Starship Krupa

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Coke#Backlash It wouldn't be as bad if it only lived up to its advertised promises. The thing is, those features such as the ability to hibernate when no signal is present, depend on developers actually using them. So far the only developers I know of who put plug-ins to sleep when there's no audio at their inputs is Meldaproduction, and their VST2's also have that feature. VST needs things like protection against taking down the whole DAW when there's a crash in a plug-in and maybe the ability for different instances of the same plug-in to share core code. Would it be more efficient to to this rather than have the multiple instances all independent? I don't know, but it's the sort of thing that I think should be accounted for in the spec.

I liked it better in the olden days when a DAW would query a VST and get back the list of factory presets, which would then show up in the DAW's pull-down list of presets. Nowadays, with every new plug-in I have to poke around and play a bit of "find the preset manager." At least I now know about looking in the VST menu in Cakewalk to see if the manufacturer is storing them in a canonical location. I'd be a happy boy indeed if Cakewalk could scan the presets when they are in the location(s) specified by the VST3 spec and then present them in its own preset menu.

I found them in the "VST3" menu in Cakewalk's plug-in properties window. Click on it, Load Preset, and there is a ton of them. A lot of Plugin Alliance stuff is that way, too. Seems at first like there are no presets, then you check that menu....

Meldaproduction is the brand that has inspired the most devotion from me. They have the most geek appeal of any developer, IMO. Sound fantastic and you can get very far under the hood with them. iZotope's products are great, especially for "don't know what I'm doing" people (and no insult intended toward the company or anyone else). They have so many wizards and assistants and really good presets, and should the time come when you crack your knuckles and decide to get under the hood, their stuff sounds great, too. I don't use anything from iZotope lately except for the Exponential reverbs. I've never heard a reverb that could beat them, although MTurboReverb comes darn close. Apparently my ears are good at picking out reverb tails, and they are the smoothest I've heard. I know FabFilter have a heavy rep, but I've never tried any of their products. This is because they never flow any freebies, and freebies are always my "gateway" to becoming interested in a given company's products. I can't think of a single effect I've bought where the company was one where I didn't first get a freebie. Meldaproduction is the most notable; they pioneered that marketing method with their insane collection of free FX. Not the first to do it, for sure, but they did it on such a massive scale. In the case of McDSP, the single license/cloud activation can be a pain in the neck, this I know from Fresh Air, so I hope they'll do what Slate did and repeat the offer so I can snag another non-cloudy license. Hard to find fault in a freebie, though. As far as I'm concerned, they have a lot of leeway. Thing is, though, as others have pointed out, if the stuff you have to pay for is similarly licensed (single seat cloud), I'll have to take that into account if I think about buying any of it.

Also busted. I've managed to snag A|A|S' Objeq Delay and D16's Sigmund as freebies, and they are both monstrous powerhouses of sound design. The Unfiltered Audio Sandman Pro/Instant Delay bundle that you can get for free (or close to it) during PA's no minimum sales is another favorite. The big disappointment in delays was iZotope DDLY, which I also got as a freebie but have never been able to do DDLY 5h1t with.

So it's possible for someone who owns MTurboDelay to want another delay enough to buy it? ?

Haven't snagged one this big in a while: Global/Drop Indicator (on p. 10 of TYLIP) is used for the line that appears between track and folder headers when dragging and dropping.

If I were looking for a USB interface in your price range and feature set, I would be looking hard at the brand new Universal Audio Volt 2. It has slightly better metering than the Studio 2|4 Audiobox (two LED's instead of one ?), and they're doing some fancy stuff with the preamps. UA have a reputation for quality (including build quality) that they're probably not looking to squander with this new line of budget interfaces. Incidentally, I just bought a Studio 2|4 (no "c", but Presonus have confirmed that the only difference is the color) for $30 on Craig's List, and its playback blew away my ancient Firepods. Sure, any interface from the past dozen years will sound better than the Firepod due to the adoption of better convertors (with PLL jitter correction). When I say it blew them away, that's almost literally. The 2|4 sounded SO much better that I knew I had to dump them and went back on Craig's List and snagged a Focusrite Saffire Pro 40 (I like Firewire, and I record drums, so having 8 mic pres is essential to my studio). It's well in the era of better jitter correction, so it also sounds fantastic by comparison to the Firepods.

I generally use the modules as inserts in channels or buses. If I were using the reverbs, I'd use them as sends. They're just an FX bin that you can place before or after your regular FX bin. Check the Cakewalk signal flow diagram in the Reference Guide for better understanding.

