Starship Krupa

Whaaa? FM&D is almost the last theme I would think you would dig (after EVA 01 and Yellow Submarine). ? It's a cool theme, very fun.

Some of the most enduring pop music mixes were produced by a guy who is deaf in one ear. Brian Wilson. I don't know how he managed stereo mixes, maybe he had help. His stuff still gets heavy airplay over 50 years after it was recorded. Sir George Martin produced into his 80's, and you know that he must have had some rolloff by that time. There is an art to listening that goes beyond the basic sense of hearing. Mix engineers learn to listen to detail, mindfully, which is a talent that is learned. I learned by listening to This Is The Moody Blues on headphones for hours upon hours when I was in high school. Their music and mixes have so much depth and detail that I wanted to explore the space they created. I have uneven hearing loss in both ears, both because of loud music exposure and age. Also tinnitus. But my ability to listen is still intact. As @treesha said, listening to reference tracks (I can't stress this enough, it's useful for so many things in the mixing and mastering process) through your monitor system to get a feel for what a balanced mix sounds like is a great idea. Boz Labs' freeware Panipulator is a great plug-in that lets you mono your mix, swap left and right, and send the mono to one side or other, which is different from listening to mono on two speakers. It also lets you do weirder stuff like flipping phase on one channel to account for poorly configured playback systems. A version of it used to come with SONAR as a ProChannel module. I also check the overall balance (pan and tonal) of my mixes with a couple of Meldaproduction free tools, MStereoAnalyzer and MAnalyzer. One more thing: I have a nice porch and have been known to take the laptop out there for some producin' and mixin' with my ATH-M50's on. I'm a porch rocker. ?

Yikes, anyone who hasn't snagged Audiomodern's collection of freeware FX needs to go there right now. Filterstep, Gatelab, and Panflow are amazing. Top notch (pun not intended) for electronica and EDM. https://audiomodern.com/free/

SPAN is great, and much loved. My favorite tool for this is MAnalyzer, which has presets that allow you to compare the tonal balance of your mix with typical curves from different genres. It's great for knowing whether I'm in the ballpark.

No problems here. But as with all A|A|S plug-ins, the first time you show the UI, it takes multiple seconds to display, and during that time, the DAW's UI can also stop updating and go unresponsive. So it looks like the whole thing has frozen, but I just have to wait it out.

ʔEnough to make you cough up your lunch. Not to mention these abominations:

Not to worry, I've been using Cakewalk for years and still sometimes forget to record a mono signal to a mono track. Welcome!

This is odd. I've never tried working with surround in Cakewalk so I don't know, but research via Google suggests that surround plug-ins aren't supported. Yet as you point out, Cakewalk sees that it has 8 inputs. It recognizes them, it just doesn't know what to do with them? Doubly odd, since Waves claims compatibility with Cakewalk by BandLab. I'd also contact Waves and ask them exactly what they mean by "compatible."

I understand that English is likely not your first language. You need to be clearer on what a "Stroke Map" is. Cakewalk by BandLab (SONAR is long gone) has no feature with that name.

I shoot for everything I export to -1dB, using the LEVELS plug-in from Mastering the Mix. If I'm not sure I've done a "hot" enough export, I load the file into Sound Forge or Audacity and just normalize it to that. If the files you're getting from FL Studio aren't similar in level, you should work on your understanding of FLS' metering and how it relates to mixdowns/exports/renders, whatever they call it. It's not always the easiest thing to get a handle on. I now set up a dedicated bus for exports and do my exports from that bus rather than Cakewalk's "hardware outputs."

