Starship Krupa

That's what their email and website said. I registered and redeemed, but the only files I could find to download were installation instruction PDF's. No actual plug-in installers.

Ah, yes. I was confused because you said "the free version." Does Premium have a different authorization frequency or something? I was under the possibly false impression that the authorization was similar, but with SoFT, it turns off the aforementioned features. With CbB, once authorized/validated it would run for 6 months without needing a re-up. I imagine that with Sonar the interval between last phone home and demo mode is shorter, but is it different for the two tiers?

I know the workarounds from your past helpful suggestions. I said "no simple way."😄 My workflow when recording drums is to loop the whole song and do multiple full-song takes. Sometimes I have to stop in the middle of a take due to major foul-up. When I do that, I get one of those what I call "spurious splits." I finally understand why they are there, the program assumes that you're going to split at that point while comping. I just want to be able to toggle it off. IIRC, your methods wouldn't work for my continuous looping workflow. It's especially a PITA when recording drums, because each take is spread across at least 4 tracks, and that's if you're a minimalist drum mic'er like me. Healing all of the splits across multiple takes across multiple tracks. Sheesh.

Just as well, I have tried grabbing it twice, including registering an account, and the only downloads I can see are installation instructions. I should have listened to you!

Cranking up the UI scaling a little helped me with the text that was shrunk between CbB and Sonar.

I'm curious as to which feature(s) SoFT lacks vs. SoPre that you think render it not suitable for live use or "semi professional" work. Plug-in oversampling, one more choice of dithering algorithms, one more choice of stretch algorithms, Workspaces, Overloud TH-U, and the BandLab loop collection? The only one of those that I'd noticeably miss would be Workspaces, but I'd probably work something out with Screensets to replace what I do with Workspaces. If I were worried about being able to apply DAW-based oversampling, running at 88 or 96 takes care of that during mixing, and exporting at 88 or 96 takes care of it at render time. The tests I ran on POW-R dithering and Elastique Pro stretching suggest that at least to the extent that I take advantage of them, they make no difference compared to the other algorithms that SoFT comes with. I've yet to use more than one Arranger track in a project, so that wouldn't feel limiting. The loop library is nice, but I already have access to all the loops I want via other means. TH-U is a good amp simulation plug-in, but there are numerous free alternatives. I wouldn't wish to see the membership ads. Everything else has simple workarounds. There's one big feature missing from Sonar that was in CbB, and that's user control of UI element colors. I reeeeeeeeeaaaaaaalllly hope that the promised remediation of that isn't going to be paywalled.

He is a heck of a guy like that, I must say. Still using the iLok 2 that he gave me years ago. Sorry to hear that you couldn't get the Saffire to work on your newer computer. My Pro 40 is still going strong, knock wood. I don't expect it to do so forever. When the time comes that it and Windows refuse to speak to each other, I'll probably get whatever Focusrite USB model will allow my to continue to use the Pro 40 as an 8 input mic pre via ADAT. I think the current one with ADAT in is the 81i something. I want it to stick around long enough for Microsoft's promised streaming-optimized USB stack to come out. At that point I'll feel better about using a serial port that was originally designed for mice, keyboards, and printers to stream asynchronous audio. The fact that Pete Brown thought that MS should redo the stack with audio streaming in mind tells me that I wasn't just being curmudgeonly about my USB skepticism.

The most baffling thing about Cakewalk (and Sonar) is that there's no simple way to suppress this.

Tried have you? From the description it sounded like it should definitely do something to audio. "Unleash unparalleled creativity with Warper, the ultimate detune and warping effect. With a single intuitive knob, you can effortlessly stretch, twist, and distort your audio, crafting rich, textured soundscapes and otherworldly effects."

