Starship Krupa

I've posted about this in the Tutorials and Deals forums. I have a folder on my desktop with shortcuts to: C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\VST3 C:\Program Files\Common Files\Avid C:\Program Files(\Common Files (x86)\Avid (dawg, if an installer is sloppy enough to spew AAX, chances are it will spew it in 32-bit as well) C:\Program Files\Steinberg\VstPlugins C:\Program Files (x86)\Steinberg\VstPlugins C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Digidesign\DAE\Plug-Ins (iZotope likes to spew Pro Tools RTAS) Also look for VST2 and 32-bit plug-ins that duplicate ones in your VST3 folder. NI are great for that, still clinging to VST2. I call this folder "A|A|S Wipe" because A|A|S' installer used to be the worst for spewing. I wrote them a personal email to beg that they stop, which they eventually did. I think at their worst, they put 10 useless copies of their plug-in somewhere on my C: drive. Now they're one of the cleanest. Also, don't forget C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Temp. There are many leftovers in there that only a manual deletion will get rid of. Installers are fond of putting stuff there and then forgetting to delete it.

Oh this this this. One of my favorite rants, and one that I use to troll people over 50 who say "music today is so lame compared to when we were younger." (When we were younger, "You Light Up My Life" and "Havin' My Baby" were #1 singles.) Two major reasons people develop this belief: first, we have a collective filter for crap. There was just as much crap if not more around 40 years ago, but we push those memories down because, well, who wants to remember crap? The second one, that I've never seen anyone else point out is that at some point, we stop putting as much effort into seeking out music that resonates with us. True for me, too, but I try to work against it. 35 years ago I had a job where I could listen to the radio while I worked. So 8 hours a day soaking up the local commercial alternative rock station mixed in with the local college station, and then more during my commute. Every time I drove somewhere I had the radio on, tuned to a possible source of new music I would like. Read Musician and Spin and record reviews in the local alternative weeklies. Went out to at least one show a week. Listened to recommendations from friends. I worked at finding good music for literally hours every weekday just to glean what I could that made it through the radio programmers' and record companies' filters. So, I ask my fellow over 50er sneerers of "music today": how many hours last week did you spend actively seeking out new music that you might like? Did you even do it at all? Do you ever still do it? Chances are the only time they ever get exposed to anything current is during award shows on TV, which, duh, those shows have showcased the lowest common denominator pabulum for the past 60 years. About the time that the Rat Pack-era wound down. Every once in a while, you'll get a Prince or Elliott Smith or Arcade Fire or Eminem on one of them, which people will talk about for decades because it's so unusual. Whatever style genre, whatever of popular music you like(d), there are people actively making it, and it's available for you to find via the blessed www. If you care as much about music as you say you do, then go fscking find some. Okay, this we can work with. This is easier to fix than the songwriting part. This is a matter of acquiring technical skills and applying them, just like woodworking or model aircraft building. You already have all of the physical and software tools you need. You've done the harder part, learning to play instruments and write songs. There are forums dedicated to "how do I get this sound" including this one right here. Put a link to your song(s) on them and ask the collective mind what they think of your mix and how you might improve it. For good measure, mention another song that you think does have the sound you are trying to get. You just have to be prepared for unproductive comments and criticism. There are magazines and YouTubers who regularly have people submit mixes and analyze them and give advice. Post on the Songs forum here, gives the link, and I guarantee you, everyone in this thread will go listen to it and probably give you good advice. We might even tell you that you're trippin' and that it sounds great already. About this last, seriously, at some point, we have to take in perspective outside our own. We can have inner voices telling us we'll never be as good as the people we admire, that we're just faking it. My first and foremost bit of advice for anyone: reference. If it's not sounding "pro," listen hard to a song you think is "pro" and pick out the areas where yours is missing the mark. There's software to help your stuff match pro mixes. Shoot, just buy Neutron and Ozone and turn them loose on your tracks. ? Right now, you can get two really great mastering tools, bx_masterdisk, and Shadow Hills Mastering Compressor, for free at Plugin Alliance. Mix engineering is a set of acquired tech skills. If you're not getting the results you want, acquire some more and practice practice practice. Everyone who does it has struggled with this.

