Amberwolf

Thanks! I usually consider my stuff "#motion picture scenes" (a hashtag I put on them sometimes); it's not really music you might just listen to for the sake of doing so, but it would often fit as background to something else. But sometimes I'm successful and manage to evoke a vision or a feeling with one, now and then. Some of them I have an intent, or an idea, behind them (like this one), most of them I'm just feeling my way around the sounds and letting it take me along for the ride while I grab the edges and fold them and trim them.... I only have maybe a couple dozen hours of editing into this one so far; I haven't even broken 100 versions saved yet. Usually takes at least that many to get close to where I want to go. Some songs I get stuck, usualy on a technical issue, sometimes a musical muse one, and don't get it really "finished" (I put them up anyway, so that the few that want to listen can). This one still has some ohter pieces to add; I have to find the right strings sound (or make it) to blend and contrast (in different places) with the vocals. Something else also has to be added, but I dont know what it is yet--my brain is still working on that, and hasn't told me about it yet. I've been trying for years to find good ways to get voices in there, especially for performances like these, but even if I could sing (can't carry a tune in a locked steel box), I have the completely wrong kind of voice--I want to sound like what you hear in this one and the other recent ones, but it's not possible. You can hear my actual voice (with lots of technical work on the clips after recording them) in these two and a few other worse ones https://amberwolf.bandcamp.com/track/back-to-the-world https://www.soundclick.com/amberwolf/?more=13530596 So having found these really cheap libraries I can snip up and use (or in the case of Less Like A Whisper, use several entire phrases, started out just as a toy to play wiht the sounds I'd gotten, but turned into a song. ) Some of them I pitch correct***, some are already in the key, and sometimes I build that bit of the song around whatever they are because I like the way they sound as-is. I also tend to trim off just the bits I need for that section, or evne just that note, snipping a phrase apart and sometimes reassembling it differently than it was recorded. And I often stretch or scrunch clips timewise to fit the rest of whats' going on. Some of that is done to a whole clip, and some of it I'll split it after some part of the phrase and then stretch the rest out to make it to a beat or some other sound that's going on, so it doens't mess up the timing of the whole phrase. ***some of the pitch correction is done to the whole clip, and some of it is done to just a syllable or section. I almost always just use the built in clip function for that. So I'll either enable loop or fit to tempo modes (the only way you can enable pitch changes in the clip dialog), then pitch it up or down as needed. Almost always that is only needed in whole notes, but sometimes I'll use a few cents here and there to detune for multiple voices together, or to correct a mistuning, or just for effect. There's a guitar "dive" in this song https://amberwolf.bandcamp.com/track/when-the-dark-closed-in-and-night-eclipsed-day where I couldn't play the actual guitar the right way to do it, so I just sliced up the sustained note I *could* play into a bunch of small segments and pitched each one down a semi. You don't hear the slices because I did that to the clean guitar tone that I actually recorded, before it goes into the effects chain. It's harder to do that to something "clean" and have it come out natural, but it works pretty well for distortion guitars and synths. Is it steady? I'll have to go back thru to see why...I actually tried to break it in at least a few places, both with the percussion and the bassline, so that it doesn't just plod on, even without tempo changes (whcih are a PITA in my ancient sonar; the tempo view in it could stand a lot of improvement, but that's probably been done in the intervening years).

AFAICT, you put your soundfonts onto it, so whatever sf2 you have or make.

Funnily enough, I hadn't used a CS-80 type sound in many years, until this past week or so I started using a Rapture patch that emulates the CS-80 as used for some Bladerunner sounds, in this project https://amberwolf.bandcamp.com/track/gareki .

I don't know who owns the code so I don't know who you should contact. You can try the shotgun approach and hope something sticks somewhere, but I wouldn't expect any results.

Looks oddly familiar...I think I might've seen that on an amazon listing for other Doremidi stuff and not realized what it was, last year or so when I was looking for a replacement for my finally-died 1990s MIDIMan USB-MIDI box....

