Starship Krupa

Probably the best thing I do for that is listen to reference songs in whatever genre I'm working in, songs that I think are well mixed and mastered. And I listen to them on my monitoring system. When asking for advice on "how do I get this sound?" it makes it much easier to give advice if you give us an example of exactly which "CDs and radio songs" you think do a good job of presenting an "in your face" bass sound. Different genres call for different methods. Go to YouTube and search for "how to mix bass" or even "how to get an in your face bass sound" and you'll find plenty of information. A mistake that I think a lot of people make is in assuming that "bass"=low end. I grew up listening to Paul McCartney's bass coming through on the 2" speaker of a plastic AM transistor radio. Our ears "fill in" the rest when we're listening via imperfect reproduction systems. Listen closely to those well-produced songs and you'll likely find that the "bass" sound that pops out is much higher in frequency than we might expect, and that the extreme lows are rolled off with high passing. As a listening exercise, try throwing a steep highpass on your bass track and slowly bringing it higher and higher until it doesn't sound like "bass" any more. When I do this, it's always higher than I expect. The way it "looks" in my mind is that there's the "upper" component of the bass sound, where the pluck, snarl, whatever, is, depending on whether I'm using a bass guitar (or sample of one) or a bass synth sound. Then down from there comes the space that I cut out for the kick drum, often involving sidechaining with Trackspacer or just a compressor. Then down from there in a space all its own is the pant-flappy boom, the amount of which can vary depending on what genre and what I'm trying to achieve. Club sound systems can reproduce it, earbuds less so. To make any fast attack rhythmic sound stand out better, I use compression, usually with about 5-10 mS attack to let enough of the attack portion through, and 100mS or shorter release. This isn't to smooth it out, it's to give it a bounce that resembles how our ears naturally react to instant sounds. I didn't twig at first that compression can be used not only for the gluing and smoothing functions (that were the first parts of its job that I understood), but also to shape the dynamics and rhythm of sounds. As a side effect of putting this kind of "bouncy" compression on other sounds in the mix, I find that it helps them stay out of each others' way. I started a thread on this forum about noticing an example of that. I was twiddling a compressor and thought it was the one on the bass track because it was affecting the bass track in a big way. Then I noticed that it was on a different track. What I was doing was just getting that track out of the way of the bass track, leaving space for it to come through. If I can't hear my bass distinctly, what's covering it up? Look for things that might be covering it up and maybe work on them a bit. It might have less to do with the bass sound and more to do with the other things we try to cram in. In trying to understand it better, I thought of it like looking at an image. If all of the elements in the image are tinted medium orange, it's harder to pick out individual elements. This is how I think of the usual advice to carve each element its own space in the frequency spectrum. However, if we take a full-range image and then make a spot on it that's completely bright white, even though that bright white spot isn't strictly "in the way" of the darker elements in the image, it still draws the eye's attention away, and maybe even make the iris close somewhat. This is akin to having a poky loud sound in the upper mids: nothing to do with "bass" as far as frequency, but its volume makes the ear recoil and pay less attention to what's happening lower down. In this way, sounds can mask other sounds that aren't even within the same spectrum. Not something to be afraid of, rather something to notice. As for listening environment, I don't know if there's such a thing as a perfect listening environment. I figure if I can play my Radiohead reference CD on my monitors and it sounds killer, then there's no reason that with mixing and mastering chops, I can't theoretically produce something with at least a similar sonic balance. I haven't deployed any bass traps as such, but I have 4 different sets of monitors connected to my workstation, plus good listening systems in my bedroom and living room, plus headphones and automobile. I work on it until the song sounds good on all of those systems. Hey, why not? After all my stuff is listened to more by me than by anyone else. 😁 P.S. I've heard nothing but good about Kalis. It's on my to-do list to go down to GC and audition some.

So it sounds like your issue isn't that your laptop isn't fast enough, it sounds plenty fast and it sounds like you're happy enough with its speed. It's rather that you are looking at Task Manager and seeing all this RAM that you paid extra for "going to waste." The thing about RAM is that you just want to have enough that you don't run out of it under taxing conditions (like sample-heavy projects). You don't say how much RAM you actually have installed, I'll guess 24G. That's great, but I've never come close to hitting the ceiling on my laptop which only has 8G of RAM installed (that's all it's designed to be able to hold). And I do use some sampled instruments. Not a full orchestra's worth, but some. It's reserve capacity. Unlike me, you don't have to be concerned at all about the size of whatever sampled instrument you're using in a project. You can load anything you want with confidence that the system isn't going to have to start using your drive as virtual memory. That's what your extra RAM is "doing."

