bitflipper

Whenever I think about the past, it brings up so many memories! When I sit around with my geezer contemporaries these days, we're not talking about CP/M or Berkeley vs. AT&T as much as about what body parts are failing at the moment. Although sometimes I do get nostalgic for vi. Back then, composing a text message was a real skill.

Mesh, you're going to do well with those M50's. I can't think of another model that's as versatile for the price (and most of us paid more than $129 for ours). Isolation is decent enough for tracking, frequency response is good enough for at the least the early stages of the mix process, transients are clear enough for detail editing, and they're not bad for just kicking back and listening for enjoyment. That said, I have moved away from the M50 as a single do-all headphone solution. All headphones compromise something. It's about physics, which no amount of money can defy. The M50 achieves a practical balance of compromises, but... For tracking, I want better isolation. For mixing I want a less-hyped bass. For lying in the dark listening to music, I want clarity and a flat response. Because no single headphone model can do all that, I've resigned myself to having a different headphone for each purpose. The M50s still serve for editing tasks such as Melodyne tweaking and cutting/fading clips, but the HD280Pro's superior isolation and midrangey-ness makes it better suited for vocal tracking. The HD650s are for pleasure listening only, being too nice-sounding for critical listening but deeply satisfying for immersing myself in my favorite music. I use the very similar but less-expensive HD558s for travel, just because they're older so I wouldn't be as heartbroken if they got crushed in transit.

There's a downside to disabling the zero-controllers option, which is why it's an option in the first place. Weird stuff can happen if you don't zero controllers when playback stops, such as restarting playback and the sustain pedal is stuck down (resulting in stuck notes), or an instrument playing out of tune because of where the pitch wheel was last set. For this reason, I combat the Kontakt modwheel problem using msmcleod's method of inserting a CC1 event at the start of the track. It's a small bother, but the problem mostly affects orchestral libraries that I'm probably going to add CC1 events to anyway.

Is your whole house that tidy? I'm guessing probably not. Then again, kitchen utensils and your wife's knickknacks don't really lend themselves to wire tie organization. My own rack keeps getting emptier as I cannibalize it for the band. Gotta get some more blank panels.

I've been a Sweetwater customer for many years. Service has always been excellent (although I've only dealt with two employees in all that time, so maybe I just got lucky). Shout out to Dennis Konicki, my guy at Sweetwater. If only Guitar Center salespeople were as self-confident and honest enough to say "hmm, I don't know; lemme check", I might still be doing business with them. Dennis has been a good source of solid advice - for a bass player. After dozens of purchases big and small, I've only been disappointed once, and that was partly my own fault. I had ordered a keyboard case only to find that my keyboard did not fit inside it. Of course, they took it back but I had to pay $95 to ship the case back to them. The moral of that story: measure twice, cut once.

It might be helpful to specify exactly which "various sidechainable plugins" you're using. It could be a specific combination of plugins, and that's why it's not a widespread problem. Also, presumably you have crash dumps that would identify whether the fatal error was raised by CbB itself or a plugin. That's the first place I look after a crash has occurred. 98% of the time it'll point to a specific third-party plugin, usually a recent acquisition that I haven't established a track record with yet. I have, however, never experienced a sidechain-related crash with any plugin, and I use sidechaining a lot. One other thought...if the project does not consistently crash, then the problem could lie outside the DAW entirely. If it does crash consistently, that's the best possible scenario because then you'd have a reproducible bug that Noel & Co can analyze. If it's a big project, make a copy of it and start removing plugins until you've boiled it down to the simplest demonstration of the crash. Doing that has sometimes pointed me in a surprising direction, toward some factor that I'd previously not thought of as being relevant.

