bitflipper

Same here. When my 1TB samples drive got full, I added a 500GB SSD for the overflow. But then I had to sit and sort out which libraries were most deserving of the faster drive and which ones weren't. It was an existential moment. Leaving one behind on the old disk seemed like an admission that I'd never use it again, and maybe I was an idiot for buying it in the first place.

Don't you Scots throw rocks around for fun?

I haven't tried them all, as many of them are clearly meant for more electronic-sounding styles that aren't my thing. But the ones I have used have all had plain and logical UIs that were simple to figure out. Even the ones that offer more than meets the eye, such as Ricochet, a multi-tap delay whose basic functionality is immediately obvious but which can still surprise you. If there's one plugin that you can use right out of the box and get nice results, I'd recommend the aforementioned Fluid. Try it on synth pads, background vocals, rhythm guitar - anything that can afford to get smudged.

I've got gobs of chorus plugins, which is odd because it's not an effect that I use often. But when I throw one on and it works, I always wonder why I didn't think of it immediately. And even though they all work on exactly the same principle, each of them has a distinct character, which is why I've accumulated a collection. Fluid just adds one more. On bright synth tones it sounds very 80's to me, reminiscent of the old Electric Mistress stompbox I used to use back in the day.

Unfortunately, those two gigs were already spoken for. Seems I've been downloading a lot of 24-bit wave files lately.

...all the old Audio Damage plugins are now free. I grabbed Ricochet, Fluid, Liquid and Vapor. Nothing earth-shaking there, just a bunch of solid, usable effects.

Yeh, every time I start cleaning up I think maybe it's time for Samplitude to retire to the bitbucket. But dang it, I paid a couple hundred bucks for that back during the Gibson debacle so it'd be like throwing out a perfectly good lamp just because it's ugly. Libraries are another matter. I just can't bring myself to toss them. You never know when that Kontakt 2 Factory Library might have just what you need.

Lemme fix that for ya... The keyboardist runs around the club at 1:00 AM trying to pry the guitarist and bassist away from the barmaid so they can help him hoist the keyboard into the van. The van he had to buy because no regular car is big enough for the keyboard. Then, hopefully, said string pickers will also help tear down and pack up the PA, which the keyboardist bought as well. If they're feeling generous, they might even bring the keyboard player a cola since they're all packed up and ready to go while he's still rolling cables. My standard whine: next time, I'm taking up the piccolo.

Apparently I've either forgotten to un-check the "AAX" option on installers (dozens of times), or some installers just don't give you that option. This morning I noticed that \program files\avid\audio\plug-ins had over 2 gigabytes' worth of .aax files and related content taking up space. Granted, 2GB isn't much on a 500GB SSD, but whenever I find things like this I kick myself for not being diligent about monitoring disk usage. Back when drives were much smaller, I used to be obsessive about such things.

Is that a Moog amplifier on the floor? Talk about a rare piece of kit.

It's been years since I last sat down at a B3, longer since I've had to haul one, but all it takes is a photo to remember exactly how comfortable it is to play one. Those lightly-weighted waterfall keys encourage your fingers to glide over them like weightless sprites. Aiming for a C and lazily press B and D at the same time? That sounds good, too. In fact, go ahead and lay your whole arm across the keyboard - there is no such thing as dissonance on a Hammond. As a Hammond acolyte, I am obligated to point out one trivial error in the linked article, though. It wasn't a B3 on House of the Rising Sun. It was the cheap Italian-made VOX Continental. I know this because at the time though I lusted for a Hammond I could only afford a Continental. Consequently, I was thrilled to see the likes of John Lennon or Alan Price playing one on TV. Those guys can surely afford a B3 and someone to move it, I thought, but there they are on TV playing on the same red plywood box that I used.

Quite likely. Seems like they're putting it in everything these days. Apparently you can make it in your garage with cheap ingredients from Walmart. Tom Petty was felled by what he thought was a headache remedy. I once wondered if I was gonna die after drinking a single rum 'n coke after a gig. I'd forgotten about the cold remedy I'd taken earlier, to clear my sinuses for singing.

Just an un-commented video of Dan mastering his own stuff. How you feel about the music is irrelevant, just appreciate those crispy transients! A couple takeaways for me. First, notice how most of the time the limiter isn't doing anything at all. I've always believed that if a good mix stands on its own before mastering, the limiter's mainly just a volume control. As you can see, he's adding a lot of gain because he mixes with gobs of headroom. Second, note that he uses no lookahead. I don't have an explanation for this other than if you're not continuously driving the master above the threshold you really don't need lookahead. I'm guessing in his examples it wouldn't make much audible difference either way.