I have a rental cottage at the rear of my property, my tenant, Steven, is a music teacher (been around the SF East Bay music scene forever, was giving lessons to Mike Dirnt a few years ago). One of his longtime students works for Avid, we know as makers of Pro Tools, and he told Steven that most of the people coding for them these days are in the Ukraine. I don't have any news, but he's obviously very concerned for them (as well as the possible impact on the business).

Well done, Shane. I can't think of an explanation where increasing the PSU wattage would result in a boot speed increase. Unless it was putting out "dirty" power that made it so that it took the detection circuit on the muzzabo longer to give it the green light. Of course it's always good to blow the crud off of your heatsinks and fans. It's always great when the upgrades you put in jack up the performance so much. And LOL at your "old i7 6700K DAW."? Check my sig. Adding the GTX550Ti really opened up graphics performance. ? Still, it does what I want it to do, Cakewalk, Vegas Pro. I don't feel that it's holding me back. It would be nice to have better performance, but it would just make things faster, not necessarily better. My thing is that I rely heavily on the kindness of others when it comes to acquiring new computers. I still know enough people who work IT and facilities at big Silicon Valley companies that I can score systems that have been retired only because some executive got in a computer weenie-waving competition with the executive in the next office. I'm good at keeping trailing edge hardware viable. Most of my projects can play back just fine on my 2011 Dell Latitude E6410, which I upgrade by swapping the i5 in it with an i7-720M. 8 virtual cores helps a lot with the stuff we do.

I understand what you're getting at, but I gotta say that an Arranger Track, Articulation Maps, and even nested folders are way more interesting to me than bundled plug-ins. I already had a favorite synth, reverb, and compressor before I started using Cakewalk 4 years ago. Aside from the workflow annoyance kind of things that I post about in Feedback Loop, an integrated sampler is about the only thing that I think Cakewalk really "needs" at this point to retake its rightful place among the heaviest hitters. Then the vaunted chord track, I guess. I'd also like to see it return to its roots a little bit and pay attention to the trend toward integration with hardware. That's something I don't do at all at this point, but it's in Cakewalk's DNA and I know that it's a growing trend. I don't know what features are important to those users except for MONO EXTERNAL INSERTS and making it as easy as possible to integrate external synths. One of the issues with getting those big front-cover reviews is that it's easy for a magazine to know when to do one for Cubase or Live! or Logic: go for the major release. But Cakewalk by BandLab adds features a few at a time rather than making users wait years to get a dumptruck full and then harvesting the upgrade licenses. By the feature-addition yardstick that other companies use, Cakewalk would be up to Cakewalk 2.5 or so by now. There's also the question of how important is press for an individual DAW these days? I have the most recent 27 issues of CM in my Zinio library. Of the 27, Logic's most recent release made the cover, as did Ableton Live!'s and Cubase's, Studio One's, and (I think) Bitwig's. Live! Lite 11 had its own cover 2 months ago. Live! is mentioned 3X in cover stories in other contexts. That's only 6 covers in 2 years of publishing, and they are heavily skewed toward what they obviously think is their target audience's favorite DAW. Notice who (along with Cakewalk) is not mentioned on those covers: Pro Tools, FL Studio, Digital Performer, REAPER, Samplitude, Reason, Waveform, Mixcraft, Mixbus, Garage Band, some of which have had major releases in those past 2 years. I think the idea that press coverage in magazines like CM and SOS results in a lot of uptake of whatever DAW is featured may not be as true as many seem to believe. I think it's the other way around: putting popular DAW's on the cover sells magazines. The former assumes that there is a readership of those mags that hasn't already settled on a DAW, or is ready to switch, and I don't believe that's true. I think people read those to get ideas about what to do with the DAW they have. If we're interested in the articles about the latest release of whatever, we might read it to check up on the DAW's other people prefer (oh look, Pro Tools now allows you to automate gain inside a clip, how revolutionary). I find the ones on Pro Tools amusing, as they add catch-up features that even "little guys" like Mixcraft have had for half a dozen years or more. I'm looking forward to Pro Tools "revolutionizing" the DAW market by adding a performance panel.?

More like "anything at all to say about Cakewalk," amirite? As a subscriber for the past couple of years, I'm going to drop Andy Jones, Computer Music's editor, a note telling him that I appreciate the coverage of....well, the DAW I actually use. And they hit a bullseye with it, most of the work I do these days is electronica, and I find Cakewalk to be pretty ideal for it. If you wish to do the same, it's andy.jones@futurenet.com. The issue is Aptil 2022, #306.

