev/unofficial-windows-10-audio-workstation-build-and-tweak-guide-part-1/ He's a Microsoft dev who's buddies with Noel, the head of BandLab's Cakewalk group.

Start at the very top: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/windows-music-dev/unofficial-windows-10-audio-workstation-build-and-tweak-guide-part-1/

Just wanted to comment that the local help works great. There is so much to love in this version. Xmas in June.

I wonder if there was some equation, or analysis, or market research that told them that $29 was some kind of sweet spot, where people wouldn't think too hard about spending the money.

Well, yeah, so was my question. 😄 And he paid $600, he thinks, but estimates an new license at $35. He's really overestimating the cost of goods! The weird part is that even after bluzdog kindly clued him in, he still has the ad up.

Did Andy Warhol predict that in the future, all plug-ins will be priced at $29?

And the ad is still up! The aroma of burning herb emanates from this listing. Is this thread tiptoeing around the pirate software rules? 😆

Probably on sale from time to time, but yeah, score. About 5 Waves plug-ins' worth. My first experience with PACE licensing, and it made me wonder what all the fuss was about! It only took half a dozen years before I had any serious hassle with it. All sorted now, though.

Sonic Anomaly Unlimited is another excellent freeware limiter. My favorite before I got MLimiterX.

This. The only one I can think of is Eventide UltraChannel. It has the transformer emulation, doubling (pitch shift as well as time shift), delay, parametric graphical (rather than knob) EQ, and de-esser. I got it for free as an introductory deal years ago. I tend to forget what a great-sounding powerhouse it is. I got into individual effects as I was learning the basics (which I still am!). I think of the VX64 as a multieffect rather than a channel strip, because it goes beyond the usual channel strip. Most channel strips keep to the analog emulation, compressor, and knob EQ. The classic Eventide pitch shifting doubler alone is great to have.

You'd probably have to change your handle, at least. 😄

You got it. Long story: I'm a geek for corporate history. I've read every book written by former Fender employees (and there are a LOT of them!), books on Vox, Slingerland, Intel, Apple. I don't mention it around here, but I started a musical equipment company myself about 20 years ago. I was in the second wave of boutique stompbox builders and worked as a consultant to other boutique effects and amplifier companies. I've made many a trip to the NAMM show, and even seen my product ideas influence the companies who now own the brands that originally made the products I had reissued in boutique form. An interesting conceptual loop. It's a tangled web we weave even when we're not trying to deceive. Prior to starting my own company, I worked at Orban Associates, Nady Systems, and a variety of software companies including Macromedia (bought by Adobe). Macromedia was notorious for buying up promising products....and killing them. Deck was a sad example. Some here may remember that debacle. The SONAR story without the happy ending. They eventually hit it HUGE when they acquired a company whose main product was called Future Splash and renamed it Flash....which ruled the web for about 20 years. I don't know who might remember this, but back on the old forum, I was the biggest rah-rah about how the BandLab acquisition and freeware model might just result in the product becoming better than it ever had been. I was obnoxious about it at times. But I understood what was going on. Someone who cared had picked up the product, and he had done it before with Heritage Guitars. When I was 11, I acquired a stepfather who had already owned a company in Los Angeles that made fiberglass boats. Before music, boating was my main hobby and interest in life. I soaked up all of his stories of how companies go astray, observed in the next decade as he rescued multiple companies from the brink of ruin. This was getting toward the end of the era that saw CBS and Norlin going around snapping up peripherally-related companies that nobody at the home company either knew how to run or even wanted to run, and believe me, there were just as many sporting goods companies that suffered from this. Ron's biggest success was at a company called American Fiberglass, who had been bought by Ithaca Gun. Because who knows better what to do with a sailboat company than a gun company? One part of the Norlin story that's not mentioned often is that it was formed when a South American beer and cement company bought CMI. Because who better knows what to do with....you know the rest. The problem with the strategy in this era was that the acquiring companies overestimated the synergy, including how their corporate cultures would work together. I'm not as up on the Norlin years at Gibson, but I know a lot about the rise, fall, and resurrection of Fender. A fundamental flaw with the late 60's and early 70's acquisition culture was that these companies were founded and run by people who had a passion and great understanding for the products they were making. Leo Fender was a tech geek and music fan who was still inventing things up until about a week before he passed on. Gibson of course also had a great history of building great guitars and innovation. The pleasure boat business is similar. They're all founded by boating nuts who turn to design and construction. No ding whatsoever on a beer and construction materials company successful enough to buy an established American musical instrument company, or CBS/Columbia, who were and are legendary. However, the executives at these companies who were sent in to manage the new acquisitions joined the parent companies because they wanted to work in the industry these companies specialized in. People who worked at CBS wanted to work in the entertainment industry in New York City, not in manufacturing in California. It was probably similar with Norlin. You can be a brilliant in the beverage industry and/or construction, and passionate about it as well. And there is probably synergy between beer and cement. Construction workers buy lots of both things 😄. No, actually, they're both made by mixing up bulk ingredients. At CBS, Fender was where careers went to die. The only hope these people had was to try to make Fender as profitable as possible so they could get sent back to New York. And no mystery what happens when that is the sole motivation for coming to work every day. In this era, Gibson was playing catch up with Fender for popularity. That Sonex guitar was a Gibson-shaped guitar built like a Fender. Screw-on removable neck (as you point out, for servicing and replacement, Gibsons are notorious for headstock cracks), drop-in pickguard with electronics all in place, etc. The best hope of salvation for these brands is subsequent acquisition by people who are passionate about the product. Bill Schultz and his crew with Fender are my favorite example. I watched Ron do it with American Fiberglass. Ron was living on a boat when he married my mom. The companies' original products also have to be popular enough and have enough reputation for something to survive. Fender guitars and amps? Heck yeah. Slingerland and Rogers Drums? Rhodes electric pianos? Sadly, not. So when Meng picked up Cakewalk, I had informed theories of how it might play out. He wisely rehired the people who were passionate about the product. I know about software development and music companies from the inside. It makes using Cakewalk more fun for me, watching to see what happens as far as product quality. I'm rooting for it. That's a cool piece of musical instrument history you have. And for maintenance and repair purposes, having the neck able to be removed makes for much easier refretting and other work. You don't have to protect the body while you're doing it.

