Starship Krupa

This may be old news to some people, but I only noticed it this evening when I happened to check the info box on Sandman Pro. Apparently Unfiltered Audio had sent their updates in almost a year ago, but they got left out of Plug-In Alliance's mid-March update. The change logs only list Apple M1 compatibility, but the Windows installers have also been updated (at least the ones I checked).

Since the DAW I learned on, Mixcraft, uses lanes, I was already familiar with the paradigm. Theirs are similar to Cakewalk's, but more rudimentary. Unlike Cakewalk, you can't hide your lanes, so screen real estate can get pretty scarce. You also can't group clips or tracks, so any edits have to be done on one track or clip at a time. I've poked around at Studio One and their take handling is called Layers. It looked to me like there was no way to make all the layers visible like I can by opening Take Lanes. I may be wrong, but if that were the case, I'd find that difficult to deal with. I don't have too many complaints with Cakewalk, but one that I do regarding the comping workflow is that the more advanced features seem to get in the way of when I want to do something simple. The business of their being half a dozen different hotspots on every clip is hard to deal with at first. It took me a while, plus the advent of the configurable Smart Tool and the Shift key modifier, to get a handle (huh huh) on it. When I started out, I'd find things happening like I'd split a clip and then want to slip edit one of the resulting clips, something that one does all the time when comping. You have a bad rim hit or finger squeak or breath intake that needs to go, what do you do? Split it right there and just drag the clip edge over until it ain't there no more. But Cakewalk would inevitably allow me to only drag the split point back and forth, with both clips remaining intact. Which is an operation that I want to do with a frequency of only slightly greater than never. If it's a matter of hotspots, I never figured out where the hotspot was. I just hold Shift. Or, for instance, do 5 takes of whatever, in Comp/loop record mode, then pick my favorite take and trim a little pre-roll off. Drag the edge of the clip to the right, and....the leading edge of the clips in the other lanes come with it. Also an operation that I have never done intentionally. The comping workflow in Cakewalk has the feel of something where a bunch of people designed it, and while they were doing so, somebody or other would bring up "wouldn't it be great if it could also XX," and then instead of making the fancy XX an option or modifier, they made it the default behavior. So I have to sort of keep brushing Cakewalk away when it wants to do more than I want it to. Speed comping: great feature, once I woodshedded with it, it can really help eliminate a whole bunch of steps, but, since it's the default mode, when I was newer it became an efficient way for me to mess up my tracks. Speed comping is great for a scenario where you've played multiple takes of something and played some bum notes here or there and sort of know the sections you have trouble with and where the good takes are. Wham, bam, make your selections here here and here, it mutes and fades everything automatically, done. What it's not so great for is when things are more complicated. It doesn't scale well for me when I have (as the OP mentioned) a multi-mic'd drum performance and I need to nudge a kick drum hit a little, take a bit of this take over here and that take over there....to do that I have to either modify or drop the Smart Tool and switch to the Edit tool for most of my moves. With one way, I have a strategy, and want to execute it in the fewest number of steps. With the other way, I'm going along one edit at a time. Both are valid ways to work, I tend to stay closer the one edit at a time. Laser focus on that one change, get it, listen to it, go on to the next one.

I guess not. I suppose people have accepted it as it is. I never used SONAR in the "Track Layers" era, so I can't speak for how awesome (or not) it was. You're not the first person I've seen who preferred them to Take Lanes. I can say as someone who used a few other DAW's before Cakewalk by BandLab, lanes systems seem to be the industry standard paradigm for managing multiple takes and comping/editing. Sure, some people liked it the way it was, but having an "idiosyncratic" workflow makes it harder for people to a. use skills they got from using another DAW and b. use their Cakewalk skills elsewhere. As they've evolved, DAW's have become standardized to a degree. Piano roll for MIDI. Lanes for multiple takes. Trying to buck these results in a product being a "niche" tool. Look at Waveform for example. I've tried it a few times over the years and just can't get started. It's just too different from the workflow I'm used to. On the other hand, I just got a license for Studio One Artist with my new audio interface, and thanks to it following DAW conventions I'm used to, I was able to jump right in. I also suspect that the initial negative reaction to Cakewalk's Take Lanes was partly due to the way they were implemented. They introduced some advanced features like Speed Comping that were confusing to new users. The point I agree with you on is the one about muted clips. No matter how I change my clip colors, even with deep diving into Theme Editor, I still have some trouble with figuring out which clips are muted vs. other states. A little red icon in the clip header would be sweet.

