Starship Krupa

As Brian said, getting in touch with Meldaproduction seems to be in order. If they sold you products that aren't working, why not give them a chance to make good on the deal? If you have MAutoAlign and MAutoStereoFix, that suggests that you have a bundle or two. Swearing off the entire line, which includes many more straightforward plug-ins that don't include the same analysis and processing because you got poor results from those two of them seems like throwing a lot of babies out with the bathwater. You're not getting acceptable results from their phase alignment tools. What does that have to do with the same company's compressors, EQ's, reverbs, delays and filters? Due to bundle purchases, I have 90 or so of their FX, but I only use a fraction of them because either I've found no use for what the other ones do or have similar FX from other manufacturers that I prefer. Both of those FX do advanced, unusual analysis and processing independent of user control. Meldaproduction's Achilles' heel is sparse documentation, specifically in the area of suggesting appropriate source material and applications. They rely too much on trial and error on the part of the user. I've said it before, even directly in forum conversations with the owner, Meldaproduction's plug-ins have always felt to me like I found an alien artifact with 1000 buttons and knobs, and I've figured out that about 5 of them can do really useful things. The rest of them can probably do other maybe even more amazing things, but I don't have a clue what those might be. There's a lot of confusion around just what kind of source material MAutoAlign is supposed to be used on. It does really well with single instruments that are multiple mic'd, and material that's been mic'd with stereo pairs. For instance, when I mic an acoustic guitar with 2 mics, one pointed near the bridge and the other further up, MAutoAlign works great. I get a huge sound. When I apply it to my drum overheads, which are set up asymmetrically in a modified Recorderman/Glyn Johns configuration, I have to be more careful where I take the analysis from. I tried adding the kick drum and snare mics to the group and things got a lot less usable. I only got MAutoStereoFix a few days ago, but it looks like it uses similar algorithms for analyzing phase. I'll keep an ear open for the kind of artifacts you mention, but if I don't like the results I get with it, I'm not going to bench my remaining 89 Meldaproduction FX. I'm suspicious of FX that run on any kind of autopilot, like iZotope's "assistants." It always feels like I've turned part of the mix over to someone else and therefore have to listen closely to the results to make sure they didn't screw something up. So I use MAutoAlign sparingly.

Bob Bone, Reanimator! In the few years since I originally posted the frustrated rant, the devs blessedly fixed a big issue and using drum names in the PRV is now persistent. Also, I've reasonably tamed the Drum Map Beast. Not that I don't stand by everything I said; okay, after 5 years I finally got it to work, even though it's still a hassle, and I still sometimes forget that after "creating a new drum map," I still need to switch the track's output to use the drum map. This suggests that the learning curve is just slightly less than flat. One thing I didn't mention is the fact that, AFAIK, there are UI benefits to using a drum map beyond just getting the note names. I like programming drums with the little triangle-y notes where it's so easy to adjust velocity per note rather than having to open the velocity pane at the bottom. Unless there's something I'm not grasping (probability: high), you must be using a drum map in order to get that.

Okay, RX10 Breath Control, Ozone 10 Exciter Neutron 4 Sculptor, Neutron 4 Compressor, RX7 Breath Control, Insight 2, Nectar 3, Ozone 10 Dynamics, Ozone 10 Imager and Ozone 10 all installed on one track, all UI's open correctly. Unable to test whether either RX10 or RX7 Breath Control are controlling breaths, but at least I'm not seeing blank black squares. This is on my Dell Latitude 7480 with Intel HD 620 Graphics. 16G RAM, 1TB NVMe SSD.

Wow, yet another extension. I think there was a Black Friday Sale, then the 2022 Fade Out, now this. Great opportunity to get on the Meldaproduction train. I've found their product line to be most addictive. Their products have the best value of pleasure/price ratio because even if you only have one (or the FreeFX bundle, even in its non-upgraded state), you'll never exhaust its capabilities. A couple of nights ago I checked my account to see if I had enough referral credits to do any upgrading before the sale ran out. I discovered that someone apparently bought the MTotalFX bundle using my code. This amazing windfall allowed me to leverage up to the MMasteringFX bundle, so I now have MConvolutionMB. I've never clicked with convolution reverbs, so hadn't tried it yet. I had no idea it could do all this. Especially the guitar cab device, I'll have to try it with MTurboAmp. Maybe it'll get me to give convolution reverbs another shot. If anyone's wondering what to start with, using Brian's code and the newsletter credit can bring the price of the 37 piece FreeFX-to-pro upgrade down to around $10. After that, MEssentialFX is the best deal in the bunch, containing most of the MTurbo FX in LE form. MTurboReverble, MTurboDelay (with the bonus MTurboDelayMB), and MAutoDynamicEQ are top-of-the-class powerhouses, MAutoAlign is the way to go for phase alignment of stereo mic'd tracks, and the rest mostly live up to the "essential" tag. MTurboComple and MTurboEQle are collections in themselves. Without the added discounts it's $13 per effect, add the newbie discounts and it comes in at around $95. If you add the FreeFX-to-pro upgrade (as you should), everything clocks in at $118 for a new customer.