Depends on how satisfied one is with what one already has, I suppose. I haven't looked that deeply into Playbeat Lite, but lately my favorite drum machine sound has been the DMX, which I get by loading one shots into Sitala. If Playbeat Lite has a better-sounding DMX and/or a more pleasing UI, then getting it and an updated RX Editor for $10 is a happy deal. Price of a meal at Jack-in-the-Box. FWIW, I passed on the most recent PB freebie and maybe the one before that. Whatever the Antares thing was. I keep a couple of $5-10 items in my wishlist in case I want the add-on. They're all things I want, but not urgently. All in good fun. My strategy once I decided that this was a serious enough hobby to put some money into was to (via the best deals possible) acquire a variety in the different categories I was interested in, then stick to the faves. I'm still looking for a drum machine, and always on the lookout for weirdifiers. Really, though, I have a pretty deep bench in weirdifiers, especially with Audio Damage releasing their legacy line as freeware. Still a sucker for a pretty Glitchmachine!

The blurb page at PB says that it comes with Playbeat Lite.... I'll probably get some trinket or other. I thought it might be iZotope RX9 Essentials, but as it turns out there is no RX9 Essentials, it's RX8 Essentials. PB are kinda coy, they call it "RX Essentials." I have Rx7 Essentials, and the Editor was updated for 8. Whether it was a $10 update remains to be seen in my demoing of it.

I can't help wondering if in two more years we'll be seeing Capricorn and Jones modes. Oops, I see there's already a Capricorn mode. Well, what about Jones?

Okay, I'm by no means a "luthier," but I've built a few part-o-casters and done refrets and done setups and renovations on friends' guitars. I'm also an amateur woodworker who has gotten as far as milling my own window sash and making a table saw finger-joint jig so that I could build a Bassman copy 2-12 cab out of fir. At first I was WTF? about your dovetail joint. But then I'm also familiar with the weirdness that went on at Gibson in the Norlin years. Not too long ago, I worked on a Gibson Sonex for a friend. I only knew of the foam core ones, but then I learned about this mode;, body made of MDF(!), with a bolt-on neck. Japanese humbuckers with coil split switches. Someone had botched the electronics in it, so I looked up a schematic and got it all set back to stock, and set it up correctly. Replaced the potmetal bridge with a Tone Pros. Turned out to be a really nice sounding and playing axe. So anything is possible. Selling what was probably a prototype? Sure, why not. It's a finished instrument, isn't it? I can understand the thinking behind trying this construction method. A properly cut dovetail, as opposed to the standard tenon joint, will inherently be aligned without as much need for human intervention. And they're strong. They probably got a big-a55 dovetail shaper bit, made a jig to hold the body in alignment and let it rip. At which point they also said to heck with even gluing it, the string tension will hold it in, and we can spray the finish on the bodies and necks separately. They were probably trying everything to automate the process as much as possible. If all the workers have to do is feed parts into a machine and then stick them together, that would in theory eliminate (expensive) skilled labor. Who even cares about skilled labor? This is the same era and industry that saw legendary Fender neck shaper Tadeo Gomez hired back by Fender's parent company, CBS, as a janitor. At least they kept Abigail Ybarra at the pickup winder. She could have wound up in the lunch room or something. What I see in your photo suggests that the way to get it apart is to take the strings off and hold the body under one arm (your left if you're a righty) and tug the neck straight away from the body with your other hand. There's a telltale line at the heel where there's a gap in the finish. I'm pretty sure the idea was that the string tension holds the neck snug in the pocket. And from what I know of dovetail joints (yeah), there would be no other way for it to come apart. Since you're having a hard time pulling it apart, that suggests that it's in there nice and snug, which is good. Were it my guitar, I would be sorely tempted to put some Titebond in there before putting it back together, because I have the idea that the it would "sing" better. It's a truism that the better the coupling between neck and body, the more a guitar will sustain. Sustain ain't the be-all and end-all of tone, though. Glue is a one-way street with this joint (getting it back apart would require the services of a pro), and if it plays and sounds like you want it to, it ain't broke. Many highly-regarded guitar makers, including Martin, use or used dovetail neck joints. This is the first one I've heard of that wasn't also glued. 😳