Sadly, it's not that old a picture. Less than 5 years, IIRC. I say "sadly" because in those short intervening years my hair has taken on the same hue as my beard and the small bald spot you can't see in the photo has expanded greatly. My daughter commented that nothing looks dumber than a balding guy with long hair (or worse, a pony tail, which I was often guilty of). So I cut it all off. RE Craig's Yes/Halloween comment: I actually still have a couple Wakeman-esque wizard robes and dragon kimonos in the closet from my glam-rock days. Might have to have those dry cleaned before Halloween, the only appropriate time to actually don them. I'd need a wig, however, to complete the image. I can relate to the hospital discharge story, as can we all. My theory is that they intentionally drag the process out in order to bill an extra day's stay. It's happened that way every time I've been in hospital: in the morning they inform me that I'll be released, but it doesn't actually happen until afternoon. In the meantime they've brought me a fresh $100 toothbrush and a $50 sandwich. Yes, I realize that's just here in the U.S. - nobody in Australia, the UK, Canada or the civilized world in general has ever seen a bill for a $20 plastic cup.

As a fellow four-timer, I can tell you that life gets better quickly once you unclog that lifetime's worth of kielbasas and big macs. Just remember to eat your veggies and you'll be feeling 20 years younger in a few weeks.

You are absolutely right. Reverbs are CPU-intensive by nature, and it takes some clever programming to make them less so without sacrificing quality. So if you want to insert 20 reverbs into your project, then I guess you'll have to stick with the ProChannel reverb

ProChannel modules are not fundamentally different from third-party plugins. They're all doing the same things under the hood. Although efficiency does vary from one vendor to the next, the major factors such as buffer sizes will necessarily apply to all plugins of that type.

The problem description is vague ("going bonkers" is not actually a technical term, even if techies do use it often) but an I/O bottleneck would indeed be a prime candidate. That can be caused by insufficient RAM, among other things. There are many other things that cause problems while recording, though. Make sure wi-fi is disabled! LatencyMon will provide helpful clues. In any case, even if it doesn't solve your problem a memory upgrade is cheap and may make the computer more useful for other things as well. Minimum machine specs are just that: minimums. You could buy a car based on minimum specs, e.g. something that'll get you to work, only to realize that your drums don't fit inside.

Standard practice when moving to any new DAW is to install old and new side-by-side, wrapping up existing projects in the old DAW and starting new projects in the new one. That is a viable strategy for you because 8.5 and CbB will happily coexist on the same system. You'll want 8.5 there because CbB does not have all the effects and soft synths that were bundled with 8.5 - but can use (most of) them if they're present by virtue of having been installed with 8.5. That's the cautious approach. In practice you will likely find that CbB handles your 8.5 projects just fine, and you'll just switch over to it. Doing so will give you access to the many features that had been added in X1, X2, X3 and Platinum, as well as to CbB itself. Your biggest challenge, as noted by Steve above, is that CbB does not have an offline install. Yet. But the internet connection is only needed during installation and you can safely go offline afterward.

I wanted to make sure I knew how to insert a video into a post...turns out, it's even easier than on the old forum.

Because some of us old-timers are creatures of habit. Plus there's not much need to "maintain" the utility, since its functionality hasn't changed and may not ever need to change.

Don't know for sure, but my guess would be that yes, it applies to all editions. AFAIK there is just one common executable, with different features enabled or disabled to create the different versions. So a fix to one would constitute a fix to all.

First, double-check the synth settings. If any (or all) of the synth's voices are set to omni, that could account for the strange behavior. Each voice would play correctly when soloed but interfere with one another when played concurrently. If that part checks out, then we have to assume that the synth is receiving unexpected data. Go to the List View and look at the early events there. I know, you've already done this, but you may have missed something. Problem events don't always stand out at first glance. Make sure you enable all classes of events, including RPNs, NRPNs and SysEx. Try experimentally deleting all of the first measure's events and see if the symptoms change. If it does, then you know you have to zero in on that portion of the event list, perhaps deleting individual events until you identify the one that was causing you grief. Is this project an original composition or a MIDI file you obtained elsewhere?

I'd strongly favor a separate Q&A subforum, but only if users were to exercise some self-discipline when using it. We all know that ain't gonna happen.

PerfectSpace still worked fine last time I checked. IIRC, it was Aleksey Vaneev who wrote it originally and licensed it to Cakewalk. He still has his more full-featured version of it, Pristine Space, available for sale. Unfortunately it was never ported to 64 bits. There are also a bunch of free IRs available from Voxengo. If you have a strong aversion to 32-bit plugins, there's Reverberate 2 from LiquidSonics. It's got every bell 'n whistle you could ever want in a convolution reverb, but it'll set you back about $125 or so. And if you've got some serious coin rattling around your piggy bank, there's Altiverb. It's the choice of many folks who do post production, but rather pricey at over 500 bucks.

