Starship Krupa

Sturgeon's Law says that 90% of everything is crap, so what can we do but endeavor to rise above? It takes a lot more to put together a metal track than it does my arpeggiator-and-drum machine opuses. As ever, trying for the magic Sturgeon's 10% is where the rabbit meets the road. One of those things: stick around in the wide world of music long enough and you'll wind up with odd kinds of cred. Long decades before I was an electronic bunny making trippity-bloopity music for dozens to shake their body and drift off into space to, I played somewhat "harder" styles, including what would later fall under the umbrella of "grunge." Music by former teenage punks who had stuck with it long enough to acquire music skills and turn to the music of their childhoods (classic hard rock and funk) for inspiration. In one of my SF bands I was half of a rhythm section with Jef "Wrest" Whitehead, who later became known as American Black Metal pioneers Leviathan. That's gotta afford at least some metal cred upon my head? I hope so. If not, well, it sure was musical fun playing bass with that guy. He tore it the fsck UP on the skins. We locked in like Fred and Ginger. I checked out what he's done as Leviathan, and typically for him, it's pretty excellent.

And there it is again. It's never asctuall "Calkewalk" itself with this forum! LOL. You had to settle for "a lot of times" when you couldn't provoke the actual response you wanted. In your thread, I and others repeatedly said words to the effect of "if you think the latest version is causing the problem, roll back to the previous version." But it seems like you wanted to pick a fight and had a heck of a time doing so. ? We have more than one person in this thread who is saying that this build broke something on their system and not a single one suggesting that it's not an issue with the Early Access Cakewalk build. Sometimes it is, and then we help the developers fix it by sending in as detailed a crash report as we can, complete with our system specs. With audio apps, it's critically important that developers know what hardware the person's running. Not so they can fingerpoint or say "you don't have enough RAM and you need to buy an SSD" but because they need to know what hardware Cakewalk, or "Calkewalk" or whatever you want to call it, may be having trouble with. Obviously, it works fine on their systems or they wouldn't have sent it out. I myself, this morning, installed the EA build on my laptop and suddenly, projects that played fine the night before were clicking and then grinding to a halt. I tried this, I tried that, including rolling back to the last release build. Then I discovered that I had both onboard sound and my Presonus interface enabled as output devices using WASAPI. Apparently Cakewalk doesn't like that, so I unchecked the onboard audio in Preferences and all was well again. ASIO would probably work even better. Last night, I didn't have the Presonus plugged in, so it was a completely different output device configuration. All this crap matters. It's impossible to say, because AFAIK you've never even said what version of Windows you're running. The bigger question is: if you have all of these other DAW's that work smoothly on your system, and Cakewalk is crashing, and you're unwilling to divulge the information needed to figure out why, why don't you just use one or all of those other DAW's? They're all fine programs that pretty much do what Cakewalk does (aside from crashing on your system). Surely you'd be happier?

Blessed be. This will make a huge improvement in my drum recording and comping workflow.

That raises some questions I've had but have never researched. One of them is what effect the CODEC's used for Bluetooth audio have on sound transmitted over the link. What frequency bandwidth is it capable of? What dynamic level? Does it mess with the transients like MP3? I've kind of been scared to find out.

I tend to forget about his (actually quite good, especially given that he does metal, an underserved genre in the world of tutorials) series due to the amount of bitterness I've seen him express toward BandLab and to this forum. Apparently early on he approached them about getting them to finance his efforts. BandLab, with their "attraction rather than promotion" policy toward marketing Cakewalk, could offer him nothing but encouragement. It's regrettable, because from what I've seen of his tutorials, he's really skilled with SONAR/Cakewalk. Sure it would be great if Cakewalk could get a bit of marketing push, but given the choice between funding that and funding development, I'll have to go with development. The attraction rather than promotion strategy pays off when someone like Lorene discovers the software and goes nuts about how capable it is. If I want all my friends to use it, all I have to do is tell them about it and let them go with it if they choose.

RecordingStudio9: https://www.youtube.com/c/RecordingStudio9com has a playlist of 85 Cakewalk-centric videos.

