Matthew Sorrels

I bought a bundle of his stuff that included D-Looper. Was kind of looking forward to it. But while he tosses around the words "with support for ACID WAV / Apple Loops", it doesn't actually read Acid information out of wave files. Nor does it read Apple loop markers either. Which makes its value kind of weak at best. This isn't a super high bar (read the loop markers that are in the wave file/aiff file), but it doesn't do that. Was very disappointing.

Looking at my CAL scripts I found this RemoveDupNotes that I guess I wrote (don't remember it to be honest). It does duplicate note removal on polyphonic sequences by processing each MIDI note lane. Not sure it really works though, but it might be a start. I bet it's pretty slow. There is a bunch of debugging stuff commented out if you find it's not working for you. RemoveDupNotes.cal

Play has been borked for years, the engine doesn't correctly play release samples when data isn't fully loaded into memory and you fast bounce (or actually even normal bounce). If you want to use Play the only way is to cache the samples fully in memory (there is an option in the menu) and to never use fast bounce. And it's not just Cakewalk, every other DAW has these problems to. Using a very fast SSD can help, but mostly what it does is just make it hard to notice it, but it still happens. They have been told extensively about it, for years. I've given up on a fix coming. Load everything into RAM and slow bounce and you can mostly get by.

They just released v1.1.2, guess v1.1.1 had some issues:

https://www.samplemodeling.com/en/news.php Basically they have a no sales policy but for this pandemic they are making an exception. Solo & Ensemble Strings: Eur. 299 instead of 399 Samplemodeling Brass: Eur. 299 instead of 399 The Trumpet, the Trombone and French Horn & Tuba: Eur. 119 each, instead of 159 Digital River will add VAT (if you're in the EU) or US sales tax. Plus currency credit card fees or Digital River's currency fees. Full Kontakt is not required. I've never bought any of their stuff because of their no sales policy, but I just picked up the Brass bundle. On loading the Trumpet it tells me it hasn't received CC11 and thus won't work, making me stretch under my desk to get at my expression pedal. Might be a bit more involved than I normally like. If you don't have an expression controller, you may not like their brass.

Early on they were show stoppers. So much so I pretty much only ran the beta builds, which he released relentlessly. I seem to remember days where he would actually ship multiple updates on the same day. It's not quite like that any more. In fact I don't think I'm on a beta build right now. Most of the bugs these days are just annoyances. There is a lot of logic behind how music works and it's easy for things to not work right. If you read the KvR bug thread https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=168&t=450065 You can see some of the history of issues that have come up. I don't think bugs should be the major issue with deciding if you and Rapid Composer are compatible. It also sounds like he's going to take the melody generator and make stand alone plugins out of it (I hope he does more than just it). Which I think is a great idea. I do recommend getting the full version, the extra tools are really the heart of Rapid Composer. The generators it has are crazy complicated but also generate some of the most usable MIDI. Need a strum, its got it. Want an ostinato, there is a generator for that too. Fingerpicking, check. Bass generator, check. And it follows your chord progression and all the crazy music theory math you can imagine. And then on top of what it generates you can toss in a bunch of phrase variation tools, to humanize things, change chords/ velocity/etc. Here's the generators it has (every one of these has zillions of options): Then here is the list of phrase variations you can stack and use with those generators (think of them as extra MIDI plugins): But with this near infinite amount of power comes a pretty near infinite amount of complexity. If you can get your head around it though, I think it's amazing. I'm fully prepared to pay full price to get the next upgrade, I think it's that good and worth supporting. But it's not for everyone. I'm a big believer in anyone can be a "professional" and should/can use professional tools if/when they want to. But Rapid Composer is one of those tools that learning to use it and getting something out of it is a lot harder than most music software products -- sometimes the pro tools aren't a good match for the normal user. Rapid Composer is one of those apps that while it's crazy complex, it's not because of bad design or because of poor planning (in general). It's very precise about how it works. It has it's own logic and workflow. Taking a pass on it isn't unreasonable though.

