Amberwolf

There are some streaming services that appear to have somehow messed up the soundtrack of various documentaries such that all the backing sounds and music are blasting over the voiceovers, making them unwatchable. In some it is almost as if they used some sort of reverse-ducking, where the voice gets ducked instead of the rest, *and* at the same time also increases the volume of the rest of the stuff. One of the Jim Al Khalili physics documentaries (don't remember which) was the worst, couldn't even hear that anyone was even talking thru the majority of it, I think on Amazon PV. Some of them even seem to be the wrong soundtrack--like they took two channels out of a surround mix and fed them to left and right of a stereo signal instead--but didn't use the main L and R channels, and instead used some other pair that has mostly music and effects in it, and very little center / vocal / etc. I have such problems hearing (well, really it's *understanding*) voices in various circumstances that I use a multiband compressor and limiter to greatly reduce eveyrhting but the main voice bands, and to really smash everything down (and bring up the low levels of quiet passages) for any "show" I watch. But even that doesn't fix the shows they've messed up this way. And even if I bypass it and just listen normaly, it's still very messed up.

a spam post that appears to have since been removed. figured while i was in the thread i might as well post a useful tidbit... (many spammers quote someone's long post, so that most of the quote is not visible unless you click the expander, and then edit an obvious spam link or phrase (or lots of them) into the quote, where it won't be seen 99% of the time as nobody expands the quotes, just reads the responses. so they get their spam in there where a websearch robot will find it for seo purposes, but where moderators and members of a forum almost never will notice, so it stays up at least long enough to do the job of making the linked / keyworded site(s) rank higher in search engines as those rankings are based on how many other sites link to those sites (rather than how many people actually used a search result, or searched for that site, etc). i'm an admin over on endless sphere in charge of spam control more or less, so i've seen practically everything so far there in the last decade and a half or so)

Also, if you are dealing with mono audio (vs stereo), you can turn on snap to grid, turn off Musical Time, switch from Move By to Move To, and turn on just Audio Zero Crossings in the landmarks, and use max Magnetic Strength. I don't know what the snap dialog looks like these days, but in my ancient version these settings make it relatively easy to avoid clicks from non-zero-crossing cuts of audio clips; if for whatever reason I didn't cut at one to start with I can just slip edit until it "gets sticky" and let go and it will be where it needs to be. Unfortunately with stereo clips it's not very often that both channels have a zero crossing in exactly the same place, so this trick doesn't really work very well for those.

wait for the remote control implants

I'm pretty sure it's that you get older. But maybe we already said that?

If the sound is there like normal when you play the recorded tracks, but you just can't see it, then it doens't have anything to do with hte source, as the recording is still happening as normal. That usually means either you are zoomed out vertically on the track itself so that it can't display the waveform, and vertically zooming in on it would show it, or that the wave isn't being drawn because something has caused the "picture cache" files that contain the preview of these waveforms to go missing or be corrupted. You can regenerate those either by opening the properties for the clip (alt-enter, or double-click, or rightclick on it and choose clip properties, etc) and finding hte button to redraw those (in my ancient version that is in the last tab on the right), or by emptying hte picture cache folder (there are a few threads about that including one posted to just yesterday, if you poke around the forums). If the sound is not there either when you play back, then you'd need to be sure that you are getting sound from the source and it's showing that on the record meter inside the recording program.

Introducing Cap'n Maggie Carrington, "leader" of our reluctant heroes, and fixer-upper of their misadveturously acquired owies, from the Drywater, Mars series. https://amberwolf.bandcamp.com/track/capn-maggie-carrington-drywater-mars-part-8 Presently with some placeholder vocals from Artifact until I finish building the new versions.

Introducing Cap'n Maggie Carrington, "leader" of our reluctant heroes, and fixer-upper of their misadveturously acquired owies, from the Drywater, Mars series. https://amberwolf.bandcamp.com/track/capn-maggie-carrington-drywater-mars-part-8 Presently with some placeholder vocals from Artifact until I finish building the new versions.

Not sure what the picture showing BlueCat's Gain Suite for free in your Plugin Boutique account back in 2020 has to do with the described issues with Scaler...?