While I absolutely respect your opinions and (greater) experience, my perceptions in these matters differs. It's part of my understanding of the magic that a compressor can work at quick release settings is to make us perceive sounds as "loud" when they're not actually higher in level than the surrounding information. One of my "lightbulb" moments that took compression from a utility to a creative effect. Compression does exist in the natural world. Our hearing perception reacts to loud, sharp sounds (and continuous loud stimulus) by closing down somewhat. A compressor can do the psychoacoustic trick of mimicking that closing down. Our brain thinks "oh, there's a sharp sound that sharply attenuated a moment later, it must be LOUD." Think of how sensitive your ears sound if you walk around with industrial earplugs in for 15 minutes or so. Take them out, and for a short period of time it's like you can hear ants walking around, but this quickly attenuates as soon as you're exposed to the sounds of the human environment. Our hearing perception adjusts all the time. As for what real world situations are similar to collisions and masking in a mix, one of the symptoms I have when I have been working my ears too hard is that I have a hard time hearing conversation in crowded restaurants. This is due to the other human speech occurring around me at the same frequencies as the ones required to hear what my dining companions are saying. Sounds overpower and obscure other sounds all the time in daily life. Listening to music or trying to converse in the car while the windows are rolled down? Someone talking while you're trying to hear what's coming out of your television? Right now, I'm watching Free Practice at the Monaco Grand Prix and noticing how the trackside commentators raise their voices when cars come around. They raise in not only volume, but pitch, and timbre. Isn't that a natural way of adjusting pitch to avoid collisions (no pun intended here) with the sound of the engines? This is just my understanding and thinking, please let me know if you think I have it wrong (or my understanding of what you said wrong). Trying to describe these things verbally is always a challenge. ? I'm here to learn (and to help others, if possible).

Okay, to answer your original question, "perhaps" it will be out within the next 30 days. Perhaps it won't. Nobody on this forum, including the developers, knows exactly when. This release is unstable for you. The forum would be exploding if others were having similar issues. In the meantime, report your issue to the appropriate personnel, roll back to the previous version, and wait. The reason that people asked about your system specs is that Windows systems are so different from each other. If nothing else, we want to know if there are certain configurations that people such as yourself are having problems with. Maybe it is due to some change in Cakewalk that only affects systems with some component or other that you're using. Sometimes we have knowledge about specific hardware because we're running it ourselves. If you said that you were running a Saffire Pro 40 on a Dell Optiplex with an nVidia GPU, I'd have special insight into that. I'd tell you what drivers I was using, etc. If you said you were running on Windows 7, Cakewalk is leaving that platform behind. It's not officially supported. The devs still want to know if Cakewalk won't work on it, but they (and the beta team) don't test on it anymore. As pointed out earlier, the various components each have their own drivers that get updated (or not). With the way that Microsoft is handling forced updates, systems change often whether they want them to or not. Other software can mess with drivers (MAGIX and Steinberg products notoriously install their own ASIO drivers, which have known issues in Cakewalk, Realtek's ASIO driver puts the a55 in "ASIO"). On your system, Cakewalk is starting up okay, but then as soon as you start a project, it crashes. That means that it's tripping over something at that point. Whether it's Cakewalk's "fault" or whatever else's. And really, lose the 'tude, dude. We're only trying to help you get your DAW working again, even if you don't like our approach. A simple, "no, I just wanted to know if anyone knew when the next release was going to be out" after the first replies was all that was necessary. Roll it back.

You have to have a (drum) set on you to successfully take over from Bill Bruford. Rock on.

With a single notes performance, try dragging an audio clip and dropping it onto an empty MIDI track. No special dance required. Yes, it is Melodyne doing the MIDI conversion; the Essentials version that comes with Cakewalk can handle monophonic pitch-to-MIDI. I think the next level up of Melodyne can do polyphonic. Of course, the cleaner the signal you give it, the more accurate results you'll get, and don't get fancy with pitch bends and whatnot. I stumbled upon this feature by accident, I buttermoused an audio clip onto a MIDI track and saw it happen and said WTactualF was that? ? The DAW I used before Cakewalk had no such feature, and a popular n00b question was "how do I convert an audio track to MIDI,?" This was always answered by "with special software." Which now seems odd given that it's Melodyne doing the conversion and the other program comes with Essentials as well. Okay, so now, for the staggering price of free, I have a DAW where I can hum into it and get back a MIDI track.... Another bit of software that can supposedly do pitch-to-MIDI, although I've never tried it, is Meldaproduction MTuner, comes in that same FreeFX bundle as MCompressor. I think someone else on the forum tried it and had good luck.