You no longer need to register anything to get the MP3 encoder. It's built into Cakewalk by BandLab. All your customer needs to do is download and install Cakewalk by BandLab and they will get that function for free (like the rest of Cakewalk by BandLab).

Ach, that old bugaboo: if we change how it works due to majority(?) request, it will screw up someone's workflow. That's why when I talk about my favorite request, to be able to suppress the automatic splitting in Comp mode, I always say "to have the option to turn it off," rather than just "make it go away." Although I've never yet heard from anyone on the forum who makes use of the feature, I just know that somewhere out there is someone who loves it.

I'd like to mention at this point is that I know that back in the Gibson days (and earlier) people reported bugs and annoyances that went un-fixed to the point where they gave up hope. Which is understandable. It takes some trouble to report things and to see nothing come of it is discouraging. However, it's now under the care of a completely different company (although some of the developers are the same people). I've never assumed that the current team has a complete record of bugs and feature requests reported before the BandLab acquisition. No guaranteed "corporate memory." I encourage everyone who hasn't already done so to give it one last shot. As we've seen, there's a higher priority for bug fix/usability.

Me too, but I don't hear anything in it that Vacuum Pro (regularly $9.99 at Pluginboutique) can't do. Try a demo of Vacuum Pro. What it looks like with these (except maybe the Mellotron?) is that they took the engines (some from the previous revisions) of some of their existing synths and made simplified UI's for use with the MPC platform. That said, I love every AIR synth I've ever purchased, they've turned into my go-to instruments. They sound great, they're way easy on resources, and a steal at the prices I paid. I predict that after they've cashed in on this initial release, probably before the end of the year, they'll all show up at Pluginboutique for under $10. I'll take the Mellotron, please. Vacuum Pro is already my go-to for basses, so having it in a bass-focused monosynth version is appealing. If they took the full versions of Hybrid 3, Vacuum Pro, and XPand!2 and did nothing but put modern, resizable GUI's on them, I'd pay to upgrade.

Here's where I like to pop in, as someone who let his SONAR license lapse 20 years ago and only started up again in the BandLab era, and say THANKS to you and everyone else who paid license fees over the decades (which does include me, back in the day). There would be no free, excellent Cakewalk by BandLab without the 30 years of commercial development that came before. Which was funded by the license fees that we all paid over the years. So cheers, mates! Moreover, maybe the fact that the program had such a large, invested, loyal userbase and history had something to do with how attractive it was to Meng? He probably loves being "the guy who rescued Cakewalk." He definitely has much to be proud of in that regard.

Got another use of Track View/Unfocused Track Text: In the Add Track Flyout dialog, the digit that indicates how many tracks you're adding. As below in purple.

Not necessarily, unfortunately. Or at least I think there are some that should have been "designed as an insert effect" but somehow the Dry/Wet knob got left off. Maybe in an attempt at verisimilitude, trying to emulate old hardware designs. For the number of times that I've encountered FX with no Dry/Wet controls and want to be able to control that, the Cakewalk Console has served just fine. And as you pointed out, by trusting a plug-in's Dry/Wet control, you're trusting that the developer has implemented it correctly. I've encountered more than one EQ plug-in that wasn't flat when bypassed using the plug-in's own "power" switch.