It means exactly what it says: Cakewalk thinks you have an audio and/or MIDI controller called "AC Interface," and the OS is reporting to Cakewalk that it's been disconnected. How many interfaces/USB MIDI devices do you usually have connected? Do any of them have a name that relates to "AC?"

Of course as we saw with my recent experience, actually getting your licenses reset may still require opening a support ticket with the publisher.

Something odd I've noticed is that my Presonus Studio 2|4 has a window of buffer settings. It likes either 512 or 1024. Higher than that and it starts sounding like my project is rolling around in a gravel truck. Lower than that can be okay but I can't put too much in in the way of plug-ins. So it may be counterintuitive, but try dropping yours down to 512 and see if it helps. Your computer is spec'd way way better than any of mine. It should be able to cruise right along at 1024. 4096 seems like way too high.

It "works" inasmuch as iLok Manager let me issue the request, and afterward indicated that I'd made the request, and then 6 out of 9 manufacturers reset the licenses without further communication. I had to contact another 2 myself to get them to reset the licenses. The remaining one, Pulsar, hasn't reset my license, but it's for Smasher, a compressor I seldom if ever use. I'll send them email just for form's sake to get the last license out of iLimbo. This suggests that there are some holes in the system regarding the companies receiving the requests. Maybe a group of email messages like that triggered junk mail filters? Who knows. I didn't completely trust it, and I was right in that. It reinforces the strategy of having a physical iLok for my main system, as its iLok just sits there always plugged into a port that's out of harm's way. If I had been getting ready to take a trip with the laptop, I could have just pulled the iLok from that main system and been good to go. Since I'm not making music on deadlines or making money from it, having one system's licenses offline for 24 hours was no big deal and I don't feel any urge to fork over for ZDT. My setup has sufficient redundancy (with the physical iLok) that I had zero downtime as it was. So my advice to anyone who's storing licenses locally: that's feasible for a #2 workstation if you have a physical iLok on your main system (or the other way around) with a set of licenses. I find it hard to imagine that if a person has 2 workstations, the main one will have all of the licenses that the #2 one has. At this point, if I had only one single DAW computer, I'd not want to store iLok licenses locally unless they were for software I'd be okay without using for a day. Thing is, though, some of my most-used instruments and FX are iLok'd and I'd not want to be without them if I could avoid it. A one-time fee of $35-40 for a physical iLok seems like good (and plenty) insurance for 28 activations. If my physical iLok went to computer peripheral heaven, then I'd still have a full set of licenses stored locally on my #2 system and could move them to the main one if need be. Figure that in the case of a calamity sufficient to break both my dongle and my laptop, I'll be seeing to more urgent matters than having to wait overnight to get access to my plug-ins. I'll suggest learning the process for contacting companies for resets. In a nutshell, they need your iLok ID, the email address you use with the iLok ID, the location ID of the downed system, and the titles and activation codes for the plug-ins that are stuck in iLimbo. It's not obvious, but you can copy and paste the location ID and the activation codes from iLok Manager. Just click on the field and it becomes highlighted with a thin rectangle around it. Then use Ctrl-C to copy. So it's easy enough to do, although it would get tedious with more than about a dozen licenses. iLok sends you a notification via email every time a company fulfills a reset request. That's how I was able to report on the progress throughout the episode. For those who found my tale scary, remember: from a location that iLok has deemed lost forever, I had all but the iZotope/Exponential ones back online overnight. Even if I hadn't had the physical iLok, I'd have been back up and running without much downtime, and I didn't permanently lose any of my licenses. I suffered no downtime whatsoever, as I still had a full set of licenses on the dongle. And the full recovery didn't cost me a dime. My only beef toward PACE (and Waves) about any of this is that it's stupid to have a system that can maroon a license location just because I temporarily disable two pieces of hardware. At worst, they should have recognized the location as soon as I re-enabled the adapters and restarted the computer. Fortunately, Waves have a fairly simple solution for it.

