Matthew Sorrels

Every audio app/plugin on earth is using the TensorFlow stuff to split audio into parts. Acoustica 7 has it and now Spectralayers are the two I know about. I'd bet other plugins/apps are also using it. With the right training I think it does a OK job. But I'd not want to count on it all that much. SL7's splitter isn't bad but each layer isn't exactly pure or clean. Better than nothing but not quite as good as real stems. https://www.tensorflow.org/

Google's recent update to their authenticator lets you export your 2 factor keys to another machine. You aren't stuck anymore with it.

I don't think there is a VST2 plugin? Sure didn't ask for a directory to put it into.

I use Keepass on everything and sync my encrypted password file using Google Drive. So the file is kept updated on all my computers and phones and tablets. I think most normal people just use a password manager that lives in the cloud. But I've been doing the shared Keepass thing for a very long time and have been loath to change. I also let Firefox and Chrome keep accounts/passwords to make logging in easier, but I keep master copies in Keepass. I like the fact that each entry can have comments and notes, so I record all those silly questions sites love to add to identify you. Plus pins and anything else. Of course if you can get my password file and brute force the password you would have everything. But I don't think anyone has the computational power to do that right now. At least not with my current password.

My login seems to work. Note their store has a different password/account than MySteinberg (steinberg.net and your software account) I have two different passwords for that. You might want to try another browser. I've been having all kinds of strange browser issues requiring I use a lot of different browsers this last week. I even ended up having to use Edge when Chrome and Firefox wouldn't work on (of course) Microsoft site's login.

Never use the same password on more than one site. Seriously. Yes it's painful, so get a password manager (or use the browser stuff). For every site generate a new random password. The two together (different passwords everywhere and password not humanly generated) you can avoid a lot of issues. If you use the same password on more than one site and your password is something in the dictionary (or on the list of top 100 used passwords) and you will get hacked a lot. No matter how great the site encrypts your password, if your password isn't crazy random it will be decrypted in no time. For anything relating to money I'd recommend adding some sort of 2 factor authentication as well.

$80 to make Spectralayers Pro 6 do what it should have done when it was released. I went ahead and did the upgrade, but I'm not very happy about it. Just did a quick spin with it in stand-alone mode. The processing seems kind of slow. For example you can't easily or quickly preview VST3 plugins. While the preview is playing changes to the plugin's UI don't seem to take effect (or at least didn't for the R4 reverb) I had to stop the preview and press the preview button again, which then takes a really long time to start playing (on a monster machine). And you can't toggle the bypass effect during the preview playback. It's very awkward. Maybe I'm missing something but this isn't how VST3 effects should be. The layers in ARA 2 is a welcome addition. Seemed to work. I loaded in some audio, unmixed the stems and each one was a layer. Inside Nuendo (didn't try anything else yet). Note: if you are going to uninstall SL 6, do it BEFORE you install SL 7. They share the same VST3 plugin. So if you uninstall SL6 after you install SL7 you lose the ARA plugin and have to reinstall.

Technically this isn't an upgrade. It's a sequel. With a discount for previous owners. The real question: is any percussion library worth $400? The vendors seem to think so, but discounting 50% is pretty much standard. To be honest I think they are running about twice what this is worth, should be $200 full price, $150 intro, $100 for Damage 1 owners. Still it does sound and looks very nice. I'd pick it up on a better deal, but that might be a few years.

Looks like it's a whole new download. They pretty much re-worked everything. Not sure what I should do with the old one (may need it for older projects I'd imagine). They do seem to have removed the Tutorial Files directory and the stuff that was in it. The new GUI is nice. Can't really remember how the old one sounds to be able to tell what's different though.

Looks like they added the Emotional Cello free update to my account, though I haven't seen email about it yet.