So you cut the bass and midrange and it no longer sounded boxy. This is not surprising. What may we glean from this? In general, if you find that things have too much midrange and/or bass when you reference them on other systems....that suggests that your monitoring setup is somehow deficient in those areas. Simple as that. You're cranking those freqs to compensate for it. Good on ya for chasing down the issue. No longer a mystery, now you know what's wrong, you just need to figure out how to correct it. Mixes not "translating" is an old old problem for which there are well-established solutions. This is the most golden of advice. One of the first tricks I figured out all by myself back in the days of cassette 4-tracks. Like how Bauhaus sounds? Play some Bauhaus on your mixing system every once in a while to "remind" yourself what a well mixed and mastered track sounds like. Yes, I was into Bauhaus back in the day. So, now we've established that at least compared to your other listening environments, your BX-5's, sitting where they are, have some frequency dips at your listening position. What can we do to help the situation? Take a look at how you're positioning the monitors in relation to your head and how you're mounting them. Those things look to be back-ported, so make sure you don't have the backs jammed up against the wall. As much as you're able, try moving your workstation to a different place in the room. Ideally, as most know, your speakers should be placed to form an equilateral triangle with your head. Try to achieve that as much as possible. If they're sitting on a desk, raise them up. If you turn your head to look at a monitor, you should be staring straight into its tweeter. Do they have frequency balance adjustment controls on the back? If so, experiment with them. If they don't, you could possibly put an EQ on an output bus, after the bus you export your mixes from. You can get a reference measuring mic for around $50 new. That will allow you to take accurate measurements of frequency response at your listening position. I did this, but just grabbed the most accurate LDC mic in my locker ("a half-***** job is better than none!"). Put it on a stand where my head usually is and swept tones and white noise through my speakers while watching on an analyzer plug-in. The Meldaproduction FreeFX Bundle comes with all of the software tools you need to do this. Doing this satisfied me that there wasn't anything TOO weird going on with my setup. I don't have bass traps as such, but I also don't have 4 parallel walls and I do have multiple bookcases in the room, which actually serve as pretty good bass traps in practice. 10' ceiling with coffer beams also helps. Worst is a room with nothing on the walls, uncarpeted, parallel walls, 8' ceiling. But some people have that because that's what they have. I won't say unequivocally "you need to treat your room in XX way" because we don't know exactly what freqs your room is emphasizing (although upper mids and highs sounds likely, so you could try hanging a blanket on the wall behind you and see what happens). Can you afford to consider different monitors? Maybe now that your ears know better, it's time to go audition some and take it to the next level. Maybe not. None of my monitors is likely to show up on anyone's wish list (more likely they'll say they had a set of them back in 1997 and outgrew them) but I know their sound and how it compares with other setups. My Events are, as they say, "revealing," which works for me.

Probably the best thing I do for that is listen to reference songs in whatever genre I'm working in, songs that I think are well mixed and mastered. And I listen to them on my monitoring system. When asking for advice on "how do I get this sound?" it makes it much easier to give advice if you give us an example of exactly which "CDs and radio songs" you think do a good job of presenting an "in your face" bass sound. Different genres call for different methods. Go to YouTube and search for "how to mix bass" or even "how to get an in your face bass sound" and you'll find plenty of information. A mistake that I think a lot of people make is in assuming that "bass"=low end. I grew up listening to Paul McCartney's bass coming through on the 2" speaker of a plastic AM transistor radio. Our ears "fill in" the rest when we're listening via imperfect reproduction systems. Listen closely to those well-produced songs and you'll likely find that the "bass" sound that pops out is much higher in frequency than we might expect, and that the extreme lows are rolled off with high passing. As a listening exercise, try throwing a steep highpass on your bass track and slowly bringing it higher and higher until it doesn't sound like "bass" any more. When I do this, it's always higher than I expect. The way it "looks" in my mind is that there's the "upper" component of the bass sound, where the pluck, snarl, whatever, is, depending on whether I'm using a bass guitar (or sample of one) or a bass synth sound. Then down from there comes the space that I cut out for the kick drum, often involving sidechaining with Trackspacer or just a compressor. Then down from there in a space all its own is the pant-flappy boom, the amount of which can vary depending on what genre and what I'm trying to achieve. Club sound systems can reproduce it, earbuds less so. To make any fast attack rhythmic sound stand out better, I use compression, usually with about 5-10 mS attack to let enough of the attack portion through, and 100mS or shorter release. This isn't to smooth it out, it's to give it a bounce that resembles how our ears naturally react to instant sounds. I didn't twig at first that compression can be used not only for the gluing and smoothing functions (that were the first parts of its job that I understood), but also to shape the dynamics and rhythm of sounds. As a side effect of putting this kind of "bouncy" compression on other sounds in the mix, I find that it helps them stay out of each others' way. I started a thread on this forum about noticing an example of that. I was twiddling a compressor and thought it was the one on the bass track because it was affecting the bass track in a big way. Then I noticed that it was on a different track. What I was doing was just getting that track out of the way of the bass track, leaving space for it to come through. If I can't hear my bass distinctly, what's covering it up? Look for things that might be covering it up and maybe work on them a bit. It might have less to do with the bass sound and more to do with the other things we try to cram in. In trying to understand it better, I thought of it like looking at an image. If all of the elements in the image are tinted medium orange, it's harder to pick out individual elements. This is how I think of the usual advice to carve each element its own space in the frequency spectrum. However, if we take a full-range image and then make a spot on it that's completely bright white, even though that bright white spot isn't strictly "in the way" of the darker elements in the image, it still draws the eye's attention away, and maybe even make the iris close somewhat. This is akin to having a poky loud sound in the upper mids: nothing to do with "bass" as far as frequency, but its volume makes the ear recoil and pay less attention to what's happening lower down. In this way, sounds can mask other sounds that aren't even within the same spectrum. Not something to be afraid of, rather something to notice. As for listening environment, I don't know if there's such a thing as a perfect listening environment. I figure if I can play my Radiohead reference CD on my monitors and it sounds killer, then there's no reason that with mixing and mastering chops, I can't theoretically produce something with at least a similar sonic balance. I haven't deployed any bass traps as such, but I have 4 different sets of monitors connected to my workstation, plus good listening systems in my bedroom and living room, plus headphones and automobile. I work on it until the song sounds good on all of those systems. Hey, why not? After all my stuff is listened to more by me than by anyone else. ? P.S. I've heard nothing but good about Kalis. It's on my to-do list to go down to GC and audition some.

