Starship Krupa

If you are interested in that sort of thing and don't already have it, you can get Glitchmachines' Convex, along with Soundspot Union and denise Bass XL for $5 at Pluginboutique. I am a Glitchmachines fan.

As video tutorials go, Chandler's are some of the best. To me, most of the Meldaproduction documentation fits your description of "state what the different buttons do." I have a lot of the "TurboLE" versions, which are their effort to make things simpler, with graphical UI's and the deeper parameters hidden. But I also have MReverbMB, which exposes everything. I don't really know what to do with a multiband reverb. I get that you can apply different settings to different frequency bands, but to what end and what do people usually do with it? Longer or shorter on the highs or lows? Deeper? It's tantalizing, because I'm really interested in spatial effects (big fan of Tipper and Telefon Tel Aviv's stuff), and I suspect that a multiband reverb might be a good tool, and I'm sure that the one I have is excellent, but I just don't know what to do with it beyond slapping it on a bus and using the beautiful algorithms as a send. My learning style is what I think is called "top down," which frustrated me while attending school and trying to learn things like math. I can learn and understand the importance of fundamentals, but if I can't see the path to the "finished product" I get frustrated and wonder if the knowledge I'm taking in will even help. The way I really shine is by starting out with a goal and then acquiring whatever skills I need to accomplish that. Unfortunately, at least when I was in school, that made things more difficult, because schools focus on acquiring fundamental skills. I don't know how it is now, but 40-50 years ago, it seemed like one of the biggest insults you could give to a teacher was "how is this going to help me in the real world?" And sure, most of the kids who asked it were being confrontational, but to me, that's an opportunity to give a student motivation. I remember one kid in algebra class tossing out "how is this going to help me be an airline pilot?" Well, if I were that teacher, I'd have pointed out that if you're going to have any hope of learning navigation, fuel usage, yada yada, algebra is going to be all over it. Want to program computers? You'll be dealing with sets every time you sit down to do it. Want to learn music? Make beats? A good understanding of fractions will move you forward in the game. I'll be charitable and say that some of that problem, I think, is that people went into teaching with a pure affinity for the subject itself, so to them, the learning itself was the reward. I now understand that the fundamentals they were teaching us were building blocks that I use to this day, but at the time, it felt like some kind of punishment I was forced to endure. "I had to learn this, so you have to learn it." Disclosure: I've written manuals, both as an employee taking in the notes from the developers and for my own products, so I'll speak from that POV. I don't know that it's harder, but it requires certain skills including being able to communicate with highly technical people and translate what they're saying. Ideally, you put yourself in the viewpoint of someone who's never seen the product before. These are "soft" skills that skilled engineers often don't have. If they wanted to be teachers or writers, they would have chosen those professions. As far as taking things for granted, by the time a product is ready for market, the engineer responsible has spent countless hours with it, they know every feature because they just created them. Putting themselves in the position of someone who knows nothing about it is difficult. For an engineer, by the time the product is ready to ship, as far as they're concerned, the job is DONE. Anything else is trivial drudgery. It's about as appealing as doing your taxes. Vojtech is much better than most with the soft skills, he's a gregarious guy who communicates well (and he listens), but inevitably, he takes things for granted about his audience's understanding. I know because I've conversed with him in his forum (which is great that he makes himself so accessible). Fun discussion! It's cool to hear everyone's thoughts about this stuff.

My biggest issue with my favorite plug-in house is that the manuals....ain't so hot. I'm a reader, my comprehension and retention aren't as good with videos. The written documentation is better than it used to be, but it suffers from, among other things, a tendency to tell how to do things but not why. As in what kind of program material to use it on, use cases, etc. I'm okay with the basic food groups of FX, but when it gets into "spectral gating" or something like that where I'm not even familiar with the the effect sounds like, I need more guidance.

@Kurre found ins2map and instructions for me, so if anyone else wants them PM me and I can send them along.

Me: "solo careers were invented for those who can't get along with other people, PAUL."

Woo, want to credit this sikk burn. It's not musicianship, it's just slapping rectangles down on a grid! Me want longer sound, me make rectangle longer. 😄

One note: when I imported the definitions, it showed up as Break Teaker (sic). This gave me my first opportunity to edit MASTER.INS.

And as such, very useful in my quest to get a handle on instrument definitions. Thank you very much, Steve.

Too soon.

Hmm, Unfiltered Audio TAILS. Wonder what it could be. Reverb is the first thing that comes to mind.

Given the thread title, I thought this might be a sample manager. If you want some HY modular effect goodness for free, HY-FX CM is part of the Computer Music plug-in suite. CM is available via Libby.

I gotta say, I'm underwhelmed with this update. Yeah, whatever, most audio software companies have been busting a55 to make their stuff M1 compatible, but I was surprised that nothing even got a resizable UI. Maag EQ2 looks small even on my not huge 23" monitors. Also curious that one of my fave houses, Unfiltered Audio, wasn't involved in the update at all. I wonder if they're still playing M1 catchup.