Actually, no, I did initiate the reset request from my other computer. And it worked, for a little over half of the manufacturers. So the ailing system can be completely gone when you issue your reset request. Just go to a computer with iLok Manager on it, log in, and your dead system will show up with its location ID and all locally-stored licenses listed. Aaaaand, it looks like my 2nd email did the trick, I have my Exponential licenses back. The only remaining straggler is Pulsar Audio, whose Smasher compressor I have a license for, and which I never use.

48 hour update: I contacted iZotope last night and got email from their rep at 9:00AM my time (noon their time) saying "I have gone ahead and reset these iLok licenses." Um, not yet, according to iLok Manager. They're still in iLimbo. As we have seen in my case study, that seems to result in about 60% of the companies responding. With the rest, I've had to contact them directly, either via their support sites or (in the case of InMusic) email. Fortunately, I found that I can copy the activation codes and location ID from iLok Manager and paste it into email, so that made it much easier to do. Everyone but iZotope got me my resets within 24 hours. My iZotope/Exponential resets still haven't come through.

Wow, bad iZotope, even after filling out a support ticket on their site that included all of the activation numbers, my iLok ID, and the location ID of the ghosted system, no license resets yet. You know things are dire when friggin' SONiVOX beats you by a day (at least).

As a big user of Plugin Alliance plug-ins, I heartily endorse this request. It is a chore to have to open them from the VST menu then name and save them in Cakewalk's preset manager.

One thing I'd like to mention because it's not obvious and it came as a surprise to me is that you can float individual views of Console, PRV, Browser, Inspector, whatever, wherever you want. I had thought that Console and PRV always had to be in the Multidock. So they may not be in the Multidock, but you can certainly drag whatever you want to monitor 2, outside the Multidock or Main window. But I agree, it would be nice to be able to tuck the Inspector and Browser in next to the Console and PRV in the Multidock rather than having to tab over to them.

I'd have done the same. I guess I got lucky, the first PACE'd plug-in I got was when Eventide were giving away free licenses for UltraChannel. Late enough in the iLok game that it has mostly worked well over the years. To their slight credit, they do seem to be trying to make it less of a hassle, with this being able to issue reset requests from iLok Manager. After waiting for iZotope to get the message, though, I just sent them a reset request on their support web form. When it comes to having to contact manufacturers for license resets, I had to reset my main DAW's Windows 10 installation, and wound up having to make license reset requests for WA Production and Soundspot licenses, which are both tied to the system in whatever way. Probably a key on the disk. You get a certain number of authorizations and then they don't allow any more. So on the hassle meter, it was about even. I doubt that WA or Soundspot allow deauthorizations either. I think the smoothest way to handle it (other than not using any licensing scheme at all) is done by Plugin Alliance. You can deauthorize even offline systems from their website. Easy as pie, no manual reset requests, and it holds you to 3 authorizations.

Says the guy with enough UAD hardware to start his own space program. 😄❤ I get it, I do. But, personally, I just see the iLok as another piece of hardware, like my audio interfaces or MIDI controller or whatever, that's part of making music with my computer system. The brand new price of the dongles seems high, but once you get into used iLok 2's, it gets closer to reality. I can, if I wish, use the local authorization. And heck, my iLok 2 does after all, allow me to take those licenses anywhere I want to. As someone with too many computers who also likes to do music when he's traveling, that's a bonus. I also understand how the idea of buying a $40 trinket in order to use plug-ins that cost $10 each (in the case of my AiR and Exponential products) seems rather ridiculous. And believe me, the "I turned off my network card and had to reset all of the iLok licenses" fiasco makes me feel much less warm and fuzzy about those locally-stored iLok licenses. That's just bad programming and worse QA, to have the thing go casters-up just because someone tried something that is not uncommon in the world of DAW's. There are plenty of other bits of hardware that can be used to identify a computer system, they don't need to use a NIC.

Hear hear. Filterstep in particular is amazing.