So it sounds like your issue isn't that your laptop isn't fast enough, it sounds plenty fast and it sounds like you're happy enough with its speed. It's rather that you are looking at Task Manager and seeing all this RAM that you paid extra for "going to waste." The thing about RAM is that you just want to have enough that you don't run out of it under taxing conditions (like sample-heavy projects). You don't say how much RAM you actually have installed, I'll guess 24G. That's great, but I've never come close to hitting the ceiling on my laptop which only has 8G of RAM installed (that's all it's designed to be able to hold). And I do use some sampled instruments. Not a full orchestra's worth, but some. It's reserve capacity. Unlike me, you don't have to be concerned at all about the size of whatever sampled instrument you're using in a project. You can load anything you want with confidence that the system isn't going to have to start using your drive as virtual memory. That's what your extra RAM is "doing."

It means exactly what it says: Cakewalk thinks you have an audio and/or MIDI controller called "AC Interface," and the OS is reporting to Cakewalk that it's been disconnected. How many interfaces/USB MIDI devices do you usually have connected? Do any of them have a name that relates to "AC?"

Of course as we saw with my recent experience, actually getting your licenses reset may still require opening a support ticket with the publisher.

Something odd I've noticed is that my Presonus Studio 2|4 has a window of buffer settings. It likes either 512 or 1024. Higher than that and it starts sounding like my project is rolling around in a gravel truck. Lower than that can be okay but I can't put too much in in the way of plug-ins. So it may be counterintuitive, but try dropping yours down to 512 and see if it helps. Your computer is spec'd way way better than any of mine. It should be able to cruise right along at 1024. 4096 seems like way too high.

It "works" inasmuch as iLok Manager let me issue the request, and afterward indicated that I'd made the request, and then 6 out of 9 manufacturers reset the licenses without further communication. I had to contact another 2 myself to get them to reset the licenses. The remaining one, Pulsar, hasn't reset my license, but it's for Smasher, a compressor I seldom if ever use. I'll send them email just for form's sake to get the last license out of iLimbo. This suggests that there are some holes in the system regarding the companies receiving the requests. Maybe a group of email messages like that triggered junk mail filters? Who knows. I didn't completely trust it, and I was right in that. It reinforces the strategy of having a physical iLok for my main system, as its iLok just sits there always plugged into a port that's out of harm's way. If I had been getting ready to take a trip with the laptop, I could have just pulled the iLok from that main system and been good to go. Since I'm not making music on deadlines or making money from it, having one system's licenses offline for 24 hours was no big deal and I don't feel any urge to fork over for ZDT. My setup has sufficient redundancy (with the physical iLok) that I had zero downtime as it was. So my advice to anyone who's storing licenses locally: that's feasible for a #2 workstation if you have a physical iLok on your main system (or the other way around) with a set of licenses. I find it hard to imagine that if a person has 2 workstations, the main one will have all of the licenses that the #2 one has. At this point, if I had only one single DAW computer, I'd not want to store iLok licenses locally unless they were for software I'd be okay without using for a day. Thing is, though, some of my most-used instruments and FX are iLok'd and I'd not want to be without them if I could avoid it. A one-time fee of $35-40 for a physical iLok seems like good (and plenty) insurance for 28 activations. If my physical iLok went to computer peripheral heaven, then I'd still have a full set of licenses stored locally on my #2 system and could move them to the main one if need be. Figure that in the case of a calamity sufficient to break both my dongle and my laptop, I'll be seeing to more urgent matters than having to wait overnight to get access to my plug-ins. I'll suggest learning the process for contacting companies for resets. In a nutshell, they need your iLok ID, the email address you use with the iLok ID, the location ID of the downed system, and the titles and activation codes for the plug-ins that are stuck in iLimbo. It's not obvious, but you can copy and paste the location ID and the activation codes from iLok Manager. Just click on the field and it becomes highlighted with a thin rectangle around it. Then use Ctrl-C to copy. So it's easy enough to do, although it would get tedious with more than about a dozen licenses. iLok sends you a notification via email every time a company fulfills a reset request. That's how I was able to report on the progress throughout the episode. For those who found my tale scary, remember: from a location that iLok has deemed lost forever, I had all but the iZotope/Exponential ones back online overnight. Even if I hadn't had the physical iLok, I'd have been back up and running without much downtime, and I didn't permanently lose any of my licenses. I suffered no downtime whatsoever, as I still had a full set of licenses on the dongle. And the full recovery didn't cost me a dime. My only beef toward PACE (and Waves) about any of this is that it's stupid to have a system that can maroon a license location just because I temporarily disable two pieces of hardware. At worst, they should have recognized the location as soon as I re-enabled the adapters and restarted the computer. Fortunately, Waves have a fairly simple solution for it.

