Starship Krupa

No, that's the same Sampletank 4 MAX that has been kicking about for $49. This is a change they made to the bundle, an excellent one.

I sent email to e2genesis warning/asking them about this but haven't heard anything yet. Kinda disappointed in Groupon for letting this kind of thing through.

On subsequent viewing, the listing shows a lot of older versions of the products, but then so does e2genesis' own website.

Can you elaborate?

If this is legit, this has to be the deal of the century: https://www.groupon.com/deals/e2genesis

I don't know what genre you're working in, but for electronic stuff, often what sparks an idea is choosing a synth I haven't explored in a while and running through its presets. Often enough, a timbre or arpeggio will suggest a melody, chord change, lyric, and then further filling out. A drum machine with interesting pre-programmed beats is also a good way to spark something. Running through the content in Breaktweaker, all the patches and individual variations in them can flush out an idea. With more conventional guitar bass drum keys pop, I start with a lyrical phrase, sing it to myself, make up a melody, add chord changes, etc. Whatever instrument(s), I put my hands on them and just make up shapes and patterns, without regard for whether they "fit." Thom Yorke and Brian Wilson are a couple of songwriters who I am sure do this at times, I can tell by the way their chords shift.

"Can't apply coupon to already discounted order"

I created the Wikipedia page for Cakewalk by BandLab, but when the new name semi-reversion was announced, I threw in the towel. I suspect the page for SONAR could stand to be updated at this point.

Wow, I didn't know there were so many visual artists on the forum. I will be asking for advice. I've only briefly tried the freehand painting/drawing functions in Painter. I made a couple of abstract things that I liked. Painter locked up and crashed at one point just as I was digging something I had done. It feels kind of "fragile," so saving is important. I'm hoping that Rebelle is more sturdy. I need to get used to the feel of the pen and what it can do, how to quickly correct when I make mistakes, etc.

Thank you Brian. I almost pulled the trigger the last time a sale was mentioned here, this is a much better deal, 7 instead of 6 and Pro for $15. It will be interesting to compare it to Painter, which I Humble Bundled. I got good results with Painter, using it to morph a photo of my mother's dog into a pastel drawing. She loves it. Thanks to the local Salvation Army thrift store, I now have 2 Wacom tablets.

Try running LatencyMon. Let us know what it says. Also, run Task Manager and see if you have any background processes using up resources. If your SSD tests good, it's very unlikely that the SSD is the problem.

The product currently known as Sonar (mixed case) doesn't have a 32-bit version. Rex is gushing about the very latest release of Sonar (mixed case). It's the latest incarnation of Cakewalk (a product of Twelve Tone Systems Inc.)>SONAR (a product of Cakewalk Inc.)>Cakewalk (a product of BandLab Inc.)>Sonar (a product of the Cakewalk group of BandLab Technologies, a division of Caldecott Music Group). Did I miss any names? I tried to stick with the main product rather than including Home Studio or whatever. It is all a bit confusing (pun intended). It can make a person feel out of their depth (pun also intended).

I recently moved a 500GB C drive to a 1TB drive using Clonezilla, a favorite of Mark MacLeod. With Clonezilla, you make a bootable disk (CD or USB stick), boot from it, and then follow the prompts to clone the disk. Then once you have the system booting from the new drive, you can use the Windows Disk Manager to extend the partition size to take up the unused space on the new, larger drive. E-Z P-Z.

I didn't notice it because I only use it to dirty up dialog samples. Seems odd, worn vinyl records certainly have noise in between sounds.

The topic title makes me think of Morrissey. "Interesting plugs, the ones that you tried, it really really helped you...."

LEVELS is just a meter, and Bass Space tells you if the rest of the mix is making room for your kick and bass. It's then up to you to highpass and/or duck the other elements if you want to. Things like Curves Equator, Trackspacer, MSpectralDynamics, MAutoDynamicEQ, Equivocate and Neutron both analyze the mix and provide the tool(s) to make space. Either statically or dynamically.

Hey, I sympathize. Just saying that iZotope acquired an unfortunate situation as far as how the product line was set up. The line should have already been down to just 4 reverbs. I too have a couple of Excalibur licenses kicking around although I no longer even bother to install it. I only picked it up because $9.99 and Phoenix knocked me out so hard I figured it had to have something going for it. Turns out it just never made the rotation. As you point out, the Exponential abandonment should be less of an issue on Windows. Mac users are used to being treated as money-filled piñatas, hung by their feet and beaten until the cash falls from their pockets. At least MTurboReverble finally managed to equal the Expos in quality (IMO).

