mettelus

8 hours ago, Mark Morgon-Shaw said:

15. But the best way to learn is just do a lot of mixing

+1, You will always learn best by doing. Studying will only get you to a certain level before experience will allow you to go further, and experience will provide tools to accommodate gaps you may encounter. Never fear making mistakes either; those are often the best learning tools.

I was going to tack this on to the 10th Anniversary thread, but this is from Humble Bundle and looks like it includes everything Escape Motions has for $30, except Rebelle 6 (Rebelle 5 is included in the bundle).

Interesting faux pas or Freudian slip there... it is Meng, not Mung.

You might want to check out some of the free online courses. I just checked and Coursera has one for "The Singer Songwriter," that started today (July 10) but use the search engine on there and see if something interests you. For Coursera specifically, they create a forum for each class (it is wiped about a week after the class ends, so keep that in mind) which can be a great way to run into like-minded individuals and discuss ideas. It is very common to find other collaborators in those forums, and we even had breakout groups years ago that did songs during the course duration as group projects in some cases. Those forums you get out what you invest in them, so active participation is a huge plus.

This might be good to also post in the "Feedback" section for improvements/features. AFAIK, CakeTalking was discontinued and was last used with SONAR 8.5, and a few forum members still use 8.5 for this reason. When Windows is drilling into apps (for things like Voice Assist), the app also needs to expose active child windows (like the arrangement window) properly. I am not sure if there is an answer to your question, but hopefully someone can chime in with better insight.

Your question did prompt me to look for more information, and there are quite a few ideas out there, but not specific to Cakewalk that I could find. "Best DAW for a blind person" came up with mostly Mac results, so they didn't lead to anything Windows-based. It did make me even more curious, so "How many people in the US are legally blind?" returned "1.3 million people over the age of 40," which is a significant number. If someone doesn't chime in with a solution, please consider also posting in the Feedback section. That was one feature of 8.5 that keeps that version still in use by many.

On 7/7/2023 at 6:02 PM, timboalogo said:

Didn't change the keyboard, so there's something off somewhere.

Changing the keyboard is something to consider. Keyboards collect dust and crap that can interfere with the gap needed to let keys "release" (builds up on the rubber diaphragm under the keys). Typically this takes years to become an issue, but if you ever eat at the computer or have pets it can be quicker. I took a shop vac to my keyboard once and pulled enough cat hair out of it to make quite a dust bunny. I am rather violent as a typist, so once lettering starts to wear off keys it is reaching end-of-life (about the 4-5 year point for me). If you have a shop vac, you could try vacuuming things out (a lot of what went in will come out, but not all).

3 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

Whoa! Just from hitting the spark plug boots with D5? I must try that.

Bear in mind the plugs were also new. They suffer dielectric breakdown over time and were reaching end-of-life as it was. The LS4 motor locks out the 4 inner cylinders when cruising, so mileage also depends on traffic (sitting at reds lights chews up the most gas because it idles in V8 mode expecting you to punch it) and that the motor monitors itself when to shift into 4-banger mode. New plugs up the torque in the 4 outer cylinders, so the inners were locked out more after swapping the plugs.

I only ever had the one can of D5 that John had recommended, and just use it on metal connectors. It seems to wear off its lubrication capacity after a few years, but takes such a small quantity to be useful. Stuff worked so well I couldn't feel the "pop" of the connector on the plug and the boot came back off so easily I resorted to the metal-on-metal contact internal to the boot (the ignition contact on these is at the tip of the plug). Plugs have been changed 3 times in this vehicle, but connectors have never been cleaned. 20% increase in fuel efficiency, so the entire can would have paid for itself on one tank of gas. I had to lay across the motor to reach the back bank and hold myself off the fuel rails at the same time while wrestling the boots, so the boots "just coming off" now is a GREAT THING.

I would be very leery on sandpaper around electronics. For all the crap that "comes out," a portion of that crap "went in." The gap tolerances in many PCB applications are pretty small, and depending on what conformal coating method they used (if any), can make them vulnerable to conductive particulates building up. Stuff like car battery posts and connectors (where you can see where all the dust goes and it doesn't matter anyway) are fair game for sandpaper, but pushing that into a pre-amp or instrument I would definitely not do.

