Starship Krupa

16 hours ago, Tim Smith said:

trying to stay future proof

There really isn't future proof when it comes to performance-sensitive computer components, is there?

From my perspective, it's usually just nudging my computer system(s) further away from obsolescence. I'm about to post a thread about my "new" build.

On 6/22/2022 at 3:21 PM, Sheens said:

Audio Technica M40X best (most flat) I found so far, well in your budget (forget the M50x)

I had the opposite experience. Based on reviews and specs that indicated the M40's had a flatter response than the M50's, I bought a pair of them.

Then a friend came over with a pair of M50's. I put on one of my favorite downtempo tracks and compared them, and when I was using the M50's, I heard a faint running water sample that the producer had used. It was inaudible on the M40's. So I went for a pair of M50's and have been reasonably happy with them, although I'm open to the idea that other cans might please me more.

What's important to me is soundstage and detail. Do I hear a wide stereo image or does it sound confined to the width of the drivers? Can I hear the little details that the producers of my favorite tracks used? Radiohead's "Everything In Its Right Place" is my favorite test track because 1. It has lots of little ear candy FX, like slight reverse reverb on the vocal and hard panning and a bunch of other stuff, and 2. I love the song and can listen to it over and over.

My advice for headphone shoppers is to try to find a way to listen to the cans you're considering using a well-produced track that you're familiar with. If you hear things in it that you never heard before, and it sounds like you can "walk around inside" the image, then you've found some winners.

4 hours ago, Klaus said:

Waves' plug-ins are sorted just alphabetically in this view, they are not in a dedicated folder.

Look at your "Berzerk Distortion" Mono / Stereo plug-ins. ?

LOL, of course, we all have multiple licenses for these due to giveaways!

Yep, there they are. I got rid of the Presonus shell thing, it was taking years off my life waiting for it to enumerate, and just not worth it for the sake of one good vintage analog delay emulation and a channel strip containing vintage hardware workalikes duplicated elsewhere.

3 minutes ago, Kevin Perry said:

32 and 64 bit VST2s

Are you using 32-bit plug-ins on new projects? I kept a few around for a while for legacy projects, but I think I finally got them all weeded.

5 hours ago, RexRed said:

Chrome will not play sound while using Cakewalk

Thing is, the ASIO driver model is intended for absolute best performance during dedicated use by one single app at a time. Sometimes, with some drivers, it's possible to be able to hear browser audio while you are running an audio program in ASIO, but there are no guarantees.

What seems to make it go more smoothly is if I set my Windows sound options to match what I'm using in the DAW. This at least makes it so the interface and its driver don't have to flip a coin to decide what bit rate to use. Another thing is to of course, use WASAPI Shared, which is designed to allow apps to share the audio output device. There's also the trick of enabling your computer's built-in audio hardware and setting Windows sounds to use that while ASIO is driving your studio interface.

In the end....I really don't need to have a browser or any other audio-generating program running when I'm recording or mixing. It's better for my focus not to.

2 hours ago, Klaus said:

FWIW, my Waves plug-ins (VST3) do appear in this view, too.

Hmm, maybe I missed something....

10 hours ago, Jerry Pellegrino said:

Graphics driver

In the search bar down at the left side of the Windows taskbar, type in "sysinfo" and hit <enter>.

Then click on Components, then Display. That should tell you what video display and driver your Windows system is using. The information may be helpful in determining a solution.

What version of Windows are you using. 7, 8, 10, 11?

Only Behringer's absolute bottom-of-the-line interfaces use ASIO4ALL. The UMC 1820 is not one of them.

The ASIO model is not officially supported by Windows, and there's no guarantee that programs that do use the driver models supported by Windows (WASAPI, WDM, Direct X, etc.) will be able to use an audio device that's already tied up using ASIO. ASIO4ALL,  perhaps surprisingly,  would allow it, because it's a wrapper that lets WDM drivers report to programs that they are ASIO drivers. But an interface using ASIO4ALL will have no less latency than if it were using WASAPI, and some programs choke on ASIO4ALL.

My experience is close to the others': I've usually been able to do things like watch Netflix or YouTube while Cakewalk uses my Presonus or Focusrite interfaces via ASIO. I will say that the Presonus handles it better than the Focusrite Saffire, which can sometimes get put in a state where it loses sync with Windows and I have to power cycle it.

This is an interesting article about IRQ sharing in versions of Windows after 7. You can easily find out which devices are sharing IRQ's using Device Manager:

https://maxedtech.com/show-devices-by-irq-in-windows/

You can also change some of them to using message-signaled interrupts, which is a newer modelI've done some playing around with MSI Utility and really, saw no perceptible difference on the system where I tried it. Maybe I'll try it on my new system that is having no problems and see if I can break it:

https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/windows-line-based-vs-message-signaled-based-interrupts-msi-tool.378044/

With old-device-on-new-USB port issues, I suspect that it may have something to do with the newer port supplying data at a faster rate than the client device can handle. There may be less engineering attention given to the port's ability to fall back, and of course, USB 2 devices made prior to the adoption of USB 3 might not be as good at communicating that they need the port to fall back. It's just a guess due to having read so many reports of older USB 2.0 devices only starting to work once the person plugged them into an old hub.