Actually, no, I did initiate the reset request from my other computer. And it worked, for a little over half of the manufacturers. So the ailing system can be completely gone when you issue your reset request. Just go to a computer with iLok Manager on it, log in, and your dead system will show up with its location ID and all locally-stored licenses listed. Aaaaand, it looks like my 2nd email did the trick, I have my Exponential licenses back. The only remaining straggler is Pulsar Audio, whose Smasher compressor I have a license for, and which I never use.

48 hour update: I contacted iZotope last night and got email from their rep at 9:00AM my time (noon their time) saying "I have gone ahead and reset these iLok licenses." Um, not yet, according to iLok Manager. They're still in iLimbo. As we have seen in my case study, that seems to result in about 60% of the companies responding. With the rest, I've had to contact them directly, either via their support sites or (in the case of InMusic) email. Fortunately, I found that I can copy the activation codes and location ID from iLok Manager and paste it into email, so that made it much easier to do. Everyone but iZotope got me my resets within 24 hours. My iZotope/Exponential resets still haven't come through.

Wow, bad iZotope, even after filling out a support ticket on their site that included all of the activation numbers, my iLok ID, and the location ID of the ghosted system, no license resets yet. You know things are dire when friggin' SONiVOX beats you by a day (at least).

As a big user of Plugin Alliance plug-ins, I heartily endorse this request. It is a chore to have to open them from the VST menu then name and save them in Cakewalk's preset manager.

One thing I'd like to mention because it's not obvious and it came as a surprise to me is that you can float individual views of Console, PRV, Browser, Inspector, whatever, wherever you want. I had thought that Console and PRV always had to be in the Multidock. So they may not be in the Multidock, but you can certainly drag whatever you want to monitor 2, outside the Multidock or Main window. But I agree, it would be nice to be able to tuck the Inspector and Browser in next to the Console and PRV in the Multidock rather than having to tab over to them.

I'd have done the same. I guess I got lucky, the first PACE'd plug-in I got was when Eventide were giving away free licenses for UltraChannel. Late enough in the iLok game that it has mostly worked well over the years. To their slight credit, they do seem to be trying to make it less of a hassle, with this being able to issue reset requests from iLok Manager. After waiting for iZotope to get the message, though, I just sent them a reset request on their support web form. When it comes to having to contact manufacturers for license resets, I had to reset my main DAW's Windows 10 installation, and wound up having to make license reset requests for WA Production and Soundspot licenses, which are both tied to the system in whatever way. Probably a key on the disk. You get a certain number of authorizations and then they don't allow any more. So on the hassle meter, it was about even. I doubt that WA or Soundspot allow deauthorizations either. I think the smoothest way to handle it (other than not using any licensing scheme at all) is done by Plugin Alliance. You can deauthorize even offline systems from their website. Easy as pie, no manual reset requests, and it holds you to 3 authorizations.

Says the guy with enough UAD hardware to start his own space program. ?❤ I get it, I do. But, personally, I just see the iLok as another piece of hardware, like my audio interfaces or MIDI controller or whatever, that's part of making music with my computer system. The brand new price of the dongles seems high, but once you get into used iLok 2's, it gets closer to reality. I can, if I wish, use the local authorization. And heck, my iLok 2 does after all, allow me to take those licenses anywhere I want to. As someone with too many computers who also likes to do music when he's traveling, that's a bonus. I also understand how the idea of buying a $40 trinket in order to use plug-ins that cost $10 each (in the case of my AiR and Exponential products) seems rather ridiculous. And believe me, the "I turned off my network card and had to reset all of the iLok licenses" fiasco makes me feel much less warm and fuzzy about those locally-stored iLok licenses. That's just bad programming and worse QA, to have the thing go casters-up just because someone tried something that is not uncommon in the world of DAW's. There are plenty of other bits of hardware that can be used to identify a computer system, they don't need to use a NIC.

Hear hear. Filterstep in particular is amazing.