I guess if you never change the layout of the screen you could put a bit of highlighting tape over that part of it... to remind you where it is, even if it doesnt' tell you if it's active or not. If someone that knows how (not me) really got bored they could design a little RPi camera to keep an eye on that part of the monitor and detect whether that control was in it's active state or not, and have it turn a little laser pointer on that is fixed to shine on that spot on the screen. 😆

Put them in a Midi clip, turn the clip into a loop, and roll it out? If you are using envelopes (shapes) to do it, you can copy/paste one measure's worth repeatedly.

The individual things appear to also be on sale (half price for the ones I looked at), but (sorry for the grumpiness below): Too bad it only applies to the Kontakt stuff. (which anything I want requires the full version, not just the player, adding at least $300 to the cost of the single one I would want (Cait) that is $15 right now (half the usual price), so it would cost at least $315 to get it (never happening here). The Soundpaint versions, despite being the "same" things, are not on sale, and none of the 8dio discounts or codes apply. So Cait would cost $30 (which I can't justify...I could skip enough household stuff to swing $15). I couldn't swing the money for the whole solo bundle ($85 with the half off, if only it applied to the Soundpaint versions) but it includes Barbary and Francesca, which I could use in conjunction with Cait for some of the vocal work I would like in my projects. Currently I have to slice up the pre-recorded vocals from various libraries I've gotten from BlackOctopus, Cymatics, Ghosthack, etc, to build mine from, for stuff like the ones below; it'd probably make better music (and be easier to do) with "playable" voices like the soundpaint Cait / etc. Since it's just a hobby, and very few ever even listen to what I make, I can't justify spending much of anything on it, despite it's importance to my sanity to be able to do it. https://amberwolf.bandcamp.com/track/gareki https://amberwolf.bandcamp.com/track/if-i-should-wake https://amberwolf.bandcamp.com/track/less-like-a-whisper https://amberwolf.bandcamp.com/track/a-peek-over-the-wall https://amberwolf.bandcamp.com/track/the-moon-it-read-to-me-and-it-was-bright

Unfortunately I don't have any contact info. I *think* that at one time, pre-bandlab, he worked at least indirectly for Cakewalk, and that might be why there had been several RGC things included with / provided by Cakewalk back then. But it's been so long I don't remember for certain. EDIT3: a google search finds potential links to contact info, but you'll have to explore them to see if any are actually for the person we're talking about. https://www.google.com/search?q=René+Ceballos+RGC AFAIK, the site you link to (http://www.rgcaudio.com/) is just a squarespace domain placeholder; it's not actually the real site, which IIRC was taken down years ago. It probably won't have anything useful on it, but you could check archive.org for any copies of the real website from back then. EDIT1: this is the last version of the RGC site that archive.org has that doesn't basically just send you to the old cakewalk site for anything. It's pre-Z3TA2, just hte original shown there, from 2007. (I didn't check *every* version of hte archive, just sampled along the timeline every several versions for a moment, so there *could* be something else there, if you have time to check them all) https://web.archive.org/web/20070203173036/https://www.rgcaudio.com/ I'd certainly add my name to any list asking for a re-release of Z3TA...but if it's not actually included in the properties bandlab acquired with Cakewalk, and if RGC / Rene isn't still around as a legal entity to authorize it, then it probably can't happen. (that's something Bandlab would have to respond to). EDIT2: Poking around, I found this post that indicates v2 was a CW development based on v1. If true, then unless bandlab also acquired the synth code and stuff too, you'd have to get Gibson (the last owners of it all) to release it, or sell someone the code so they could do that. Basically, without knowing who actually presently owns the code, we don't even know who to pester.

Are you using the actual Cakewalk/Sonar metronome for the click track now? Or something else? If you're using the audio version of the metronome, you can pick from a number of preset sounds. In my version you can only send the midi metronome to a hardware port AFAICR but they may have updated that in newer versions. If you need to create an audio or midi track click track to match an imported wave file's beats, you could line them up manually, but it's tedious. One automated way to do it, if the wave file has clear audio peaks on the beats you want the clicks on, is to select the clip of that wave, then turn on AudioSnap, and set the sensitivity low enough that it only picks up the peaks you want, or manually disable/enable the markers on the peaks you want, then choose to have it make a midi clip of that data. Or have it just make a midi clip of all the markers it has by default, and then delete the notes in the midi clip you don't want. Then that midi clip can go into your drum synth's midi track, and you can set the synth up to play the sound of your choice for those notes.