I have all of these (Orb Composer/Sundog/ChordPotion/Rapid Composer) you name it, I've bought it. I've spent a lot of time with Rapid Composer. The developer is very responsive and has taken and fixed bug reports pretty much non-stop. The problem of course is that it has had bugs, pretty much non-stop. That said in the last few years it has really grown a lot. While it does have some of the best generators out there, it also is one of the few apps in this class that I don't feel like I'm just driving a random number generator. You really can compose with it and it really can help you do that. But the learning curve is pretty much a brick wall. From the very odd/unique UI that wraps the whole app to some of its crazy ways of working with things -- it's very hard to get to grips with. I figure I maybe understand about 20% of it. Huge sections of it I still have no idea how to use. And I first bought it in Dec 2014. There is a lot more learning material available now which can really help, but even still I think most users are going to find it's almost impossible to get a handle on. My only advice is to try the demo and watch some of the videos. Also download all the user generated phrases/content you can find on KvR. While I think it might offer some big productivity wins if you go all in and use it to make an entire work, I'm still at the using it to generate short (less than 24 measures) bits which I almost always take out of it and put into a more productive DAW. I know I'd get big wins if I did the whole work inside it, but I just can't quite do that full level of project management with it (part of the huge sections I have no idea how to use). I think I have the most fun with it when I just use it as a phrase/chord/melody generator. It might sound like I'm not recommending it, but that's not really the whole truth. I do recommend it very highly but not for everyone. For me it has helped me start thinking about music and music theory in ways I don't think I would have without it.

If someone really had nothing and just wanted full Kontakt getting a player library and then crossgrading is the best deal. But honestly with NI things are set up so a better deal is to get a version of Komplete that includes the full Kontakt. Komplete isn't cheap (though I think there are some cross grade deals) but you do get a ton of great stuff. Once you have an account at NI if you go to the Kontakt crossgrading order page and are logged in it will tell you if you qualify for the cross-grade offer (and which product it thinks qualifies you). That list of 3rd party libraries may or may not be "komplete" lol.

Traditionally the cheapest way to get the full version of Kontakt was to get one of the handful of free Kontakt player libraries and use that as the crossgrade. The trick of course is sometimes NI changes the rules on which of the free Kontakt libraries qualify (if any of them) In the past I know users have used Sennheiser's DrumMic'A, which can be gotten for free (in the past you had to get through the German language website for registering but that looks like it's changed). https://en-us.sennheiser.com/drummica Recently ProjectSAM released a free Kontakt player library, The Free Orchestra. I'd try that if I were starting from scratch https://projectsam.com/libraries/the-free-orchestra/ There are a few other free Kontakt player libraries (if neither of those two qualify). There are also a bunch of low priced Kontakt player libraries that will certainly work, though most of those seem to be stuck in the $99 price range. There are exceptions though, Soundiron has a handful of $39 Kontakt player libraries for example. https://soundiron.com/collections/kontakt-player-edition-collection If you are going to go that route it's best if you find a cheap library you'd actually use/want. But I'd try the free ones first. You might also want wait for the next sale to buy the crossgrade, NI usually has a summer sale of some sort.

Your dump doesn't have very much in it. No plugins in the crashing thread. It appears though you are using Gutair Rig 5, Ozone 8 and a bitbridged 32-bit plugin. When in doubt, it's ALWAYS the 32-bit bit-birdged plugin that causes the crash. So I'd say it's the most likely place to start. Also the version of Cakewalk you are running doesn't match mine, which means you haven't updated. Your running 25.11.0.54, the current version is 26.1.0.28 Update your software, all of it (windows, video card drivers, etc). But especially Cakewalk. Remove any 32-bit plugins from your project. Good luck.

From the change log: I think I'm going to wait, this doesn't seem 8.62GB worth of important.