This is a matter of perspective. Would you say the same thing to a sailing or fishing friend who was thinking of spending the same amount of money on a boat? $3500's cheap for a boat! Why would we think that a boat should pay for itself in any dividends other than enjoyment? How about a pop-up camping tent? (BTW, I agree with you that $3500 is too much, period, to spend on a computer, but someone with the handle "Mr. Torture" might be a Mac user, in which case, hey sweet deal!) On the other hand, if that friend didn't have much disposable income and had the expectation of becoming a professional charter skipper or nature guide, and had been trying to do so for 20 years without coming close to earning a living, we might suggest against it. Maybe there wasn't as much money to be made as a single boat skipper or independent nature guide as they thought. Maybe those fields are too competitive and/or controlled by larger companies who can afford insurance, advertising, etc. Maybe while it's fun to take your boat out every other weekend, it's less fun to HAVE to take it out full of people who may or may not be fun to go boating with, or face not being able to make your housing payment. It's okay for a job to be something we don't always love doing, and it's okay for a hobby not to earn us money. For some reason, that truth seems to come more easily to non-musicians. ?

Lot of food for thought here. The question that hasn't been addressed directly is "what do you hope to get out of making music?" We all grew up in that (relatively brief in terms of musical and human history) when (a relatively tiny percentage of) being a popular musician (and by popular, I mean following the tastes of the day) could possibly lead to international fame and riches. The "gold rush" that Kenny so wisely draws a parallel with. It used to confound me no end that the music "players" magazines placed so much emphasis on the "make it big and play in big venues" goal, as if everyone who bought a Squier Strat was supposed to have that goal and if it didn't happen, that was "failure." Someone finally came out with a magazine, I don't know if it's still around, I picked up a copy at NAMM and subscribed, called Making Music, which was dedicated to the hobby of playing and singing "just" for fun, not professionally. They had famous cover artists, but they were mostly people who were famous in other fields, successful actors, successful businesspeople, whatever. In other words it was a magazine for 99.99% of the people who buy a Squier Strat. Yet my subscription was free and I never saw it in bookstores. I mention it because at the time it was such a breath of fresh air. Since the very suppliers of tools and services depend on selling those tools and services to survive, they have (or at least believe they do) more to gain by perpetuating the myth. There's an upward path that starts with taking music lessons and ends at "pop star" and anyone who puts their foot on that path and doesn't make it all the way to the end "didn't make it." We're all older, so we have had this experience, but back when I was in a music scene, which was underground rock in San Francisco from '85-'95, nobody ever said "I play in bands as a hobby" even though everyone was doing it as a hobby, with the exception of a few, most of whom eventually gave up. It just wasn't cool to say you were doing it for fun even though in reality, there was no other reason to be doing it. All of this is to get to my point: I think it's important to be aware and honest with ourselves about what we really want and expect from playing music. And if we're feeling frustrated and unfulfilled, it's a good time to reassess that. Why did you start playing? Why do you continue to play? What would you like to "get back" from it (if anything) and what level of expectation do you have that you can get that back? People who paint, do woodworking, ride bicycles, swim, play amateur team sports, own custom cars, sail, build electronics projects, stargaze, build model railroads, whatever, as hobbies don't seem to suffer as many illusions as people who do music, or at least that's my impression. Another of my hobbies is woodworking, or at least it is a sometime hobby, it comes and goes. I have some nice power tools including a Jet contractor saw in my basement. Would I say "it's really tough to make it in woodworkingbiz" or "I've been making things out of wood for 20 years and what do I have to show for it?" Heck no. I don't have the desire to become good enough at it to the point where I could hope to do it professionally, but when my vintage home needs some trim replaced, or I need shelves or whatever, it's fun and economical to be able to do it myself. Why isn't it as okay to have music be a hobby? Or am I even correct in the perception that it is less so? Fortunately, before I started doing it, I had it figured out that I was never going to become a "rock star," but I still had goals. When I was little, bla bla, Beatles on TV bla bla. I looked at those guys and immediately wanted to do