This issue has bedeviled me since I first started using Cakewalk. When recording in comp mode/loop mode, Cakewalk makes assumptions about where you want to split your clips and then does it for you. Unfortunately, at least in my case, its assumptions are never correct. For audio, just swiping across the clips in the lane with the Smart/Comp tool will fix things, but with MIDI, it's more difficult, as you found out. You have to select everything and then bounce to clips, and that doesn't always go to plan. I recently made a feature request to have the option to turn off automatic clip splitting. If you agree, please reply to the thread:

The Cakewalk devs are unlikely to come up with something you like better any time soon, since the current knob design works perfectly. I too am unwilling to learn the tools necessary to create knob art; fortunately there are hundreds of other elements in Theme Editor that I can change.

It's certainly my choice these days. From the April issue:

I've been working on my mix engineering chops pretty seriously for about 8 years now, and one of the things I love about it is how there's always something new to learn or insight to be gained, no matter how many hours I spend on my own mixes, watching and reading tutorials, taking online courses, whatever. Today's insight: Last night I came up with a nice little 3-note Krautrock-style arpeggio. This morning, I came up with a bass line to go with it. I also installed Acon Digital Dynamics BE, which I got with the latest issue of Beat. Nice dynamics processor, nothing that I didn't already have, but I wanted to try it out. So I have my arp arping away in the top end, and my bassline going on down at the bottom, and I throw Dynamics BE on to see what it can do. I put it on the bass line, call up one of its "1176" presets and tune the threshold to try and put some bounce into it. Not much going on there, so I drag the plug-in up to the arp track. I tune it to get it bouncing, and I momentarily forget which track I have it on, because suddenly the bass line is tickling my ears in a most pleasant way. So I'm wondering what I did to make it work on the bass line and then remember that I don't even have it on the bass line any more, that putting it on the arp is making the bass line jump up and down. Makes complete sense, the high arp is now getting out of the way of the bass, but still, quite a moment of revelation. Compression is such a trippy thing.

Jeez, another note on this: when I installed the Acon Digital Dynamics BE (which is a pretty nice processor, on the material I've tried it on so far), Acon's installer put the 64-bit VST3 in the C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\VST3 folder. I have this excluded from scanning by Cakewalk because no 32-bit plug-ins at my party. After I moved it to the correct folder, it scanned okay as a 64-bit VST3. I think maybe Acon have trouble with the whole VST3 thing. Their chorus is my favorite chorus effect, but when they came out with the latest version, which included a VST3 version, only the VST2 version works correctly in Cakewalk.

That's odd, my licenses for Acon Dynamic and Future Synths came through just fine.

In case your interest was piqued by the mention of 2 free A|A|S soundpacks on the cover, just to let you know, I purchased the magazine and tried to redeem the licenses and got a notice saying that the code had already been used. Apparently, if you got the soundpacks the last time Beat offered them, that's it, no more for you. I'm not going to complain about it to the magazine; the IK Future Synths license is plenty for my $6. I even suspected that it might be the case, so I'm not miffed.

All of the iZotope Exponential Audio reverbs are great. Last time it was on sale at this price I bought multiple licenses.

Oh indeed. Unfortunately, they don't supply the manuals, which look to be pretty essential for getting the most out of these. Good news, I found most of the manuals: http://audio-damage.manymanuals.com/

Or you could scoot over to Pluginboutique, pick up iZotope's Exponential Phoenix Stereo Reverb for $10 and avoid the hours of testing. It will sound better than anything you've ever heard. Once I got Phoenix I wanted to change the reverb on every existing project anyway.

Toneboosters have retired their TrackEssentials and BusTools plug-ins and released them as freeware. These are top-quality FX packages. Compressors, equalizers, meters, reverb, limiter, and more, pretty much every effect you need to mix and master from the mind of Jeroen Breebart. I've long been a fan due to their FX being bundled with my other DAW, Mixcraft. They produced some of the first top-quality FX I ever worked with. These packages include such industry-standard FX as Barricade limiter and Sibalance de-esser. Plus lots more, including an EQ with mid-side capability and what is now my favorite vocal pitch shifter. To get them, go to this page and scroll to the bottom: https://www.toneboosters.com/changelog.html Manuals may be downloaded at the bottom of this page: https://www.toneboosters.com/support.html When installing, take care to set the correct path to your VST2 plug-ins folder. By default, the installer puts them in C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST2.

Another interrupt-y background process you might wish to banish during DAW sessions is your Canon Inkjet network scan utility.