The loops aren't bad, but they are kind of stuck in UVI/Falcon. You can drag and drop them out, one at a time now (a new feature I think, they updated the library). But otherwise you have to use UVI player. Which is kind of un-Acid like and just bothers me a bit (I like to paint loops not trigger them in a sampler). I've had this for a long, long time and I've used it zero times. The workflow with UVI for loops always made it not worth it.

If you hold a key/chord while you do the drag it reflects what you are holding. If you don't you get the same base chord/note. I suspect if you use the latch mode you might not even need to hold, I didn't try that. The MIDI it generates do have keyswitch leader notes at C-2 that trigger VB into instrument mode for every note on. So if you wanted to use that MIDI somewhere else you'd need to lasso delete or filter those keyswitch notes out. Unlike the guitarist the bass instruments are all playable as instruments, which is a big win.

I went ahead and upgraded. I just bought the Bass bundle at the end of Feb, so less than a month ago. You can drag the MIDI by dragging the top part of the phrase keys. It has a couple of lines that is the drag "source".

Unify's dependence on open source VST plugins seems to take some of the value out of it for me. The presets are pretty nice though. I wish the content management was a bit better. Plugins that have their own/expandable content/presets aren't new but lately it's been a lot of focus. But in almost every case the end user headaches are way too high. The idea that a community will share patches and content for free hasn't ever really worked all that well, Native Instruments Reactor I suppose is the only "good" example I can think of, and it's a zoo. Unify has a bit of that still, instead of supporting a managed a curated library of high quality (and perhaps paid) content. I don't want 9999 patches of various quality and value. I want 10 excellent patches with well thought out macros and controls. I need less quantity and more quality.

They vastly overpriced the full version, and this doesn't fix that. I have Symphobia 1 and 3 and the Animators. They are great libraries, but they are normally way overpriced and I only got them because of the NKS deals brought the price down to earth. Symphobia 4 though is a new level of crazy pricing.

Are you using the Instruments drop down and selecting PG-8X or are you using the Tags drop down and finding the PG-8X tag? Using the Tags I only get the Spitting Piano. But the Instruments drop down gives the larger list, since it's built from the plugins on the patch.

If you expand/scroll that view database window really, really wide, there is a column "InstPlugin" that may be where the instrument tagging is coming from.

So looking at my database, the patches that do show up as tagged PG-8X don't have that tag in the View Database window. See the tags on LEAD - Fat Blat Brass and LEAD - Fat Blat Brass octaves below, but they both show up in the browser when I pick Instruments->PG-8X The only patch with the PG-8X is the KEY - Spitting Piano (see it in the shot below a bit above the selected line).

They still haven't really integrated the Expontential Audio product line into the iZotope way. The Product Portal won't update them and they are all tied to only iLok authorizations. I've never seen anything that said they would be changing this, but it has to be on their to-do list.

You should also have a 2.35gig Unify Factory Content.guru file that contains most of the patches. Depending on when you bought Unify that base file may contain all the 1.0.12 update data. There is also a button to add a guru file on the option panel which works the same as drag and drop.

Did you hit the Reset All at the top before picking the PG-8X tag? Unify doesn't seem to like letting you un-select a tag, so I found I often ended up with less matches because something else was also selected.

Well removing and reinstalling all the presets didn't help. Still crashes on load of any of those PG-8X presets. The synth itself can be loaded though, but I did get it to crash once that way, but only once. But the PG-8X presets all crash instantly if I load any of them.

Here's what I see I think I may re-download and install all the content. Sadly PG-8X doesn't have any source available so I can't really debug why it's crashing.

If you have Unify could you do me a favor and go into the browser and under instruments pick PG-8X. The 6 patches there all crash Unify standalone and as a plugin for me, but not for the Unify guys. I'm curious if these patches work for other users (and I'm just the odd man out) or if other users get crashes also. I don't remember trying them before I upgraded, so if you haven't upgraded and they work that might interesting to know as well.