that. Not because they had all these people looking at them, but because it looked fun and cool. I wanted to get up on a stage with an instrument and make music with it and look cool. That was it. So decades later, when my first hobby band played its first real gig, and I experienced that unique sensation (I call it standing in the middle of a tornado while people pat you on the back). The big checkmark got crossed off and anything subsequent was gravy. And for the following 40 years, I've tried to keep my musical goals simple and realistic. I've gone without barely touching an instrument for years, I've switched primary instruments, learned how to write songs, etc. etc. But it's always been about seeing something and wanting to be able to do it. I did some deep diving at one point to figure out what it was about, to provide momentum for continuing, and came to the conclusion that I feel things that I can't express in other ways, and I want to express them, and connect with as many people who care to listen. Which is what listening to music is for me. Someone's expressing an emotion in their music and I listen and it makes me happy, and/or helps me know that I'm not alone in sadness or confusion or anger and/or provides me with a soundtrack for my life and inspires me to jump up and down and shake my butt. That's a beautiful process and I want to be on both ends of it. And it can be one person I'm playing to, or 100, or 1000 the more the merrier. If whatever styles I happen to be interested are no longer "in fashion," that doesn't matter any more, because there are so many outlets for people to find niche music. Being an old fart doesn't matter like it used to. I've always liked shiny toys, so owning up a collection of tools for making music has always been a big part of the fun, and I've worked at MI companies and even had my own for a while. I love my many guitars and basses and microphones and my Slingerland drum kit. They're shiny and make my heart smile. Also my Glitchmachines and Plugin Alliance and Meldaproduction and Cakewalk and Mixcraft and Ableton software and my Focusrite interface and all that. Starting with The Beatles again, I've always been interested in sound recording technology (Yellow Submarine soundtrack was the first rock record I owned, with all the crazy sounds on "Bulldog," and "Northern Song"), so now I have a home studio rig where I can create whatever sound I can manage to pick up the skills to create. For someone with my personal goals in making music, right now is the best time to be doing it in history! Geniuses keep shoveling incredible music making software onto my computer for cheap or even free! If I make something I like and want to make it available for others to listen to or purchase, I can do that without leaving my chair! I think the fact that anyone can put their music on Bandcamp is really great, so I made a song that I thought was worthy of that (and not incidentally, learned all the steps that it takes to set up the account, make a halfway decent looking cover page, etc). Check that one off. I'd like to be played on one or more of the streaming stations that plays the kind of music I like, so I went to my favorite station's site and learned how to submit songs. Check (they haven't played it yet, AFAIK). I made a video for the song because I think videos are fun. And so, thanks to the times we live in, my song is up on YouTube just like all the musicians whose work I love. Check. So, for anyone who is making music, or wants to, I would suggest that it's important at any point in the journey to know what you really want from it and as much as possible be realistic about whether those goals are achievable given the amount of drive and effort and talent you have to put toward them. And adjust them if necessary. If your goal is "earn my living with music," maybe that's going to have to include playing in cover bands and teaching. If your goal is "play for thousands of people," learn all the personal skills you can to make connections. Become emotionally resilient enough to weather inevitable setbacks. Some people did actually get some gold out of the hills, but they had to get survival skills fast. Whatever. If there were shame in not becoming a rock star, then that shame goes all the way back to Adam and Eve. And news: getting paid to do something you already love is a privilege only a tiny percentage of people ever get to experience, even once. The vast majority work at jobs they at best tolerate, but often just endure. "Deserve's" got nothin' to do with it!

Now we need to get one of the Cakeverse's reverse engineered add-on wizards to do a translating program. @scook or @azslow3 or @sjoens or someone like that.

Hmm. I just opened the same .vstpreset file and the corresponding Cakewalk user preset I put in in bx_rockrack. In Notepad, no pluses. They look very similar for about the first 1700 characters. Then the Cakewalk one seems to repeat the format. It looks pretty plain text-ish, not sure what delimiter they are using, kinda out of my depth there.