This isn't the Feedback section, Q&A is for people seeking help from other users about using the software. We can often help sort out issues, but with the attitude you've shown, all I will say is run the rollback installer for the last release that worked for you:

Best way to do that is duplicate the track and then replace the synth. I do it all the time. I'm working on something that has a bass sound and a flute doubling each other, which, or course, seems like it might be ridiculous, but it actually sounds really cool because so few people do it. I came up with the flute part first, and figured I could duplicate it and change it up a bit for the bass part, but when I hit Play it sounded pretty great.

You will become one with the Korg. Also, like User 7 of 905133's post, I honestly thought this was a topic about controlling a virtual instrument and was wondering why Mark would put it in Coffee House.

Also, unless I just haven't found it yet, a way to clear them from Start Screen. I launch using Smart Screen, and the recent projects clutter is a bummer.

If there were a reaction stronger than "Great" idea, I would have used it. "Excellent Idea." How to delete a marker was something that baffled me, and that I had to Google. John is absolutely correct about the "mid-click" modifier key being non-standard Windows, and given how Windows-compliant most of Cakewalk strives to be, rather odd, and it sure feels weird. I tried all of the standard modifiers before giving up and Googling. Alt+right click or something might be good, but just having it in the context menu would be a step in the right direction.

That is par for the course. There's another thing that a compressor can do, which is "glue" the individual instruments in a submix together. This helps them sound like they all exist in the same virtual space, it complements how our ears hear things. This would be your bus compressor, which is typically slow and more characterful. The T-Racks 670 sounds great on buses. Finally, the master bus compressor, another slowbie. I don't know if this is considered a hard and fast rule, but if I want to do the punchy compressor thing, I put it on the individual track. Then, depending, I put the smoothing compressor next in line. Thing is, it's a judgment call on all of this stuff. Some synth sounds don't need any carving or compression, they come out of the box ready to go. So far, I never use reverb as an insert effect, only as a send effect. I need to learn more about using multiple reverbs and especially delays, to help place instruments in a 3-D space. I want to create mixes that you can walk around in! Well, what are you saving your CPU power for? ?I'd guess that your system has more capacity than mine, and 20 tracks with instances of compression on each one would be fine on my system, as long as the plug-ins were well-coded (and it sounds as if you're using pretty good stuff). As Tim mentioned, the cycle eaters tend to be the ones doing heavier lifting. A compression algo looks at the level of a signal and responds to it with level adjustments. Depending on how much "mojo modeling" is going on, that's not typically an "expensive" computation. Fortunately for this equation, the type of compressor I tend to use first in line is MCompressor or elysia mpressor, which don't do a lot of mojo modeling. The smoothing compressors are a better place to sprinkle that pixie dust. Every channel of my DAW has one of the best para EQ's I've used built right into it, the ProChannel QuadCurve. Matter of fact, the ProChannel has a few pretty good compressors in it. I would've recommended one of them if they had more extensive metering. If you find your system bogging down under the weight of too many plug-in instances, then it's time to start bouncing synth tracks to audio. Virtual instruments are usually way bigger cycle eaters than FX. Then Cakewalk can just read them as audio files. As someone who has learned to play 4 instruments, I'll say that I've probably put as much time and work into getting better at mix engineering as I have into any one of the instruments I play. By the time I became a rock music fan, at around age 5, Revolver and Pet Sounds had come out and firmly established the concept of recording-studio-as-instrument. The Moody Blues were already recording Days of Future Passed. So I've always thought of it as such, and I'm beyond psyched to get to live my dream of being able to produce music all by myself, using nothing but my own gear, in an environment I can access 24/7. It's just like learning to play an instrument. It takes building basic skills, such as we've been discussing, and it also takes practice practice practice. I can tell someone verbally how to play an Em chord on the piano, and a C, whatever but for them to learn enough on piano or organ to create music is going to take a while. Watch YouTube videos, subscribe to Tape Op (it's free), read Sound on Sound at the library or electronically. It takes woodshedding. It's taken me years to be able to speak with any true confidence about these topics, and I still consider myself a n00b. And what I'm telling you is merely the way I've learned to do it. 2 years from now, you and I, presented with the same basic tracks, could make all the "right" mix engineering decisions and still come up with different sounding finished songs.