Why not? What, then is the purpose of the forum, and why do you bother to participate? I see the forum as like those old "Leave a Penny/Take a Penny" trays. I've contributed pennies over the years, and I've taken them as well. There is a value for me in helping people solve their issues. It keeps me sharp, and I don't always have an answer ready to go. Sometimes I have to do research myself in order to help, and that extends my knowledge. There is no value for me in withholding troubleshooting suggestions to a fellow user. I don't feel the need to try to "teach Cakewalk a lesson" or whatever. I prefer Jake being able to install the software over him not being able to install it. @JakeJordan is a fellow Sonar user who's having trouble. If I have any ideas to contribute, I will. No in-house support system will be able to solve all problems. Did someone at Cakewalk suggest that Jake ask on the forum? I don't know, but I doubt they did. It sounds like they took the matter to the limit of their capacity to help. Should the company invest in increasing that capacity? Dunno. Not my call. I think you're on to something there. According to Google, the error code you're seeing in the first dialog, code 0x80070002, is often due to missing or corrupted system files. They suggest running the DISM and sfc commands to check system file integrity. To do that: open a command prompt as an administrator. type DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth and hit Enter type run sfc /scannow and hit Enter Here are some questions, and forgive me if any or all of them have already been asked: Are you running the Sonar installer as an Administrator? Is the user that you usually use to log on to Windows in the Administrators group? If you open Explorer, do you see an icon at the left for "OneDrive - Personal?" What do you get if you run OneDrive.exe and check OneDrive Settings? If you browse to C:\Users\Public\Public Documents\Overloud\REmatrix Solo\IRLibraries\, what do you see? On my system, I see the FACTORY.rir file, and the groups that have permissions are SYSTEM, BATCH, Administrators, INTERACTIVE, and SERVICE. My user is in the Administrators group, so I'm covered there. What happens if you choose to Skip writing FACTORY.rir?

I'm using the Syba mentioned by @mettelus and others. PCIe.

Here's another. How you tie the string to the post makes a big difference in tuning stability. I've been using the "luthier's knot" for 40 years, and have never felt the need for locking tuners. I have multiple guitars with Strat-style vibratos, and don't have tuning issues. I do install graphite impregnated nuts on most of my guitars. I'd assume that a high end axe like a PRS would already have a pretty good nut.

I'm in the US and just enrolled in the free updates program. MS says that Windows 10 systems will get updates to Defender at least until 2028, so it seems that there's less urgency to leave Windows 10 behind.

Wow, I didn't know that there was a free option. I'm already using OneDrive, so I suppose I qualify. One thing that the article mentions is that ESU or no, Windows 10 systems will still get Defender updates through 2028. Since the FUD I've seen centers on security, that would seem to address those issues. FUD runs deep, though.

I recently set up a Cakewalk DAW system for a friend who bought a refurbished Dell Optiplex 7050 i7-7700 system at Amazon for $210. It has both PCi and PCie slots. I installed a Firewire card in the PCi slot. Works great with his PreSonus Firepod on Windows 10 Pro. The Windows 10 Pro license was included. I prefer Pro for a DAW because it allows for more control over the OS. It also came with 16GB RAM, a 1TB SSD, and a 2TB spinner. Quite a loaded little system for DAW work. On my own system, I use a PCie Firewire card with my Focusrite Saffire FW interface. Works great with Windows 10. See my sig for details. So for very little money, you could set up a much more capable and up to date system. Get in there while Windows 10 is still being updated. You can still have your old Windows 7 system as a backup.

Here's what my Settings page for it looks like: As you can see, it says that it can only be turned off "for a short time." It also says that it's managed by an administrator. It's not true that it can only be turned off for a short time before coming back on, but it is true that it's what will happen if you try to control it from that Settings panel. You have to do it from Group Policy Editor, and you also have to turn off Tamper Protection. If you don't turn off Tamper Protection, Windows will keep turning real-time protection back on. Once you've done that: Open Local Group Policy Editor (type gpedit.msc in the search box) Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Microsoft Defender Antivirus > Real-time Protection Enable Turn off real-time protection Restart the computer As you can see, it uses similar logic to certain locations in Sonar where you disable/bypass FX. You don't "disable" it, you enable turning it off. Note that this recipe requires you to be running Windows 10 Professional. Years ago I figured out how to both enable Group Policy Editor and use it to turn off real-time protection on Windows 10 Home, but it's harder to make that one stick. Microsoft kept turning it back on when system updates were installed. So I finally caved and bought a Pro license, which can be had for about $10 if one searches Google Shopping. Defender will still do its downtime scans, it just won't scan every read and write.

There are likely differences. I'm running Windows 10 Pro and I've tweaked the heck out of it. One of the biggies is that Defender realtime scanning is disabled entirely. Defender scans during idle periods. If I have any doubt at all about a downloaded file, I scan it manually. You might see less Defender activity at project load time if you exclude C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3 and your VST2 folder from realtime scanning. On systems that I set up or tune for other people, I exclude plug-in folders as well as the entire Cakewalk Projects folder. When setting Defender exclusions, I noticed that Celemony apparently adds exclusions for the Melodyne separations folder and files. I've made the suggestion to the Cakewalk devs that the Sonar installer could do this as well, but maybe the fact that the user can choose the location of their Cakewalk Projects folder makes that problematic.