Everyone, feel free to ignore everything I wrote above.

From Cherry Audio. A pretty good emulation, IMO, with a decent number of presets to get you started. Oberheim synths are also a good choice for beginners because they're fairly simple to program. So if you'd like to dip your toes into the world of old-school subtractive synthesis but are intimidated by all the controls on Synthmaster or Zebra, Oberheims are pretty quick to pick up. The free OBXD is even simpler, but not as fat-sounding as the 8-Voice. $19 for an Oberheim 8-Voice is a pretty good price, considering the first time I checked one out back in the 70's a real one went for about 4 grand. This one sounds almost the same. Are you into EDM and epic supersaws? This is the synth it was invented on.

So I finally got the piano tuned. For some reason I'd had difficulty getting tuners to return my calls. Cost was $200 because it was so far out that he had to tune it twice. He also straightened a hammer that hadn't been hitting all three strings, so I not only got an in-tune piano, I gained two strings! Not to mention 15 more keys than I'm used to having with my band rig. The puppy wasn't helping. He's part husky, so he offered to sing harmony during the procedure. Sadly, his only skill is making sticks into smaller sticks so he had to be relocated to the garage. Even the cat got in on the event. The piano is her favorite perch, but she'd never seen the lid open before and I had to drag her off the strings twice. It was only after spending a couple hours deliriously jamming away on it that I realized just how weak my wrists and forearms have become playing synths. Been awhile since I've experienced muscle aches from playing. Other than the usual back aches from hauling gear, anyway. That wasn't the end of the pain, though. This morning I jammed my pinkie attempting to hit a key that wasn't there on my 73-key KRONOS. But golly gee whiz, I'd been playing really fast right up until that happened. All this time I'd been bemoaning my loss of speed and blaming it on old age. Should have tuned up the old acoustic piano years ago.

Yes, bapu did the mix. I think he's getting better at it, too. Nothing better for polishing your mixing chops than being handed a big pile of beach detritus and then being asked to please make a beautiful stained-glass window out of it.

I agree. This thread has run its course and is unlikely to change gears into something helpful. Time to let it die.

Grammy's?

Step One: Instruct CbB to be more verbose about errors. That will usually reveal, or at least provide a clue to, the source of these kinds of problems. Open cakewalk.ini with Notepad. cakewalk.ini will be in %appdata%\cakewalk\cakewalk core. Search on an entry named ExceptionHandlingSeverity. If you don't find it, manually add it in. Then set its value to 7. It will look like this: ExceptionHandlingSeverity=7 This tells CbB to complain about any error. The default value is 1, which tells to keep quiet about most errors. After you've troubleshot this issue, you'll probably want to set it back to 1 again, lest it get too verbose.

You can preserve food in alcohol, why doesn't that work for humans?

Yup. In other breaking news, it turns out that the earth is indeed spherical. One reason I know this is the large number of people who have actually gone all the way around it. (Full disclosure: I've only been halfway around it myself, but I'm pretty sure the other half follows a comparable geometry.) An even greater number of regular people use Cakewalk (or Reaper or ProTools or Logic or Fruity Loops) every day without tearing their hair out. Heck, most people who drive Audis or use Samsung phones don't catch on fire, and most passengers on Spirit airlines get to their destinations on time. I say this not to belittle the OP, but only to reinforce Craig's point. Richard is obviously having real problems and is frustrated. But he's making a fundamental mistake by assuming that his issues are caused by the DAW, when in reality that's probably the last of many potential culprits to put in the police lineup. A computer system is a complex jumble of software and hardware and magic smoke that's not easy for anyone to grasp. I've been figuring stuff like this out since 1976, and I still routinely get stumped because I get stuck in a rut of erroneous assumptions. Not to mention the many times my UTK interface has failed me (UTK = User To Keyboard). Actual bugs in Cakewalk that bite me constitute maybe 0.001% of my problems. And I'm a beta tester. I'm trying to find problems. So Richard, this is actually meant to be words of encouragement. If you feel like switching DAWs, go for it. Moving to a new environment can actually be creatively inspiring. But I'd like to save you further frustration and get you back to making music, and concentrating your efforts on the wrong culprit is only going to delay that further.

His last performance...

Sacrilege! OK, I'll admit doing that, but usually not on purpose. When I do, I always immediately do it again because anything you do twice in a row is "jazz" and it's OK.