He changed 2000 MIDI files' channel assignments? If so, ask him how he did it and reverse the process. Why would he have been messing with your files? I'm thinking that what is more likely is that he changed the channels on your gear? That's a relatively easy fix. There should be a way to go into these devices' settings and check what MIDI channel they are set to listen on. They should be set to Omni, or maybe for the drum machine, Ch. 10.

Illustrating the need for regular backups.

I'd say that if you want to use something that's already in your locker, go with Waves C1. Turn off the EQ function, and pay attention to what the screen with the curves on it is showing you. It has a similar display to sonitus fx and MCompressor. I like the one in MCompressor because it's BIG. I love the sound of the T-Racks processors I have, but the metering in the compressors is pretty slavish to the vintage vibe they're going for. Not the best for learning on. Re: MCompressor, it's part of the Meldaproduction FreeFX Bundle, which includes 36 other top quality FX and utilities. I use MStereoscope on every project, and MNoiseGenerator and MOscillator are great for equipment setup. I mentioned MAnalyzer earlier. They're all part of the bundle, all free to use. Okay, yes, the settings on those "bass" presets are way "slower" than the ones I suggested. They're set up for the thing that compressors were originally designed for, which is to control the dynamic range. Bass notes can leap out at you in a bad way, bass players put dynamics into what we play with slaps, picking harder or softer, etc. Sounds great "in the room," but not so much for a recording where you don't want a sound to dominate. I know, counterintuitive, if you're looking for the bass to "pop," why reduce the dynamic range? In short, reducing the momentary level spikes allows you to set the bass track's overall level higher without it poking your ears every time a high-velocity note sounds. My quest when I started recording vocals was "how the heck do these mix engineers get the lead vocals to sit out in front of the speakers like a hologram?" I played my engineer friend a track from Elliott Smith's XO to demonstrate. He had me do two things to my vocal track. First was smoothing compression, second was sweeping for the "honk," which has become a topic of controversy due to people misusing it. Sweeping for honks is a way to find any obnoxious freq buildups that are due to the imperfections of the recording chain and the nature of instruments and voice. You listen to your track for something that's unpleasantly poking out (and I emphasize that because part of the misuse is that some people think you have to do it for any freq that sticks out, and that's not true. Just the one(s) that are clashing and poking the ear), and first exaggerate them to make sure you have it right, then drop them a bit with the EQ. My rule is no more than 2 honk notches on a given track. It sounded great, a big step toward what I was looking for, but it seemed counterintuitive: why would I take things away from an instrument (my voice) that I wanted to stand out. Well, duh, if you knock down the spiky things, you can crank it higher in the mix without it sounding obnoxious. Get the concept? We tone down the spiky things so that we can turn it up and have it not hurt. So what is the role of the "smoothing" settings vs. the "make it bounce" settings? With one, you're emphasizing the instrument's rhythm (and this was not, I think, the original intention of the compressor, engineers just figured it out), with the other, you're making sure that the level is reasonably smooth. We use two compressors. The "bouncy" (or "punchy") one goes on first, then the "smoothing" one. If you have ever refinished something, coarse sandpaper first, fine later. Same idea. All along the chain, dynamics processors are smoothing it out so that it can be louder. What are we listening for as far as gain reduction? Until you tune your ears to hear the effect of compression, a good all around number on your meter is averaging 3-6dB. It's hard to do too much damage at that number. When you get better at it, the "bouncy" one can have more GR. P.S., for the "smoothing" compression, I like something like the T-Racks 670 (it sounds so good it's like cheating) or whatever LA-2A they have.