Man, that photo just screams "GEEK". Compare it to a pic of Bill Gates during the same era. It was a time when being a nerd was just becoming cool. Being a long-haired rock musician, computer enthusiast and electronics geek, I figured I had multiple bases covered, even if I knew few others who shared those interests. People like Craig showed me that I wasn't alone, that those worlds could overlap and coexist. I, too, was a charter subscriber to Polyphony. I kept my collection for many years but in an uncharacteristic fit of tidiness I threw them out, along with a stack of Nibble magazines and Dr. Dobbs' Journal.

The best reference I've seen for subwoofer placement is a book called "Sound Reproduction" by Floyd Toole. Dr. Toole is either retired or deceased (or both), but was chief scientist for Harman and widely-recognized as one of the preeminent authorities on speaker design. I like this book because it treats the room and speakers as two halves of a single system, and thus deals more with acoustics than with speaker and speaker enclosure design, Low frequencies are indeed relatively omnidirectional, that's not a myth. Why, then, do mastering studios often have two subwoofers? It has to do with their long wavelengths, which means most things in a room are physically too small to interfere with them (including the speaker enclosure itself.) If, for example, you were to take SPL readings around a subwoofer that was sitting outside in an open field and elevated off the ground, the readings you'd get for 360 degrees around the speaker would be surprisingly consistent. Of course, nobody listens to music out in an open field. The point is that only very big things can get in the way of low frequencies. In a room, there are things big enough to interact with low frequencies, namely the floor, walls and ceiling. They are referred to as "boundaries" because they impact all frequencies. And they are the reason it matters where you place your subwoofer. It matters a lot, but it has nothing to do with directionality. Boundaries reflect low frequencies and send them colliding back into themselves. If they happen to collide in phase, that's constructive interference that will result in a large volume increase at that point in space. Conversely, if they hit 180 degrees out of phase, cancellation will occur and that frequency will essentially disappear at that specific point in space. Finding the best spot for a sub is very important, and that spot will probably not be where you think it ought to be. Oh, and crossovers are technically either low-pass or high-pass filters, depending on whether it's feeding a woofer or a tweeter. Most subs have both. Conventional passive filters are single-pole, meaning 6 dB per octave. Active filters can be designed as steep as you like, although most will be 6, 12 or 24 dB/octave. Crossover frequencies are typically between 70 and 150 Hz. However, that value will be determined by the characteristics of both the sub and your main speakers. There'd be no point in setting the crossover to 60 Hz if your mains only go down to 80 Hz. Also keep in mind that these filters have a gentle slope, so if your mains are 6 dB down at 60 Hz then 60 Hz would be too low a crossover frequency. You want to choose a frequency that's well above the point where your mains wimp out.

They are currently unavailable for purchase, but will be back for sale eventually. In the meantime, everyone who had them before Cakewalk's demise can continue to use them under CbB. Had the indispensable CA2A really gone away for good, I'd have held a somber funeral for it and would still be in mourning.

Just slap Sausage Fattener on there and crank it to the max. No need to adjust anything after that. Disclaimer: I am just kidding. Sincere apologies to any beginners who might be misled into taking such horrible advice seriously. What I meant to say was "slap on BBE Sonic Maximizer and you can avoid having to learn how to mix. altogether"

I got here by accident after mis-typing the URL of a an alt-reality conspiracy site. Or maybe it wasn't an accident. It already knew who I was...it's the hidden hand of the Illuminati, I think. My avatar came from a different forum than the old SONAR site, though, which was a surprise. I'll leave it in place, since it is about 20 years newer than my old one. Time to own my grey beard.

It wouldn't be hard to add a search-the-old-forums feature here. Might be a nice convenience, at least for a while. There is an enormous amount of information there, and it'll be years before this forum gathers the critical mass of data needed to make it a comparable resource.

So I guess the first thing you did was fact-check the book for the author? 😁 In the back of my filing cabinet I have 30-year-old brochures in Chinese for one of my past products. I have no idea what they say, but they're tool cool to throw out.