You know, the field up at the upper left that says No Preset until you double click on it and type a name for the preset you want to save and then click on the little floppy disc button to save it. Like this: Cakewalk actually stores these in <username>\AppData\Roaming\Cakewalk\Shared Presets. Each plugin seems to have its own folder labeled with a GUID-dy string. Inside these folders are the user's presets. I'm still working on how to propagate them across my various computers. I'm sure the GUIDish folder names are unique to each plug-in, but I don't know yet if the folder names will be the same across multiple computers. In any case, once you figure out which plug-in goes with which folder, you can probably copy them across. The challenge is to reverse-engineer the Cakewalk user preset files themselves, which have no extension, and see if it's possible to write a translator program. The best thing would be if Cakewalk is storing them in the VST3 spec's .vstpreset format. Then you could just drop them in and strip the .vstpreset extension off. Or you could do what I do, throw The Mandalorian on one screen and bang VST presets into the dialog on the other. Oh wait, wow. I just saw your reply to Steve. Did you not know that you can save your own presets in Cakewalk? If not, then I have now repaid you for the Shift-D key combo you bestowed on me. That was life-changing. I use it about every 5 minutes.

Oh that is sweet. Like Waves, but better.

I guess I'm fortunate in that I have no idea what this thread is talking about in regard to dynamic discounts and getting plug-ins for nearly free. When I cashed in my 6 plug-ins voucher, I thought the cart said that it wasn't eligible for any dynamic discounts because of the voucher. I like being able to get things for next to nothing, but I don't understand how you all are doing it. How would I know if I have any coupons or whatever? They don't seem to list that stuff with my account the way that other places do. I think at this point that the only one of their products I would like to obtain is bx_refinement. I already have so many PA FX! I recall someone saying at one point that if you have all 3 of the Lindell "500" series FX that you get the Channel X framework for free, but I only see it listed at full price even though I have the set.

I've posted about this in a few Plugin Alliance threads. Except for the Unfiltered Audio stuff, which has built-in plug-in management, the way to access presets for most Plugin Alliance plug-ins is via the "VST3" menu in the plug-in UI in Cakewalk. Up there at the top, usually a bit left of center. Click on that and select "Load Preset" and it will take you to a standard Windows file dialog where you can load the presets. It was a great day when I discovered this, because I thought all of their stuff just didn't come with any presets. Most of them do, though. I did some research on this, and they actually use the canonical locations and format specified by Steinberg. Aargh, once I discovered the preset situation with PA, and the fact that they were in the canonical locations (and format), I posted a feature request asking if Cakewalk could get this feature. I didn't know that S1 already had it because all I have is Artist 4, which of course does not allow 3rd-party VST's, with certain exceptions. I think nobody else knew WTH I was talking about, so my feature request sank like a stone. Now I sit and watch TV and bash PA presets into the Cakewalk system the hard way, one at a time. Go to Load Preset, copy preset name from file dialog, paste into Cakewalk's preset list, save, repeat 15-30 times.

"Start" it is, I think. Thank you for the deep dive.

One word of caution: I hope this means they've given more attention to their engine, because with the other stuff I have from them (notably Serenity Pro), they're kind of resource-y. Which for a ROMpler, is perplexing.

What I mean by "dry" is that I want no added reverb. Clean, mostly close mic'd hits. I'm picky about reverb, I use Exponential Audio and Meldaproduction's top of the line stuff. I'm usually trying for a sonic landscape where everything sounds like it's in the same space, and for me, that's harder to do if individual instruments are doing their own reverb thing. And with most (not all) VSTi's, the built-in reverb sounds to me like the onboard FX in a practice amp. This goes for virtual drum machines, too. I always go through and turn off all of the 'verb effects. I think companies load their VSTi's with internal reverb so that the patches will sound attractive when auditioning them. I'm looking at you, A|A|S.

