Starship Krupa

https://www.pluginboutique.com/products/3259 One of the best plug-in purchases I've ever made. Def in the top 5, maybe #1. I've long held that given a DAW's stock plug-ins, MFreeFXBundle and Kilohearts Essentials, I'd feel comfortable mixing just about any project, therefore the rest of my collection of FX plug-ins is pure luxury (except for the weird ones like Glitchmachines and Unfiltered Audio). The only one I'd miss would be Trackspacer and I'd miss it bad. It's not even worth questioning whether it'll actually get used. If you're mixing 2 or more audio tracks, it will get used, probably on every project, and your projects will sound better for having used it. Does what it does so well and with such little effort that it feels like cheating. Surely, something that gets this important task done so easily must have a drawback? Well, I have yet to hear anyone say anything negative about it. I've tried other products that claim to perform the same function and while I got similar results with one of them they all cost more and....I already have Trackspacer. It goes on sale maybe once or twice a year at this price. I've never seen it for less.

The bundle lives up to its name. I could live without MTurboCompLE, but MTurboReverbLE, MAutoDynamicEQ, MTurboDelay, MAutoAlign, and MLimiterX are in tight rotation in my projects. https://www.pluginboutique.com/product/81-Bundles/39-Effects-Bundles/5590-MEssentialsFXBundle

My impression right now is that when NuSonar was announced, along with the impending discontinuation of Cakewalk by BandLab and no mention of any free tier, the robust collection of CbB oriented YouTube channels either stopped producing anything or did one video about the announcement and stopped. 6 months after the announcement, I did a YouTube search and there was no new content at all. After the announcement of Free Tier Sonar, new videos popped up very quickly. My most recent search, which wasn't really deep, turned up 8 about the announcement. I guess the YouTube creators were watching and waiting.

It occurs to me that Tony Burrows is the perfect artist for Adam's schtick. "Professor Rock" seems to have a special place in his heart for one hit wonders and Burrows generated 5 of them. The video for "Pop Muzik" is so great. Looking at it today, was Robin Scott like Nostradamus or something? As for Rick Beato, I think even he gets that people are getting tired of his hating on the hits of the current day. I've never cared for it myself. Wow, he listens to the top 10 most popular songs of the day and concludes that they mostly suck. To use his own question: how can he not know that about pop music? At any given moment in the history of there being such a thing as top 10 songs, most of them will be forgettable, saccharine tripe. "Forgettable" being the operative word. We don't remember how crappy pop music of the past was because the songs themselves are not memorable.

Uninstalled!

Ah, that must have been where I copied them to before trying it.

Not sure what you mean by this. You installed SONAR Platinum and were expecting it to give you an option to import custom themes? AFAIK there's never been any dialog or mechanism to import themes, you just put the .STH files in your C:\Cakewalk Content\Cakewalk Themes folder (that path is hard-coded) and they show up as available in Preferences. I only installed SPlat after years of using CbB and creating themes for it. Themes created in newer versions of Theme Editor seem to load fine into SPlat. I guess as with the DAW itself it just ignores the stuff associated with newer features, which is the way to do compatibility, IMO. I don't think Cakewalk/SONAR/Sonar gets enough credit for how well it handles 2-way project file compatibility. Newer project files usually open okay in older versions. From the limited testing I've done, this goes for themes as well. My up-to-date CbB themes work in SPlat. This is good news, because with my aging eyes, Sonar's new Squintlight™ interface makes comping more difficult.

"It's my authority and by golly I'm gonna appeal to it!" I do not recognize Berklee's definition (or maybe it's just your interpretation of their definition). Here's some NOTmusic written by Claude Debussy:

Nice. I've had this question in the back of my mind since Sonar came out: do the developers use monitors or monitor settings with greater contrast/vibrance than my poor old Dell and Samsung HD monitors'? The other day I bought a 27" 4K monitor thinking that it might help with my Sonar legibility issues. Unfortunately it didn't.

What happened 5 years ago? CbB came out over 6 years ago. IMO, it improved a great deal over the years, up until the point that development on it stopped. Do you mean that 5 years ago another DAW surpassed it?

I would love to find out how to customize it to be more visible. I would prefer it not to then go missing from time to time. Does it still go missing if you back out your customization(s)? I've never been able to detect any change in "LED state" in the icon, not from the start. The "lights" are just too small. My MIDI chain troubleshooting is to look at a MIDI track's meters to see if Sonar is able to take data in, and then if it's not, then I fire up MIDI-Ox. I find MIDI-Ox' port mapping setup screen to be mostly unfathomable, so I use a "brute forcing the puzzle" approach to setting it up. Once it's set up, MIDI-Ox is a powerful tool.

Edited because misunderstood inquiry.

People actually use this? I've never been able to detect MIDI activity, the thing is just too small. Permanent disability. A longstanding feature request of mine is to move the indicator somewhere within the main UI. Maybe at the bottom or somewhere in the transport module.

Only BandLab know for sure and that information is locked behind a wall of non-disclosure agreements.

You're either not reading my posts or you don't think I'm a grown man.😆

That is great news, if I remember correctly, the 56 is similar to the Pro 40, but with onboard FX? I saw a post on VI Control from a person whose Liquid Saffire 56 had become unusable on his Windows 10 system. When he upgraded his OS to Windows 11, the interface started working again. Reports of Firewire's death on Windows seem to still be premature. I'm not concerned in any case, my Pro 40's can continue to be of value whenever Firewire finally does breathe its last. They should function just as well as an Octopre, and they're already paid for.

Sonar has a nice command that will fit your entire project on the screen horizontally. Ctrl-Alt-F is the default keystroke for it.

