Tim Smith

@msmcleod modified a version of the Mackie MCU script that allows you to use multiple Mackie controllers. My understanding of this is unless you need multiple controllers at the same time the script probably isn't necessary. I have the link for it from an older post HERE To connect to the Keylab 61 MKII you will need to use MCU mode on the MKII. Next go to EDIT>Preferences>MIDI> Devices -Select MIDIOUT (Keylab mkII 61) in outputs and MIDIIN2 (Keylab mkII61) from the devices list. Still under MIDI> Control surfaces, click on the yellow new devices icon located in the upper right and select Mackie Control. Go to Utilities menu. Third from right along the top of Cakewalk. Utilities>Mackie Control 1. Check the "disable handshake" box. Name and save your preset in presets box. TIP- Running fader to 100% grabs fader in software TIP- Faders are controlled in CONSOLE VIEW TIP- Pre arm track you want to record. Record button operates main record function TIP-Metronome button operates loop mode instead of metronome After tracks are selected with buttons underneath each fader on MKII mute and solo will work as marked. Panning and faders work on all tracks in console view. I haven't been able to get master fader to respond, however this is no big issue for me since I don't play with the master fader usually while mixing. I have not been able to make the scrubber wheel work. Punch in/Punch out not working. Midi tracks input with all external input selected on individual tracks. -Tim

For anyone who wants to know more about using Kelab 61 MKII and Cakewalk, I'm going to take further response over to the gear section as a new thread in a few minutes so as not to clutter up the Arturia sale thread.. The same things should work for 49 and 88 key versions

I appreciate you pointing this out. I guess the question here is 18gigs of what? Certainly not unreasonable. I mean how much does a drummer and set of drums cost rented for a few hours? This is a pittance. Very possibly. It certainly IS a wonderful value, even for someone who only occasionally uses drums. My niggle isn't really with TT or anyone else. It has more to do with narrowing our selections so we can create. What is a guy going to do with three drum programs all using different complicated GUIs and each with many different drum kits and more loops than anyone can count in a day? Will he be creating anything or looking at drums all day? The answer to this is probably just to pick one you like and roll with it. Maybe even pick one or two kits you like and learn to use them very well. Programs never made hit records. People did. How many "preset people" do we have sitting behind recoding desks who sit all day playing through presets? I guess that's really my point

Well ur a drummer and hats off to you guys! Everyone has different ways they like to work. I am probably an odd ball out, if I ever use a pattern I almost never leave it as is. I seldom like the pre baked loops, so I'll just load up something to keep the beat and add my cymbals where I can imagine an excited drummer hitting them, and yes, sometimes it might sound like the WHO. 4 to the floor is about as exciting as watching grass grow for me. As a non drummer I get to actually pretend I can play drums! Man how fun is that? OTOH prebaked loops are someone else's interpretation of pop. Yes I am a bit of a hypocrite here because I have a shed load of midi drum loops. I only like maybe 1% of them though. What is an "expansion pak"? It's a durned sampled drum kit mated to a midi loop. Places like the loop loft and groove monkey are inexpensive ways to add more personality to a kit. I have a ton of em'. That's now I realized that either I have very poor taste in drum rhythm or they all make terrible loops. It's probably the first one.?

Points well made. For anyone who is just now getting into VST drums though, if Toontrack or any other well known drum VST for that matter have their way, this is only the beginning. They probably don't want you to like the included kits too much, because at least part of that business is in selling the sample paks. I haven't traditionally gone in that direction because if I already had a nice kit I could get out of it what I wanted. I see it like a drummer who has 20 drum sets. Not too many drummers have multiple drums. They use what they have. It wasn't that I couldn't buy the extra kits if I wanted them, I just never seen the need for it if I had a good kit. The basic factory kits in many of the better drum programs will let you swap out one drum for another IN THE INCLUDED KIT. For me BFD 1&2 were like that. Plus, I don't think everyone is buying a new drum program because the GUI was improved. Relearning a reengineered drum GUI might take time and time in the studio is important. If I worked well in the old GUI why would I want another one? Just playing devil's advocate here plus I am cheap Geesh groceries are going up 40%. Do I want to eat or a new set of drums? I think my price was 20.00 less on this sale or 79.00 . I have the extra 20.00 buck when they ever get on to actually letting us try a demo. I don't want a 1 minute shmooze video. I want to know how the heck this thing works.

Just a small FYI on this going out for the Deals thread. I trust cclarry to post legit links. He only looks at the good links and I appreciate his work on that thread. Having said that, you still gotta be careful. If someone posts a link there to check out a plugin and you suspect it, go to the source of the sale from a legit browser. I have started using duck duck go more lately, but really I think it protects your tracks more than anything.