Thanks! I'll poke around with it and see what I can mangle with it.

If you didn't use bank/patch changes, and didn't save the preset separately from the project as an FXB or FXB file to manually load into the plugin, then the preset data is simply part of the project data that would be fed into the plugin itself directly and isn't user accessible. If the plugin isn't installed, and you just get the "missing plugin" dialog for it, the preset info is not sent anywhere becuse there's nowhere to send it. If the new version of the plugin is so badly designed that it doesn't understand or accept data intended for it's previous versions, then that data is "lost", in that there is nowhere for you to retrieve it from. To get that data back you'd have to install the old version of the plugin that the data was intended for/came from, and load the version of the project that still asked for it (hasn't yet been replaced by the new one). Then you could try saving the state as an FXP (preset) or FXB (bank) and then see if that data will still load into the new version of the plugin. My guess is it will not, because that's the same data Sonar would be sending it anyway so if it is not accepting it now it probably won't then either. At that point, you would have to manually recreate your preset by taking screenshots of all the controls in all the various parts of the plugin with the old version, and then try to figure out what those correspond to in the new version, and set those controls the same way. It will probably still not sound the same if they've really changed it that much to not accept the old data, though.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding people's use cases for remote control and midi learn and even ACT, but: If you could't record the incoming control data onto the tracks, how would it be useful for automating things? If all you could do with it was do a realtime control, you could not use it to do anyting more than you could just do within the program or synth interface itself as a one-time change, and would not be very useful beyond avoiding opening the UI sections with the controls you're changing. Being able to automate the changes over time within a project, which is the most useful (to me and probably many or most others) application of external control of a parameter, requires being able to record them into the tracks so that they get played back to the controlled parameter during the project. Otherwise you have to remember all of your sequences of control manipulations and then manually do these over and over eveyr time you play back the project. You must also do them again while you realtime record the project out from the tracks to an audio recording, because you won't be able to ever fast bounce anything without that control data being automated inside the tracks themselves.

If I could just tell the computer what I want and have it do that....

That's about the same reaction I get from JellyBeanThePerfectlyNormalSchmoo when my brother says "the dog" in some phrase referring to her.... :lol:

ok, i think i understand now. (my brain doens't work like normal people's)

A friend in Utah has to ride a bicycle in traffic on roads with holes that he describes as worse than those of old bombed out runways.... I don't ahve a picture of what he actually rides thru, but apparently som of htem are pretty bad based on a google image search I gather that some time ago, Texas tried out converting poorly maintained paved roads to gravel instead of fixing them.... I used to live in farm country in Texas between DFW and Red River, not far off the interstate, and almost all our roads were gravel, even in (the very very small) town. Some of the holes and other road conditions were enough to break vehicles unless they just crawled along or sped really really fast (enough so that they could lose control), and once the schoolbus was broken (axle or driveshaft, I dont' remember as that was a loooong time ago but it was very loud and the adults were very angry) not far from where it picked me up. We used to have "suicide hill" a ways down the road from my house, where the white (limestone?) rock shelf the road crossed was too hard for the occasional road grading to do anything to, so the sharp drop off there just got steeper and steeper as the top of the shelf was graded down onto but the part past it would get graded away and washed / pushed away by traffic and weather, down into a "gulley", making a very short but very steep hill. The bus broke going over that shelf. At some other point I was going down that hill belwo the shelf on a bicycle and skidded out in the gravel trying to avoid a hole or something, and tore myseful up pretty good before sliding to a stop at the bottom. One also had to sometimes avoid large bigger-than-head-sized fossils (and other rocks) eroded out of the limestone, usually ammonites, that could end up in the roadbed (sometimes having been in the roadbed and then pulled out by traffic or the grader, leaving a giant hole), or be sticking up out in the middle of a plowed field.

Thats not in this thread so I still don't undestand this thread's first post? Shouldn't it be in that thread?

Um, what post? Yours is the first one in this thread, and it is from today (11-16-2025)...I'm confused.

