Starship Krupa

I'm going to proceed with using it as if there are no restrictions. I've searched for a licensing agreement and none is disclosed in the usual places.

Kilohearts, Native Instruments, iZotope, ToneBoosters, MeldaProduction, Audio Damage, Cherry Audio and IK Multimedia are just some of the companies whose product lines have included multiple free loss leaders for years. Not having a collection of free products is the exception for plug-in manufacturers. I'm having a hard time trying to think of a company that doesn't. Which is the point, I reckon. FabFilter, Sonible, UAD....

The licenses for the individual modules are specific to TR5 or TR6, so if your licenses were purchased for TR5, you aren't entitled to the TR6 versions. That's how it's worked for me at least. I would think that that is by design, because it would amount to a free upgrade for each of the modules, which I don't think they'd want to do (otherwise why bother making new versions).

I couldn't find a license agreement. Not on the website, not in the download.

Surprise, I also know of a free product that can help out with this until such time as the Cakewalk developers implement the feature natively: DMG Audio Track Control.

What do you mean? If there's some restrictive license for it I can't find one. I can't find any license at all for it.

Thanks for this review. I'm a big fan of the Exponential algorithms, going back to when Phoenix first went on sale for $9.99. I tried a demo, substituting if for my previous main reverb and the difference was stunning. Using a good reverb turned my mix into something that sounded....not sure of the word I'm looking for, "real?" "professional?" I'm apparently very sensitive to reverb tails when listening to music, and Phoenix' tails go on forever without turning grainy. They're just "right" in a way that no other reverb I'd tried before that. Since then MeldaProduction's TurboReverb has proved able to equal if not best it (esp. the Brichamber model), but it doesn't surpass it (for natural go-to reverb that is; MTurboReverb can also do what you call the "color" stuff like SuperMassive). My questions for you: the fact that everything from Phoenix/R2 through Stratus/Symphony is very easy on resources is a selling point for them. iZotope are notorious for the high overhead their processors usually have. How does Equinox stack up to the Exponential reverbs that were coded by Exponential? I have Neoverb, and it just seems to me like an attempt to kludge an iZotope wizard onto the Expo algos. I don't need my reverb to analyze my song and then recommend a preset, I can choose presets myself, I can even adjust the parameters myself, although I usually don't with the Expo reverbs. Second, have they finally done away with the godawful single seat iLok'd licensing scheme and enabled the much saner iZotope licensing and validation? That alone would make it worth the loyalty upgrade price. Otherwise, as with anything iZotope that I want....kick back and wait for the glitch, they usually seem to happen right around the end of iZotope's financial year.

I notice some confusion as to how exactly to install the presets. The location mentioned is the correct one for VST3 presets, and a host that uses Steinberg's canonical VST3 presets can populate their preset list by scanning them. Sonar, unfortunately, while it can load single VST3 presets one by one using the VST3 menu, it doesn't scan the location and populate its own preset manager. Fortunately, with this one plug-in, I found a solution that populates the plug-in's own menu system as well as Sonar's own preset menu: after you've installed the VST3 version per the instructions, also install the VST2 version and let Sonar scan it. After it does, the preset menus should work in the VST3 version and you can delete the VST2 version. I don't know what's going on here, but it works, and when I called up Minimogue VA VST3 in another DAW, the menus were functional in it as well (although I don't know if they otherwise wouldn't have been). I know this is a necro of the thread, but so what. This topic is very high in Google's results when you search for how to install the presets.

It looks like the "Classic" UI wasn't present in the first iteration, but arrived pretty soon after that. I can say that some of the newer IK releases are leveraging the AVX extensions, because MODO Drums refused to install on my old laptop, whose 2nd generation i7 apparently lacked that instruction set. Yes, less eyeball fatiguing colors is good, and they're at least in the ballpark of resembling their earlier forms. Red Opto Compressor looks good, and IIRC, has the M/S feature that I love so much. I wonder when that startedI was surprised to see that the 670 arrived so early. It was actually the plug-in that introduced me to the magic that M/S processing can do. I had been conflating it with M/S micing, so had no idea why such a thing would be included in EQ or dynamics processors. Ohhhh, it lets you process mid and side individually, same as if they were left and right, and that can do magical things to the stereo image. It was one of the presets that had something about widening in the name and that was the lightbulb moment and now I use it on everything. Started using it with the MeldaProduction processors too, most of which also have the feature, and any other plug-in I get my hands on that has it. I understand not wanting to see a stylized tyrannosaurus rex on the face of every plug-in. Especially since IK are, IMO, the best at designing clean skeuomorphic UI's. You don't put in silly things that distract the eye, like non-functioning screw heads or wear marks, the UI's represent what is best about using hardware and that type of UI: you can see knob position and meter movement instantly, and when you move a control, it "feels" more analog. Also, they're just pretty to look at. As I said, you got it right 25 years ago, which is impressive in the software business. I'm thinking of XLN's recent facelift of Addictive Drums. When I first got the product, as part of a bundle, I paid less attention to it than I should have due to the fake brushed aluminum Johnny Space Commander control panel UI that screamed "I'm from the early 21st century!" Then they laid the free update to 2.5 on everyone, with the UI overhaul, and I took another look and saw that it's actually a pretty great product. Maybe I'm shallow. If the UI looks exciting, I'm more excited to use it. A dinosaur silhouette in a purple oval kinda doesn't fit that. He could be on the website somewhere in with the blurbs, though. I found the history of the product to be fascinating, and would also if more of it were described on the IK T-RackS product pages. I wasn't aware of the pioneering nature of the company.