I just wrestled with putting plugs into a trans-mounted V8. After the royal PITA of popping connectors off they didn't want to reseat properly (especially on the back where leverage isn't the best), so I said screw this and grabbed the DeOxit from the house. Suddenly they went back on with minimal force and I could feel the metal-to-metal contact inside the boot. Sprayed every other connector I pulled apart while I was at it. Gotten so much mileage from that 12-year old can and still have half of it left.

3 hours ago, PhonoBrainer said:

What about the ethical consideration of using AI to write lyrics, then calling / considering yourself a songwriter?

Just wondering.

Sort of reminiscent of the two who ran a script to generate a truckload of song melodies (they claimed they had done all possible variations). With storage being so massive and cheap these days, someone could script it to pound out lyrics just the same, text files are so small they could pump out thousands of songs a second.

I notice Bing has shifted to assembling responses from its web spiders, but at least they footnote which page each sentence comes from. So far they are simply butting complete sentences together AFAICT.

6 hours ago, John Nelson said:

and oh yeah, the candy.

Crooks who hate candy are particularly dangerous!

Not sure how far from home their distribution center is, but I have actually gone to pick up something I was after once (call and verify it is there before going). Two of the centers are less than 20 miles from my house, but most stuff "just arrives when it arrives" as far as I am concerned.

Didn't read through the entire thread, so not sure if you checked the input devices - a wireless mouse in particular. Low batteries or dust on the optics (for the wireless/optical variety) can wreak havoc on inputs. Those devices drivers can also be "reset" on the fly by unplugging the USB FOB and plugging that back in.

Just to be aware, the VST3 implementation for a lot of plugin vendors was hit or miss for years, so the workaround was to keep the VST2 on hand just in case (often the quick workaround). When there is a mismatch between a DAW and plugin, it often comes down to the developers talking to each other to resolve the issue, but the reason is to get the vendor to conform to the VST3 standard rather than fit a specific DAW. If a DAW accommodates non-standard coding, it will almost lock that plugin vendor to the DAWs that did rather than make them universal.

I just happened to remember this site for free Guitar Pro tabs. If you share links on FB or Twitter they will download immediately, but you can simply wait 20 seconds to download them. Pretty simple. These are the actual gp[x] files, so you can edit/manipulate them in Guitar Pro however you choose. There are almost 50,000 tabs on that site to choose from.

Ample Sound guitars will also import GP files, so the two applications pair up rather well if you have any of the Ample Sound products.

Quick edit: Not used the site much but the link at the very top of that page to download the entire database (all 50,000 tabs), is $9 for July (normally $18).

3 hours ago, Grem said:

So I realized I just needed a clean take, and I can fiddle with it later. I just need to stay focused and get the elements down. 

+1, I find I violate my own guidance to others at times, and one that bubbles to the top is "Draft first, then edit." Especially with longer works (music included), I get easily sucked into editing "do loops" when reviewing where I left off (terrible habit on my part). Unless a good portion of the final intended work is present, I am going to end up modifying it later anyway.

DI takes have proven themselves valuable for me, since I can simply re-amp during mixing rather than trying to shoehorn the original wet version where it doesn't quite fit.

I am not familiar with copyright laws very much, but I do find it ironic that someone who has no ownership of a piece to get a copyright of a transcription (especially if in error).

Flip side (in the days of early internet one can never quite verify things like these): When MIDI first took off there were often errors in pieces as they were published. An early version of "Don't Stop Believin" was a bit off for the piano piece but otherwise intact, and the person who brought it up the piano most adamantly simply redid the piano track and gave it back to him. Supposedly that person who redid the track was Jonathan Cain. If true, that was such a classy move on his part.

2 hours ago, Sander Verstraten said:

Here's to hoping NI will finally do something with the PPG code that Brainworx bought

Eesh, I saw PPG and my first reaction is "paint." Is funny how many acronyms span industries with entirely different meanings.