I have learned not to even bother visiting channels that do that, same as forum posters that post something useful, and then delete it. I've added many videos from various people to my watch later to learn from when I find the time, only to end up with the message "x number of unavailable videos are hidden", or have a bookmark to a video only to go back and find "can't find this" or "this video was deleted by the user". I've also bookmarked many posts in many forums to go back and read, only to find they're deleted by the user once I get the chance to do so. Whenever I can see or figure out which user it was I "block" them or "ignore" them so I never have to waste time on them again. Now I have another user / channel to add to the list. It's a waste of any user's time to go find things to learn from, only to have them disappear so that when they go back to learn from them and find they're not there anymore. Any content creator that does this is worthless for this reason.

For systems that are fan cooled, that's a fairly common cause of failures, by causing the fan to fail or inlet grilles to clog up, decreasing cooling to the point where heat begins to damage things. I've seen it in many many computer systems (especially laptops). But most audio equipment is not fan cooled (because that's usually noisy enough to interfere with it's intended usage), so it's not a common cause of such equipment. In old stuff, especially a couple of decades or more, and especially that is often left on (even if not active) for long periods, it's more common for elecrolytic capacitors to degrade or fail outright. In stuff that gets thermally cycled frequently with a wide difference between cool and hot states, fractures in the solder (or even PCB traces) for PCB-heatsink-mounted parts or transformers directly mounted on PCBs (vs wired in from off-board) aren't uncommon, and tend to cause problems in the cold state that don't happen in the hot state.

Whenever you put it up I'll see if it will register and operate here (occasionally in testing things like this I've found something that works on a dev system has a dependency that didnt' get packaged with it during compile), then I can play with it and let you know of any issues (or feature requests if you accept those).

Given the age, a faulty power supply to the system MCU or other logic is most likely. Extra noise in the low-voltage logic supply (usually 5v, sometimes 3.3v) from failing capacitors in the power supply PSU not filtering properly. That is usually a simple fix, replacing any of the electrolytic capacitors in the PSU itself, a few bucks' worth typically. Sometimes they show obvious signs of swelling or leaking, sometmes they look perfectly normal but have simply aged out as electrolytics have a limited lifespan--typically guaranteed for a certain number of hours at a given voltage / temperature depending on ripple current they experience (whcih is a lot in many PSUs, at elevated temperatures, decreasing the potential lifespan). Less likely, it could the ground issue, but probably not the same way. In this type of failure, it would be more likely that they use a serial data from that panel's own MCu to the MCU that does all the major systems control. The serial data in these situations is usually I2C (IIC) and if it is not all on the same PCB then a faulty ground or signal could cause this type of problem.

If you want to troubleshoot it, the most likely problem is one of hte buttons is stuck down internally (inside the switch itself, or a plastic bit from the panel has jammed between the button and the top of the electrical switch), or the ground (or other common wire) to the panel is broken or has a poor solder joint. Have had both of those cause this type of issue on various front panels of assorted "dead" thriftstore and yardsale finds over the years.

It sounds sort of like an automatable version of Variorum's "compressor" (if that one isn't already automatable). If it's available as a 32-bit MFX, I'd be interested in playing with it on my ancient SONAR . If it obeys normal automation data within a MIDI track (not just CCs within clips) then you could copy automation cuves you have created in other tracks to the track it's on and then reassign those to it's parameter(s).

BTW, for all the readers of the thread, there are, AFAICT, two separate MIDI routing systems within Sonar. If this is incorrect, please specify where I've misunderstood or gone wrong. The first is at the MIDI tracks themselves, and obeys all the track controls, etc. The second is the Remote Control system, which AFAICT without being able to test ATM, does not have any control over which ports or channels are received by or sent from a widget (on a track or inside a synth, etc), it globally recieves or sends this data on all ports. (possilby restricted to hardware ports vs synth's virtual ports internal to Sonar), restricted only by the channel selection when assigning a remote control. (which cannot be set to send or receive on more than one channel, AFAIK, no Omni option for instance; not sure if there is any reason to be able to have that ability). This system is used even if there are NO MIDI tracks at all, as you can use this system to assign RC to audio track controls, for instance, and that is almost certainly why this second system even exists. This second system is the one Astraios is having issues with, in trying to do external control of assorted things within his projects.