Ah, so that was you tearing 'em up. Quite amusing. I had heard that there are still people out there who think they're owed something special by BandLab because they paid Gibson for the SPlat lifetime updates plan 8 years ago. They don't seem to come around here any more. That is, in addition to 7 years of continuous updates, which included a zillion bug fixes and several new features.

Wow, quite the explosion of videos! Cakewalk-oriented video channels ground to a halt after the NuSonar announcement. I know because I search for them from time to time. I guess they were waiting to see what would happen.

Of course there's more to the UI overhaul than that. The new vector-based technology is supposed to be able to handle display scaling better. We already have the resizable Console strip modules, which is great. The new Track Manager is a big improvement over the old one. Theoretically, the vector-based UI should allow for greater customization. If not for the end user, at least for the developers. I hope we see more of that. I'm here to advocate for it. I like the overall look of the new UI. Most of my CbB themes are as flat as I could make them, especially the dark ones. Flat is the current look for computer programs. Computers have been around long enough that programs don't have to look like physical objects. The last big revamp of the SONAR/CbB UI was in the oughts, right? I know that new isn't necessarily better, but It was looking dated to me. I don't like having to switch back to CbB for certain tasks.

"Blame" is a strong word. I like to stay away from figuring out what the devs' priorities are. I want to be able to use NuSonar, and they probably want it to be usable. I'll put it like this: Sonar has multiple areas where legibility and accessibility has been reduced in comparison to its immediate predecessor. I'd like to see this reversed/remedied, especially if/as CbB gets phased out in favor of the free tier of Sonar. Others have concurred, and of course there must be many other users who never post on this forum. NuSonar has been released for some time, and from the start, people have given feedback regarding how the legibility of Sonar is reduced from CbB's and how important it is to restore the features that have been removed from Color Preferences. Some users have stated that if these issues aren't addressed, they'll stick with CbB for as long as they can and then maybe go in search of yet another DAW. So far, things have stayed the same except for some tweaks to the contrast of grid lines in Track View/Clips Pane. While the UI looks slicker overall, there are no areas where legibility has been improved. In most locations, text font size has decreased. Less so button image size, but there are some locations where that's gotten smaller too, such as the note length buttons in Piano Roll view. The underlying UI elements are the same size as they were in CbB, so making the graphics and text labels smaller isn't due to lack of real estate. The text sizes really look like I went down a line on an eye chart. CbB was the last line I could read, and then NuSonar is the next line down where I start to miss letters. In the places where text contrast against its background has changed, it's been reduced, not increased. A relatively small increase to text contrast against the backgrounds would help, though. There are some operations, like comping, where I switch back to CbB even though I otherwise much prefer the look of the NuSonar interface. Comping, clip editing, any work that requires me to use the grid to line things up is much easier and faster in CbB because I can make the lines out better. When I switch back to CbB, my eyes relax, I can read labels again, and I don't have to rely as much on memory and guessing. It's easier and more comfortable to regress to a program whose UI I like less than it is to have to squint and press my face up to the monitor. I'm about to connect with someone on Craig's List who's selling a 4K monitor, which I'm only interested in because it might help me see Sonar better. The HD monitors I already have are perfectly fine for everything else I do with my system. I recently had a comping project with 4 linked drum clips. I started out in NuSonar, to give it a chance, but eventually had to choose between forcing myself and getting the job done. It's still mostly fine for MIDI editing, but I can't make out the note value buttons in PRV any more. I don't mean this to slam the developers, they're good lads who work hard and do good work. The UI revamp is a herculean task and they've actually pulled it off. But if the reason for the reduced legibility is that Sonar is still relatively new, then what better time to provide feedback, before things are set in stone? There's still time to restore the text to its previous sizes. For now, even a couple of color schemes with higher text contrast would help. "High Contrast Light" and "High Contrast Dark?"

They are completely compatible. There's nothing to do except copy them and start using them. I you change your Sonar file location preferences so that Sonar uses the same folder as the CbB templates, you don't even have to copy them.

Clarification: only one app can be assigned to open files with a given extension when the filename or icon is double-clicked in Explorer. NuSonar and CbB can both open .CWP files once you start the program and open projects via the Start Screen or File/Open.

Hmm, so with each big move in the UI, Color Preferences has become less capable of allowing the user to set colors? Disturbing.🤔 Between Theme Editor and Color Preferences, I was able to get CbB to mostly bend to my will, color wise. There were some elements that were impervious to color customization, notably the Browser background. With NuSonar, the Browser background color can now be changed, you just have to be a developer to change it.😆

That's what I thought, that it was a relatively recent feature. Theme Editor was fun while it lasted, but as far as making the DAW sufficient to my needs, not necessary. I don't have to have REAPER or CbB-level control over the program's look to be happy. I need to be able to make out my measure and beat lines, and their colors weren't determined by Theme Editor. It was Color Preferences. Although the interface to the feature is still there, it no longer has any effect on parts of the UI that I want/need to modify in order to make them legible. I can't figure out what elements it even CAN control any more. I have a feeling that Color Preferences dates back a good many Cakewalk/SONAR/Sonar revisions. I'll take a guess and say at least as early as the first X, probably earlier. The dialog has that "party like it's 1999" look about it. One thing that gives me some hope is that among the current fixed color schemes we can get an idea of what screen elements can have different colors. If we're allowed to once again choose our own custom colors, the elements that I'm most interested in tweaking should be tweakable. The aforementioned clip backgrounds and lines, text color in the Browser, various buttons, various backgrounds. As soon as they let us at it I'll be working on my own custom color schemes/themes. I hope that it's just a matter of the devs wanting to rework the Color Preferences dialog panel to match the new Sonar look before we get it back. I didn't realize until I used CbB how much more inspiring a program is when I can set the colors myself.