John Bradley

Nevermind! Apparently Chrome got cranky for some reason. Exiting and restarting it, and now (non-Admin) CW can launch 'help' tabs as usual. "Have you tried turning it off and then back on again?"

Default browser is Chrome. It used to work, but I recently upgraded my system SSD from 512GB to 1TB, which has mildly upset a few things (IK Multimedia activations, etc.). Possibly related? Any thoughts? FWIW, none of the items in the Help menu that would launch a browser window, such as Documentation or What's New? work.

I’ve only ever tried pitch shifting monophonic signals. Shifting polyphonic sounds (I assume the acoustic is strumming some chords, as they so often do), I’m not sure if you can do that at all and not have it sound weird, even if you have Studio with its polyphonic support. Maybe on a nice clean piano, but guitars are jangly creatures full of weird overtones and tuning compromises. Good luck!

In my experience, you can pitch shift +/- about 2 half steps. Beyond that vocals and acoustic instruments start getting noticably wonky. If you record your electric guitars DI and do the amp modelling in-the-box, you can go a little further with pitch shifting, as feeding the shifted (DI) through an amp sim will mask quite a bit the added artifacts. Obviously you can get away with more shifting if the amp is heavily distorting the signal. Not so much if you're feeding it into a squeaky clean Fender Twin or Roland JC-120 model.

The "click the marker and hit Delete while keeping the mouse button held down" is handy, and does what I want... but you could see why someone might use CW for decades and never run across that tidbit. We're used to trying various combinations of Shift, Alt, Ctrl and Left/Right clicking and double-clicking to see 'what can be done' with an object. And the modifiers come before the click, typically. Clicking and hitting some non-standard key mid-click is somewhat alien to the Windows Experience. Anyway, the request for a more intuitive (albeit slower) way to delete markers via the pop-up still stands. Even if I no longer need it... until I forget how to do the cool thing!

On more than one occasion, I've double-clicked in the timeline - like a fool! - and been treated to having all of my tracks un-minimized and made slightly taller than minimized but considerably shorter than they used to be when opened. Presumably it's doing one of the Fit xxx to Window commands, which I've never ever wanted to do at all, either deliberately or accidentally. Whatever, my bad. But unless I'm missing something (which is likely enough), there doesn't seem to be a way to Undo that little slice of heaven. It's not an event that was added to the Undo/Redo stack. And selecting all tracks and doing the Quick Group ctrl-click thing on the minimize button only minimizes the track you clicked on. Nor does 'minimize track' appear to be a bindable command in the Key Bindings place. So you get to click the little double-up-arrow thing on every track in your project (at least the ones that weren't hidden away in Folders), which could be quite many. Tedious.

Right clicking on a marker opens a pop-up window that lets you rename it and adjust its time/pitch. It'd be keen if Delete was also an option. Yes, I can open the Markers window, find it in there, and delete it that way. But it's good UI to have common operations on an object available via direct manipulation of the object itself, not finding it elsewhere in a list of such objects.

Used to use Bias FX. Sounded fine, but what a sluggish UI, and everything about it screamed "designed for iPad". These days I swear by Blue Cat's Axiom. Very CPU efficient, and if you've got the screen space you could have every single module in your signal chain open with the knobs tweakable simultaneously. (Rather than the 'one-at-a-time' of Bias.)

Picked it up from PluginBoutique when it was on sale for $19 back in February. It wasn't worth it. Glitchy and problematic, at least on my rig.

Select a number of tracks in the Track View. Right click the first one, select Move To Folder | New Track Folder Tracks appear in new folder in an order that makes no sense to me. It's not the order they were in, nor is it sorted in any apparent order. Ideally, I'd like them stay in the same order they were. Note: If you create a track folder, then select all the tracks and drag them into the folder, that works - they don't shuffle around randomly. So there's that. But I invariably do it the first way and then fix it, because that "saves a step". At least until I remember "Oh yeah, the order gets shuffled and now I have to fix that." This is in 2022.02 patch #1.

I'm pretty sure there's a couple ex-priests who've said the same thing...

Awesome, I was just thinking "my desktop needs a few dozen new icons" - and I need the keyboard focus stolen from this window constantly as I'm typing this, so bonus!

$19? Where? I've got a Boz account and have bought several VSTs directly from them, and it shows $49 as my price.

That's a killer price, and I highly recommend grabbing it. Picked up my copy a few months back for $54 after a $25 voucher, and have been very happy with it. And I'm not even an EDM guy - never used the 'glitch' effect - but you never know when you'll want to animate a filter to give motion to a pad, or do a rhythmic gate effect on a guitar or what have you.