I think it would be cool to have better code that also makes use of GPU's. Happy fun time! I'm frugal by nature, so I see a processor with all these cores sitting there doing mostly nothing and I wonder what use it could be put to. As I said, it's intriguing. Who knows, their efforts may lead to some other innovation that doesn't require CUDA cores or Kepler architecture or whatever. Well, as I ran up against, and others have alluded to, one of the issues I suppose would be that not everyone has a GPU that's compatible with their code. There's nothing at all lacking in my 550Ti for the DAW and NLE work that I do on my system. I have little incentive to upgrade, and prices are insane thanks to the crypto rush. I've experienced the difference between plug-ins coded to take advantage of OpenGL (or whatever) and those that don't. I can be running certain Soundspot FX just fine, but then if I open their pretty UI, I start getting dropouts. Nasty, nasty. Doesn't happen with Meldaproduction, but then their UI's are usually pretty static compared to Soundspot's. I work on two different systems, and they have two different GPU's. My plug-ins have to run on both of them, so these GPU-enabled FX would also need to come in versions that didn't need a fancy GPU to function. That may be an issue. Like with UAD, you have the ones that use the coprocessors and then the "native" ones. IK Multimedia MODO Drums won't run on my notebook because its processor doesn't have AVX. Fine, whatever, it's a freebie and I have other drum VSTi's I can use. But I wouldn't want to have that be the case with a fancy thing I paid money for.

This is a nice deal for getting a Mixcraft Studio license. Sometimes these things end up a little odd, like this time for $25 you also get a license for Mixcraft Home Studio 8, which is of no use if you are getting Mixcraft Studio 9. Whatever, Pianissimo is still useful as a lightweight piano, and all the Cherry Audio synths are good stuff.

I snagged this yesterday and if you're doing anything with synthwave sounds, this is a must-have. Com Truise must keep his Juno 60 always powered up and ready to go.

Darn, the early access requires an nVidia 10XX card. Not for me at this time.

I'm intrigued by what they're trying to do. I've long wondered whether audio software developers could somehow leverage GPU's to offload audio DSP tasks. If this is possible it could be revolutionary. The first beta product is a convolution reverb, which seems like a good choice given that those tend to be resource hogs.

The description makes it sound milder than I found it to be in actual use. In my view, it's more like a Freakshow Industries product (high praise). In other words, if you like to design sound, by which I mean mangle the snot out of it, you should download this right now.

Thanks, Steve, that's what I suspected. Where is the (I assume) .INS file(s) kept? Is it a master file, or does it work to have a bunch of them? I'd love to see your Break Tweaker instrument definition. I deliberately started with a "not much to it" instrument.

My struggles with Drum Maps have been legendary, but I am happy to say that I am no longer completely befuddled by them. While I still think they are unnecessarily complicated to set up and use, I at least figured out how to do it, and drum map/drum grid is now my favorite way to program beats. Goal & background: I would also like to be able to do the PRV thing where you don't use the drum grid for editing but you still have your own custom names over on the left side. The fact that I'm not sure even what it's called should be an indicator of the level where I'm starting. However, I'm no stranger to complexity and deep diving in tech matters. I've created and released 7 extensively-modded Cakewalk themes, figured out drum maps, and my favorite plug-in developer is Meldaproduction. I suspected it had something to do with "instrument definitions," so I tried looking in the documentation and Reference Guide for how to do Instrument Definitions and....uh, to say I found the instructions incomprehensible....It reminds me of the time I tried to learn calculus by reading a book about it. I want to do this for Break Tweaker, which doesn't use normal GM drum names, it has some pads and then a bunch of slots for patterns, all of which you can trigger with MIDI notes. I want Pads 1-6 and Patterns 1-24. That's all. I have the MIDI note numbers it uses for these pads and patterns, so I thought I was ready to go. First I was put off balance by how the documentation starts with a list of questions. I had been expecting....answers, I guess? Asking nonsense questions is a common interrogation technique for breaking a detainee's spirit, and-spoiler-in my case it worked: "To create an instrument definition, you must answer these types of questions [my answers in brackets]: What are the names of the patches in each bank? [patches? bank? I just want the note names, over on the left there where it's normally piano keys or numbers] Which note names should be used for each patch? [each patch? I want a set of custom note names for the whole instrument regardless of what patch is loaded] What are the names of the MIDI Controllers for this instrument? [What?? My MIDI controller is an old Yamaha CS6x to which I have never given a name] Which RPN and NRPNs are available on the instrument? [Does this mean those old Hewlett-Packard calculators that were no good for balancing your checkbook? If there's math, can't I just use a regular calculator? I have a TI-30 that does square roots.] Which Bank Select method does the instrument use? [Let's see, iZotope says that Break Tweaker just looks around for the best interest rates....WTH are you talking about?] To collect this information, you need the MIDI documentation for your instrument. [This is another interrogation technique, put them on ice for hours and then tell them they don't have the right paperwork to be released. Can you send in the "good cop" now please?]" After softening me up with the 5 questions I couldn't answer, it then said: "Here’s a general outline of the steps you must follow to create an instrument definition: Create a new instrument in the Instrument tree. Create any new name lists in the Names tree that are required for the instrument. Drag name lists and possibly a bank select method to the new instrument from the Names tree. Close the Define Instruments and Names dialog box. The Instrument tree? The Names tree? Name lists? Drag name lists? I don't have a "drag" name. I have a stage name, Superabbit, and when I perform I wear clothing standard for my male gender identification. And the "bank select method" again? How about PayPal? Meng promised Cakewalk would always be free. Then it showed a picture of The Define Instruments and Names dialog box, which must be the dialog box they were referring to that I must close. It looks like RegEdit, only less intuitive for first-timers: This is where I decided that I was in way over my head. For all I know, the consequences of messing this up are similar to the consequences of messing up in RegEdit, and I don't know how to back this up before I start beating on it at random. Now, snark aside, I suspect that the issue I'm having here (if it's not that Instrument Definitions isn't even the right thing to work with to get names on the left), is that the documentation was written back when a "synth" was a hardware device that you plugged a MIDI cable into, and doesn't (at least explicitly) take soft synths into account. So it's probably giving me a lot of things to do that are unnecessary. If that's the case, can someone please tell me just the steps that apply to making note names for a soft synth that are the same regardless of what patch is loaded? Again, all I want is for there to be human-readable names over on the left rather than piano keys or numbers. I have the names, I know what MIDI note numbers to assign them to. There are mentions in the forum about editing a file with a text editor, but I have no idea what file and what to do with it. I have no idea about trees, banks, patches, patches of trees, or Hewlett-Packard calculators, at least as they relate to note names. If it would help, we can call my MIDI controller "Yammie." Thank you in advance.

