Starship Krupa

Charcoal is not going to change anyone's mind about the fugliness of MeldaProduction's stock look. Sometimes I forget how much difference it makes to set my own colors in the MeldaProduction plug-ins.

After I posted this, I dug more deeply into the Reference Guide and discovered that it matters exactly where you drop the section. If I drop it in the center of the blank space, it behaves as I expected it to. If I drop it at the left edge, it slides everything to the right.

Background: On my own songs I've mostly used Arranger Track to mark sections and not for much else. However, at the moment I'm transcribing a more traditional folk song that sticks pretty close to intro/verse/chorus/verse/chorus variation/verse etc. and I'm trying to use the feature to copy and paste sections. I have the main verse, which is 5 measures long, then the first chorus, 3 measures long, then the verse again, then second chorus, which varies slightly from the first one. The third chorus is the same as the second one, so there are 3 unique sections and then these repeat in different orders. I actually got 6 parts of the song entered in before I created arranger sections. I duplicated data using basic copy and paste. Now that I have the Arranger Track set up I'm doing some tweaking of the MIDI velocities and note lengths and want to copy and paste the similar verses and choruses around to make changes. The project has 4 tracks, in the form of 2 MIDI and 2 synth tracks. Track 1 is MIDI, Track 2 is a synth track, Track 3 is a synth track, and Track 4 is a MIDI track. Where it goes sideways (literally): I adjusted the notes in the first 5-bar verse and now wished to copy and paste it in place of the other existing 5-bar verses. I clicked on a later arranger section (a 5-bar verse) to select it, then hit Del to get it out of the way. This worked as expected, the section was deleted. I then clicked on the first 5-bar arranger section to select it, then right-clicked while holding Ctrl, and dragged the section to where I had deleted the other one. I expected this to work like similar operations on clips, where the dragged copy just plops right down, but instead, everything to the right of the target space got scooted over by 5 measures. Next I tried clicking on the arranger section, then Ctrl+C to copy it, click in the empty space to move the Now Time, and then Ctrl+V to paste it. This resulted in the section being pasted in at the correct place along the timeline, without moving things to the right, but it failed to copy and paste the correct content. Instead, it created 3 new tracks below the original tracks, 2 synth and 1 MIDI. 5 empty measures were pasted into Track 4 and 5 measures with the data from Track 4 were pasted into the newly-created Track 7. On playback, the notes of Track 4 play back through the wrong synth. See attached screencap for these results. For anyone able to follow this, am I doing something wrong? No, I don't have ripple edit turned on.🙂

That's great for people who come to this forum, not so much for people who land on the old site. How much effort did it take you, an experienced, savvy, determined person, to find it? What I meant was taking away the text and links on the old site that imply that a user can recover their password by clicking on the link, as well as not telling them that password recovery email has been sent. Yes it's great that the old Cakewalk, Inc. site is available for those who wish to use the content it contains, but it shouldn't be a trap for legacy users. It's not something I lose sleep over. I'm just a compulsive troubleshooter.

WhiIe I agree, I don't understand why certain things like the "retrieve password" mechanism is still on the site when it has been non-functional for over 6 years. Why keep the email links when the email sent via the links won't be answered? Especially if it says it's sending an email when it's not. Why not just tell befuddled users that in order to reactivate Cakewalk accounts, they should contact BandLab support, and have a link for that?

Go to Focusrite's website, download the software for your interface and install it. Windows doesn't (yet) have native ASIO drivers, so it's always necessary to get them from the manufacturer's website.

Then I guess I'm a hypocrite. 🤨 Or do you mean that behavior in people who have "sworn off" buying plug-ins? I haven't sworn off, but it's rare for me to buy a plug-in. I have plenty of the standard mixing plug-ins. Compressor, precision EQ, character EQ, limiter, multiband compressor, reverb, delay, reverb, phaser, flanger, bitcrusher, pitch shift, harmonizer, doubler, stereoscope, LUF's meter. Covered multiple times over with top tier examples of each. I don't buy new ones, and it's hard for me to be interested enough to try freebies. I like being able to recommend free plug-ins, so I'll sometimes try them for that purpose. There are also plenty of "sound design" oddballs in my collection, so I haven't bought any of those in a long time, but I generally do at least try interesting freebies. I like to create sounds. As for instruments, my cup also runneth over in that department, but will occasionally try a freebie/loss leader and be knocked out enough to keep it and maybe even upgrade. Sonuscore Orchestra Essentials was my most recent instrument purchase because it's just too easy to get useful orchestral sounds with it.

Simple: it's the sound of those old, primitive samplers, which only got as close as evoking orchestral sounds, but had a sound of their own. I'm a fan of multiple bands that used them back in the day. Moody Blues, Genesis, King Crimson, etc. The Moodies especially made it an integral part of their sound. Also, SampleTron 2 includes a big bunch of sounds, SFX, and loops from more obscure sampled instruments such as the Optigan. I don't have experience with similar payware instruments, so I don't know if any of them includes such an extensive collection of these obscurities.

