Starship Krupa

Whoops, how did I miss the update? Sweet, lots of new features covered. As always, thank you Mr. S for this invaluable resource.

I'm wondering about this, too. Did a couple of searches, couldn't find anything on EastWest's site that refers to compatibility or lack of it with any DAW, and here's a thread from this site with 48 replies, nobody saying anything about trouble using it with Cakewalk. Of course, plenty who hang in the Coffee House/Deals section no longer use Cakewalk, but still, these things don't usually stay quiet: Please, @jkoseattle, elaborate. I don't know if the Cakewalk devs know about any problems with EastWest's Opus player and it seems like they would want to.

That is a great video. I was expecting an onscreen tutorial, but it's a little slice of life, a guy composing at his (presumably) computer. The composition of the video, the lighting, it looks great and creates a mood. Your facial expressions and body language really tell the story, the viewer doesn't need to see the hardware you're using. The nearly empty studying desk taking the center of the shot makes the viewer consider the possibilities: does he have it set up so that when he takes the laptop over to the "school" desk he's not distracted by having his controllers and gear? Did he recently graduate? It's more interesting than if you had your head in the center covering up the view of your working environment. The editing is good, too. I like the subdued lighting, it tells the story of "it's daytime, but he likes to keep the drapes drawn for lower light while he's creating." It also goes well with the chilled beat you're making. And I have to say, relatable: you go from a facial expression of "I have this chord change, how can I come up with a good beat?" through getting excited playing the drums on the pads, and then finally letting your groove loop while you have a snack and move to it. That is pretty much how it goes around here. If I can dance to it at the end, and still like listening to it while it loops, I know I have a keeper. Really, I love this. Well done.

Okay, so you're trying to set it up so that you're feeding it both the carrier and the modulator. This is "Case 2" in my tutorial, and I'll recap: To do that, you need to insert TAL Vocoder on a bus, then use sends from the carrier and modulator tracks to the vocoder plugin. Pan the carrier send (usually a synth sound) hard left. Pan your vocal phrases track's send hard right. For this operation mode, the vocoder should only be on the bus, and you shouldn't send your audio to the bus itself, but rather to the plug-in. The plugin's input should show up on the send menu's list of available destinations. It looks like you're doing that part correctly. Sometimes you need to crank the levels of the sends to get good results. Too low a modulator signal can result in no modulation, and all you'll hear is the unmodulated carrier. Get it good and hot. Use the Gain knob or a gain plug-in like BL Gain to boost the level if you need to, Hope this helps.

Yeah! Sounds kinda like Atlanta Rhythm Section.

Nice, reminds me of REO Speedwagon.

Very nice. I like the voice you use on it. You do it in a style that is a tribute to Lennon without sounding like you're trying too hard to mimic him. I don't think there's anything at all wrong with your singing voice. It's got a cool Dylan/Petty/Knopfler wheeze that I wish I could call up without sounding like a caricature. You may have clammed a note in one of the changes, but hey, isn't that what overdubs and comping are for? When I started doing lead vocals, I hated my voice as many people do at first. I was working on a song and did take after take after take, I think I got it up to 24 takes over a few days. I never thought to record it in phrases, no, I wanted to spit the whole thing out in single takes. So I was going back through all of these to try to find a good performance, or maybe two so I could comp them, and because I started with the first take, I noticed that about halfway through, I started to nail every note. For a laugh I pushed up the faders on the last 10 with no backing and it sounded fantastic, 10 of me singing in unison. That's when the Beavis and Butthead lightbulb popped over my head: well, duh, my pitch and enunciation, breathing and stamina started to get better because my singing ability, like with any other instrument, improved with practice. This is probably obvious to most people, but it somehow escaped me until I heard it. I don't know what I had been thinking, like I should be able to just sing, right off the bat, with no woodshedding? And why force my untrained voice to sing the whole 4-minute song in one straight belt? Why have an unnecessary challenge? No idea.