Sorry for the continued OT below: Same idea, just used the older DB9 serial port instead of USB. Some time after I lost access to use my "beloved" Bars & Pipes, I got that for cheap used, and it was how I connected up all my hardware MIDI gear to play it together (including the MM7s and an Alesis Midiverb3 for effects). It would be kinda nice to have an MFX that would allow this sort of thing, where an instance of a "patch" MFX goes into the bin of each track you want to use it with, that creates a "virtual MIDI port". Double clicking on any of those brings you to a GUI window for the "bay" that is common to all of the instances, that is really just the UI into the settings for the whole patchbay. It could be visually designed something like Kxproject's DSP view, or the module view in VSTHost by Herman Seib, where a box appears for every MIDI port both in and out, and you drag cables from each thing you want to connect to the thing you want to connect it to. Each box representing one of the Patch MFX would have the options for it's channel setting(s), so you could pick a channel or leave it so it passes all 16. (or have tickboxes to allow multi-selections). Could be done for the output boxes too, but not necessarily needed since you can filter the channels at hte inputs to the midi tracks if you're feeding htose, or stick an MFX filter in if you're feeding synths that don't suport that. (see below) Ideally the MFX would itself have fx bins in each of the ports' boxes to hold sub-MFX, if that's possible, so you can filter any patch any way you need to (without the bay actually needing to do anything but the routing, so it is not nearly as complex to create). Might want to disallow inserting the Patch MFX itself so you don't accidentally create feedback loops. That's always the problem with control information (which is what all MIDI is), in any system / environment. It's one of the (many) issues I am dealing with in trying to work out the computing / processing of sensor data in my Snuggles The Wolf emotional support robot project.... https://endless-sphere.com/sphere/threads/robotics-project-snuggles-the-wolf.122280/

WHRAAAAR --lift squeeze smash drop-- There's your "do", how do you like it? 😆

On the endless sphere ev forum, I deal with that all the time when people have battery/etc problems, where they use A and Ah and W and Wh interchangeably, when they are completely different terms. Unfortunately many ads also use them interchangeably, and since it's "on the internet it must be right", many people won't trust anyone that says otherwise, so they can't be helped with whatever their problem is.

I've had that experience too (more with computers and ebikes than anything else OTTOMH). Unfortunately there are many things in all sorts of hardware and software products called features that I'd personally class as bugs. At best, bad design. So, if I didn't already know that, I'd be one of those people.

Like the MOTU MM7s? (have one sitting around that I don't use anymore because the very ancient laptop I used *just* for that with a Studioware panel in a very ancient CWPA version (6? 8?) died years back, so I didn't have a way to easily control the mixer, with no hardware controls available for it's functions. Or do you mean something like the Studio128X (have that too) to "mix" and route actual MIDI data?

I know of no legal way to get Z3TA (any version) nowadays, but it's a great synth (with a few minor design / usability issues), and I wish it was still available for others to get. It was made by RGC, I think that was Rene Caballos (sp?); if you could find the source programmer or company maybe you could convince them to re-release it. I love the thing and use it in virtually every project to one degree or another; some have many instances in it! Even after all these years of using it (since it was first included in SONAR), I still haven't explored all it's abilities. This one uses it for most of the synth sounds in it https://amberwolf.bandcamp.com/track/intron-159

I'd guess it's sending patch / bank changes. If you can turn that off it should stop changing presets on things it's connected to. If it can't be turned off in the hardware, then you'd have to see if the plugin can choose to ignore P/B changes. I don't remember a global way to do that in SONAR, but newer versions might have added one. If it's triggering other synths at the same time as the one you intend, you probably have input echo on for those tracks, and the input set to Omni so they all get all signals from all input ports and channels. If you need the echo on so a drum controller (etc) can play those other synths, you'd need to set specific ports and channels for every synth (on each track's MIDI input) and every input device (in their hardware settings) so they only talk to / listen to the correct pairs to work the way you want.