On 6/23/2023 at 11:39 AM, rfssongs said:

Better:

Yeah, it certainly takes a different breed to be in the submarine community. The news on that just gets worse, since the initial pics of recovery showed a de-laminated section (of a 5" hull), but no one in the news seems to know what they are looking at or saying. The appeal to authority fallacy of putting James Cameron out there as a materials expert took the cake for me. For anyone interested, wiki has a decent write up of HY-80 steel that is used for submarine construction (and why).

I may need to stop reading news for my own sanity, the recent roller coaster "crack" was another one. The use of the word crack versus break just comes across as intent to downplay the seriousness of what a spectator videoed. Field failures are the ultimate failures any engineer can suffer (specifically with loss of life), but there seems to be a growing cavalier attitude towards design.

Try typing "Cakewalk" into the Windows Search bar and see if "Cakewalk by BandLab" pops up as the recommended app (it should). The installer is saying that you already have it installed, which is why it did nothing.

4 hours ago, chris.r said:

Guys I can't find the installer for Stratus the version one before current, so 3.0.0-something (for Windows). It's the one still with VST2 in it, any idea how can I download it? Tried in products>downloads and in legacy products but no luck.

iZotope has always exceled at purging older products from stores and the internet, so you might try reaching out to iZotope's customer service. The file was named "Exponential_Audio_Stratus_Win_Release_3_00.zip" (105MB) but has no hits for search engines.

I must have just hit one of those windows by dumb luck then. I thought that was the norm and it got changed.

Quick FYI for folks not familiar with these. I had to go back and check what this entails (read the details at the bottom of the above link), since I only ever pop these open if something strikes my fancy when I open GP8 (one per day pops up randomly if you own GP). Basically these help with practicing transcriptions (not all are accurate), and even using credits you cannot save or edit scores (just allows printing them). I think you also get a free 7-day trial to everything when purchasing GP8.

I went on a massive "unsubscribe" binge last night (my custom email filters to screen "advertisements" are suddenly leaking) and Arobas got nailed from sending me one for GP8 when I already own it.

These promos always make me check this... there was a time when HELIX Native was free to HELIX owners, but for a while it seems that it is often 75% off rather than free. Never quite understood that since it is essentially a VST version of the hardware.

4 hours ago, hockeyjx said:

As long as the actual playing is good, I can really park the guitar in to the mix. You can't dial back the distortion after a take with a mic/real amps.

+1, it took a while for me to take advantage of pulling the DI signal from guitar inputs, but one of the best advantages of amp sims allows for rapid composition with the ability to re-amp in the box (that, and you can own $50,000 in "gear" that weighs nothing, of course).

As far as presets, I finally upgraded to TH-U last Christmas, but still haven't downloaded any of the monthly presets. Presets (and samples) can be the biggest waste of time to sort through; it is often better to know how to tweak them to make them fit with what is "close enough."

I have found "in the box" a bit stifling to creativity over the years, specifically camped out near a computer. I ended up going wireless several years ago, so can go outside on the porch to play and just let the DAW be itself (why I appreciate Studio One Remote a lot). Sitting in front of a DAW (or even with the screen in view) seems to shift focus to "potential editing" rather than "just playing" for me.

10 hours ago, msmcleod said:

It's an option when you Save:


 

This is also the preferred method to clean temporary files. A "Save as ..." with the above settings to a new project folder will only copy over the audio in use by the project at that save point. You can test that out quickly by trying and comparing to the original folder. Depending on your work flow you could be creating a lot of temp files (Cakewalk does not delete those for you as a fail safe for oopsies, but they can build up quickly in size).

If you are using Melodyne, there is a similar issue with it's cache (where the "Separations" folder is being saved in Melodyne preferences) or if you save a Cakewalk project with active Region FX in them (the cwp file will be noticeably larger). That Separations folder also does not purge, and can get to GB in size fast on you.

Quick edit: typed that from my phone so edited to add clarity regarding Melodyne. Where temporary audio is saved is in the preferences for applicable programs (Cakewalk, Melodyne, et al.), but those folders also do not purge themselves. Temporary audio (and video) files can consume massive amounts of drive space quickly. Melodyne's Separations folder (I think it defaults to 10GB max) can be purged regularly; it will reconstruct itself as needed when opening projects with active Region FX in them. For the OP, adjusting preference settings to save data to the D drive is preferred as already mentioned.