Canopus

I don’t think XLN Audio is trying to compete with Toontrack any longer. Their latest product, XO, is something completely different and probably indicates the direction in which they’re heading: to create truly unique products. And, honestly, unless you’re a virtual drum kit hoarder, how many kits do you actually need?  I’ve got 19 out of 21 ADPaks. If XLN Audio were to release another ADPak, would I actually buy it? IDK.

In short: if there were money to be made from creating additional ADPaks, I’m sure they would have done so a long time ago. Multiple times. Otherwise, no. They’re not stupid.

I see that you’re using Kontakt 6.3.1, but the latest version of Kontakt is 6.4.2. You could try to install 6.4.2 and see if that makes any difference. And make sure you’re using Native Instruments installation program Native Access when you do.

28 minutes ago, abacab said:

I recently noticed that the brush pack installers did in fact place a copy of each brush pack on my Data Volume (D:), at the root of the volume, and not in a sub-folder

I had almost the same thing happening to me, but in my case the brush folders were silently duplicated to the root of my external USB drive. To say that I was surprised and not even a tiny bit impressed is an understatement. I removed all 22 brush folders together with a folder called ISINSTALLED_PAINTER2021 (despite having Painter 2020 installed) and couldn’t see any problems after that. The brushes were still available in Painter 2020.

There’s a free update to UVI Falcon 2.1. This update includes:

• New Feedback Machine FX
• New Magnetic Bass Shaper FX
• New Step Arp script
• New Chord Strum script
• New record option to Arpeggiator
• New Gate Mod, Gate Mod Poly and Gate Mod Bernoulli scripts
• Various enhancements
• 40 new Wavetables
• 100 new Factory Presets

So what's the deal?

Also, there’s 30 % off for those who doesn’t have a previous version. This deal is valid through October 18th and includes two free expansions worth €39/$39 each. Regular price €349/$349, now €244/$244.

8 hours ago, SteveStrummerUK said:

2. I'm in 'Accountancy' mode for the money values to be listed in the TOTAL column; is it possible to have Excel display zero pounds/pence as £0.00, or is this only possible in 'Currency' mode?

Select the range of cells you want to format, right-click and select Format Cells. Then from the dialogue select the Number tab. In the left-hand list box change Category to Custom, and in the Type field enter £* 0.00;£* (0.00) with a space between the asterisk and the first zero or left parenthesis. The asterisk followed by a space results in the Pound being left-aligned, so skip the asterisk(s) if that’s not what you want. Finally, I have assumed that you want negative numbers to be displayed in parentheses, accounting style. If that’s not what you want, skip everything after and including the semi-colon.

Edit: I just realized that you perhaps wanted negative numbers in red, just like in your question. If so, enter £* 0.00;[Red]£* (0.00) or £* 0.00;[Red]£* -0.00 depending on your preferences.

Disclaimer: 1) I don’t have an English version of Excel, 2) You may have something more recent but I’m still running Excel 2010, and 3) I normally use a decimal comma instead of  a decimal point. Still, I think my localized instructions should work. Otherwise, I'm sure someone will correct me.

Same here. I checked my themes the moment user fonolit mentioned the change being made to Tungsten according to the CbB 2020.04 release document, but for some unknown reason none of my themes needed any modification of the marker lock indicator. They all just worked.

Do you possibly have the menu option “Allow Any Preset Location” checked when you click the “Import/Export Presets” button? And if so, what happens if you deselect that checkbox? Is it then possible for you to select a Padshop 2 program/preset?

I noticed that if I have that option checked I get the same strange behaviour as you with a standard Windows File Open dialogue being displayed. But with that option deselected, I get the preset/program browser pop-up you would expect.

I think that .vstpreset files are not factory content presets, but factory content presets that have been edited by the user (at least that's true for HALion). So in case you want to load the Padshop 2 factory content, you should make sure that the related .vstsound files are registered.

If you used the Steinberg Download Assistant to download a particular sound set, you should have been given a chance to register it by clicking the Open button in the right-hand pane. Otherwise, if you double click on an already downloaded .vstsound file in File Explorer, the Steinberg Library Manager (SLM) will open. If you have a valid license for the sound set and the .vstsound file isn’t already installed, SLM should allow you to register it.

If you click on the PADSHOP tab in SLM, all currently installed libraries in Padshop will be visible with the paths found under DETAILS. This is how it looks on my computer, and as you can see all libraries points to .vstsound files.

Once installed, the Padshop 2 preset browser in CbB won't be having the same extensive search functions as it does in Cubase, but the same is true for Padshop 2 when used in e.g. Studio One. Outside Cubase you will only be able to browse the presets in a simple structured  list.