For audio, I'm a Firewire guy. I like my asynchronous streaming of data for audio streams.

Hidden in plain sight, I guess, but I only discovered it today after using Cakewalk for 4+ years. A slip of the mouse and I had it.

We all know about how you can sort plug-ins in the Browser by Manufacturer, Category, and Type (which means you see them sorted into VST3, VST2, and DXi folders, and then by manufacturer within those folders). Ever wanted to see them sorted by where they are in the Windows file system? Read on.

All you have to do to see this is click on the "Plug-ins" tab at the top of the Browser, then whatever sort method it's set to, move your mouse to it and click. You'll see something like this:

It's not sorting by manufacturer, it's showing where my .VST3 files are in the VST3 directory.

As you can see, it winds up being a combination of folders that the manufacturers' installers created and then plug-ins that were installed at the root level of VST3 or whatever folder you use for VST2's.

The possible use for this that I can see is plug-in organization: you can have folders for manufacturers and then categories (which Meldaproduction already does) or even put it the other way around. I supposed there's not much you can do with it that you can't do using plug-in manager, but who knows. It might be good for helping track down where a plug-in's DLL actually is. It uses the friendly names from inside the file rather than the filenames.

Caveats: if you decide to try using this to organize plug-in lists, sometimes plug-ins don't like being moved from their original install location. Also, plug-ins that load via a unified shell, like Waves' or Presonus', will might not appear in this view.

Note: this sorting view also switches in the FX rack and instrument menus.

4 minutes ago, RexRed said:

I found the "Gear" discussion thread

See you there! I'm about to write up my adventures in building a completely new (used parts) DAW system. ?

9 hours ago, Pollux said:

I added the money I spent on cheap (and not so cheap) plugins in a bit over a year and I almost had a heart attack

Yeah, it adds up for sure. I have a philosophical opinion to share, though. Something I remind myself of when I mentally total up what I've spent on plug-ins to go with the FREEWARE DAW I use (which comes with its own set of mixing plug-ins) ?. I was the guy who started the Freeware FX and Instrument topics, and know that there's plenty of really great free stuff out there that I don't need to wait for a "deal" on. (Although I haven't found a freeware reverb that can touch the paid ones I have).

I'm not trying to encourage anyone to buy shiny trinkets that they don't need, no way nohow. But we shouldn't trip too hard on spending money over time. The thing is, if the pastime brings you happiness....most interests and luxuries come with costs that freakin' add up.

Golfer: buy clubs, shoes, gloves. Recurring costs: tees, balls, and green fees. Play at your local muni course twice a month, even at senior (60+) or off hours rates, that comes to $100 a month. Times 12, $1200 a year. Fancy courses or places where you're not a resident? $1500-2000?

Woodworker: buy table saw, miter saw, chisels, planes, router, router table, etc. I can attest to this hobby also resulting in trinkets one is initially excited about but seldom if ever uses because who can keep track of all those gadgets and you finally get good enough where they're superfluous. Then you have to buy decent wood and fasteners if you want to make anything. I work mostly with birch plywood, which goes for roughly $75-100 a sheet, depending on thickness and quality. If you work in hardwood, fuggedaboudit. Recurring costs: sandpaper, finishing supplies (decent finishes are spendy), bits, blades.

Like to maintain fitness? Access to a good gym, and at home have various dumbbells, exercise mats, etc. How many gym memberships and exercise goodies go un(der)used?

Like to watch TV? How much did your set cost? How long did you have the last one before you decided it was too small or too low resolution? Even if you're frugal like me and have no cable package, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+ add up to about $40 a month, and how much for the broadband internet service to deliver them? A cable package with 200 channels? You can only watch one thing at a time, so most people probably only regularly watch fewer than 10 of them.

Go to the movies twice a month on bargain night, get a large popcorn and a drink, and you've spent $500 on that per year.

Concert tickets? Don't get me started.

Enjoy having a bite in a restaurant with friends? Just grabbing a burger? The other day I went out to Five Guys with a friend/former bandmate and got one sandwich, a small drink (they're refillable, so frugal boy orders the small cup), and large fries for the two of us. $18. Go to a nice restaurant and order two glasses of wine once a month to enhance your romantic relationship? Yikes! Go out to a bar with your mates and have 2 beers? Premium beers? Add it up.