Eduardo, with the number of plug-ins you have, two iLoks and $30 a year is pocket lint! Having the physical iLok is most definitely the way to go with systems that don't travel, and I must thank you again for your kindness. Before that, I had an iLok 1, which was not compatible with my Exponential Audio reverbs. I need to get a small USB extension cable so that I can just use my second iLok2 on the laptop. An iLok is too nice a thing to risk injuring sticking out of a laptop. So: for those following the saga, it's been just over 24 hours after stranding 20 iLok licenses by merely disabling the network adapters on my laptop. The reset score so far has surprising results. Most of them have been reset. I did the original reset request through the new option in iLok Manager. PACE keeps you notified via email each time a company resets your license(s), so I have a timeline for how quickly each company responded. Also, the first email they send has a table of all of the licenses and manufacturers, with contact information. InMusic's (AIR, SONiVOX) and UVI's entries showed no email, only a website link, so I decided to contact them directly, via email in the case of InMusic, and a web form at UVI. This was going on the theory that if no email were shown, then iLok Manager wouldn't know how to contact them. The absolute winner is Vienna Symphonic Library, who reset all of my VSL licenses in a matter of hours right from the iLok Manager request. Next was Softube, then UVI in the wee hours of the morning. Upon waking up, I found that InMusic had issued the reset pretty much upon start of their business day. then Soundtoys, then Eventide. The surprise poor performers are iZotope, who still haven't reset my Exponential Audio licenses. Surprisingly good performance from InMusic, although I helped out by emailing them directly with all the information they needed. The email address I used was softwaresales@inmusicbrands.com. Way better than expected. In the past, I tried contacting them via their websites, and it didn't work. I suspect that trying to use the support forms on the old AiR and SONiVOX sites is like trying to use them on the old Cakewalk, Inc. site. Nobody on the other end. Tip: when I contacted InMusic (and UVI) directly, I gave them all of the original activation codes as well as the old iLok location ID of the laptop, and I'm sure that helped speed things up. If you're storing locally, I strongly recommend keeping these available, although they should theoretically be able to be gleaned from iLok Manager on another computer in case of complete system failure. Still, easier if you can just copy and paste them from a document. So, overall, I'm sore about how merely disabling my network adapters bork't both iLok and Waves. That's just sloppy (and scary). I prefer local license storage on the laptop because less crap to haul around and this is making me trust it less. The laptop does have an SD card slot, so I'll look into using that, moving the Waves licenses to an SD card if I can. On the other hand, both companies' recovery solutions got almost everything back in under 24 hours. I suspect that if I contacted iZotope directly as I did with InMusic that they'd get me the reset pretty quickly, although I'm tempted to wait a bit longer just to test the system. Maybe it's an excuse to get more cozy with MTurboReverble and MReverbMB, which do actually rival the Exponential stuff. As long as nobody gets pissy about doing the resets, I guess I'm okay with the iLok recovery process, although it does seem to rely on the companies involved still being around to reset your licenses. What happens when a company goes under and then iLok arbitrarily decides to give your computer a new location ID? No reset, no recovery? I'm not against the iLok dongle in principle, it's just part of whatever method companies choose for licensing. Of course I prefer the Meldaproduction and A|A|S type licensing, but that's not my business decision to make.

Wow, PluginDoctor is really a must-have for any plug-in addict. Especially if, like me, you've been very curious about what the various "character" EQ's and compressors in your toolkit are really doing. MTurboEQ and MTurboComple, I'm (literally) looking at you. All of those models in MTurboComple that have both a "compression" knob and a "threshold" knob. 🙄 I was charmed to find that one of my favorite "digital" compressors, MCompressor, actually has a little upward kink after the knee, which the dbx 165 emulations I ran through it also have. No wonder I like it so much. Turns out it has some "character" after all. What I'm hoping is that by giving me a better insight into how these processors are actually behaving, I can do some weeding. Choose my favorite fast or squishy compressors, precision and character EQ's, etc. Do some checking into which ones are throwing off harmonics (desirable or not). Check out this review by our own Dave Bitflipper: https://soundbytesmag.net/review-plugindoctor-from-ddmf/ He's right, the thing is just plain FUN.

Being a BIG fan of the singles from Daft Punk's Discovery, and their production methods in general, sidechaining has long been on my radar.

I got this bundled when I bought my new-in-box Focusrite Saffire Pro 40 a couple of months ago, and thought "a 2-band EQ?" Turns out it has the lord's own air band. A real ear-pleaser. Haven't tried it on vox, but on breathy synth pads, it's the bee sneeze.

Wonder when they'll update Swatches so that we can try Tabby Dance and Caffeine. Its lagging behind could mean that more soundpacks are in the pipeline, yay.

If you need to push bass down in the space, sidechain. If you wanna make room for the kick drum boom, sidechain. He don't lie, he don't lie, he don't lie: sidechain.

Huh. I also snagged it during that sale and can say nothing but good about it. It is the plug-in to have for treating dialog samples in ambient productions, as far as I'm concerned.