Oh dear. Is it running in linear phase mode or something? I read up on PDC and it seems like Pro Tools has some...issues with handling it, the foremost being that it sets a fixed limit to the amount it can do? The forums I saw suggest that PT users would like an overhaul. Pro-Q is the EQ to have it seems, a favorite of many in the audio engineering world. I have no experience with it or any other FabFilter product. If it (or at least one of its features) is having problems with Pro Tools, that is....interesting. Maybe that will be the tipping point for Avid to do some retooling (no pun intended). There are some pretty popular FX that are latency hogs, iZotope and Acustica come to mind. Maybe Pro Tools users mostly stick to UAD.😏

Cool story. Smart move on their part, then. The audio features are definitely a big reason I've stuck with bargain bin Vegas licenses. I recall not long ago seeing a post from someone on a forum somewhere who uses Vegas as a DAW. The software industry has changed to the point that it's now possible to put together a studio based entirely on free loss leader software. Start with Cakewalk by BandLab, get the Kilohearts and MeldaProduction free bundles, Kontakt Start, Vital, Soundpaint, Swatches and so forth and go from there. I think that many software companies realized that most people who use cracked software aren't people who would have bought licenses if they hadn't had access to cracked copies. It's not an alternative, it's the only way they'd be able or willing to use it in the first place. As for whether it cannibalizes sales, to the extent that it does, they're not buying your competitors' product either. The loss leader concept absolutely does work, even for hardcore penny pinchers like me. MeldaProduction have many hundreds of dollars from me as proof of that. A|A|S as well, Swatches should be better known than it is. Swatches and soundpack giveaways hooked me and I now own both Chromaphone and Analog VA, as well as plenty of paid soundpacks . True for IK Multimedia, Soundpaint and Sonuscore to a lesser degree. Maybe as a greater benefit, I've advocated long and loud on multiple forums for these companies' products. For sure I know a couple of people from VI Control bought MComplete (and other) bundles using my referral code. That's a few grand right there. Even good ol' Vegas. They've only ever gotten my Humble Bundle pittances, but they've gotten multiple of them at this point, and who knows how many other HB users turn pro enough to want the latest features and the full suite. Their upgrade prices are reasonable. Of course my main DAW is one that I originally got for free before choosing to pay for it with the fruits of my labor....

There are many ways to get similar results. Apparently the University of Milan has a whole Bachelor's program for developing music technology (dang, when I was in high school, I would have learned Italian just to get that degree!), and the students make audio plug-ins as term projects. One of them, TheMasker, is an attempt to do a Trackspacer workalike. While I haven't tried it on program material, it looks like they at least got the overall concept. It doesn't have the advanced screen for setting attack and release and so forth, but it's great that they gave it a shot. MSpectralDynamics does it, MAutoDynamicEQ does it, Neutron does it, I know little about Pro-Q4, but given its reputation, it wouldn't surprise me if there's something in there that will let you sidechain in a signal and create a dynamic EQ curve based on frequency content. The extent to which all of these products can do this varies, as does the method they use. As others have said, you can achieve similar results using EQ and sidechained compression, it just takes longer. Frequency unmasking is as old as multitrack recording itself. Even older, before that they did it by moving the mics around.🙂

I gave Music Maker a very brief look years ago when I got it in one of these Bumble Hundles. It was much too basic for me to even try doing anything with. So I have no experience with what you're describing. Supposedly, when they acquired Sony's product line, they kind of did a BandLab and maintained the US development staff. That may have changed. I can say that the first MAGIX release of Vegas Pro was vastly improved as far as crashiness. Since then, they have made more progress. Nothing close to what the Cakewalk engineers achieved in even the first 9 months of BandLab's ownership, but progress. Added advanced features that I'll probably never use but that seem to be important in the video industry these days. It backslid a little for a couple of releases as far as the crashiness, but during that time I learned a bunch of tuning tricks in the advanced settings (which could only be accessed via hidden menus) that made it faster and more stable. When that sort of thing happens, my guess is that the developers' systems are already tuned up, so they forget the fact that they could be doing better for brand new installations. Cakewalk has some settings that, IMO, could be deprecated or have their defaults updated to reflect things like the fact that it's probably been 10 years since anyone even thought of running it on anything less than a 2-core system with 8G RAM and at least 7200 RPM spinner. With Vegas, they've lagged behind taking full advantage of things like nVidia's CUDA cores. Supposedly they've teased a new video engine that will change that, but for me it's a couple of Hundle Bumbles in the future. My nVidia card ain't the latest by a long shot, but it's not a tater either, and when I'm rendering in Vegas, it barely uses the GPU (watching it with a monitoring program). It perks up a little when I have a preview window open, but then so does Sonar, so that kind of thing is probably managed by the OS. Once they do leverage the GPU better, Vegas will be much snappier, at least it will render more quickly. It also may introduce some bugs. Whatever, it seems like we're talking about different product lines. For me, these Humble Bundles are just Vegas Pro and Sound Forge updates. I may check out the rest for curiosity's sake, but I'd still buy the bundles if the other licenses weren't included. Vegas is still the least stable thing I run on my computer, but there aren't entire features that don't work for me, and it's about at the level most DAW's were 15 years ago, with "save early and often" being a prime directive. Run your AI search on Vegas Pro and see what you get. The Google AI seems to agree with my views on it as far as the DAW-like UI and audio features making it more beginner-friendly than most other video NLE's. That's very important to me, I don't have to switch my mind to another workflow paradigm (which is why I've yet to do anything in Ableton Live). The video and audio are in tracks and clips, with headers and automation and whatnot.