Here's some additional info:
https://helpcenter.steinberg.de/hc/en-us/articles/360012109820-Installing-VST-Sound-and-Loop-Sets-vstsound-files-for-Cubase-Nuendo

17 minutes ago, simon said:

I'm a dinosaur* and prefer to 'own' (licence ?) software but at some point we are probably not going to have a choice but to rent/subscribe...adobe I'm looking at you

That’s how Adobe lost me as a customer. Had been buying and upgrading their very expensive Creative Suite offerings until the day they decided to turn to the Dark Side and go subscription. Oh, well. Still using my paid for CS6 Design & Web Premium as long as it works on Windows.

And now I have a license for iZotope MPS 3. Be careful, iZotope. Be very careful.

51 minutes ago, thatoneXman said:

The title speaks for itself. I'm trying to Export my Music to midi, And it Always exports All of my Instruments to Piano. Always. How can I fix this?

By start viewing some of the tutorials available on YouTube? In case you didn’t know, MIDI in itself doesn’t contain any instrument information. It only contains structured data that can be fed into an external or internal instrument that’s MIDI enabled. You might compare MIDI to sheet music which in itself doesn’t sound or play a piano, guitar or violin. It’s just structured data, mostly note information, that needs interpretation.

If you export to a MIDI file, that file will thus not contain any instrument information. Never. If you later load a MIDI file into Cakewalk (or any other DAW for that matter), you will have to assign that MIDI to an external or internal (virtual) instrument if you want to hear anything. By default, on opening a MIDI file, Cakewalk will assign your MIDI to the virtual instrument TTS-1 which by default contains a piano. That’s probably what’s happened here.

Simple solution: don’t export to MIDI. Instead save your work as a Cakewalk project. That way any instrument assignments you’ve done in Cakewalk will be kept in the project file and later correctly reloaded into Cakewalk. Always.

It might be that your samples are very large and can’t be loaded within the time frame specified by CbB. Got to Edit > Preferences > Audio > Configuration File – Properties and increase the parameter value DropoutMsec until the drop-out message hopefully disappears. I have increased my value from default 250 ms to 1500 ms to be able to load some large Kontakt library presets.

This thread reminds me of another one posted earlier this week (see below). Could it be that the code rendering pressed keys in the PRV being sent from a MIDI controller has been changed sometime in CbB? I compared the PRV in CbB (2020.08 build 100) to the last version of SONAR Platinum (2017.10). In the latter the piano key rendering in the PRV is displayed with light-grey keys as expected, but not so for me in CbB. Unless, of course, there is some display setting I’m not aware of. Having a Core i7-3770 with 32GB RAM and an AMD Radeon HD 7700.
 

I can verify that. I hadn’t really noticed it but just to verify I started up the last version of SONAR Platinum (2017.10) where the PRV keyboard correctly reflected the keys being pressed on the MIDI controller in light grey. But for some reason not so anymore in CbB. And I can’t find any setting in the PRV menu or in Preferences that restores the previous display functionality.

44 minutes ago, Dzilizzi said:

I thought they give discounts on the bundles if you own some of them?  I have Adaptiverb and Wormhole, so the Design Bundle would only be for Morph.  Has anyone ever upgraded to a bundle?  I can't find anything on their website.

I think that you previously could get a discount on the Design Bundle (containing Adaptiverb, Morph and Wormhole) if you owned both Adaptiverb and Morph. No other combinations were unfortunately valid. Wormhole was the last of those three to be released so I guess that was the reason. And I haven't seen that offer for quite some time.

That Harmonium Environment Preset sounds very much like the Harmonium placed in my first-grade classroom. My teacher sat down by the pump organ every morning and played some psalms while we children sang. It was quite relaxing, a soft beginning of the school day, and particularly atmospheric around Christmas when we all had lighted candles on our desks and the snow silently fell outside in the dark. But of course, that was many years ago. I’m sure singing hymns isn’t part of school nowadays. So much has changed since then and not always for the better.

And while walking down memory lane, that teacher drove a red Ford Anglia 105E Deluxe with tailfins and that funny backward-slanted rear window. And she kept on living until she was 102. What a woman.

Oh, sorry. Don’t mind me and my nostalgia flashback. Please carry on.

15 hours ago, Xel Ohh said:

The dark theme has some elements from Grand Vista Black and Blue by @Canopus. Thanks for making yours so that I can make mine..

No problem, and thanks for the credit. The more Cakewalk themes available the better chance people will find something they like. Having seen the video, I kind of liked the blue bars in your Performance module so it’s not impossible that I will change from orange to blue in Gran Vista sometime in the future.

As for the name Canopus, it’s a star that only can be seen from the southern hemisphere. It’s actually the second-brightest star in the night sky after Sirius.

2 hours ago, Kevin Perry said:

I'm really liking this - even more than my own Tungsten+ theme which I posted here!  My one "complaint" (which applies to virtually all the themes I've looked at) is that the PRV looks awful unless you change the background colours to pale - the Mercury ones are actually pretty perfect).