Nor do I. The problem for me is that a large swath of my most-used plug-ins are iLok licensed. XPand!2, Hybrid 3, Vacuum Pro, Boom, Exponential R4 and Nimbus to name a few. I use at least one of them in every project. My Meldaproduction reverbs can just about touch the Exponential ones, but only just about. To get synths that do what the AIR ones do, I'd have to spend a bunch more money and learn my way around the newer synths, which would likely be more resource-hungry than these. So iLok is an unavoidable fact of my digital audio life if I want to use my favorite tools. All I can do is be aware of the gotchas and try to avoid them as best I can. I also had the USB stick I was keeping my Wave licenses on go sideways a few days ago and did the once a year reset on the lost activations. When it rains, it pours.

I feel compelled to post this because I've long been someone who mentions that he's never had any trouble with iLok's local drive activation. This is no longer the case, and the failure is pretty spectacular. Thanks to the kindness of a forumite, I have migrated all of my iLok licenses to a physical iLok on my main system. On my laptop, however, I activated them to the local system. This is despite the fact that said forumite was extra kind and gave me not one but two iLok II's. I just didn't want to have a dongle sticking out of a USB port on the laptop. Today, while trying to chase down an issue with clicks and pops, I turned off both my hardwire and my wi-fi adaptors and restarted Cakewalk. Both iLok and Waves threw dialogs during scan saying that there must have been some change to my system and that they couldn't load the plug-ins. I re-enabled my network adaptor and checked Waves Central and iLok Manager and sure enough, the licenses were shown as being activated to a system that was unavailable. Waves' support FAQ gave me a recipe for disabling all but one of the network adaptors and trying again, and that seems to have solved the issue. No go with iLok, so I had no choice but to try the new integrated reset request feature in iLok Manager. There are 28 licenses from 8 different companies currently in limboland. I've not tried the built-in reset request feature yet, so we'll see how it goes. I'm giving some thought to using a small USB extension cable to attach the spare iLok to the notebook in case of future "hardware changes" that really aren't. Not much harm here; if I want to get full functionality from my laptop all I have to do is stick the iLok from my main DAW in, but if this had happened while I wasn't at home, I'd have been dead in the water, waiting for these companies to reset the licenses. Some of my bread and butter synths are iLok'd, such as my collection of AIR instruments. AIR is not known for excellence in customer service. In the past, when I bork't a system by replacing the system drive, it took me days to get a reset from them. I had thought that iLok used a key on the hard drive somehow, but it's apparently also tied to the network adaptors, and subject to having the system ID change if you turn them off. So if you're thinking of trying that old suggestion to disable network interfaces while you're DAW'ing, tread lightly and maybe carry a physical iLok stick. I'll report back on the results of the reset request. If it works, it's a very good advancement for iLok, but if it doesn't, I'll be chasing down AIR/Sonivox via their "support" forum at KVR.

PluginDoctor, you are MINE!

I seriously thought that this had already been addressed (no pun). Or was it only how Cakewalk would usurp the next available port for control surface duty if you started with your USB MIDI control surface unplugged? And yes, Windows manages USB ports, but so what? That does NOT mean that Cakewalk should lose track and shuffle them around if you unplug a device and then restart the program. I believe that each USB MIDI device gets its own GUID, but even if that's not the case, most of the ones I've seen have unique friendly names, which Cakewalk can and does read (it displays them, after all). Just because Windows manages them doesn't mean that Cakewalk can't or shouldn't gather and maintain its own information about them. So IMO, Cakewalk doesn't have to lose track (no pun). Even if I'm wrong about the GUID's, at worst it might be lose track in the case of two USB MIDI devices with the same friendly name, which is a thing that I've yet to see. If you want to see the information that Cakewalk can get from the OS regarding USB ports and devices, there's a freeware utility called USBDeview (scroll alll the way down to download it) that will show you. Each USB device has a manufacturer number and a product ID, which you can also read right from Device Manager: https://www.the-sz.com/products/usbid/ There's plenty of information supplied by the OS to distinguish one USB MIDI port from another. A program should be able to look at that list, notice which devices are still there from the last time it started, which of them are not, and retain its configuration for the ones that are still there. As the OP points out, there are other Windows programs that don't have the same issue, which suggests that it's possible to address. I thought that it had been addressed. It no longer causes trouble for me, anyway, but that might just be for the control surface issue.