Sports fan? How much do tickets for games cost where you live? SF Giants baseball tickets go for around $20 for upper box. 49ers tickets? $50 for the way high seats. IndyCar? $30 for race day in Long Beach. Formula 1? In Austin, $550 for a race day pass ?.

Like to sew? Good sewing machine. Needles, thread, fabric, patterns, buttons, trim.

Like to cook? Good chef's knife, any number of other gadgets, fancy spices, fancy olive oil, fresh organically grown locally farmed ingredients.

Guitar strings, picks, cables, tubes, drumsticks, drum heads, moongels, cool tuning gadgets. Musicians' iPhone apps. How many did I buy last year?

All of these things are luxuries. I get 60 channels of TV over the air. I can eat and exercise at home (jumping rope is said to be one of the most effective aerobic exercises), make wooden objects out of pallets using a handsaw.

We all like getting shiny toys to augment our interests. It's a dopamine rush. It probably goes back to tribal hunter-gatherer times where the one with the most tools survived.

Getting a new gadget inspires us to try it out, and often enough I come up with a new idea or two. Every time I get a new plug-in, I spend at least an hour test driving it, and spending an hour in the play zone is actually good for coming up with new song ideas. I have half a dozen songs in folders named things like "Objeq Delay Testing." Or seeing how it performs on older, unfinished material. It tricks me into the play zone, which is the best place to be for creating.

Maybe it's kinda silly to buy a new W.A. Production or Waves multi-widget when you're a good enough mix engineer get the same results (or better) with the freeware Dead Duck (or Meldaproduction, ob. mention) FX collection, but if you do anyway, and it made you happy for an hour or two, how much would you have spent on a burger and a movie? It's fun to chase down these deals and see how much we can get for relatively little. Does Larry get paid for it? Yeah, in enjoyment and the respect of people who benefit from his efforts. Do I feel cool when I manage be the first to share a deal? Heck yeah I do.

tl/dr:

Thanks to getting cheapie and freebie deals, I have some of the best audio production software in the industry. I have peace of mind that the tools I'm using will not hold me back, I only have to build skill in using them. Elysia mpressor and alpha master (total outlay $35). kHs Slice and Carve EQ's (both free). MAutoDynamicEQ ($20). Exponential Nimbus and R4 reverbs ($10 each). T-Racks VC-670 (free). Objeq, Sigmund, and Sandman Pro delays (total outlay $14). T-Racks Quad Compressor (free). Those are desert island processors, and let's see, total outlay....$89.

That's less than or equal to two rounds of golf, or a sheet and a half of cheap birch plywood, or a new set of heads for my Slingerlands, or 10 pairs of Vic Firths, or one decent used Zildjian, or 4 good cables, or a year's worth of sanitation supplies for my hot tub, or 7 months of Netflix, or one really nice restaurant meal for two, or four "wagon wheel" pizzas.

Ilir, have you posted about the collection on VI-Control? Big group of orchestral composers and arrangers on there. The pros of course go for fancy and expensive libraries, but not everyone over there is a pro.

Latest find, CBBTV by @RexRed.

He seems to favor longer streams that demonstrate his own use of the software as opposed to shorter tutorials. I find it instructive to watch other people use Cakewalk, as we each seem to have our own workflows and tricks.

Rex, a suggestion/request. The forum has subforums specifically for discussion of hardware. I'm not the forum cops; rather I feel inhibited discussing hardware in a software subforum, which is my own trip. Also, things are a bit quieter in those subs, and they could use your discussions. It doesn't really matter. I just wanted to mention it.

That said, for someone at your level of hardware investment (a frickin' RME, wish I had one!), do as you did and examine the specs closely on any interface or mic that has "podcast" as its focus.

It's my impression that they're aimed at V.O. people who want a simpler solution that may be less complex (hence less versatile). I suspect that an entertainment mogul ? such as you can use more versatility.

Only if it appeared on an aptitude test where I had to fill in the next number in the sequence.

Thank heaven. My mixes have been lacking in "torque" lately and this might be just the thing.

18 hours ago, marled said:

As you said all very unprofessional! ?

To add injury to insult: I was checking through Services, and it installed something called "Antares Central Services." When I disabled it, the plug-in still performed its single trick well enough, so it's apparently not even necessary. They just install it because they can.

I swear, audio plug-ins that install services. I think most of us dislike installer shells in the first place, and to have them also install their own little do nothing service whether it's needed or not is antagonistic. It's obnoxious, like an installer that puts a shortcut on your desktop without asking, or worse, after you tell it not to. I always feel like the CEO of the company just took a dump on my lawn to mark their territory. Like they can't even imagine someone not wanting a shortcut to their installer shell on their desktop.

There is one service I will tolerate, and that is the PACE Licensing Service, because I know that it does the job of a virtual iLok. And they aren't coy about it, they explain what they're doing and ask during the process whether you want to go ahead. It's not "surprise, now you have Waves Local Server installed just so we can do our kluged-together preset browser! How do you like your permanently-running Softube Install Helper, which is only used while you're installing one of our products?"