I recently cleaned up my downloads folder. I saved 10 gigs there. I am reluctant to remove some of the zipped program folders for companies that make getting replacements costly or time consuming. Yeah, maybe storing some of the libraries on a cheap outboard drive is a better solution. I store MOST of my files on additional attached drives if they are large files. What seems to happen with me is some programs I thought were light weight programs like vst synth libraries default installed into my C drive. At the time I went with the default assuming the files wouldn't be over 100mb. Sometimes they would be much larger than that. And it accumulates as you know. My 500gb C drive ( which is double what was at one time the recommended size for C ) only has just over 20gb left on it. This is even when I direct my DAW projects to another drive path. Of that amount I have no super huge libraries to speak of. Most of it is programs and their data. Video can munch it up too, so I have been deleting or moving video files after I work with them and complete a video. I'm not even a big video guy. I can't imagine working in video with new files every day. That would REALLY rack up disk memory. The answer is probably a 1TB C drive, but I hate to even think about that right now.

If it's the model I'm thinking of it has old school midi out/in. I would look at that route before I threw it away! Midi I/O into your interface would communicate with DAW learn. Or you could send it to me ? @abacab Thanks for sharing this info. I have had some frustration with MKII and Cake . I'm not finished trying yet. I'll let you know how it goes. @msmcleod has some helpful advice. Still digging to figure this out. I won't spend a huge amount of time messing about with it though.

No I was probably out of line and you had a valid point. Meanwhile the info on EZDrummer3 ?................................................................................................................................................................................................ *sound of a pin dropping* Might as well move on. Nothing else to see here yet.

Please don't include me here. I appreciate the info. My IT department deals constantly with threats. This is why we went to a VPN. At one point we had to shut all of our servers down because someone was attempting to get in. Due to concerns of privacy breaches we pulled the plug until we could get a solid VPN in place. We already had VPN, but we extended it and added more protection. A hacker made it into the server for the software I work in a few years ago. This software controls the lighting ,heating cooling systems electric usage and many other things for multiple millions of dollars worth of buildings and infrastructure. Not just control but monitoring trending of multiple data points etc. They went in and changed a bunch of temperatures and systems. Luckily they were beginner hackers and we caught up to it soon enough to get a hold on it. I think one of the newest trends is to put a spy inside of a common program container....like VLC. Can't ever, EVER be too careful.

Good point @Brian Walton I guess if I needed or wanted ideas it might make a nice way to go about getting them. I have played with Captain Chords and Scaler. I don't think this approach fits me. Still, I am going to give this a try. In Cubase I can highlight a midi section and have it play alternate chord idea based on what I played which I guess is similar. This idea sounds similar to Biab? Or maybe using an AI profile and input a chord progression to get something. As I said I will surely try it out and I appreciate the info. I don't tend to like any 'help' in creating what I make. I sometimes make music arrangements around existing tunes that are not under copyright, but most often make original music. I like the portable aspect of it though. Thanks!

Thanks for clearing that up. Correct me if I'm wrong here. The writing is on the wall to phase out VST2 in C12 unless they changed course due to customer complaints. Not pushing it here @DeeringAmps I would like to know What is EZDrummer 3 compared to other drum programs? How is it better, if it is better? In what ways is it better? Can we quantify 'better' here? And this is a psychological question- Why would a person pre buy a product they have never heard or demo'd?

I get it. Look at it this way. Some here might have learned more about other options. What do we actually know about EZDrummer 3?

Sorry to hear about your back @Shane_B. It seems you are making the best of it. What else can we do? When my back goes out which only happens very seldom, it's generally very bad so far as the pain from it. The last time I had it go out on me in a very bad way, it had more to do with the way I twisted. I cut an old unused antennae mast down in back of my house and I was throwing the top section of it into a trailer to take to the scrap yard. When I heaved it into the trailer I pivoted with the weight. That's when it happened. It wasn't necessarily the weight that got me but the way I moved with the weight. I felt a little pop and disk L6 shifted. I was in pretty intense pain for two months afterward. My body healed itself. I don't think the chiropractors helped. It took awhile but eventually things worked back into place. For the first few weeks I could barely walk it hurt so bad, then gradually I could walk sideways and people would ask me if I was ok. I still cringe thinking about it. Music making was out of the question.

Thanks for this info. I'll have to give it a shot. Other than the collaboration aspects, how is this much different than playing with ideas in my main DAW? Why haven't I used Bandlab? For me overall it's probably the lack of functionality as compared to most resident DAWS. I seen Bandlab as more of a collaboration tool with basic functions. When you start forking things, you could completely loose the original idea for the material. That might be good for some. Not so good for others.

Thank you for the FYI. VLC is my go to player. I recently had a request asking me if I wanted to update it. I really didn't think much of it at the time since it was they who were making the request from the player portal. VLC has lots of capability some might not be aware of, including reading lots of video codex little else can can read. Not being a coder myself I guess I don't know what to look for at the code level....and if it's in my machine to look at it's probably too late. We use VPN at work, but clicking on a sour link from Russia probably won't save your butt. I had an attempted ransom a long time ago. I played hardball. I just wiped the computer and started over. That was back in the day when I was dumb enough to use Limewire to download music. That's pretty much like opening the door and saying, "come on in". I hated to see Adode flash go. A bunch of our much needed software ran on it. Apparently it could be exploited. Let's just say you are not alone in thinking these thoughts.