When I just want to play around with the AI I actually like using the stand alone Composer. It annoys me that it complains it can't find the MIDI channels (I uninstalled their MIDI expansion since I already have a full LoopBe30). The whole interface between a DAW and Composer is so much of a pain. But that's mostly using it as a doodle kind of thing. I almost never take anything out of it and back into a DAW. But I do like having it and launch it often to just play. For actual work in a DAW I tend to use Captain Chords more often. Though to be honest the two products are very equal. I like the Orb AI and the Arp module is pretty nice. I think for melody work Orb is better. If you were more interested in full on composing Rapid Composer is by far the better tool (than Orb Composer). But for EDM/Pop/synth type music I think Orb Producer is pretty solid. I installed this latest update. Everything seems to work for me. The UI is resizable (that happened a while back I think) and the AI is pretty good at producing interesting things. The synth/sounds I'm going to have to say aren't all that interesting, but I'm not sure it's fair to judge that compared to my vast library of Kontakt libs and an army of synth plugins. Orb Producer still has some of the issues it had when it first came out. Velocity still seems to be an afterthought and it has no way of doing articulations. It wasn't really designed to control other instruments all that well (but it can so it's not a lost cause). I think it's a pretty nice tool for working with music theory and quickly generating chords/melodies. Especially if you don't play piano. They have some nice video's on YouTube that can show how it can work. As long as you are realistic about what these kinds of plugins do, I think any of them can be useful. But none of them will replace actual composing, at least yet.

You can load multiple versions of the Producer plugins into the same project, but everyone shares the same chord progression, no matter how many copies of chords you load. But each chord does seem to have it's own settings/instrument/etc but the progression is completely shared. So yes you can have multiple melodies/bass/chords/arps at the same time. And you can just take the MIDI from one and make a real track out of it. Honestly Composer and Producer are very different things. I'd almost think it's best to not think of them as "together" at all. Composer doesn't appear to be as in active development as Producer. I'm not sure what that means though. I don't think they have any active communication channels. Just a handful of forum posts like this one and YouTube videos.

Assuming you have Cakewalk configured to 960 ticks per quarter note (it is an option in preferences under project->clock) you can use 0.016 * BPM * delay to compute the delay in ticks. So a delay of -250ms would be 480 ticks at 120BPM

PDC is for audio track/plugin compensation. For MIDI tracks (and sample libraries) you can adjust the offset in the Track Inspector by setting the MIDI Offset Controls Time+ The units for this is in ticks, which the conversion requires using the current projects BPM. As a result I've never bothered trying to use it.

I think for a beginner FabFilter is way overkill. There is no way you will get anything close to value out of having it early in your musical journey. That doesn't mean it isn't excellent stuff, but jumping into the Mastering Bundle is a bit much. The same is also true of the iZotope advanced versions. The extra things the advanced versions bring aren't going to be all that big a deal either. But the better answer is the question: What do you want to do? If you just want to eq mixes, Fabfilter's Pro-Q 3 is much better than any iZotope Eq. If you want to mix a track, Neutron is a better toolset for someone without a lot of experience. To mix a track using Fabfilter tools requires you know how to use a lot of tools, none of which will hold your hand even a little bit. Neutron has a lot more hand-holding/AI. If you want to master an album or a track, again Ozone is the better toolset for someone without a lot of experience. Mastering with Fabfilter requires really knowing how to master/what you want. Ozone can help you more. My advice if you must get some Fabfilter plugin, would be to just get Pro-Q 3 and not the Fabfilter Mastering bundle. The other Fabfilter plugins in the Mastering Bundle are still a version behind the flagship EQ (and the upgrades won't be free) and you aren't ready to use them just yet. Upgrade the iZotope plugins to advanced based on what you want to focus on, or just stand pat with the standard versions. Get a year of experience and then re-evaluate. Since Pro-Q 3 isn't on sale, I'd say you should wait till you can get it on sale (I think they will have some sale price on single plugins around xmas). Adding a bundle of tools just will make learning harder, I know this one from experience, since I love bundles. At least with iZotope you are talking about single tools. OK very complex bundles of tools all tied together, but still just two things. I bought the Fabfilter stuff in bundles and I know I've gotten less out of it because of that.