My understanding is that Bandlab uses the same credentials for everything. Are you able to sign out and then back in to the forum with the same username/password that you're trying with activation? You don't mention what browser you're using, but Bandlab tends to favor Chrome-derived ones like Chrome, Edge and Brave. I use Brave, which comes with extensive cookie, tracker, and popup blocking by default for every site. Sometimes for things like this where the program uses a browser for authentication I have to disable all of that blocking to get it to work.

Are you using separate MIDI and Synth tracks or are you using Instrument tracks? If the former, you have to make sure that the output of the MIDI track is set to the Synth track. With some soft synths, they like to receive on MIDI channel 1 rather than Omni, so I have to set it to that.

I'm not well versed in Bandlab. If it's possible to permanently apply FX to clips and tracks by bouncing or whatever, you'll need to do that before exporting them and importing to Cakewalk (assuming you want the FX on them). You don't say whether you're exporting clips or entire tracks, but exporting the entire tracks with FX applied would probably be the easiest. That is, if your editing is done. Then of course you can apply whatever FX you like in Cakewalk, either track or clip. Cakewalk is of course a more powerful tool for mixing, and I have plenty of excellent 3rd-party FX, so I'd be inclined to just export the tracks without FX and use the FX I have in Cakewalk.

See the other thread you opened. It looks like permissions. Make sure you're signed in to the system as a user that has Administrator privileges. Check permissions on the Cakewalk Projects folder.

Your system exceeds the specs of the Dell laptop I'm retiring and it's able to run Cakewalk just fine, even with multiple orchestral instruments. The only issue I can see is that the processor is only a 2 core (4 virtual). DAW's like as many cores as they can get. Is what it is, though. I'm good at Windows and BIOS tuning, which leads to my computers being from the stone age yet still able to do DAW and NLE work. I just renovated an old Gateway(!) Core 2 Quad system to give to a friend. It runs Cakewalk just fine with 8G of RAM and SATA III SSD, and an older nVidia Quadro, The 1TB SSD is a very good idea. That 5400 hybrid spinner is the biggest bottleneck on your system. Install the SSD before you install Windows 10. My favorite price:performance brand of SSD's is Silicon Power. You can probably get one on Amazon for $50 and have it tomorrow. Write down your Windows product key before you burn down the old installation. You can probably install and activate Windows okay without doing that, but be sure. At some point, laptops started using motherboard license keys, but yours is kinda old. Probably had a key for Windows 8? If you can cram 16 or 12G of RAM in it, do so. The more RAM the merrier, and 16G is about the "don't be concerned about how much RAM you have" point these days. But my old Latitude only has 8G and is fine for DAW work and even Vegas Movie Studio. Once you get the system put together and Windows 10 installed, it will do its thing of sending a buttload of telemetry to Microsoft. This settles down after about 24 hours. During that time, the system will be unnaturally slow, so don't worry. To get your processor to spin up to 3GHz and stick around that point, enable Turbo and Speedstep in your BIOS (and check with Lenovo to make sure you have the latest BIOS). Turbo is a must, Speedstep may or may not help. Turn off C States. Use Task Manager (or better still, HWINFO) to monitor where your processor's clock is hovering. Make sure that hyperthreading is also enabled in the BIOS. In your advanced power settings, set your processor's minimum and maximum speeds to 100% while on charger. This will make for a lot of power eating, so if you are planning on doing a lot of DAW work on battery, you can set it that way for battery as well but expect reduced battery life. Better to just bring your charger with you when you want to get your DAW on. Get whatever system and video driver packages you can from Lenovo's site (the video driver and chipset drivers are the most important). Then you can go around to the sites for Intel and Realtek and so on to pick up the latest drivers (although Windows 10 is pretty good about hunting down drivers, just check in Updates for optional updates). Exclude your Cakewalk project folder and VST/3 folders from Defender's realtime malware scanning. After you do all that, run LatencyMon and see if there is anything tripping your system up. My new(er) Latitude 7480 is notorious for getting hammered by ACPI.SYS, so I had to track down a workaround setting for that. A "clean" installation of Windows 10 is fairly free of crapware, but it does enable some things like Skype and Meet and XBox that I'm not interested in on my laptop. You can uninstall Skype and use the Services app to disable the XBox stuff if you don't want them running. If you want to get even fancier, Process Lasso is a good way to monitor what processes are running in the background and take control of them. Do all this stuff and your Lenovo should work quite well for audio recording and even mixing. If you've gotten used to it with the 5400 hybrid spinner, you will be blown away by how fast it boots and starts programs and loads projects with an SSD and a fresh install of Windows. It'll be like getting a whole new laptop. (all bits of software that I mentioned are freeware)