You may very well be right, and it would be great to get this bug to the devs, but there is one hurdle: I used to be a pro software QA engineer, and a hard rule is that in order for the devs to do anything with a bug report, the bad behavior has to be reliably repeatable. In other words, if you can do this 5 times and it's guaranteed that somewhere in there you'll see this behavior, then cool, they should be able to reproduce it reliably. If they can't reliably reproduce it, and it's not happening for anyone else (that they know of), then they're helpless to come up with a solution. Since I see that your hardware outs are the Realtek onboard CODEC, this suggests that maybe you're using virtual instruments? If so, can you post a list of which ones you're using? As mentioned before, it's possible that a plug-in and Cakewalk are not getting along, and that includes soft synths. If so, this would explain why you're the only person we know of who is seeing the issue. And then the challenge is to pinpoint which plug-in, so the devs can check it out and determine whether the issue can be fixed within Cakewalk or if it's something the plug-in maker needs to address. (I watched a live stream this afternoon with Vojtech Meluzin of Meldaproduction fame, and the interviewer asked him if he had any plans to allow MSoundFactory, his KONTAKT-alike to host 3rd-party plug-ins. He said that hosting 3rd-party plug-ins is every developer's nightmare. And this is a guy who makes plug-ins for a living.)

Oh, cool, you added the set marker. I gather this is a key combo thing, like in order to set a marker, you hold the cycle key and then tap the FF key and for undo you hold Cycle and tap Stop.? I don't quite understand the stuff with the plug-in params and all that, is there something in the documentation that can help me with that? I'd love to try using the nanoKONTROL to adjust plug-in parameters.

Wondering if a Workspace could make them disappear....

To answer one important part of your question, no, for most users having a Master bus isn't a problem. All of the default Cakewalk project templates include a Master bus with all audio tracks routed to it (including soft synth outputs). So something is going wrong with your projects. As mentioned, make sure that all of your audio tracks route to the Master bus. Best practice is considered to be that all audio from tracks and buses routes to that Master bus, which then routes to the hardware outputs (or in my case to another bus that routes to the hardware outputs). If you do this, there should be no sonic difference between what's coming out of the hardware outputs and what's coming out of the Master bus.

Got it. Well, my issue was not that it wasn't appearing anywhere, just not in Cakewalk. The thing about all the hubs and cables and whatnots, it seems to me that if those things were the trouble, then Live! and Mixcraft and Studio One wouldn't have been able to recognize it either. Anyway, I tried Mark's trick of getting rid of the Korg driver and just using Microsoft's, and voila, it appears in Cakewalk's list of MIDI devices. Why Cakewalk alone and none of the other apps failed to recognize it is beyond me. I haven't yet tried it to see if it actually works using the Microsoft driver.😄 @msmcleod: should I be running the nanoKONTROL2 in "SONAR" mode, where you boot it up holding Set Marker and REC?