The carpal tunnel varies in diameter among people, making for greater or lesser susceptibility. RSI may be less common among musicians because we have to be mindful about things like finger placement when learning instruments. Positioning the extremities for injury-free less restricted efficient movement isn't a behavior that people are necessarily born with. When I first started playing 1st person shooter games back in the 90's, I had some residual joint pain in my right index and middle fingers after multiple-hour sessions. I studied how I was using my mouse buttons and noticed that I was pressing with the pads of my fingers rather than the tips. This resulted in the joints inverting slightly when I pressed. It had never been a problem because I never had to deliver that many mouse clicks before, and I was pressing with more force in the heat of battle. I made a conscious decision to curl my fingers and start pressing with the tips of my fingers and the pain stopped immediately. Not everyone seems to be capable of, or good at, analyzing how they're holding their fingers/wrists/arms and making adjustments. My mother has been using computer mice for 30 years and has never performed what I would call a normal double-click. It may be hard to describe this, but when she's called upon to double click a mouse button, she performs 2 distinct single clicks as fast as possible. What I mean by this is that if you tell yourself you're going to click your mouse only once, you'll (all in an instant) place your finger on the button, then press it, then your finger will return to whatever its resting, ready position is. When you double-click, you probably press the button, then leave your finger on the button for a quick second press, then return to ready position. With mom, she executes the full "place, press, return to ready position" sequence, then repeats the whole thing again, hopefully quickly enough for the computer to register it as a double-click. As many times as I tried to explain it to her that her computer often fails to register double clicks because her technique delivers them too slowly, rather than trying to change it up she just tries to be faster at her 2 single click thing. I gave up years ago. To me, it's as obvious as if I were watching someone deliver a meal to a house, and instead of handing the various dishes through the front door all in one session, they hand over one dish, then close the door, then ring the doorbell every time they hand over a different part of the order. Ring, here's your chow mein, ring, here's your rice, ring, here's the chicken. Some people just have a harder time of it. The way they learned to make these movements made sense to them when they learned them and being mindful about whether it's the most comfortable, least stressful way just ain't happening. Check the differences in the ways people hold writing instruments. I see a LOT of people with the pen or pencil in this inverted-knuckle death grip that would result in joint pain if I tried to write an entire page that way. My penmanship has never been great, but at least the way I hold the pen is textbook. I was a mouse-and-keyboard gamer up until a couple of years ago, then switched to a controller. Now I use a hybrid system where in movement/combat activities I use the controller and when doing more type-y things I use the mouse and keyboard.

I got the complementary "Guitar and More" bundle last year, surprisingly few overlaps, so I have a friggin' music encyclopedia for dummies to load up on my iPad. I even have Drums for Dummies in dead tree format. Been a fan of For Dummies going back over 30 years to Windows for Dummies.

Fortunate that my studio is operated by a HI (human intelligence) rather than an AI. There are multiple points where I must agree with the AI search results, but as pwal said, all software companies have their issues. MAGIX does seem to party like it's 1999, but stability has improved since I first started using Vegas Pro, and I get along with Sound Forge all right, haven't had any issues with exporting. It's fine for cleaning up the audio from video sources that were recorded at low levels, with background noise, etc. They at least finally introduced dark themes in Vegas and Sound Forge, so they're easier on the eyes. Oddly enough, the MAGIX program that sees the most use around my place is Audio Cleaning Lab, which came in a Humble Bundle. It's their consumer-y take on RX. I don't use those features, but it works a treat for sampling dialogue from movies and television shows. Unlike many programs, it's easy to route audio from Windows sound output without weirdness such as feedback loops. Their stuff happens to be what I have and it happens to work. I originally got my Vegas license for free from a friend, upgrades are cheap from Humble Bundle, licenses are perpetual. No way would I shell out full price for any of it. But at Humble Bundle prices, I think it's very much worth it. For someone starting out now who wants to work with video, I'd suggest they take a look at DaVinci or HitFilm. But Vegas, true to its original heritage as a DAW, kind of acts like a DAW for video, which makes it great for casual users like me who spend most of our time with DAW's. Video clips move around like audio clips, the timeline looks like a DAW timeline, video FX are applied like audio FX, you create fades by dragging at the edges of clips, etc. I can go away for a year and come back to it and get back up to speed in minutes without referring to a manual.