I need to do this as well. Seriously considering deleting ACID and Mixcraft...or just having them available on my laptop. I hated to do it, but I deleted a few never used libraries. Remember Kirk Hunter diamond orchestra? It was purdy. It was an older version though and kinda quirky. Not to mention tech has moved ahead to better sounding more realistic libraries. Another place where memory gets eaten like a Burger King whopper is when your DAW makes useless random files you'll never need or use, like copies of older versions of songs and track clips you've long forgotten about.

I miss my old CME 88 key controller and wish I had never sold it because it had lots of knobs and sliders. The MKII seems to be about as close to a unified DAW/synth controller as anyone is likely to find unless you go the Mackie route or similar and it's going to cost a lot more money. I had some growing pains with the MKII in figuring some of it out on different DAWS. I now have it working well in Ableton and Cubase. I have the keys working in Cakewalk and right now that's good enough for me since I know most of the keystrokes on Cakewalk already and can probably work faster that way. I would like to get the sliders working in Cakewalk. I diddled with different modes last night trying to do it, but it appears ACT is probably going to be my answer in Cakewalk. Cakewalk seems to rely more on MMC otherwise. If anyonewants to share how they got it working in Cakewalk I would appreciate it. Arturia will let you map to their user mode as well basically tying anything to anything else. This is probably ok as long as midi cc isn't chosen that overlaps with more important rudimentary functions like the basic keys, mod wheel etc. I don't claim to be a midi guru.

EZ Drummer is only drums of course and it plays midi lines mapped to the kits in it. Drums can be tuned but not usually transposed. It sounds to me like you just need to put together a midi composition in Cakewalk. In that domain you can tune any instrument in it at random, mix the midi to decent instruments and you're done. Any similar drum kit, including the one in Cakewalk can be set into such a composition. We don't say that Apple word around here very often. I'm feel confident in saying they are both just fine. I haven't heard all of the sample paks for either BFD 3 or SD3. I can only say that BFD3 had some amazing samples right out of the box and I could make them anything I wanted to make them. I had no need to really look at anything else. I'll probably roll with the new LM even though I hate it. The BIG thing with BFD3 is probably lack of VST3. Cubase won't scan VST 2, neither will Ableton. Sure I could still throw it in UNIFY and probably make it work but if you don't have it that's another 79.00. Those coders need to get cracking on a VST3 version of BFD3 IMHO. One benefit to Cakewalk is they haven't ditched VST2..............yet. Toontrack had a program that will remap drums from other programs. I don't believe they have done much with it for a long time or if you can still get it. I have it. It's called EZplayer pro. It had midi map wrapper for different formats, say if you wanted to buy 3rd party midi loops mapped to another drum kit. It will be interesting to see if EZDrummer 3 has any flexibility in deciding if you want to change the assignments. Most DAWS will let you build your own drum maps as well.

For me, I already had the Arturia license manager installed prior to this. I only had a few free plugins in it, but I was on their mailing list. Getting your foot into their door like this might help in the future. I think my break was I had the free software that came with MKII which were older versions of V lab. Those versions were registered before the sale. This saved me 350.00 and qualified me for their offer. Still a far cry from 99.00 or 149.99. but I'll take 249.00 . From now on any updates shouldn't cost me anywhere near this amount. If they do I won't buy. If the window hasn't closed on the sale, buying even their 49 key controller isn't a bad deal if you were looking for something like that. Keylab Essentials boards aren't as well made but you can land an 88 key that gets the job done ok for under 4 bills US and I'm pretty sure it carries the same software offer. I would make sure before I bought one and look at when this window closes.

TS MAX has not generally been part of the group buys in the past. This year it was a separate sale. To me it's becoming a lot like the updates to Komplete where I question the upgrade price .vs the amount of added value. MODO Bass is a fantastic program though and if I didn't want a MAX package I would surely consider buying it separate. MODO probably WILL be in a future group buy. ..............but since almost everyone here already has everything they are going to need to get really creative for the next GB.

I realize there was a buyout of Fxpansion. For this I don't believe any of those who worked so hard to make such a fantastic drum program should be held accountable for what has happened unless they were also owners. Sorry to hear about the way the new license manager works. I think it's tragic when the amount of trust a company puts in it's customer base demands something like this. Once again, I know it wasn't you if you were somehow involved in the company's products. I would have personally rather had a simple ilok setup over this. It's probably sign in time for me again as it's probably been three months since I used it. If they don't wake up soon they are going to loose their entire customer base IMHO.

Well now it works. Wind must have changed direction.

How about accordion players? Never mind. It actually has to be music.

Cool. Thanks @abacab