Starship Krupa

https://www.theverge.com/23543094/creative-sim-wong-hoo-sound-blaster-obituary-death

Dang, that's pretty young.

I think about it, and the question for Windows users past the age of 30 isn't whether you ever owned a SoundBlaster, but which one(s) you owned.*

This guy created a standard for PC audio when one was sorely needed.

Thank you Sim Wong Hoo for making so much possible.

*(I don't remember the first one, but the last one I owned, which coincided with my entry into prosumer audio, was a Live! Unfortunately, I had to dump it once I found out that it resampled all incoming streams, no matter what the rate, to 48K. Even if you fed it 48K it still resampled it, and its resampling algo was not good. So my transcriptions of old DAT masters sounded "flattened" in comparison to the bit perfect transfers I later achieved. My first lesson in the fact that a "digital" audio stream could stay in the digital realm and still become compromised.

The fact that an $18 CMedia 8739-based card smoked it in terms of quality when taking input from (and sending output to) S/PDIF devices made me sad. The Audigy chip had so much potential.)

This has me curious. RME has about the best rep in the business in regard to drivers (no personal experience).

Does the same issue happen no matter what driver mode you're using? I mean ASIO vs. WASAPI Exclusive vs. WASAPI Shared?

Not suggesting it as a workaround or anything, but if there's a difference, it might help the folks at Cakewalk and RME if they look into it.

With your position as a creator of YouTube tutorials, there is probably a greater motivation to help you sort it.

37 minutes ago, Noel Borthwick said:

be careful to eliminate dependencies on other other tracks routed to the bus. The bus has the additional load of waiting for all its dependencies to be computed before it can mix its inputs.

Can you explain this in more practical terms? I'm not sure what a "dependency" is in this scenario.

I imagine that it has to do with the bus having to wait for every track that is routed to it to finish doing whatever it needs to do with  the stream (FX, synth computation) before it can do its thing, but in practical terms, how would I set things up to be able to observe this or optimize it?

36 minutes ago, Harley Dear said:

Are there any videos or written instructions on how I achieve all of that which you suggest?

https://www.hwinfo.com/ (the best view for ongoing system monitoring is had by checking "sensors only" in the start dialog)

Google "how do I disable C states in BIOS on my <make and model of your laptop here>"

According to TYLIP, "A selected region will invert the color of the ruler. For example, with the ruler background set to White, the selected zone will be Black,
which may render the Selection Marker invisible if it also happens to be Black or near-Black."

So the color of the "green bar" is really a matter of the color of the ruler underneath it. In my Blue Flat Dark theme, it appears as very bright white, because my dark themes kinda take "dark" to the next level:

Yes, as @msmcleod suggests, go into your advanced power settings and you will see that your notebook is configured to throttle CPU performance when on battery. Choices: either bring your power adaptor to the gig (my favorite solution), or set the minimum processor performance while on battery to 99% and expect much reduced battery life.

Other things to mess with to see if you get any change in performance are Cakewalk's Thread Scheduling Model (I use model 2, you may get even smoother performance with 3). Also turn off the 64-bit Double Precision Engine if you have it on, it's not necessary for your scenario.

I also disable C states in my BIOS. C states is another power-saving-at-the-expense-of-performance feature.

My favorite freeware utility for monitoring such things as processor clock is HWINFO. That will show you if your clock is bouncing around.

Selecting none is a handy thing to be able to do quickly in Cakewalk. Performing certain operations with too many things selected can easily produce unwanted results.

Mapping the tilde/invert quote key  to Edit/Select None is the choice for many. No modifier needed.

Yeah, the documentation and actual behavior of wheel zooming don't always line up. I've brought it up in the past.

I was going to mention the Zoom Factor settings, as at one point I got into the same pickle you did. Glad you found them.

Also, in teh PRV don't expect everything mousewheel zoom to work as described. It doesn't. It's not that far off, but some things, like vertical zoom, just don't work as described in the documentation.

Just now, antler said:

Sorry, I don't follow: elysia and SPL are actual brands that make audio hardware.

Yes, I know.

AFAIK, though, the plug-ins that are branded as such at PA are developed by the brainworx team. Do I have that wrong?

2 minutes ago, Brian Walton said:

I forgot about Unfiltered Audio in the discussion of "innovate" even though I own most of all of them.  They certainly think outside of the box and are not afraid to release something that a large percentage of the audio production population wouldn't actually use.  We need developers like them to break outside of the "same old EQ and Compressor" plugins we all have way too many of at this point.

UfA is kind of the odd brand out in the PA universe. They really don't deserve to be included in PA's lowball sales, despite the fact that I've benefited hugely from them. They should be getting more revenue for those amazing FX.

And I think for the purposes of this discussion, people are referring to the brands that are developed by brainworx, like elysia, SPL and so on. Unfiltered Audio is a separate company based in Santa Barbara, CA that just happens to be distributed by PA.

I'm a fan of Glitchmachines and Freakshow Industries as well. They can really add some crazy ear candy to a track. Not useful for anything but electronica at this point, but if some big time pop producer dropped some Glitchmachines into a hit track, it might become part of the vocabulary, like the autotune glitch thing. Not that I would necessarily welcome such a thing.

11 hours ago, Zo said:

instead of updating the first one , relaseing a second one with just some values diff

Ugh, yeah, I don't care for that sort of thing, like the differences between Shadow Hills Mastering Compressor and the Class A version, or bx_masterdesk and the "classic" version. Or BYOME and TRIAD. New features are great. But make them available via a switch and call it 2.0 rather than keeping the old version around as a separate product. Exponential Audio was guilty of this with Phoenix/Nimbus/Stratus, which were all the same basic engine with bells and whistles added. Also R2/R4/Symphony.

