Starship Krupa

Despite having participated in the sack of PA last year and taking advantage of Meldaproduction's 60% off everything sale, there's one type of processor that I don't feel I have the "right" one yet: transient shaper. I have WA Production's Imprint, which is supposed to be a multiband transient designer, but it's so far resisted my attempts to get results with it; perhaps starting with a multiband one isn't the best route. Imprint has about 3x the number of controls. It seems like the PA choices are either SPL Transient Designer Plus or elysia nvelope. Leaning toward nvelope because of the way it can narrow processing to certain frequency bands. I have fun with "turd polishing," taking the worst phone-recorded live small gig or practice recordings and turning them into something halfway listenable, and this would seem to be a useful tool for that as well as the usual transient shaper-y tasks. If anyone has any wisdom to share regarding Transient Designer Plus vs. nvelope (for instance some special feature of Transient Designer Plus that I'm not aware of), please share.

You're referring to the ones you access by opening the "VST3" menu in the plug-in properties page. Funny, I had Plugin Alliance plug-ins for years before I figured out that most (not all) of them come with presets installed in that canonical (according to Steinberg's VST3 documentation) location. I'd been expecting them to show up in Cakewalk's own preset saving box.

Yes, likely. Shut them off one by one until you find the bad one.

I wonder if there's some way to shuffle core affinities around so that Chromaphone, when running as a plug-in, could have one mostly to itself. Someone told me that VSTi's were not included in Cakewalk's plug-in load balancing.

Blew the dust off! I did some experimenting with turning off layer 2. Since you can "solo" them, I found that in the incredibly dense sounds Chromaphone is capable of, the second layer wasn't contributing that much. Their sound designers create these sculptures using everything available, and sometimes in the context of a piece, they're too dense. I was following the conventional wisdom on that for a long time, then tried enabling it and my processor clock shot up to 3.8 GHz (stock is 3.4) and stays there. This is on a Dell, which are notoriously clock blocked. So I'd encourage folks to experiment with that setting, monitor it with HWInfo, see what you get. The trick was to turn on the turbo boost, but keep the power saving one off. Must confess at this point: I'm not (at this point anyway) much of a "synthesist." I call myself a "preset jockey." Mostly I turn off synths' internal reverb so I can replace it with R4 or Nimbus. My compositional process often involves browsing patches, finding an inspiring sound, then building the piece around that sound. It used to cause me a bit of shame, like "real" synthesists dive in and create their own unique sounds, blah blah. But then it struck me: some of my favorite composers' keyboards only had one "preset," and it couldn't be tweaked at all. ? If A|A|S Player would only allow me to turn off reverb, I'd have much less interest in Chromaphone, which is probably why they don't allow it. Hybrid 3 (great arps and sequences) is actually my most-used synth, and Vacuum Pro is up there too (some nice basses in there). XPand!2 is great for the kind of workflow you describe, and of course has sounds that can stand up to being used in a final mix (basses, arps, and pads). As Cakewalk itself has gotten more nimble and resource-friendly over the last few years, I guess plug-ins have gone the other direction. AIR will probably never develop my favorite workhorses into the resource hog zone.?

A|A|S licenses may be transferred, so if you wanted to flip your full licenses, you might be able to find a buyer and recoup your cost. You'd need to surrender the full upgraded license(s), though, as I'm pretty sure the upgrades themselves aren't transferable. So if you still want to be able to use your version 2 stuff, that wouldn't be possible. I am very glad that I ran the trial before paying for a license. I started out very enthused and ready, and then became less so. I still want it, just not now. I think there's a tradeoff that media software companies (I used to do software QA) have to keep making: hold back functionality from the latest version in the hope that they'll sell some licenses to people with older hardware, or put in the features and hope to more licenses to people with newer hardware. And the answer is often to do the second thing, because people like me who squeeze every last bit of use out of older hardware tend to spend less money in general, which includes for software (especially upgrade licenses).

Without access to the original plug-ins (and what that would mean would be opening the project in an older Cakewalk DAW)), then screen capping the plug-ins' UI's so that you could copy the numbers over), there is no way I know of to duplicate their settings short of listening to a render of the last mix you did and figuring it out by ear. On the bright side, I'll hazard a guess that your mix engineering skills have improved since the days of Home Studio 6 (and BTW, that product wasn't "several," it was "many" years ago, you can't fool us ?). If so, you'll likely be able to make better choices in how you set those FX up (and the FX you'll have available will likely have better sound than the ones that came with HS6). Maybe you'll decide that the huge chorus you used back in the '90's should be replaced with something else? Or doubled down on, whatever your taste. If the projects were already as you wanted them, would you want to open them in Cakewalk? If you're going to work on them, maybe they'll work out better with newer techniques and tools. With your drum kit instrument issue, on the other hand, Cakewalk has a feature available called Drum Maps that should allow you to set up and save a new drum map and remap the note number(s) for your hi hat and/or crash. Then you can call it up in any project where you need to shuffle the note numbers and sounds around. Drum Maps were made for the kind of thing you're doing, they act as a translator for these cases. There's a learning curve on getting one's head around them, but basically what they do is take in note numbers from a MIDI track and assign them to note numbers and instrument names in a synth (which may be the same number, we hope, for most of them).

