Sidney Earl Goodroe

Same here. Used Ilok License Manager!

We do have surviving original scores written in the composers hands to refer to and in those days the composer had the last say as to whether the published piece would be released. My comments were not meant to offend anyone or start a debate about which workflow you use. It was only to bring attention to the fact that even now notation is as important as it always has been as far as a means of communication for musicians, both amateur and professional!! Why Cake persists in not really either upgrading or at least admitting they don't intend to ever fix notation is perplexing! I will continue to use Cake as I have since late 80s or early 90s and fully support it but the notation has always been almost unusable for any serious task!!!

If you search the old Cakewalk forum you'll find a thread in there that I started a few years back about fixing notation that may have set the record for the number of responses. I think the last time I checked it was 300 pages or more. That was years ago and very little has been done to upgrade notation in Cake. I still have hope that they will. Bottom line!! If it were not for notation, think of all the wonderful music from the past hundreds of years we would not have. Would you really trust the process of someone learning every single part of a symphony by ear and then passing it down to a younger musician to carry on to the next generation? I think the odds would be pretty high that parts would be lost or or at least wrong. And what about dynamics. If not for notation we would have no idea about the emotional performance of a piece! Even a slammin' hip hop song has breakdowns!! Finally, notation is the earliest form of direct communication for a composer to communicate his interpretation of a piece. I think we are very fortunate to have any system that allows me to pick up a piece of paper and see EXACTLY the way Beethoven intended for this music to be performed. This system is responsible for laying the groundrules of all the music you play by ear now!!! We should respect this communication tool enough to keep it alive another 1000 years. As far as this thread is concerned, I feel that it is beating a long dead horse. If you care about notation that much, buy a notation program that fits your budget and move on!!

I got xt with my samplitude 5 suite upgrade. It is very good if you like variety and vintage reverb box sounds. The drawback for me is it seems very cpu intensive. Some of the presets cause clicks and dropouts for me but I use a large number of vst instruments in my projects. If you're just doing audio tracks mostly, you should be good. The magix plugins are very good as well. Definitely worth having in the toolbox!!!

Love the Pultec module in this rack. Also, being able to use the modules separately as vst plugs makes this a sound investment!

Bapu and I received our notice and downloaded ours week before last!!

Just got my Spectralayers 7 update code from Magix.

Thanks, Bapu!!! I was due the same upgrade. Will the code be in my Steinberg account or Magix?

Not sure if this is what you need but you can use the tempo window under Edit to drop incremental tempo speeds from beat to beat or measure to measure to speed up or slow down time changes.

Hi, Mark! The control panel has a tab to click so you can choose between viewing the first or second interfaces inputs. The master clock interface is named simply Studio Capture and the slave interface is named Studio Capture Exp. You toggle between the two.

I would check if the midi channel may have been changed in vb3 first. I had a major malfunction about 2 years ago when a Windows update trashed just vb3 out of all my vstis. I even went as far as contacting the guy that wrote the vb3 code!! I must say that he was more than gracious and worked very hard with me for almost a week back and forth in emails until he finally had to give up. We finally surmised that the update was the culprit. Sure enough, Windows sent out a patch fix after about 2 weeks. I nervously applied the patch fix and, lo and behold!!!!, vb3 worked like nothing was ever wrong!!!! Did you possibly receive an update before the strange behavior???

GK Amplification by Audiffied is a great Gallien-Krueger bass amp sim. There is a free version along with a pro version that is rather affordable. I used the free for a long time and was so impressed I invested in the pay version. It still finds its way into my projects to this day.

Having used amp sims and POD type devices for so long now, my advice to you would be to set the amp sim to a setting that you feel is best and if there is something lacking eq wise, insert a simple graphic eq on the output of the sim. Preferably, before you hit any rack type of plugins. My setup is usually any gain type fx first, amp sim next, graphic or parametric eq, then add fx. This seems to be the most natural sounding configuration to my ear. I am not against using the preamp but that to me would be adding something that is going to alter the natural tone of the guitar itself. It is also one more link in the chain that you will spend tweaking on for hours!! It sounds to me like you are less happy with the amp sound than the guitar itself. There should be enough tools in your amp sim or DAW that you can use to get that amp singing. One more thought!! I had the pleasure to be on a session with the legendary Tom Dowd back in the day. There was a particular amp sound that just was not cutting it. The engineer started to grab eq knobs and twist his heart out. Tom smiled and walked to the mixer, disabled the eq on that channel, grabbed a pair of headphones and disappeared in to the recording room. Within a matter of minutes, there was a great guitar sound singing through the monitors. When asked what his secret was, he smiled and replied, " moved the mic". I still to this day try to remember that you should try to fix the problem with as simple an approach as possible.

BTW, yes, you can control every channeling and monitoring aspect of both boxs from the software!!

I have no experience with the Octo but if their control panel is the same, there is a box to check for VS Expand mode. It automatically sets the driver for ASIO mode. Windows does not show the additional ins and outs but they are listed in your DAW control panel.