They didn't abandon them, they consolidated them. Except for that multi-fx one whose name I can't even remember. Stratus and Symphony and their 3D counterparts have been updated to run on Apple's new processors and are still being sold. Phoenix, Nimbus and Stratus could have been called Phoenix, Phoenix 2, and Phoenix 3. Or even 1.1 and 1.2, the newer features really weren't all that. The presets from each previous one work in the later ones. Same with R1, R2 and Symphony. That was the Exponential guy's doing, for whatever reason he decided that each revision should have a whole new product name. He did seem to be into wringing as much money as possible out of the products, Stratus and Symphony are STILL single-seat licenses. iZotope at least put them in the iLok Cloud so you can use them on multiple systems, just not at the same time. iZotope probably decided that there was no reason other than price to maintain 12 products instead of 4. There was some outcry about old project compatibility for Phoenix and the rest, but If Phoenix and R1 stop working for whatever reason and people still have unfinished projects that include them, they can export presets and use them in the newer versions. Sux for Mac users, but if anyone's used to forced upgrades, it's Mac users.🙄

Given the amount of system resources UAD's VCA Compressor eats up on my system, I can do without their products. These days, plug-ins should not jump in resource usage when you open their UI. Especially ones that have no dynamic display other than a moving needle. We have OpenGL, we have DirectX. Use them. Has me wondering whether all those years of being able to offload the processing to their coprocessors made them lazy as far as resource usage. It looks as if they decided that personal computers now have enough CPU cores and RAM to do what once required a dedicated IC. I was skeptical about those UAD coprocessors until about 5 years ago, when I got a chance to compare brainworx' native plug-ins to the UAD-aware ones. The UAD-aware ones sounded better. Likely due to being able to do more with those coprocessors.

I already have all of the Exponentials and Neoverb, so I'll wait a couple of years for the $9.99 sales. What it does can probably be approximated with pre and/or post EQ on a reverb send. Some reverbs (like the Exponentials and MeldaProduction's) have EQ built in. It looks like what they've done here is built in Trackspacer or MSpectralDynamics-style adaptive collision control. Notice how the demo shows a common EQ "smile." Carving EQ in reverb returns dates back at least as far as George Martin at Abbey Road. What they've done is a clever, iZotope-y take on it. If I want what it does, I can twist up something in MXXX. Might be a fun challenge.

I think it's already been figured out, but I'll chime in as a user of LEVELS. You can definitely check for everything that LEVELS does using just what comes with the MFreeFX bundle, with MAnalyzer and MLoudnessAnalyzer. As for the Bass Space feature, they make it sound fancier than it is. If you can interpret what SPAN or MAnalyzer, or even just the spectrum analyzer in Sonar's built-in EQ, you have everything that Bass Space does. The genius of LEVELS is that they took half a dozen common analysis tasks and put them in an easy-to-read display. There's a big round meter-y space in the middle, then the various tasks are arranged around the outside like numerals on a clock face. That's why it's the last thing in the chain in every single one of my templates. I think I got version 1 in some freebie deal or other, then paid to upgrade it when version 2 came around. Good marketing on their part because being a frugal guy, I would never have paid for such a tool. I already had its functions covered. But once I was exposed to its handiness, I was hooked. Truth, though, Bass Space isn't something in my critical path. Along the mixing way I already have EQ's with spectrum analyzers that show me when tracks have needless energy down there, and at this point, checking to see what can benefit from highpassing is muscle memory. I mostly use LEVELS to check for peak and LUFS, and stereo image. The widgets around the clock face turn red if it thinks there's something that needs attention, so I check those and decide if it's right about that. It kind of reminds me of RC-20. Before I got RC-20, I had multiple free plug-ins that could do everything that RC-20 does. There's nothing at all special about vinyl crackle, noise, wow and flutter, bit reduction, etc. The mighty FreeFX and Kilohearts Essentials bundles have it covered. But the designers of RC-20 probably worked backward starting with the task at hand, which is making clean samples sound like they come from thrift store vinyl or by holding a cheap mic up to an old TV speaker. So it takes 1/4 the time for RC-20 to do what I'd do with the other plug-ins, and most importantly, it doesn't derail my ADHD brain. I stay in the flow rather than going down garden paths with 3 or 4 plug-ins. Mastering the Mix are good at that, too. So they probably thought about what the most-needed metering tasks are and whittled it down and made a cool front-facing UI. Same reason I reach for EXPOSE to analyze final mixes despite the fact that I have MMultiAnalyzer, MCompare, Ozone Advanced, and Master Match.

Especially with that "customers who previously purchased the plug-in at its old price will be refunded" clause, I'd say they did not. If they had said "both customers who previously purchased the plug-in at its old price will be refunded" it wouldn't have surprised me. I mean, what were they trying to sell it for? $200? Or was it more? "Hello, this is the plug-in market, we're calling to inform you that everyone who wants a vintage Fairchild 670 emulation already has at least one, and they paid less for it than this. IK Multimedia even gave out free licenses for their highly-regarded one a few years ago. PreSonus bundles one with their DAW. If you had come out with this product in 2009 you may have had some takers at that price. It is not 2009. Many DAW users were not even born in 2009. Goodbye and have a great day."

I was surprised by the reasonableness of the price. I'm sure it uses those sweet, sweet Exponential algorithms, so it should be a great-sounding 'verb.

May be a few other tips I could share around this topic.... Cakewalk demands many Deselect All commands in order to allow us to create without negative consequences, so what I do on all of my DAW systems is bind "Select None" to the "~/`" key in the upper left corner of most Windows keyboards beneath the Esc key. It's great because it's one of the few single keys that's not bound by default. Do you know about engaging Scroll Lock to stop automatic scrolling?

For what it does, I've seen nothing that can beat it.