Ha, I wonder if Peter was lurking the loss leaders topic. ?

In agreement with all of the above (except not a fan of MDrummer, I tried the lite version and it just wasn't for me). I got MTurboReverble in the Essential bundle, and it's the only reverb I've tried that can touch the Exponential ones, Phoenix and Nimbus. I could happily mix and master using only my Meldaproduction FX, no compromises. I think his stuff appeals to a certain type of person who appreciates great engineering and a sense of excellence. Also those who agree with him that there is no need for modern software FX to be constrained by the limitations of vintage hardware. Not that his stuff doesn't sound great, it certainly does in most cases. Once I realized what he was doing with the core and shared modular code, I was hooked. I've never seen anything like it. He can make an improvement that propagates to the entire line of over 100 plug-ins without having to touch the code that's unique to each of them. It's the way that every developer should be doing it, but he's one of the few, and the only one doing it at such a scale. And it's all bug-free IME. For stuff that gets new features as often as his does, this is amazing. The depth of the products, you could take just one of them and spend a week figuring out all of the under the hood stuff with modulators and multiparameters. And of course you don't need to do that to get perfectly good use out of them. I also dig his personality, he's a character, and dedicated to his own way of doing things. The fact that he's personally engaged with the user base is great, and I'm charmed by the way he'll tell someone who makes a feature request "I don't really have the time to do that, maybe in the future," then said feature shows up in the very next release. I was the beneficiary of exactly that when I requested a tap tempo for MMetronome. Yes, he added a feature to one of the FreeFX Bundle plug-ins by request. He's had some blind spots, but seems to be moving past some of them, if the new pretty device graphics in the Turbo FX are an indication. I've hammered him about my frustration with the documentation, even suggested that he set up some way to have user-contributed tutorials and cheat sheets, but still no go. He said that he doesn't have time to teach someone about compressors, to which I said, fair enough, but what about your FX that are unique and that people can't be expected to already understand? I have MDrumLeveler, for instance, and I'm sure that it could be more useful if I understood how it's supposed to be used.

This. Even though the Vocal and Percussion strips are VST and usable in other DAW's, I forget that they are there. It may be my odd blind spot/prejudice regarding multieffects (I'm told that I'm not alone in that), although I do love me some BYOME and TRIAD. The Sonitus suite is a sore point because they do have some good sounds in them. Their UI's just offend my visual sensibilities. Too small, not so easy to get around in due to that. And the color scheme and overall design just tells part of my brain that they're not "up to date." As well as the fact that they're DX and therefore can't be used in my other DAW. The only time I use anything in the ProChannel other than the Quadcurve EQ is when I want an 1176 or LA/2A type compressor or console emulation. The Quadcurve is so good it's managed to bump MEqualizer out of the top spot.

I suspect that the 3rd-party ones that used to be available were vetted by people at Cakewalk, Inc. before they were allowed to ship. It was probably part of the agreement that allowed them access to the API. You can't ship your PC module until we've had a chance to wring it out. I'd of course love to have access to more PC modules, but I realize that BandLab's Cakewalk dev staff is probably way too small to be able to vet 3rd-party PC modules. One that used to be available, even shipped with SPlat, that I'd love to have is Boz' Panipulator. It's a freebie on his site, and I have politely requested an installer for the PC version, but he's never answered. Shoot, just making it available would increase traffic to his site, and I think our recent thread on the success of loss leaders shows how valuable a good freebie can be for a developer.