Quick Groups and Smart Swipe will give you wings in Cakewalk. Archive is one of the few controls that can't be Smart Swiped, but tracks can be swipe selected for Quick Grouping. Whoever came up with those features, my hat is off to them.

Well, that would be the same as Comp Mode without the splits, which would be fine with me. But I agree with @reginaldStjohn that the nature of Sound on Sound mode is that you hear the previous takes.

It’s not really that hard to clean up, just swipe across everything with the Smart/Comp Tool and it will “heal” the splits. Make sure you have “create new lanes” selected while recording. It’s more of a PITA than something that ruins things, but it did take me literally years to figure out what was going on. I’m persistent and dedicated to learning Cakewalk, but I can imagine people trying it out and being dismayed with the results. I was once one. If it’s a feature that few people make use of and slows down everyone else, it seems like a good candidate for being made optional. Cakewalk’s comping is pretty powerful, I got much better results after switching off the Smart Tool’s Comp Tool (a great example of making features optional resulting in a simpler workflow). Otherwise it’s kind of in “speed comping” mode, which is fast and powerful, but also a way to mess things up if you haven’t studied up on it. I made some miserable messes with that when I was first learning comping in Cakewalk.

Yay! What I experienced yesterday wasn't to do with Loop mode, though. I was just recording multiple takes of a spoken phrase into the same track, no looping. I guess I should have made that more clear. It happens in Comp mode whether you're looping or not. I did a take of me repeating the phrase, then stopped and did a longer one, then shorter, then shorter still, then longer again, then shortest. Every time my new take was shorter than one or more of the previous ones, the previous longer takes were split at its ending point. And then when I'd do the next take it would reset and make a new set of splits (I changed the lane numbering myself). So the results wound up like this:

I'm recording audio for the first time in months after working "in the box" and this is right in my face again. I'm trying to record a spoken word phrase, so I'm doing take after take, just repeating the words until I get something that I think is right. Every time I record a clip that's shorter than any previously recorded clip, each of the longer clips gets automatically split at the point where the new clip stops, and I have to enable the Smart Tool's Comp Tool and swipe across everything to "heal" the clips. I've never made any recording, of an instrument, spoken word, whatever, where these splits would help me. Rather, it's like a bird pooping on my car while I'm washing it. Just bumping to keep it visible.

Whoa.

Osman, I'm not sure I understand the question. You may create new categories directly in the Browser by clicking on the "+" sign in a plug-in's properties dialog: For my favorites' I created a category called "A-List" so that alphabetical sorting would put it at the top.

A great free instrument. I knew Surge was open source, but is Vital now, as well?

Here's another: https://bedroomproducersblog.com/2021/02/24/rare-bpb/

So many Pultec EQ emulations out there. I refuse to adopt another, even for $5. Do you find having more than 1 or 2 available to be more "useful" or more "confusing?" I'm not sure I can see myself thinking "y'know, this Lindell PEX-500 just isn't getting the job done on this track. I bet if I swapped in the Kiive Warmy EP1A it would come to life. And then if that doesn't do it, I still have my Overtone PTH2A-CM and Presonus Fat Channel PassiveEQ to fall back on." Not that they don't all sound WAY different (see below), but my brain capacity is doing things other than memorizing which Pultec-alike has which characteristic sound. Yet I somehow have all of those (not to mention the "Pulmeld" in MTurboEQle), even after having pruned a few. If you're bored someday, get a copy of Bertom - EQ Curve Analyzer and subject your army of Pulteclones to a comparison where you set the knobs to the same thing on each of them and then see just what they're doing. Spoiler: when I dialed in the famous bass curve, I found that not all of mine agree on what "100Hz" and "3.2dB" are. If you really want to slam the low end on a track, the Presonus jacks it up 12dB at those settings! The Kiive boosts it 4dB and the Lindell boosts it 8dB. As for the curve, the Lindell starts to flatten out around 2K whereas the other two do it at 1K. These aren't even subtle differences. I'm not much one for clones of vintage hardware (at least I wasn't until IK gave me a license for their Fairchild 670 clone 🤯), but this amount of variance seems to thwart the intent of getting a familiar sound in a familiar way. Someone's throwing Jell-O at the wall. Either that or the real Pultecs that they modeled had so much variance in spec that it's a wonder to me that any mix engineer could have "learned" how to use them.