On 7/12/2022 at 6:08 PM, Brian Walton said:

Log into your account and add it to your cart, should auto add a code for you unless they changed it.

Super! Got it for $17 and change with the discount, AND it came with Antares' Choir and a month's access to Auto-Tune Unlimited, which I guess is Antares' "all access" subscription.

Warning: installing that silly little automatic multitracking plug-in was the biggest hassle I've had registering and installing a plug-in in years. First you have to find the installer on their site, which, as it turns out, Choir is part of a larger suite, so you have to get the installer for the whole suite and un-tick everything but Choir. That installer also installs their portal program, which, when you run it, get this: tells you that in order to register and run Antares software, you have to go to a third-party developer's site, and download and install a necessary runtime library. I am not making this up, the 3rd-party developer is called "Wibu," and apparently their game is software licensing. I can't remember the last time a commercial product required that I visit a third party's site to get a runtime library. And when it last happened, the runtime library was probably Microsoft C++. This gave it the feel of installing something on Ubuntu, and having to run around and find and install dependencies. Yeesh!

I never heard of this Wibu, how do I even know that I want their stuff on my 'puter? The installer indicated that you can install components that allow license sharing across networks, but I unchecked that. I don't need more than the two seats. Oddly, there was a graphic of an iLok-esque USB dongle on the install shield window for the Wibu CodeMeter runtime.

These people make Auto-Tune, for heaven's sake. It's practically a household word. It seems unprofessional to make users do this. If your product needs a runtime library, bundle it in the installer. Especially if it's one that nobody's heard of. Some people get really twitchy about installing unknown downloads.

Sweet. I got Sigmund Delay as a PB freebie a few years back and it kinda just sat around (because I already had Objeq Delay and Sphere Delay and a bunch of UfA and Glitchmachines FX for weird stuff and many other delays for "add a little slapback on that" tasks). Then I was poking around in the plug-in broswer and said "WTH is "Sigmund?"

I put it on a track and started going through the presets...holy mother of Unfiltered Audio, that thing is off the heezy. It does the usual things that delays do, but I guess their preset designers were instructed to go nuts. I think the skeumorphic 70's test equipment UI had me fooled into thinking that retro sounds were its forte, but no, no, no, It has some kind of weird sidechain-y feedback-y architecture where you can move the order of things around. I dunno, whenever I rack it up I find a preset that provides nice tempo-sync'd nutty ear candy.

In other words, yes, it's worth the price of two Burger King meals if you're into bizarre delay sounds.

Yeah, I thought I was going to read about how Plugin Alliance and/or iZotope had backed out of Soundwide.

I have to appreciate the cleverness of the name, for a soundpack that's trying to bring the sounds of 90's shoegaze and grunge guitar tones.

They've also updated the freebie Swatches assortment with 7 of the sounds from this pack, 3 articulations each, as well as 8 each from Tabby Dance and Caffeine.

The sounds they included are more Nirvana than Cocteau Twins. I want to learn the imitation guitar solo from "Digital Love" for the times that I get hold of new screaming guitar synth patches like these.

16 minutes ago, Brian Walton said:

I went ahead and bought it from another retailer (AudioDeluxe) as they were the cheapest

When I check there it says $20. Is there a code or something I need?

1 minute ago, Brian Walton said:

didn't make a big stink about it

I cut them slack due to the smoking deals I've gotten on upgrades with my referral credits. Upgrades are IMO, the best bang for the referral credit when they do something like the 60% off everything or 50% off all bundles sales. The key is to let 'em ride until a big sale rolls around.

With my combination of eligible past purchases and referral credits, I leveraged up to the MMixingFX bundle last time out for a cash outlay of $30. At this point, though, with Cakewalk counting off 78 of their plug-ins, I'm past the point of much but a "collect 'em all" motivation for getting more of their products. ?

On 6/21/2022 at 8:17 AM, Brian Walton said:

I'm waiting on Direct from Melda to see if they will lift the exclusion on this from referal credits redemption.

I don't know how on earth a Meldamoonie such as myself missed this, but I'm going to snag it from somewhere.

When you say "exclusion from referral credits," do you mean that you're not able to use the credits that you've gotten from other people's purchases?

Shoot, great deal for first time Meldaproduction buyers if you can use a referral code (such as MELDA1923165 ?) to get 20% off, coupled with the 10€ credit for signing up for their newsletter. By my reckoning, that would put it down under $10.

For everyone else, I think buying it from a reseller is the best idea due to how Meldaproduction's upgrade credits work. They assume that you got the plug-in for 50% of list if you bought it from a reseller. In this case, you'd be credited for 50€ toward any bundle that includes MTurboAmp, such as the MCreativeFX bundle.