The intrusive questions to set up an Antares account and then the various hoops you have to jump through in order to get Duo installed and authorized - far too irritating for Just Another Vocal Doubler that I'll never use. I've got Nectar 3, MUnison, and use them already, so whatever. But the $10 Objeq Delay I picked up looks semi-useful and unique...

Meh, wouldn't upgrade (from VC8 + SQ80) for any price. Already have an MS20 from Korg, and by all accounts the Augmented Strings thing was quite the CPU-hog. I assume Augmented Voices will be similar. In any event, neither Augmented product is a recreation of a classic hardware synth, so seems like mission creep.

It'd be nice (and presumably trivial) if the color picker that pops up when you click the tiny little rectangle at the bottom of the console strip (or at the left edge of the track view) had a choice that said "follow output" rather than "follow bus". I typically do guitar parts in pairs, panned hard left/hard right. These two tracks have their outputs sent to a 'submix' Aux track so I can do volume automation on the pair in a single place, common FX, etc. The Aux goes to its own bus on the console. (I prefer not to do volume automation on the buses for various reasons.) Anyway, the Aux track can be easily set to have it's color "follow bus". The individual guitar tracks have to be set manually. I'd like them to be set to automatically follow the color of whatever they're output is set to, be it a bus or an aux track.

Heh, I'm still running an i7-950 from 2009. I'm able to run any single VST without issue, including everything else from Arturia, NI, Izotope, etc.. Can typically run everything un-frozen in my moderate-sized projects (30 tracks, maybe 10 synths, several instances of my amp modeler of choice, a couple of Nectar 3's, Ozone 9, etc.) as long as I'm in max-latency (1024 samples) mode on my Focusrite. Though I usually keep everything frozen as I go so that I can keep recording guitar parts in lowish latency (160 samples @ 44.1). The only exception is Massive X - which insists on some additional instruction set that the Intel processors picked up a few generations later. Haven't tried this thing yet, but if it's really the CPU Hog that folks are saying, well, that seems like poor optimization unless it's doing something truly incredible under the lid. Can certainly live without it if so.

Thank you sir, this was most helpful and informative. Bought!

Yes, I know that (now) thanks to msmcleod. I'm talking about the Freeze command in the context menu. If you select multiple tracks and hold CTRL (or SHIFT+CTRL) while selecting the Freeze command via the context menu, it only freezes a single track, not all the selected tracks. Why not just ctrl-click the asterisk-snowflake button? It's not visible unless I explicitly 'open' the track, whereas the right-click context menu is always available. Also, I was asking for that same context menu to be available from the console strips by right clicking on their number/letter 'selector' boxes. It should be possible to do tracky operations (freeze, insert, delete, etc.) from the console, especially since the console displays far more tracks at once than the track pane, at least in my normal split "track pane in top half, console in bottom half" view.

...though I see that in order to freeze multiple tracks at once, one needs to hold CTRL and hit the often-not-visible-and-only-in-the-tracks-pane-anyway asterisk button. Selecting multiple tracks, holding CTRL, and meandering through the context menu to Freeze Track only freezes the track that was right-clicked in order to open the context menu. It seems like it should follow the "but I'm holding CTRL down!" quick-group dealie. Feature requested!

I always run in 'narrow all strips' mode, so there's no room for such there... but I don't see any reason why the track number / bus letter selector areas of the console strips shouldn't have the same context menu as they do up in the tracks pane. Which has a 'freeze' command in it.

Any love/hate for SSD5.5? Been using the free version for a while now, and think it's decent. Had been thinking about buying the full version for $120 to get a more complete collection of kits and grooves... but maybe EZD3 at $179 would be a better choice given the newness and whatnot? Looking for something to quickly get acceptable sounding (kit+groove) drums in order to sketch out songs in genres I don't especially do (hard rock / metal), then drag the midi into CW where I can futz with it, do my own specific fills, etc. SD3 at $399 and other similarly priced packages are not an option for me.

I've still got a 49 key version of same in my basement, waiting to someday be torn down for parts. IIRC, and I probably don't, they never made a Win7 driver, let alone anything for Win10. Currently using an Akai MPK261, which has All The Features I'll never ever use, as well as a keybed with too-strong springs for my taste.

FWIW, I upgraded from V6 to V8 in Sept. 2021 for $149. The deal at that time included the SQ80 as well as "Dust Materials" and "Raw Machinery", which I think are preset packs for the SQ80. Worth noting that the receipt shows that the only thing I bought was the V8 upgrade. My Products on the Arturia website shows V8, SQ80, Dust Materials, and Raw Machinery as 4 seperate products, so I'm guess those latter 3 items were 'free' with the V8 upgrade at that time, but not technically part of V8 per se.