First-time buyers: sign up for their newsletter and get 10€ credit, use referral code MELDA1923165 and get another 20% off. You can upgrade the FreeFXBundle to the pro version, which if you use the above recipe, will come in at a total price of about $13. Pretty nice for 37 really sweet FX and utilties.

Is it? I haven't experienced issues in that area.

Whoa, it can make you sound like Venus Theory? That guy sounds like a 70's FM radio jock. Can it make me sound like Greg from Kush Studios? 😄

I'm kinda skeptical on all-in-one mastering plug-ins, but I do think they are great for getting decent-sounding roughs. I've found myself throwing bx-masterdesk classic on works in progress more than TRacks One or Ozone Elements lately, and I noticed that during this sale at least, I had a $10 off chit for masterdesk in my account that could be combined with the $20 voucher to get me the full bx_masterdesk for $9.99. Ye who like masterdesk classic, go forth and go pro. For me it strikes a good balance between "too EZ" and "might as well just use my full master chain." Unfortunately, I didn't test BASS-MINT before my March voucher expired, and that'll cost me an extra fiver. Ho-lee shmo-lee that thing make the bass sound good. At first I thought "but I already have multiple bass management FX, like RBass, Fundamental Bass, and Barks of Dog I and II" and then I had to go and try the demo. Makes sense, I guess if you're going to drop into a market that already has so many other products, your stuff better have it going on. The thing makes my ears happy.

These are questions where Meldaproduction's documentation and I differ. The documentation for their products tends to overestimate an "average user's skills and knowledge." What I expect from good documentation is that all features of the product will be described, and if any of them are extraordinary for products of the type then the use of those features will be described in greater depth. This includes if the features are standard, but accessed in unusual ways or use non-standard nomenclature. Meldaproduction's website copy goes on about how everything they make is so much more advanced than comparable products from other manufacturers, and/or how a given product is unique, and for the most part, I don't disagree. It's all good, I just wanna know better how to access all that power. 😄 If it's unique, that means there's nothing else like it, so how can I have prior knowledge? Another thing that makes their documentation less useful is the amount of coverage given to features that are common to all of the products, like the preset manager. Click the "?" button on any of their FX and at least half of the text that comes up will be about the preset manager. If I'm confused enough to click a help button, it's probably not going to be cleared up with an explanation of how to load and store presets. Here's an example, MLimiterX: "A brickwall limiter increases loudness by reducing the ratio between the average and peaks in the signal, however the dynamics of the audio material is always sacrificed. MLimiter is simple to use. Watch the gain reduction meter ("R") to the right, and manipulate the Threshold. Decreasing the threshold increases the output gain and allows limiting up to 0dB. Care is needed as this can cause severe distortions if not used correctly. In most cases you don't need to worry about the edit screen, just simply focus on the easy screen, with its simplified 4-knob interface." That's all it says about the product itself. Then follows 18 pages of boilerplate about the stuff common to all of their products. Couldn't find anything about Ceiling, which is there on all of the easy screens. Seems to me that for a limiter, at least one sentence on that is warranted. There are exceptions, I'm a fan of bizarre FX whose features might not even be describable verbally. I have licenses for the entire Freakshow catalog, 11 of Glitchmachines' plug-ins, and a dozen Unfiltered Audio plug-ins. So not even don't I mind twiddling knobs and seeing what happens, I love doing it. But that's when I'm in the frame of mind of sound design, which is different from mastering or trying to get the kick and bass to play nice with each other.