Verily, it is said to be popular in your field. Lack of volume and pan controls in track headers makes Cubase a no-go for me. I learned about that in one of these "give us back our theming" threads. Still makes me shake my head.

Cakewalk teased adding more user options for UI customization about 7 weeks ago on Reddit and in this forum. My guess is that whenever it comes, we'll get more control over colors. From what I understand, changing graphical elements is a different ball of wax from SONAR/CbB. Those programs used static raster images whereas the new UI uses vector images. Custom theming was a feature that helped draw me in to CbB, and I wound up making several of my own extensively customized themes. The thing I most want control over is color. My goals with the themes I made for myself to use were to give them pleasing and more visible colors, make the buttons as flat as possible, and design buttons that conformed better to current industry iconography. 3-dot options menus, turny triangles to open tree menus, etc. Those last two have been taken care of with the new UI, so if we only get color customization, I'll be happy. The biggies for me are Track View grid lines and Browser text. Despite preferring dark themes to light ones, I sometimes use the Mercury Classic color scheme just because the Browser text is blue instead of off-white. Light grey text on a dark grey background just feels to me like it's 1988 and I'm on a monochrome monitor. Although I always at least had green or amber monitors, so it wasn't even grey on grey.

Open Task Manager and click on the Performance tab. Down at the bottom of that pane, you'll see a button "Open Resource Monitor." Resource Monitor lets you monitor what processes are using various resources, and things such as file access. Click on the Disk tab, and in there you can see whether there's a lot of disk activity, and if you choose, select one or more processes to specifically monitor. If you're running Sonar, select sonar.exe and then observe what files Sonar reads and writes. I can't remember the name of the process for Defender, but when I discovered this, I had selected the Defender process in the Disk tab, and could see it chugging away every time I hit Play in Cakewalk. I used the same tool to discover that however many takes you have in your project, Cakewalk/Sonar streams all of them on playback, regardless of mute status of the clip or take lane. If, like me, often choose to keep your unused takes around for possible future use, the way to minimize the impact is to move your unused takes to another track and then Archive the target track. Audio in Archived tracks isn't streamed on playback. This is the reason I made a feature request years ago to implement Archiving at the take lane level.

By default, Defender scans every file that is read from or written to the drive in real time. That is the reason to make exclusions. I only found this out because I was trying to troubleshoot a Cakewalk issue. I was playing back a project with about a dozen audio tracks and noticed that the the Defender process was accessing the files each time I hit Play. I run Windows Pro, so just turn off realtime scanning entirely, but for people who run Windows Home and/or who do want to have the antivirus scanning every file they read or write, it's a good idea to exclude the Cakewalk Projects folder and VST2 and VST3 and any sample folders from realtime scanning.

Here's my friend Lorene setting it up using the instructions I posted on this forum (in other pursuits, I call myself "Superabbit"):

That is an excellent analogy. If my music can be equaled or bested by algorithms, then I have no reason for doing them. My goal is always to create something with the stamp of my own personality/taste/creativity. I listen to some genres that to most people, all the songs sound alike. Ambient drone, for instance. And I understand why that is. However, I can be listening to Drone Zone and then suddenly sit up and have to make a note of the artist and song. It just has something. That something is more difficult for an algorithm to do.

Plugin Boutique sure does. Their BOGO program drew a LOT of my attention to their site. Not as much now as it did years ago, but 5 years ago, wow. The quality of the BOGO's seems to have dropped, so along with the fact that I just have so many ploog'ns already, the program doesn't get as much attention from me as it once did. I have some great products from it, including things from A|A|S, MeldaProduction, and Mastering the Mix. I subsequently spent money with each of those companies, too. Chord and arp plug-ins are some of the only types that I'm still interested in, so thank you @cclarry for posting the original link and thank you @Pragi for posting the Windows link. I'm sure if I dug through my PB account I could find the entry, but like most of us, my PB account has MANY products in it.

Wow, so much for treated rooms, you got a darn good sound there.... The Stargate visuals are fun!