abacab

I would add, get both if you can. Live is a great secondary tool to have with ANY conventional recording and production DAW. It is a different animal from those. Great for creative and experimental sound design, the session view is unparalleled. And it was built for live performance, as some have found that conventional DAWs are basically intended for studio recording only. Try it for free while you can!

I still use an old copy of Photoshop Elements as my current go-to editor for quick edits. I know my way around it and can get a lot of stuff done quickly. Also have a current copy of CorelDraw Graphics Suite, and have been rather fond of the included Corel PhotoPaint raster graphics program like forever. It's a good toolbox for some serious editing! Does CMYK, while Adobe Pjhotoshop Elements is limited to RGB. I also have a very old standalone copy of the full Photoshop if I ever need some serious lifting... I never really got into Paintshop Pro, but I do have the latest edition due to a good deal from Humble Bundle. Probably need to spend more time with the tutorials, but in general the workflow is a bit different than I'm used to. The popularity of the program begs me to check it out some more.

My next project is the sample drive. Changing my system drive to SSD was a big game changer! Got my secondary SATA hard drive split into two partitions, one for samples and one for archives, and its nearly full. Going to add another SATA SSD exclusively for the samples, and dedicate the spinner to archives. Then I can buy more sample libraries. Which is out of the question at the moment, and I'm afraid I might miss a good deal! ?

Ah! "Knives Out". Good whodunit flick!

Well I am running an audio interface in Win 10 with manufacturer drivers that were last updated for Win 7. It works. The device is end of life and no longer supported, but I can live with that until it stops working. My choice. But I can understand why application developers only support the currently supported Windows operating systems, because in this case their tools are totally dependent on Microsoft. It's fine if you wish to run end of life operating systems, but you should focus on DAWs that were were developed and tested on them. If you wish to run the latest DAW, you should keep up with the latest OS for best results. That's where it was tested.

I have the AmpleSound Metal Ray bass. The riffer does output MIDI if you select that in options. So you can route the MIDI to any other VSTi in your project. The Metal Ray only has picked samples, and I have sent the riffs live via MIDI over to their free P-Bass for fingered samples, while muting the audio output from the Metal Ray. You just have to ensure that you don't use the low string on the 5-string when you send MIDI to a 4-string bass. Or at least transpose up. ?

Doesn't it kind of tick you off a bit that Cakewalk/Gibson didn't really partner with a hardware company to make a dedicated controller, except for when Roland owned them previously and released the A-PRO series. I got the Cakewalk/Roland A-300PRO and it works, but using ACT in Cakewalk isn't exactly intuitive. A bit fiddly to set up. But even that's fairly old tech now. It would be nice if Cakewalk implemented a more universal standard that would work fully plug and play with more modern controllers.

Spoiler alert!!!

I agree with the issue of sound preview with Syntronik. I have the same beef with the instruments in SampleTank 4 Max. The load time kills me when auditioning sounds. I think that the sounds are excellent in both products. Was even thinking about upgrading my sample drive to an SSD to improve that. But in comparison, I recently picked up Arturia's Analog Lab for the massive amount (6500) of preset analog synth sounds provided. And they load instantly for me. Would probably consider jumping on the full collection, but the amount of tweaking in the Lab is sufficient for most performance needs. Sound designers or hardware synth lovers might disagree with that last statement.

Cakewalk by BandLab will see them if they are properly installed. You may want to contact support@cakewalk.com for assistance.

TH-3 Cakewalk probably has plenty of guitar amp sim, cabinets, and processing to get you started. Just start with a decent clean guitar virtual instrument sound and run it though the effect. Also, IK Multimedia offers AmpliTube Custom Shop for free. https://www.ikmultimedia.com/products/amplitubecs/index.php?p=info You get 24 free pieces of gear to start, including 9 stomps, 4 amps, 5 cabs, 3 mics, 2 rack effects. And then you can add on more by purchasing additional pieces.

You could run LatencyMon to see if you are getting excessive page faults. Windows might be swapping memory in and out to the page file on disk in an "unfriendly to audio samples" manner. Also you can open Resource Monitor from Task Manager by clicking the link at the bottom of the Performance tab. Then look at the Disk tab. It will show the open files being used. You can sort views there by clicking on the column headings. For example I can see all processes that are actively using "C:\Pagefile.Sys". As scook mentioned though, CbB will be reported as a whole, not by individual plugins. I have also never tried to run samples from an external drive. YMMV. That performance might differ by the plugin design, and how often the samples are read by the plugin, i.e., sample streaming. Bottom line for the page file issue is that more RAM reduces the need for page file usage. I suppose some folks may even disable it if they have massive amounts of extra RAM (through Control Panel > System > Advanced system settings > Advanced > Performance > Settings > Advanced > Virtual memory).

OXa is fully sampled oscillators, with modeled filters and effects. OB-Xd from DiscoDsp and OB-Xa from Arturia are virtual/modeled analog oscillators. Part of me would like to believe that Arturia's model might be more sophisticated that 2Dat's (the original dev for OB-Xd).

With Cakewalk, the MIDI controllers must be powered on before Cakewalk is launched. Some other DAWs do not require that. So if the PC has power saving enabled, it may be powering down the USB ports, even with the controller plugged in. Then Cakewalk wouldn't see them at launch time.

New from Waves! With active WUP, you get two installs at a time! ?

Waves Element 2 is a great analog emulation. Fat and warm! Got it from Waves a while back on one of their stupid deals. Grab it while it's free! Or Waves has it direct for $29.99 right now.

I believe that capability is up to the VST instrument itself. I'm not aware of any DAW features for that. Take a look at these lists: https://en.xen.wiki/w/List_of_Microtonal_Software_Plugins https://www.subaqueousmusic.com/list-of-microtonal-vst-synths-and-plugins/

I think Cakewalk Sound Center was replaced by Rapture Session. Rapture Session imports your Dimension Pro and Rapture classic presets. So if you can find sound packs for those older synths, they can be used in Rapture Session. This may also apply to Rapture Pro, but I don't have it, so cannot confirm.

Yes it is the same. Was just pointing it out to help answer the question of how far to go back. Depends on what you want.

Sonar Plugins for Sonar 3 through Platinum (spreadsheet published at Google docs) https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qNsnKBASsnsALygDDQSQ4jFW6yhZIJZcIpfwH-6qgy0/pubhtml?gid=0&single=true

Were you referring to Windows 10X? I couldn't locate anything about "Windows X". https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/windows-10x-vs-windows-10/

Anybody got this and care to compare to OB-Xd by DiscoDSP?

What price were you going to pay? Hard to recommend without a range to work with. Is a full featured arpeggiator/sequencer the most important feature? Do you want something with lots of cool factory presets, or are you planning to design your sounds from scratch?

Maybe Microsoft could replace the core of Windows with the Linux kernel, and just use the Windows GUI as the desktop environment? Windows 11 anybody? And they could bolt on the Windows API (Win32) , since they own the code. Then you could then run either native Linux or Windows apps. ?

This ^^^ I have used Linux for years. But as said previously, Linux is best as a server operating system. Yes, it does do a desktop, but life is too short. Windows does it better. ?