Oh, sorry, heavens, I didn't mean to admonish you (I would not wish thinking like I do on anyone ?). I was sort of playing to the semi-imaginary audience. I knee-jerk react when I see what I think is someone drawing a broad negative conclusion about humanity based on a small sample or anecdote and I thought I detected that: see, my brain is definitely wired to detect and react to "threats." ? In truth, the sunny-side up thing is me rebelling against my own internal misanthropy. ? The only truly good advice I have is that anyone who has the Meldaproduction FreeFX bundle, upgraded or not, next time you're feeling blocked or just feeling curious, take a sound source and go through the 30 or so of them that are actually sound FX and browse some factory presets. If you've paid for the upgrade, hit the button to download new presets. Just check them out whether you think you have any use for them or not. I suggest this because it took me years to get around to doing it and when I did, I discovered some interesting tools I hadn't realized I owned. They're easy to forget about when you have 30-some other FX in the bundle. The comb filter, MComb, is, in particular, an amazing device. MPhaser is also great. MTuner is the best I've seen, even does pitch-to-MIDI conversion.

Orange Frappe, Racing Green, Midnight Blue, Nickel Mint, Blue Ice, Yellow Submarine, EVA 01, Tungsten RS and foster theme Logical have all been updated with various tweaks for attractiveness and consistency. I'm always updating them and improving them, and I don't always announce when there's a new version up, so check from time to time for surprises. As always, they're at Dropbox. Be sure to grab the associated .CLR files to get the complete experience. They do wonders for the gridlines in Track View especially. https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ax7xeox3a5t003v/AABtPXXXSOxwJAkOH-fbyHRfa?dl=0 And as always, I love hearing from people who use them, any comments are welcome, even if there are things you don't like.

Yeah, it's sometimes called "doorknob twisting," the would-be hackers have bot programs that scan IP address after IP address and check them to see if they have open ports and/or services exposed that can be exploited. A firewall will log each of these attempts. The would-be attackers have computers that just sit there all day long doing this. They'll go through blocks of IP addresses sequentially, but there's probably some "shortlist" of the external IP addresses of financial institutions, etc. Presumably they're waiting for an inexperienced IT person to put an improperly configured server out live on the net, or fail to update their existing servers fast enough to close known exploitable holes. I used to administer the firewall for a security company. It's been a while now, we used to get multiple doorknob twists daily over 20 years ago. If all this interests you, go to Shields UP. You can actually have their site do a port scan of the system you're using right now to see if there are any vulnerabilities. (it tells me that my router has port XX open, so I should close that)

Are you saying that you think I have a moral responsibility to focus on the bad people do instead of the good they do? If so, that is interesting given what you said about how you've "taught my kids to look for, appreciate, give out freely and celebrate kindness." I thought that was what I was doing. ? From my point of view I thought that I was agreeing with that. I certainly wasn't trying to dilute the importance of doing those things. We should do them all the time, like crazy, as much as we can stand. I'm not going to toss out counter-anecdotes about times people were particularly nice and kind to me or people I know because it's pointless. Anecdotes are just descriptions of one event in a world of millions of events occurring every second. Nor am I going to try to list any credentials I have (familial or otherwise) regarding being able to see the world as it "really is." You have no idea about my background or life experiences. If I'm wrong about the world, please tell me exactly which of the statements in my post are false. I will say that expressing a positive view really seems to trigger some people (hence the "annoying" glass half-full tag). It's as if it's become a heresy to believe nice things about people in general. I've had people become condescending, even downright nasty and hostile because I dared to suggest that the world might not be the terrible place they believe it to be or that there's another way to look at it (mostly condescending, as if I must be coming from a sheltered place). To me, this seems weird. Is it just how people react when someone challenges a cherished belief (even if that belief is a negative one)? So I believe that there are more helpful, kind people in the world than there are hurtful and mean ones. I don't understand why some people take that as an affront. Years ago, when BandLab first acquired the Cakewalk IP and came out with Cakewalk-that-was-Sonar, there were many people who insisted that they must be up to some malware plot, that since they weren't making money on licenses that the quality of the software would degrade, and so on. I would counter this by saying that it seemed unlikely that a company would go to such a load of trouble and expense to target malware at such a small and specific market, when malware is so easily detectable and it would lead to their company becoming industry pariahs, and that it was entirely possible that with no need to grub for new licenses, the developers of Cakewalk might exercise their freedom to fix a lot of longstanding bugs and to introduce features that were practical and useful rather than flashy. The same "rose colored glasses" comment was hurled, among others. That's an insult, implying that since I wasn't coming to the same conclusions they were that I was naive or that my perception was somehow defective. There was one guy whose head I thought was going to explode, he got so het up about my positive speculations. I don't know if he actually even used Cakewalk, he just seemed to want to fight. I just said let's wait and see what happens. ? In the end, it's scientifically provable that the world doesn't care whether I think it's a kind place or a scary place, whether I think people are just awful or whether I think people are just great, whether I think "things" are getting better or worse. I've tried thinking each of those at various points of my life and none of it had any effect on anything but my own head. The world just kept on being what it was. It doesn't give a refried dog poop what I think, nor do I expect it to.