If you ever have any USB MIDI controller device that *doesn't* have a hardware MIDI port, you can use this to give it one. I don't know if it supports *all* such devices, but anything using the class-compliant "driverless" connection ought to work. https://www.serdashop.com/USBMIDIHost From the site: \ From the site:

For those that still use Soundfonts, and always wanted a hardware way to access them without having to setup a system just for that. Not quite a replacement for those that used to use the AWE / etc cards with the old Cakewalk that had a soundfont manager in it. Has USB and MIDI in ports. https://www.serdashop.com/SF2 There's another (older?) version here https://www.serdashop.com/MP32L From the site:

,

Yeah...that's why I stopped building computers (or bikes or anything else) for people long ago--they usually thought they knew what they needed and wouldn't listen to me about it, then blamed me when it didn't do what they wanted.... I'd rather just deal with myself; I'm not as hard on me for my oopsies and any I have really are my own fault. :lol:

Kinda OT, but: Some antibiotics / etc have ototoxic properties, so depending on the meds for the infection and the dosage and your metabolism, that could also have caused it. Some infections can do it, even if they aren't ear-related (guessing they produce ototoxins that kill "ear" cells / cilia?, or damage to the nerves that read those). Covid may also be a cause of tinnitus and hearing loss (mine didn't get anywhere near this bad until I went thru that, now it's quite severe and causes problems even understanding speech under various conditions). Some of the "studies" show it comes back after a few months, but mine has only ever gotten worse with time. I also have problems using headphones, since the damage in each ear is different, and it is confusing and disorienting with the distinct separated L and R signals in headphones, vs speakers where they mix in the air on the way to me. I mostly use them now just to listen for timing issues (mostly percussion) with sets of soloed tracks, vs whole projects, and other detail stuff like that. Can't really use them to check mixes or eq with (mostly I have to use a spectrum analyzer view, like in Audacity, to see where specific problems are in a track visually, so I don't have to just eq tracks globally and nuke stuff I really want to keep in some parts of a song but avoid in in other parts).

I'm still surprised that this has never been added to Cakewalk in all this time; I know it's been asked for in the original pre-bandlab/roland/gibson version(s) more than a few times.... There are some "gotchas" that can happen from this type of thing; for instance if you actually use the bank/patch controls in a track (I never do these days) all the synths will be set to the same one which will probably be wrong. And if there is any data fed back from the synth (envelope / controller names, etc) that conflicts with that sent back from other synths, what does the track do about that? I very commonly stack several synths / etc to build my sounds from, especially when first messing around to get an idea rolling at the start of a project. ATM I have to have separate MIDI tracks all with echo on, all with record armed, each pointing to the synth it's for, to get that to happen. If I could instead have a single source track that feeds all the others, it would greatly ease the setup and start of a new idea. (I can always later split out the MIDI that has to be different between the different synths to new tracks, since synths already accept input from multiple midi tracks...we just need to be able to do the opposite as well). One of the things I loved about the ancient Amiga-based Bars & Pipes was the ability to route anything anywhere; I sometimes used the program not to compose or record but just as a router for live playback of multiple hardware boxes from multiple keyboards without having to buy a bunch of expensive little hardware boxes and cable them all together. I don't want to pollute your request, but another potential way to do this with no host software change (thus possibly more likely to happen?): ( @Viramor because, well, you're our only hope Obi-Vir! :lol: ) FWIW, I'd even accept a workaround that's an MFX (not VST) that would Y-split the midi stream at that point in the MFX chain and provide a copy to whatever midi input you select that's in the dropdown for any midi track. So you could pick any synth hosted in the program the MFX is in, or any hardware / virtual cable port, etc. Even if the MFX only has a single Y-output, you could just stack them in the Fx bin of the source midi track to route to multiple different synths. This approach could even be used with individual clips on a track to have one feed multiple synths while all the others on the track only feed one, or even to have different clips on the track feed different synths (I would probably not use this approach much, but there are instances I could use that ability). Then you can stick filter MFX before or after this Y-Cable MFX to send only the data you want to each one, if you stack them in the right order. The Y-Cable MFX doesn't need to have any other function besides the already-probably-complicated one described.

What was the problem / solution, so that other users with the same issue can find this thread and resolve theirs?

To word it differently, I meant: is the *drum map* configured so that it is sending the notes to the same range as the bare port? Is it possible the map is transposing the notes up or down? (I don't know if this exists in them)