A lot of stuff I have, a lot of stuff I don't have that is covered by other manufacturers products I do have. New T-RackS modules are always fun. Since these are individual licenses, seems like there's a decent chance that I'd be able to give the dupes away....

I hope my research helps you get the most from it. Syntronik 2 and Sampletron 2 are fantastic.

Digital nostalgia time. I happened upon this review of what was then called T RackS 24. I guess T RackS began life as a 4 module mastering processor about 25 years ago? I didn't know that, and I didn't know that the product had been around that long. According to my research, it was preceded by SampleTank by a few years. Another surprise for me. The music software market has surely changed since then, hasn't it? Imagine paying $300 for 4 T-RackS modules. Taking a close look at the image of the UI in the review reveals striking similarities between the parametric EQ module and what lives on in T-Racks 6 as Classic EQ. Distinctive display with rounded ends, 6 black knobs just below it, frequency knobs just below those. Output level knob off to the right. I guess it's been "not broke" for a quarter of a century, requiring no fixing. The Tube Compressor is even closer to the current Classic Compressor that comes with T Racks 6 Intro. I'm not as familiar with Classic Multiband Limiter, but its current incarnation also looks pretty close to the version in this product. It also looks as if the block italic "T-RackS" logo hung around through T-RackS 5 and was only dropped for T-RackS 6. Wouldn't mind seeing that swoopy graphic with the purple oval and black tyrannosaurus rex make some kind of appearance, although it is definitely the most dated looking thing about that turn-of-the-century UI. Gotta hand it to the designer of those UI's. For something to stay so similar in 25 years in the software industry, and not look dated (to my eyes at least) it speaks to how right they got it the first time out. They even used a similar aesthetic for the much later One all-in-one mastering tool and it looks great. List price is still the same, but of course regularly deeply discounted (even without glitches) and you get 15X the number of processors that the original product came with.

I have heard anecdotally that nVidia GPU's can play better with DAW and NLE work than AMD. GPU development has been driven by gaming use for so long that I think that performance and stability in multimedia creation applications can be neglected. nVidia seem to have begun to pay attention to this market in recent years, with their "studio" drivers and NVENC video encoder. I recently experimented with comparing renders in Vegas Pro using MAGIX' own encoder vs. the nVidia one. Rendering a 2 minute project that had no VFX, all it was was editing some scenes out, took about 15 minutes using the MAGIX encoder. When I tried the same project but switched to the nVidia encoder, the project rendered in under a minute and was about 2/3 the file size of the other one. What an improvement. And this is with my not-cutting-edge CPU and GPU. Many years ago I used to run the 32-bit build of Mixcraft because the 64-bit version didn't have the same performance on my system. The 64-bit version glitched and crackled under any kind of processing load. Imagine my surprise when I switched from my AMD GPU to an nVidia GPU (of similar age and spec) and suddenly the 64-bit version ran better than the 32-bit version. I could crank the latency lower and use more plug-ins. It could very well be that I could try a newer AMD video card, or just tweak the settings, and find equal performance to a similar nVidia card, but my past experiences have made me into an nVidia loyalist. I like to game, but I don't play the latest bleeding edge titles and performance and stability for my audio and video creation software is more important.

Never assume that someone else has reported the issue. Other people experiencing the same problem may all be making the same assumption.