It's a good idea to go into the Windows Security settings and exclude your Cakewalk Projects folder from Defender's realtime scanning. Also your plug-ins and samples folders. I don't think that's the issue, though. It looks like permissions to me. If you know how, check the permissions on your Cakewalk Projects folder to make sure that you have Full Control.

Think of Step Sequencer as a way to create clips. Once you have a clip or clips you want to use, switch to the Track View and you can apply the usual clip operations like copying and pasting (which can be done in multiples) or converting the clip(s) to Groove Clips and dragging them out, as Promidi described.

There was a page on iZotope's site that was selling upgrades from Ozone 10 Advanced to MPS 5 for the low, low price of $149. I learned about it from this site's Coffee House/Deals subforum. I bought it at that price....even though I didn't already own Ozone 10 Advanced (I did have Neutron 3). All licenses showed up in Product Portal. I called it Schroedinger's Deal; my (tongue in cheek) theory was that since MPS 5 includes Ozone 10 Advanced, at some point during checkout the purchaser both owned and didn't own an Ozone 10 license, which ended up qualifying them for the "upgrade." Even though I have sworn off buying more mixing plug-ins, I kind of had to get that collection of suites and individual FX at that price. Even just getting VocalSynth and Stratus/Symphony and Neoverb and RX 10 would have been worth the outlay. I've had their Elements collections and Phoenix/Nimbus and R2/R4 for years, although I hadn't used the Elements suites in quite some time. My own mixing/mastering skills finally surpassed the wizards and presets in the Elements suites and I've bought individual plug-ins that I prefer. The Exponential reverbs are simply the best I've ever heard. A month later, things got even crazier, iZotope had a sitewide discount of 25%, which people were able to apply to that glitch deal, thereby dropping the price to $111. No regrets here; I think pulling the trigger at $149 was a wise move. Similar "legit" deals later appeared at Pluginboutique, although not quite as generous. I think $189 to upgrade from any iZotope product. iZotope left the page up for over a month, surely they must have known of its existence. For all I know it may still be active. Companies do odd things toward the end of the year to make the books look good. It may have been a sneaky way to extract money from cheapskates/deal hounds like me without harming their standard pricing.

That is indeed weird. I, too acquired MPS 5 during the Great iZotope Glitch of '22, so I can check out what's going on. I think a number of people on this forum also took advantage of the Great Glitch, but perhaps we haven't had enough time to give that huge bundle of FX a proper workout.

I started with a Cakewalk Pro Audio 9 license given to me by a friend and upgraded it to the first and then second versions of SONAR. Stopped there, then when I got back into recording in 2013 or so, went with Mixcraft. Then back into the fold with CbB. While researching exactly what version I started with, I found that some madman has made a (so far) 14-chapter YouTube series on Pro Audio 9.

I'll guess that you waited one or two then. ? I jumped right in with the first BandLab release, which I guess was what would have been the last Gibson release, had they released it. It was kinda....I could see what the complaints were about regarding stability. Freezes, crashes, and most often, the playback engine stalling out not only under load, but in response to odd things like moving the playback loop markers or tracks or clips around. Noel and the gang put a stop to those shenanigans pretty quickly, which I took as a positive sign for the future of the product.

I remember this coming up on the forum a while back, confirmed the behavior: if you have either the Multidock or any other Cakewalk child window on monitor 2, plug-in windows will get hidden behind it when it is in focus. Whatever logic keeps plug-in UI's on top of the main window when it is in focus is broken for child windows. Needs to be fixed.

