David Inglesfield

I installed Sonar yesterday and noticed the above immediately. I never experienced it with Cakewalk by Bandlab. BUT, I also noticed that the glitching in the audio when scrolling across the tracks only seemed to happen the first time I opened the Console view. If I continued to scroll left and right across the tracks, the glitching didn't persist. And if I closed the Console view, and then reopened it and repeated the same action, again there was no glitching. So, maybe not a major thing, but nevertheless it was disconcerting to hear the glitching when it did occur. It made the program feel less reliable and stable than CbyB.

Well, Noel said that Sonar uses the latest versions, so presumably Cakewalk is the same, but I'm not sure about that. I'm running the latest version of Cakewalk by the way.

I was just on the point of installing DaVinci Resolve and had got to the screen with a series of tick boxes to install various redistributables when I hazily remembered a thread on here (this one as it turned out) where people mentioned it causing problems with Sonar. I’m actually using Cakewalk rather than Sonar but I’m still wary. Having aborted the installation, I thought I’d ask if there are people on here who have installed Cakewalk (not Sonar) then later installed DaVinci Resolve and found that Cakewalk WASN’T affected. I don’t want to go through some rigmarole with repairing my Cakewalk installation. I can do without DaVinci Resolve if necessary. But maybe I could install it, but untick all the boxes for the Microsoft redistributables? If the latest versions of these are already installed, wouldn’t Resolve then run fine using those?

I bought Scaper but so far I prefer PaulXStretch. The sounds coming out of Scaper seem always ominous and menacing, regardless of the source sample. There are relatively few parameters that can be adjusted. I've tried fiddling with everything, but still it sounds like a horror movie all the time. I guess the clue is in the description of it as 'cinematic'. By contrast, even though I don't really know what I'm doing with PaulXStretch, I find that when I play around with it, the sounds it outputs have much more variety and are more appealing, more atmospheric. I've got some lovely sounds out of it. Nevertheless, I'll persist with Scaper to see if I've misunderstood what it can do. Plus, I got SkyWaves as part of the deal, so I'm hopeful that will be useful as well.

Its fine on cpu, try demo, sale ends in 1 h 55 min -- Same observation here. I would like to add the following : The presets are well worth the 10 bucks for 10 packs. As far as I can see, they are very diverse and cover a lot of ground. Thanks, I'm convinced. I'm going to go for it right now.

It's at that sort of magic price where I'm a little tempted, particularly as the synth seems to be quite well thought of. But what I'd like to know is how CPU-heavy it is, say compared to something like Pigments. I find that I can run one instance of Pigments, but my computer is fairly old, so it can struggle a bit with it, depending on the patch and the number of embedded effects.

This video on YouTube has someone using three D-50s to make a sort of cover version. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jy5prYnd-iI&ab_channel=VstSample The top keyboard in the video, played in a low register, seems to be the one generating the ‘trombone’ sounds. It’s not clear if the video poster is using a preset or they programmed something similar. In the video comments, someone referred to a preset called ‘Space Fascination’ from an expansion card, while a second commenter mentioned a preset called ‘Phaedra’. It’s unclear if either of those is correct in relation to the ‘trombone’, but they might be worth looking into.

On some tracks on the album, yes, but not on 'Another Day in Paradise', at least according to Wikipedia.

In a 2011 discussion of this topic on another forum, someone said (and I think they are likely correct) that they believed it was a Roland D-50 patch: 'A lot of D-50 in "Another Day In Paradise". That long strange breathy intro sequence with bells and random horn sounds, for example, is a D-50 patch.' https://forum.vintagesynth.com/viewtopic.php?t=60399

Do you mean that you're running it as a real-time effect on the vocal track? I would think that would involve a lot of processing. But they shouldn't claim you can realistically do that if it's not really possible without noticeable latency. So far I've just used it to process audio files offline and then I import the processed audio file into the DAW. You could export your vocal, process it, then import it back in and line it up with the original to get the timing right. (In fact, come to think of it, a more primitive version of that was pretty much how I used to work back in the old days: record the backing vocals on several tracks of the multitrack, sample the best bits into an S3000 or something like that, then adjust the midi timing so the samples audibly lined up exactly with the originals on the multitrack.)

Does the activation work OK with Cakewalk? I really want to take advantage of the $29 price while it's around. I've been using the free beta version and found it very useful, and high quality.

No, no Soundtoys plugins. Updating what I wrote yesterday, I downloaded Samsung's Magician and it reported that my SSD is in 'Good' condition with no bad sectors. The Toybox Audio plugin Thump One was definitely causing problems, but I'm still confused as to why, at the stage that I was still running Thump One, altering buffer settings from 512 to 256 improved performance. And also why freezing VSTs led to worse performance, when there was a huge amount of space free on a fairly new SSD reported as being in 'Good' condition.

Thanks for the replies. Yes, I came to the same conclusion. While it is usable for me, the CPU load is rather heavy. As I was using it just to generate a kick drum repeating over and over again, it was a simple matter just now for me to export a single kick beat as audio, run the audio as a sample instead, and disable Thump One.

Thank you for that. I had been thinking about downloading Magician but hadn't got round to it. I think I'll do it now. The drive is fairly new but it might be something to do with that, certainly with regard to the worse performance when VSTs were frozen. I've also concluded that the VST Thump One was causing excessive engine load. I was using it to generate a kick drum, but exporting audio of the kick sound and running it as a sample instead through Shortcircuit, while disabling Thump One, has resulted in a much lighter engine load, peaking generally at about 60%. I'll probably leave the buffer setting on 256. That did cause me problems in the past, but maybe I can get away with it on some tracks, and switch to 512 only when there are issues.

I like this too. But how are you finding it in terms of CPU? I read on Bedroom Producers Blog some comments saying there was high CPU load. Some said that this only occurred when the GUI was open. I'm finding that it runs fine with the GUI closed, but I am experiencing some problems with late buffers on the one track I've used it on so far. Maybe this is the culprit, though it could be something else.