Well, it’s basically a dark theme so having a bright PRV inside might look unconventional. But changing that part of the theme shouldn’t be a problem for anyone seeing it as an issue.

Of course, I realize that you know how to do this, but for someone less familiar with modifying themes it’s simply a matter of opening the Theme Editor, load the Lead theme and then expand the node Piano Roll view in the treeview to the left. There are six sub-nodes located directly beneath representing modified colours, each identified by a colour palette icon and black text. For each of those six entries, right-click the node and select Remove. After saving, the dark PRV in the theme will have changed to look like the bright PRV in the default Mercury theme. These steps should work for most dark themes with small, if any, variations.

I have actually been thinking about this myself. In my case it was mostly regarding Mute which I think looks pretty cool in Logic, where an active mute for a track is indicated by a flashing Mute button. So thumbs up.

1 hour ago, petemus said:

My zoom frustration is not having a "Fit tracks horizontally" command.

Have you tried Shift+F?

31 minutes ago, kyrillos said:

is there something like that in cakewalk guys?

Nope. However, maybe you could use the Melodyne Demo version that comes with CbB and modify the E’s by ear? Make sure all the E's are in one separate MIDI clip like Nigel proposed above and record your MIDI into audio using your orchestral VSTi. Then select the audio clip for this separate track and apply Region FX > Melodyne. In Melodyne, make sure Options > Pitch Grid is set to No Snap so that the notes won’t stick to the twelve tone scale. It should then be possible to tune your E’s into whatever. It’s very clumsy of course, but might be a possible work-around if this is a one-time occurrence.

47 minutes ago, TheCrazyLunatic8 said:

I was making a nice layout where I could have all my instruments at hand, and then Cakewalk just crashed on me. Lost almost 1.5 hours of work. Have to add 30+ tracks all over again and rename each. Very disappointing that cakewalk doesn't already have this.

But it has. Under Edit > Preferences > File > Advanced you can specify exactly after how many minutes or after how many changes an auto-save should occur, whatever happens first. I have mine set to 10 minutes or 10 changes. You can also optionally select “Enable Versioning of Project (.CWP) Files” and the number of versions you want to keep. You must have Advanced checked at the bottom of the Preferences window to be able to see those entries.

53 minutes ago, John Kalabric said:

PS: Hypersonic sounds sweeeeeet

FYI: Hypersonic was created for Steinberg by a company called Wizoo, which was later bought by Avid. According to this SOS article (which actually reviews Steinberg's Hypersonic successor HALion Sonic), much of the content in Hypersonic 2 was later introduced in the Xpand! synth which at that time came bundled with Avid ProTools. The Xpand!2 synth is now owned by AIR Music Technology and can currently be bought for only $13. It has also been put on sale for just a few dollars quite a few times (I bought it myself for £1 a few years back). Of course, as Xpand!2 exists as a 64-bit VST you can have the benefit of a large memory addressing space and won’t have to use JBridge to run it. It does require iLock but not a dongle. As for how much content was brought over from Hypersonic I have absolutely no idea, but the factory content is pretty extensive with more than 2,500 presets.

I got some spare time during the pandemic and as a result I created a new theme. Continuing with the metal label convention this one is called “Lead”. When compared to my previous themes “Gran Vista” and “Carbon”, this one is flatter and maybe less obtrusive (some would perhaps say more modern). The blue highlights are fetched from my previous themes, while the gradient Control Bar background and buttons have been created from scratch (or actually using a new custom background layer in Photoshop). An overall goal has been to maintain contrast between buttons, text and background. And, of course, to make it look good.

One small detail: a feature that I think would work well in most themes is that the Loop, Selection and Punch buttons all have been given a colour accent that corresponds to the same area in Track view, i.e. yellow, green and red respectively. I will add this to the Gran Vista and Carbon themes as well the next time they need to be updated.

Download link:

I’ve made this theme for my own use, but in case anyone would like to use it you can download it from here:

https://1drv.ms/u/s!AmXDCxaGb7JEeduVqWy0FPQFKe0?e=Jp6SkG

Release history:

For those interested, there's a release history that covers update information about all my themes. Here's a link to the that pdf document:

https://1drv.ms/b/s!AmXDCxaGb7JEdu3To6t7ZeQmmAo

You can’t control the stand-alone version of EZ Keys from within CbB, if that’s what you’re asking. To access the content of your EZ Keys project file (*.ezkp) you will need to insert the VST version of EZ Keys into your CbB project and then from the EZ Keys VST select Menu > Load project and navigate to your ezkp file in order to load your chord content. Once you’ve done that I would suggest that you select and drag your chords from the VST into the EZ Keys MIDI track and then let the melody MIDI track have its output set to the same instance of the EZ Keys VST. Also, at this point you might want to switch off the “Follow host” indicator found in the bottom-right corner of the VST display not to have any duplicate notes sounding.