In all of those cases, I might even see keeping the old version around as a freebie (which they have done in the case of masterdesk and at times SHMC) or cheapo, with an upgrade path, but that ain't how they roll. Whatever, between MEGA sales and vouchers, I have everything I want from them for peanuts.

11 hours ago, Zo said:

PA didn't brougth anything really ground breaking since a while

Depending on what you consider "groundbreaking" and "a while," Unfiltered Audio have released SILO, LO-Fi-AF, Tails and Needlepoint all in the last year. Maybe these are not the first granular, lo-fi, ducking reverb and vinylizing FX on the market, but they are unusual enough in their categories to warrant getting them even if one already has FX in that class.

For the most part, when I think of Plugin Alliance, "groundbreaking" is not the first thing that comes to mind except for Unfiltered Audio.

brainworx, elysia, SPL, Lindell, Shadow Hills and their other brands seem more aimed at "faithful software recreations of sought after hardware" than they are breaking ground. Not exclusively, but that just seems to be more their thing.

3 minutes ago, marled said:

I question if it is positive that a company makes business disregarding all political and etic views!

Must it be either/or? How about striking a well-considered balance?

17 minutes ago, Nick Blanc said:

All plugins perpetually free. Going out in a blaze of glory.

He sold to Soundwide, not BandLab.

Just now, Brian Walton said:

It feels tiny and cramped like all the Elysa releases

Yeah, it's just this side of too small on my 1920x1080 monitors. Like much of the PA line, kinda overdue for some UI scaling. I just snagged the SPL Vitalizer and it's on the other side of too small. Tiny tiny.

21 minutes ago, Brian Walton said:

for a basic track compressor I frequently start thinking about and grabbing outside the PA basket

You certainly have plenty of excellent ones to choose from.

When it comes to PA's stuff, elysia mpressor is a very nice track compressor. I tend to ignore the more advanced features like the attenuation limit and built-in EQ and just set it up using the ratio, attack, release, and makeup gain controls. Whatever its detector is doing, snare tracks seem to like it better than anything else.

On 1/4/2023 at 6:26 AM, tom said:

You know what I mean, Melda does everything across the board

Sure, a lot of developers do. Once you mentioned it, I started to think about it, Waves, iZotope, Kilohearts, IK Multimedia, Eventide, Softube, brainworx, UAD, Soundtoys, Airwindows, HorNET, Analog Obsession, FabFilter.... They all seem to aspire to be one stop shops, with multiple FX in each category.

I'm curious about what companies you think take a different approach. Wavesfactory, maybe?

I tend to take it on a plug-in-by-plug-in basis. I tend to go by my own attraction to the sound, reputation from others, ease of use and easy to stare at UI. Also I like tightly-coded stuff that pays attention to resource conservation (despite having iZotope's MPS ?). Every manufacturer seems capable of clunkers, failed experiments and resource hogs.

As I said earlier, the more they step into the "analyze the material and apply magic processing" zone, the more wary I get, from a manufacturer of any size. I think MAutoAlign and MAutoStereoFix are in that category, but MTurboReverb, MTurboDelay, MEQualizer, MFreeformEQ are not. I was skeptical of MDrumleveler, but it turns out I get good results from it.

Nice, nice. Lots of products that I own but haven't delved deeply into.

20 hours ago, murat k. said:

To be clear, when the Snap is on, the automation is drawing by the PRV snap distance.

Oops. For some reason I thought you were referring to Track View. 

1 hour ago, tom said:

wary of devs who try and tackle every known processor out there instead of specialising in a few

That would make you wary of a lot of developers. Who are the ones who specialize in a few FX rather than a full line?

I hope you're not still using SONAR. It's slower thank Cakewalk by BandLab, has more bugs and fewer features and hasn't been supported for over 5 years.

Is Rhythmizer by Futurephonic the plug-in you're having trouble with?

It looks like it takes input from the user and manipulates it and then sends it along to a soft synth.

Getting things like that to work depends on a few things, like whether it's a MIDI effect or a virtual instrument. It's likely a virtual instrument because MIDI FX are rare.

If it's a virtual instrument, you'll probably want to set it up in its own instrument track and enable MIDI Out in the VST3 menu of the plug-in UI window:

Then on the instrument track(s) you want it to send notes to, set their input(s) to Rhythmizer.

16 hours ago, Fleer said:

Rather large for Mac (around 300MB each).

That smells of convolution.

4 hours ago, Brian Walton said:

I wonder what the resource uptick would have been to add a simple convolutionez loader in it.

You make a good point that Melda also publish a free convo loader (which includes a cabinet impulse), but MTurboAmp's marketing seems to emphasize the need to pair it with MCabinet.

On 1/2/2023 at 5:39 AM, PavlovsCat said:

I wasn't sure I was going to buy Trackspacer. But after all of the recommendations -- especially when people shared how this is useful for those not very practiced at mixing (Bitflipper's quote), I thought it sounded like a good fit. So thanks, everyone.

Back when I offered to do a remix of one of your songs, I knew that one of the things I'd be using was Trackspacer. I don't remember if I mentioned it in the topic in the Songs forum, but I thought the mix' primary issue was frequency buildups and collisions. You now have the best tool for taming that stuff.

Due to the informative display, setting it up and watching it do its thing has actually increased my understanding of how sidechaining and collision-elimination work.

2 hours ago, Brian Walton said:

Mguitararchitect

I think Vojtech is blowing it big time by not naming it "MGuitarchitect."