I hear ya. From my POV, they're surely not all created equal. I like iZotope's, it checks for updates and downloads them, also keeping individual installers in your Downloads folder. Arturia's seems to work similarly. IK Multimedia's Product Manager is about the worst. Since they instituted it, I don't think I've had a single experience where it worked smoothly; I still have to fire up Authorization Manager and dance around to get everything to work. PA's is fine, but it doesn't do update checking, which is odd. Native Access would be okay if it didn't insist on spamming my drive with redundant copies of the plug-ins. I can delete the 32-bit and VST2 ones by hand, but then it complains that the installation is corrupt. I suppose that for safety's sake I should download and archive all of the individual installers for my PA stuff, but that's getting to be a pretty long list.

Fixed.

Indeed, and versatile as well. One concern might be that the individual installers might not be available for local archiving or reduction in download time/bandwidth. You can get around those concerns by using the Download/Export+Import/Install feature. Download/Export downloads whatever bundle you build, then you Import/Install using the Manager. A nice solution for people who want to have an archive of "the last version that worked without upside-down meters" or just don't feel like downloading everything over and over. I used it to snag only the Unfiltered Audio stuff after PA finally posted their 2021 builds. You still have to enter credentials and be validated via 'net to run the Manager, so it doesn't make for a completely offline solution. Smokin' pile of freebies. I only had one overlap, after mentally tossing the coin between Masterdesk and Refinement, I went with Masterdesk in the last sale, thereby helping to fund the giveaway. ?

Ha, I should have refreshed my browser, I guess. I knew there was no way I was firsties on this. ?

The scoop goes to Yan! Whompin' collection of freebies from PA, plus one each from NI and iZotope: https://www.plugin-alliance.com/en/blog/blogpost/items/introducing-soundwide.html

If something's not obeying Quick Group rules, it should be "bug reported."?

Wow, I think I may have started using Brave because of your endorsement of it. I do see the page o'gobbledygook sometimes when I click on the results of a Google search, but I read up on it and Brave does that because it doesn't like Google Ad Services or something. Other than that Brave seems to be working quite well for me. Sometimes I have to tell it "shields down," so that I can get an ad-dependent site to let me aboard, but that's about it. It does sound like something unsavory crept onto your system, but I have no idea what could be done other than what you've already tried. The idea of getting web cooties that Malware Bytes can't handle is unpleasant.

I guess we'll watch and see if we can get a repro condition for the devs to work with. Heaven only knows why the program would suddenly start tripping over snap settings.

Yes, as there is room for one more button on Audio strips. Get that asterisk down there!

This is especially a bugaboo for plug-in 'ho's like I admittedly am. Some manufacturers use the "Category" flags, which apparently never included "compressor," so compressors auto-sort into the "dynamics" category. It's actually easier when they don't, because I can look for the new plug-ins in the "uncategorized" category. I would love for recently installed plug-ins to be highlighted for, say the first 5 program starts after they are first scanned.

I think I saw this behavior just recently, and I think I solved it by changing my Snap settings. It may have been set to "By" when I wanted "To" or the value was set too high for the accuracy I wanted. Not 100% sure about this, but I do notice that your grid there looks like it's set to a whole note, which seems kinda big for moving clips with precision. I'd try turning off snap for a sec and then see what happens.

Yes, that's what I meant. Not what the graphical element is called, but rather the position. I apologize for not making that clearer and I thank everyone who responded. As in if I say "insert 2 measures at 1:01:00" Or "drag those clips to 1:01:00" I was wondering if there were a more colloquial term for "1:01:00." Nomenclature if you will. If I were to say "the beginning of the timeline" would that be accurate and understood? That's the basic issue, I just want to use the term that's most likely to be understood by other users of the program. I thought it might be "zero," due to the "RTZ" function, but really, there is no "zero," Cakewalk's timeline starts with "1:01:00." (I don't care for "the Wall" either, because to me, that's when my system has run out of resources to process audio. It "hits the wall" and I better either start freezing those synth tracks or change up what instrument I'm using. The only source I've heard it from was a friend of mine whose DAW is Pro Tools. He may have made it up himself for all I know, but he taught me a lot about using DAW's.)