Starship Krupa

While I'd like to be able to change the colors in SampleTank, at this point I'm just psyched that they're even doing maintenance work on it. Maybe the ability to change UI colors will come with ST 5, whenever that comes out.

You are correct. I set up a new DAW computer for a friend, and rather than have him give me his email password so that I could respond to the myriad account confirmation messages, I made him a new Proton Mail account for the primary purpose of setting up accounts at all of the different companies whose free software I'd be installing. First account was BandLab, so I could install CbB. Same problem you had. Proton Mail informed me, though, that due to past abuse, they require an extra step of new account verification before you can start receiving and replying to 3rd-party account verification messages. I don't remember what it was, maybe verification via another existing email address, but whatever it was, it worked.

Not a big Next user, but the last time I tried it, it allowed me to save and load projects.

They are included with both CbB and Sonar. With CbB all you need to do is watch the video in the post immediately prior to yours and follow the instructions.

ST4 still has the known bug that loading and unloading too many presets in one session will crash it. This is in any DAW or the standalone. It's a real pain in the a55 when you want to audition a lot of different presets. Been reported many times on the IK Multimedia forum with no solution offered.

Mike has MANY free highly useful and instructive videos about Cakewalk on his channel. He also has a more in-depth course you can buy, and he (horrors!) mentions this fact briefly in his videos. He also pitches a music distribution service. This doesn't make his free videos any less useful. We all have to eat. There are MANY other YouTube channels that feature instruction in how to use Cakewalk. There is a list of them in the Tutorials section of this forum.

Right click in the Track Header area on the left side of Track View and select "Insert Instrument" from the resulting context menu. Be sure to check out the Bandcamp page in my sig as well as my YouTube channel. Don't forget to like and subscribe.🙄

I'll mention here that AD2 actually has been updated recently, with not only a new look to the UI, but new tools for creating and modifying beats. The new version is 2.6 and is a free update for all owners of AD2 licenses. They created a TON of good will with that update, and a TON of new interest in the product.

But since it's a plug-in, you're free to use as many instances as your system can handle. One of the advantages that plugins have over hardware.

It seems that the Cakewalk VST scanner has incorrectly identified the plug-ins. This can happen, although it happens very infrequently. My suggestion is that you open Preferences and in File/VST Settings, force a complete re-scan.

I don't know what a "vts scan box" is, so you need to give more information on that. Missing plug-ins is usually a matter of going into Preferences/Files/VST Settings and making sure that the path to the folder where you have installed your VST plug-ins is listed. In my case, my VST2 plug-ins are in S:\VST, so I have that set in Preferences. The file location for VST3 plug-ins is usually already set in Sonar because VST3's have a canonical location they all install to (C\Program Files\Common Files\VST3). Check those preferences settings. Uninstalling CbB shouldn't delete any plug-ins other than the ones that come with CbB, and those all come with Sonar as well. The only exception I can think of would be if you had your VST2's installed to a subfolder of the Cakewalk folder.

Good lord, what a nightmare, on multiple levels. In the debate about whether it's possible for one DAW to sound different from another, I've always been focused on the playback and rendering side of things. I've always taken it on deep faith that any raw recorded audio would be identical. After all, the DAW "only" has the job of taking in the zeroes and ones from the driver and putting them, with no changes, into files. Now I'm reading here that it is at least possible for DAW A to interact with an ASIO driver in such a way that audio recordings are mangled, while DAW B may not have that issue? That's nightmare fuel given how PC's are very complex systems whose parts (usually the drivers) often interact with each other in unexpected ways. I've had it happen that swapping out my video card miraculously cured my audio dropout issues. What, exactly was the issue, and what, exactly, was the fix, I wonder. And I don't mean top-level "Focusrite fixed their driver," I mean "what went wrong with the driver that Ableton was able to deal with it and Sonar wasn't?" and "is the way that Ableton and Sonar talk to the driver that different?" Time to go take the anti-anxiety meds....

I get the impression that they're not so interested in legacy support in general.

https://gooeyaudio.com/plugins/visage/ "Visage is a stereo fattener and pan sculpter (sic)" Haven't tried it, but it looks like it might be useful for people like me who like to mess with the spatial image.

I've used Dells for music production because they are built like tanks and available at low prices on the used (and even free) market. The caveats with them are that they are built to be workhorse business machines, and as such, the BIOSes are pretty locked down. Also they are notorious for LatencyMon reporting a lot of action with the driver ACPI.sys. This is true for my current Dell laptop, but it manages to handle DAW work without crackles and dropouts, so who knows. Depending on how much you have to spend, there are companies that make laptops specifically for music production. Lenovo has a page on their site with laptops they recommend for music production, so they're at least aware of that use of their products. https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/d/workstation-laptop-for-music-production/