BBCSO/Spitfire's plugin isn't a multi-instrument/multi-channel system. So yes, you need a separate instance of it for every instrument. It's not like Kontakt where you can load once copy of Kontakt and it can contain multiple instruments.

I do know there have been reports of more issues with 6.3.1 and some Kontakt scripts on a few forums. I suspect another patch is coming. But I've not had any problems with multi-instrument Kontakt setups with any of these updates (and I'm using that a lot). Generally problems with multi-instruments/multi-channel are project specific configuration/setup issues. There are a lot of parts that have to be setup correctly or it doesn't work right. You might want to start an empty project and add everything one track at a time by hand using simple instruments (the Kontakt library instruments) and see if you can reproduce the problem. If you can't then it's something specific about your project. Could be anything of course, MIDI routing in Cakewalk can be complicated.

For the pitch bend I didn't do anything. I loaded the Guitar (any of them, though I mostly used the two with amps already included which don't seem to have the slide range selection) and loaded say Midi-4 [155bpm].MID and set the instrument to velocity mode, set my DAW to 155 bmp and hit play. The pitch bend in that MIDI file plays back very synthy. Here's Midi-4 with the Cabal 8 Crunch instrument. Cabal8CrunchMIDI4.mp3

I went ahead and picked it up, because I didn't feel at all offended by the imagery (my music needs all the paranormal assistance it can get ?), but I have to admit I'm kind of disappointed with it. There are only 7 MIDI files included, just a few bars in each. So kind of a let down there. The graphic/text is a bit hard to read at 4k, some more contrast would have been nice. I don't think it is doing the pitch bend all that well either (based on the included MIDI files) compared to some other guitars (Orange Tree Infinity and Shreddage 3 Jupiter) using the same MIDI. It does do pretty nicely with Heavier 7 Strings MIDI riffs though. Better than H7S does with Cabal's riffs (odd that). Of course MIDI guitars all have issues -- I'm not sure MIDI really captures a guitar performance correctly. It's even harder to share MIDI clips with them. You pretty much have to write to the instrument. Cabal is not the worst Kontakt guitar I've bought, but it's not the best either. Kind of blah really.

It appears NI broke something important in the new Kontakt 6.3.0 release the other day. They have released a fast update to fix this problem. So if you did update to Kontakt 6.3.0 you really need to get the new 6.3.1. If you haven't updated, well now it's even better. Run Native Access to get the update.

Note that if you are both a Red Room customer and own Cinemorphx/Morphestra you will get two different coupons, but can only use one of them -- yes, I tried. It also requires the full version of Kontakt. Which seems to be SampleLogic's new thing. The sale price is $249.99 and if you get the discount coupon you get $50 off. The coupons look custom (they aren't generic) but if anyone want's to try here's the one I didn't use: RRA-4gh4-4OfR-omd2-SAI

BOOM Library is celebrating 10 years and have marked their Cinematic Metal bundle (includes both the designed and full construction kit) to $10 https://www.boomlibrary.com/sound-effects/cinematic-metal/ Not sure I need 4000+ metal impact sound effects, but I couldn't pass up the discount. Their site also seems to indicate their will be other celebration deals.

Given the state of the world I think it's fair to say that past sales patterns are unlikely to hold this fall/winter/Christmas. Which certainly may help get a reasonable deal out of EastWest, but I wouldn't hold my breath. They seem to be focused on selling the subscription (and overpricing everything to make that more valuable).

So few EastWest sales include upgrades, you really shouldn't be all that surprised. I can only think of two in the last 4 years.

I'm sure there is some lag in order to do the English translation. I don't think they are making actual separate editions, they are just translating the content. Even with perfect translation software they would have to deal with layout issues. And I don't think any translation system is close to perfect, so figure a good bit of editor work. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a 2-3 week lag between the German and English editions. I hope they at least give it a try for a year.