I'm actually not a Serum user, but I've also experienced similar with other companies' factory presets. A|A|S for example, like to drench their factory sounds in long-tailed reverb, and I noticed on my older lower-spec laptop that if I just turned off the reverb and used a 3rd-party reverb that they could play all day at lower latency without causing clicks and pops. This was one of my motivations for buying Chromaphone and Ultra Analog VA licenses: I wanted to be able to turn off the reverb. Otherwise, using the soundpacks with A|A|S Player would be fine, as I seldom do any patch editing in them other than turning off the reverb. I can't blame manufacturers for baking so many FX into the factory patches. I noticed after I installed the most recent version of MinimogueVA that it sounded kind of unexciting, then it occurred to me to put the simplest chorus, kHs Chorus on it to give them some stereo width. Bang! It started to sound uh-MAY-zing. So I've become used to factory patches being made HUGE through (over?) use of FX, despite the fact that I often disable them in actual use. Maybe Xfer switched to a reverb algo that's more expensive in terms of processing power. Def. let them know if turning off the reverb makes the problem go away.

Was this bundled with SONAR at some point? I don't recognize the name. Ugh, company going down and activation that no longer works is something I realllllly hope doesn't become an issue with the software products I've invested in. Even the ones I've gotten for free. So far, it hasn't been a problem; even SoundSpot registration is still being supported by Plugin Boutique. Seems like you've even been more diligent than some about hanging on to your serials. I hope you find a solution.

Indeed, I originally mentioned that but then deleted it 'cause I wanted to keep things brief. Does it look like every Serum user is having these bad glitching problems, though? Even with the very best BETA team in the world, if a soft synth is causing a problem, but only a small percentage of the team is seeing the issue, and the developers are also among those who aren't seeing it, it can be a challenge to get the problem fixed. Even if the symptom is worse than glitching on complex patches.😉 The ones who are having issues need to speak up on that forum and keep doing so, make sure that the developer doesn't forget about it. Sometimes it takes being a bit of a pain in the A|A|S (so to speak). (when I first saw this topic title, my mind distinguished between "bad" glitching, and "good" glitching, and it made me wonder how Glitchmachines, Freakshow Industries, and Unfiltered Audio manage to test their products, like "it obliterated the sound completely" is a goal with a lot of their products, not a defect. "Actual behavior: source audio sounds wider and richer while retaining its character. Expected behavior: audio should sound like it passed through a tesseract and was inaccurately recovered.")

LOL. Great way to put it. When you mentioned it, I thought "maybe drop $35 on a used i7-4770" and then I read the first several XFer forum posts and thought "maybe this is one of those developers who doesn't optimize and test enough on Windows," and THEN I saw: "I'm getting the same thing on my M3 Max MacBook Pro...." "Not enough gun" is not the issue. I see in the system requirements that he doesn't even have a minimum processor requirement. Released too soon?

Any of the systems you linked to should be more than capable of running Cakewalk smoothly. I'm running it on an i7-6950X system, which is kind of old, but it works great. I also have an nVidia GTX1070 graphics card, which is also old and outdated hardware. It runs any game I want at Ultimate graphics settings. The games I play are not the latest, but they are graphics heavy, Red Dead Redemption 2 and Elder Scrolls Online and so on.

The power of a good loss leader.

I think that a lot of websites are set up that way.

I can use them in other hosts. They were available for purchase separately, weren't they?

Setting aside the issue of whether the Cakewalk dev team would be able to write an OS in their spare time, I have no interest in using a DAW that required me to boot a proprietary single-purpose OS in order to use it. Less than no interest; I would be repelled by such a product and consider it inadequate for my needs. I use Windows to run my apps. What I want is software that runs well in Windows. I often have multiple programs running at the same time along with my DAW. I also have no complaints about stability issues with the DAW's I use now. As a matter of fact, I'm pleasantly surprised that they are as stable as they are, given the tasks they do.

I think that this question can't be answered without first clarifying the term "high definition MIDI." Sonar records and plays MIDI events. I've always assumed that it records and plays back whatever types of events are defined in the MIDI specification. I don't know why it wouldn't. Compared to recording and playing back audio, MIDI is (pardon the expression) a snap.

Dumpster Fire is one of my favorite sound design destroy FX, and it's now on sale for very little. Also Backmask, MISHBY, and Pocket Dimension. https://www.pluginboutique.com/manufacturers/277-Freakshow-Industries The newer Vaporware series FX aren't included, but they're pretty inexpensive from their website: https://freakshowindustries.com/vaporware I've demo'd the Vaporware FX and liked them, but dangit, I already have too many FX, even creative ones! My only complaint about their FX is the lack of dry/wet controls, although with their schtick, I understand it as a design choice. They make things that rip sounds apart and reassemble them, they don't make things that add subtle flavoring.