Here I go again, being one of those annoying "glass half full" people, as someone once called me: 1,000 hack attempts doesn't equal that many individuals trying to hack your site. It's just knob-twister bots making multiple attempts. The poor losers probably paid some other loser for their mostly useless "hacking" software. How many hits do you get every month from people who legitimately want to see what's on your site or use your services? Even if it's just 100,000, that means a whopping 1% of visits have some malicious intent (that's too weak to even pose a threat). The thing is, if you go looking for evidence of any human characteristic, you'll find it. If you want to look for evidence that the world is packed with people who love to share what we've learned with others, look at all of the how-to videos on YouTube, or even this very forum. Look in the Tutorials section, the Q&A section, or here in the Deals section, or in the UI Themes section. I've spent countless hours developing my themes, not just for personal use, but so other Cakewalk users can have a better experience using the program. Look at Cakewalk itself, which still exists and flourishes because Meng digs music and wants people to make more of it and decided that supplying the world with a great free DAW would be a good way to build his brand. Sure, his accounting department probably loves the writeoff, but there are plenty of other ways he could have gone. He chose the cool one. Look at all of the people who make our music with no expectation of any financial return whatsoever and put it out there on Soundcloud or Bandcamp or YouTube just for people to enjoy. Our brains are designed to go on the alert when presented with danger, and calm down when presented with comfort. It's part of how we survive. It's why threats of any kind register so strongly and kindness less so. Honor kindness by acknowledging how much of it we take for granted. Yes, absolutely, there are plenty of people out there who think only of themselves and who perform malicious acts. But there are overwhelmingly more who either just don't or who even go out of our way to be helpful.

This. I, like @msmcleod, use it as a writing/arranging tool, and I also use it in this way, as a "guitarish" sound for EDM. Like the Solina/ARP string ensemble, the Mellotron, and "brass" patches on synths, it falls short of its (presumably) intended mark, but has a sound all its own that's useful. In "note" mode, they're good single note pluck sounds. Not useful enough to trigger an upsell to the full verson, but one of my Humble Bundle soundpacks was "Pop Rocks," and I've figured out how to use the Strum soundpacks in Player. Although my go-to is now elysia mpressor, I still use MCompressor for basic things like sidechaining. It has HP and LP filters for its sidechain (as well as a more complex EQ if you want to use it), which makes it great for sidechaining drum loops and stereo-only drum machines. I dug deeper into it and found that you can draw your own compression curves, like turn it into an expander. Freebie or not, it's one of the most versatile compressors out there.

6.7G download? It better be outrageous. ?

These are great bug reports, but I'd suggest you open a new thread in the Feedback section for them. Then they have a better chance of being noticed by the developers.