Wanted to mention: one of my favorite tools for getting rid of collisions is Trackspacer. The way it works is that if the sound of one instrument, we'll say piano, is obscuring another, we'll say guitar, you put Trackspacer on the piano track and make a send from the guitar track to the piano track. Et voila, whenever the guitar is playing, its frequency range is reduced in the piano track. So if we think about what Trackspacer is doing, we can do it manually by deciding which instrument we want to emphasize in each frequency range. Let the piano take the mids, let the guitar take the upper mids. As Tim mentioned, our ears/brain fill in the "missing" information from the track that's had the cuts applied to it. We haven't gone much into compression yet, but creative use of that (rather than just using it to smooth out poky transients) can really make a track pop, while at the same time helping to keep it out of the way of the other tracks. On bass, start with about 7ms attack, 50ms release, 4:1 ratio. Tune threshold until the gain reduction meter is peaking at around 5dB. Use 0% or "hard" knee. Then play around with the release until you hear the bass "swinging" with the rhythm. I suggest not using a "vintage emulation" type compressor for this as you're learning, because the quirks they add can obscure things. Many people have learned their compression chops using Meldaproduction's free MCompressor. Don't let the price fool you, it's one of the best workhorse compressors out there (the only thing it lacks is a mix control for easy parallel compression, although there are fairly simple solutions to this). There's no compressor I would recommend more when learning compression. The sonitus fx compressor that comes with CbB sounds good, but it has that tiny display.

At least in Cakewalk, during that wait period, if I click on the title bar, it'll show "not responding," but it pops back. Transport doesn't stop, though. Sorry to hear about your troubles; Objeq Delay is one of my favorite sound design/glitch tools.

Well, until the Rolling Stones started taking him on tour with them, B.B. King was a thing of the past, too, so I will be keeping the forum flame alive until something actually better, and by that I mean "better at conveying information and fostering a sense of community" rather than "better at attracting people with the attention span of a cocker spaniel puppy" comes along to replace forums. I think the issues with Facebook are at least twofold, maybe more. First, information posted there is really ephemeral. It scrolls away, it's gone, no searching topics or thread titles. I eventually get bummed about answering the same questions over and over. Second, some answers really need to be long, and Facebook doesn't lend itself to that, big blocks of text in smaller type. Third, due to its structure and culture, Facebook encourages people to try to be "helpful" when they really have no idea what they're talking about. Forums have the advantage that they are communities, and as such, reputation has a certain amount of value, both for people holding the opinion and for the person hoping to get and maintain a good reputation. If I think someone is being a little rough on a n00b, I'll try to pop in and encourage civility because I have something invested in helping the community be a welcoming and friendly place. Facebook, and especially YouTube, encourage a more "hit and run" style. Lord knows, I just saw a YouTube Cakewalk user who asked his viewers for help with a crackling and dropout issue he was having with Cakewalk on a powerful new computer (turned out to be a plug-in, surprise!). There were 2 or 3 valuable responses, and the rest were suggestions to switch to whatever DAW the person typing favored. One person suggested he try ASIO4ALL (rather than the driver supplied for his RME PCIe interface). Great use of the downtime, John! Your collection is a great set of tutorials on the basics.

I'd like to start a topic where we can post Cakewalk-centric YouTube channels. My latest find is Bongonzo, who is into beat making and EDM-related topics: https://www.youtube.com/c/Bongonzo I discovered him by way of a new video about automation by Lorene "Produce Aisle." https://www.youtube.com/c/TheProduceAisleMusic Here are some more, if I forget anyone, my apologies. @John Vere's Cactus Studios: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIImmMf5qdvYsgRLQvlZlFA @Xel Ohh: https://www.youtube.com/c/XELOhh1 @Creative Sauce: https://www.youtube.com/c/CreativeSauce (who just did a "Fix My Mix" with Lorene) @Robert McClellan's Home Studio Simplified JustDaNorm: https://www.youtube.com/c/JustDaNorm/ @AdK Studios: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC92yvXuf5WO5KG11V8MWtbw

That would be Unfiltered Audio, for one. As you point out, most plug-in manufacturers do have their own preset management systems. As you also say, you have "about 75 PA plug-ins," which is a thing that is shared with most plug-in deal watchers: their discount deals have been so generous (and the plug-ins of such quality) that we have many of them. If I only had a handful, it would be no big deal. Toss up a Disney+ movie on monitor 2 and punch them in. Another issue with it, and I'm always mindful of the new user, is that like me, people might never even realize that these excellent plug-is come with presets. And of course, new users need presets more than anyone else does. If you would like a "beta tester" for your script, I'm not afraid to get cozy with regedit. And I run at 1920x1080 100%.