A couple of bits of advice for getting your feet wet with comping in Cakewalk. There are different modes of doing it. Speed Comping is (I think) unique to Cakewalk and is awesome for straightforward comping tasks like different takes of a single instrument/vocal. It takes some time to get used to how it works, some hitting the documentation and Reference Guide, maybe a YouTube vid or two. For more complex things that include big edits, like copying entire choruses and multi-mic'd drums and pasting them around, I prefer to work in Manual Comping mode. That's the more traditional one, common to most DAW's. You might want to start with just one of them and then explore the other at your leisure. IMO, Manual is more intuitive, Speed is of course faster. Like wayyyy faster once you get a handle on it. Speed can also be simpler just because it does so much for you. But if you're like me, you'll put a shiny spot on your Ctrl-Z keys while learning it. I find that when working in Manual mode, it's often easier to switch off the Comp tool in the Smart Tool's options, and make good use of the Edit Tool rather than trying to get the Smart Tool to do everything. The Smart Tool is great because you don't have to explicitly switch it for things like moving and copying, but with great versatility can come a greater possibility of unintended consequences.

Eugene Blanchard has a nice collection of YouTube tutorials. Jason R. has a series of 5 vocal and voice oriented videos. Just in this topic, there are 16 Cakewalk by Bandlab-centric video series on YouTube. I know there are more out there, and that doesn't even take into account the plentiful older pre-Bandlab SONAR content. Way to go Cakewalk users!

The logic of it must be....interesting. I would think that it would work like "there's MIDI data in this track, let's display it" rather than depending on something happening during the initial recording process. I should check Event Viewer and see what's in there. I whaled on it some more while watching House M.D. on my second monitor for diagnostic inspiration. So far, I can only get it to misbehave if the data is the first thing recorded (if I first enter things in the PRV it works fine), and so far with one particular instrument, Meldway Grand in MSoundFactory. Meldway Grand is a 60GB library, so maybe there's something about memory going on. I'd upload the template, but it requires owning at least MSoundFactoryLE with Meldway Grand installed. Just an odd glitch, I think, and not one that many are likely to stumble upon.

And thanks to you, Colin, for starting TYLIP and continuing to update it.

The amazing invisible MIDI track: it plays back but you can't see the data in it. Therefore can't perform any editing tasks.... I got a piano chord change in my head, so loaded up my basic "piano song" template, set the tempo, record armed the MIDI track (not the synth track) set the record mode to Step, played a two-handed chord and.... Heard the chord sound, but didn't see the expected notez appear in the track. Stopped and hit play. Hmm. Expected chord makes sound. Opened Piano Roll. Nothing. Opened the take lane. Nothing. Set Now Time to start of measure 2, re-arm, strike chord #2. Sound again, no visual data. Play it back, sounds fine again. Same deal. Nothing in the lanes, nothing in PRV. Closed project. Opened new project, tried again, and hey! Everything works as expected. Just posting this to share the wonder, and in case anyone else ever sees something like it.

Good work on finding the culprit! In my observation, after about 5-6 years, heatsink paste can start to lose its effectiveness, and of course we don't know that it was 100% perfectly applied in the first place. It's also possible, especially in portables, for the mechanism that holds the heatsink in place to get knocked around, maybe compromise the thermal bond a bit. Whatever, if you have your tech replace the paste and then check the temps, I'm guessing they will be fine. Actually, you'll likely get a peppier system overall because it won't be constantly running at the hairy edge of thermal shutdown. BIOSes are supposed to throttle processor performance when they get too hot. The farther you keep them from temperatures that will trigger throttling the better. My favorite monitoring tool is HWINFO. Its "sensors" view is very similar to HWMonitor, but it also has another view with very detailed system specifications, like it can tell you the manufacture date of individual RAM sticks, remaining battery health, remaining SSD life, and on and on. To see what Windows has to say about these events (if anything), look at Event Viewer, just type that phrase into Windows' search bar and it should pop up. Run it, and you'll find what you're looking for under Windows Logs/System, if the OS is able to trap anything. It may be that your laptop is dropping so fast that the OS is taken by surprise.

Unless I'm misunderstanding the goal, rather than using automation to put together a single performance from different takes, you might try using Cakewalk's comping features. You cut the different takes into clips and then stitch the clips together to form one performance. You can move the clips around, copy them, adjust their levels individually, etc. Then once you have them arranged as you wish, you can select the individual clips you want and bounce them to one big clip (with a right click).