Seems like the free A|A|S Player might suit your needs. Unless you get under the hood with the A|A|S synths, the soundpack sounds can all be used in Player. I almost pulled the trigger on Chromaphone, mostly because I wanted to be able to turn off the reverb that so many soundpack sounds are drenched with. Or at least one of those paperback business success books. "When pricing your product, the goal is to get it just under your target market's price-point to pain threshold." Ah, how could I forget iZotope. I've got so many paid iZotope licenses, and that started with the iZotope Mastering Essentials plug-in that came with Mixcraft. It got me to buy Ozone Elements, maybe the first plug-in I ever spent money on (partly due to Mixcraft coming bundled with a plethora of decent plug-ins). It's good to see so many positive responses in this topic, because I believe in "give 'em a taste for free" marketing and it's nice to see that it works. Demos and trials are essential, but it's not the same as having a full license for something that can make it into tight rotation.

You're not the first I've heard this from. The ad hoc "educational discount." It could be that the recognition of this helped clue companies into the value of getting lite versions out there for nothing or next to it. I'm going to hazard a guess that Ableton's piracy dropped when they came out with Live! Lite.

Good thread idea from @Eusebio Rufian-Zilbermann: we all snap up freebies from companies who put them out there to encourage people to check out their paid license products; sometimes these freebies are payware that is being given away for a short time as a promotion. Which ones have worked on you (this excludes trialware/demos)? For me, the most obvious would be the Meldaproduction FreeFX Bundle. Meldaproduction were relatively early in the "pro quality" loss leader plug-ins game, not the first to ever do it, but before the recent ongoing tidal wave of freebies. MCompressor is the plug-in I used when I had my "I know kung fu" breakthrough in understanding how compressors work. Once I paid to register that bundle, since there were more panels and things to open up and see I started digging more deeply into them and concluded that the guy was a crazy talented programmer, and that his normally-licensed stuff would likely be of top quality. Since then I've spent hundreds on Meldaproduction licenses (always during sales of some sort) and recommended them far and wide. After that, Unfiltered Audio G8 CM (a near-freebie, CM plug-ins are loss leaders) was my first taste of that company, since then I've acquired all but about 3 of their FX (the synth, the compressor and the bit crusher). A|A|S Swatches and freebie soundpacks got me to jump on a Humble Bundle of their stuff. Bark of Dog was my first Boz plug-in, I now have several more. Glitchmachines' Fracture and Hysteresis are so off the hook that I knew to buy everything they had when it went on sale for $5-10. I'm nowhere close to figuring out how to control them, but they make sounds that I like anyway. Definitely for people who are into "turn this knob and see what it does."

I did the policy editing trick, added the registry keys and all that, and it worked for a long time. But damned if a Windows update forced it back on. I finally added a reg key that killed Windows Defender entirely, which I didn't want to do because it also killed the ability to scan on demand. What I want is an anti-malware solution that never does real-time scanning, yet allows me to do scheduled scans and ad-hoc single file scans. I had that with Defender for a long time. I've been using computers online for 35 years (including BBSing) without any real time scanning and have contracted exactly 3 bits of malware, none of which caused any data loss. The last one was 20 years ago (and I should have known better). I achieve this by practicing safe computing: I never open executable email attachments, and only download from sites I trust. If I'm ever in doubt, I scan the single file. From time to time I run Malwarebytes ad hoc, and it never finds anything. This is why Microsoft's treating their entire user base as if we're all gullible and sloppy infuriates me. I get that their zillions of seats in businesses around the globe are often occupied by....less savvy users, but if someone's got enough chops to enable Group Policy Editor and use it, it's safe to say that they knew the risk even if they do get into trouble. Anti-virus "solutions" commit most of the sins that people attribute to computer viruses: slow the system down, display annoying pop-ups, very difficult to remove, block legitimate software from running....

Ohh, okay, I get it. Thanks for the clarification. It's not about input quantization, nor is it about just selecting the notes and right clicking to add the quantization at one go, you guys want to be able to select the notes and then adjust the quantization on the fly. While listening to the effect it's having. That does sound like a very handy thing, and I, too would want to be able to do it with Humanize.

Ever check out: https://vst.saschart.com/binauralgenerator_monaural_beats or https://vst.saschart.com/binaural_monaural_golden_waveform_generator?