Sturgeon's Law says that 90% of everything is crap, so what can we do but endeavor to rise above? It takes a lot more to put together a metal track than it does my arpeggiator-and-drum machine opuses. As ever, trying for the magic Sturgeon's 10% is where the rabbit meets the road. One of those things: stick around in the wide world of music long enough and you'll wind up with odd kinds of cred. Long decades before I was an electronic bunny making trippity-bloopity music for dozens to shake their body and drift off into space to, I played somewhat "harder" styles, including what would later fall under the umbrella of "grunge." Music by former teenage punks who had stuck with it long enough to acquire music skills and turn to the music of their childhoods (classic hard rock and funk) for inspiration. In one of my SF bands I was half of a rhythm section with Jef "Wrest" Whitehead, who later became known as American Black Metal pioneers Leviathan. That's gotta afford at least some metal cred upon my head? I hope so. If not, well, it sure was musical fun playing bass with that guy. He tore it the fsck UP on the skins. We locked in like Fred and Ginger. I checked out what he's done as Leviathan, and typically for him, it's pretty excellent.

And there it is again. It's never asctuall "Calkewalk" itself with this forum! LOL. You had to settle for "a lot of times" when you couldn't provoke the actual response you wanted. In your thread, I and others repeatedly said words to the effect of "if you think the latest version is causing the problem, roll back to the previous version." But it seems like you wanted to pick a fight and had a heck of a time doing so. 😄 We have more than one person in this thread who is saying that this build broke something on their system and not a single one suggesting that it's not an issue with the Early Access Cakewalk build. Sometimes it is, and then we help the developers fix it by sending in as detailed a crash report as we can, complete with our system specs. With audio apps, it's critically important that developers know what hardware the person's running. Not so they can fingerpoint or say "you don't have enough RAM and you need to buy an SSD" but because they need to know what hardware Cakewalk, or "Calkewalk" or whatever you want to call it, may be having trouble with. Obviously, it works fine on their systems or they wouldn't have sent it out. I myself, this morning, installed the EA build on my laptop and suddenly, projects that played fine the night before were clicking and then grinding to a halt. I tried this, I tried that, including rolling back to the last release build. Then I discovered that I had both onboard sound and my Presonus interface enabled as output devices using WASAPI. Apparently Cakewalk doesn't like that, so I unchecked the onboard audio in Preferences and all was well again. ASIO would probably work even better. Last night, I didn't have the Presonus plugged in, so it was a completely different output device configuration. All this crap matters. It's impossible to say, because AFAIK you've never even said what version of Windows you're running. The bigger question is: if you have all of these other DAW's that work smoothly on your system, and Cakewalk is crashing, and you're unwilling to divulge the information needed to figure out why, why don't you just use one or all of those other DAW's? They're all fine programs that pretty much do what Cakewalk does (aside from crashing on your system). Surely you'd be happier?

Blessed be. This will make a huge improvement in my drum recording and comping workflow.

That raises some questions I've had but have never researched. One of them is what effect the CODEC's used for Bluetooth audio have on sound transmitted over the link. What frequency bandwidth is it capable of? What dynamic level? Does it mess with the transients like MP3? I've kind of been scared to find out.

I tend to forget about his (actually quite good, especially given that he does metal, an underserved genre in the world of tutorials) series due to the amount of bitterness I've seen him express toward BandLab and to this forum. Apparently early on he approached them about getting them to finance his efforts. BandLab, with their "attraction rather than promotion" policy toward marketing Cakewalk, could offer him nothing but encouragement. It's regrettable, because from what I've seen of his tutorials, he's really skilled with SONAR/Cakewalk. Sure it would be great if Cakewalk could get a bit of marketing push, but given the choice between funding that and funding development, I'll have to go with development. The attraction rather than promotion strategy pays off when someone like Lorene discovers the software and goes nuts about how capable it is. If I want all my friends to use it, all I have to do is tell them about it and let them go with it if they choose.

RecordingStudio9: https://www.youtube.com/c/RecordingStudio9com has a playlist of 85 Cakewalk-centric videos.