Sigh. Yeah, I love me some Chromaphone, my favorite A|A|S Player soundpacks are Chromaphone sounds. I really like what they can do with the arpeggiator(s), especially once they start stacking layers. Most of the time I can ease the resource hit by knocking the number of simultaneous voices down to 8. Many of the sounds have long decays, and once you add in arpeggiation, they can really stack up. I want to purchase at least one full A|A|S synth while they're half off, so first I tried the Chromaphone demo. Even with cutting the number of voices and shutting off reverb (I prefer to use my own), I still couldn't jack my buffers up high enough to stop the dropouts, and that was with only one instance. My system is no rocket sled, but I don't feel it's quite ready for the boneyard, and I don't have good feelings about dropping a hundy on software that's going to make me yearn for a more powerful (expensive) system. Maybe after the next computer upgrade. I know that I can freeze synth tracks and all that, but my composing workflow for my electronic stuff doesn't lend itself to that. I do a lot of slight nudging of note start and stop times and I'd be constantly freezing and thawing. String Studio and Ultra VA are somewhat better on resources, but they suffer in varying degrees from FrankenUI, where there are new, Chromaphone 3-style elements mixed with the kinda outdated clunky and hard to navigate "Session" UI. As if they were released in mid-update. If you're disappointed in your upgraded versions, please take a moment and send them a polite email telling them what you've said here. I've known them to be responsive in the past, and they should know that earlier customers are struggling to be able to use the newer versions.

I feel you. I have a raft of songs that have been sitting here because none of my channel strips can pull off the kind of subtle transformer saturation I require. And what's a channel strip without a bus compressor? Where are all the bus compressors?

Okay, considering what you pointed out about how the downward arrow pops open a menu on things like I/O, I think I may have it. How about the one used on narrowed menus and some buttons? It doesn't point straight down, it isn't a burger, and it's still consistent with option menus used elsewhere (Tools, for instance): Still a compromise, but hey, name of the game. (notice how I put an extra line on the Track tab so that it doesn't look as burgeresque?)

That's baked into Tungsten itself, unfortunately. Since there's no hover cell when the button is in its active state, there's nothing that can be done. Although now that you bring up that button, I don't know why there's a mouse over and a pressed state when the button will have no effect (when you don't have Write Automation enabled on any track). That might have to go.

The extra line was trying to convey "this opens multiple buses rather than a single panel" Silly, perhaps, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. I got into examining UI design due to theming, so some of it's kind of just playing around.

Unfortunately, we have only so many pixels to work with.

I hear ya about the consistency, but to me, they're different contexts. The Finder/Explorer convention is that the t-t's are used on the left side to open subfolders. So in my way of thinking, okay, we're opening subfolders, and the button for that is on the left side, so, turny triangles. When I tried using them anywhere else (except ProChannel), it didn't look right, so I backed it out. In any case, the arrow is an improvement over the +/- for sure. Much easier to see. Hmm, there's gotta be some way to have that Drop button be something that's consistent (rather than being the only burger in the UI) yet not a down arrow, which as you point out, is used to signify opening and closing panels. I will meditate on this.

Looks great! I like your solution to the "play row" button fakeout issue in Step Sequencer. The only thing I don't care for is leaving Global/Drop unchanged (as a down arrow). I like the 3-bar hamburger, but if you don't care for that, maybe there's another symbol that will fit better? Probably an oversight: your Mix Module PDC buttons are stock. I like what you did with the FX button, seems like that would work for PDC. Feel free to swipe my 1X/2X button for upsampling. I make cell #4 of Step Sequencer/Play into a "stop" button (which is the same convention Cakewalk uses in Media Browser). Also, in places where a preset can be deleted, like Plug-in Properties and Media Browser, I like to show a "-" rather than an "x." (I see now that I missed that on some of mine so I'll touch them up). Re: up and down arrows vs. turny triangles on the folders. My thoughts on it are if they were canonical, I'd solidly prefer turny triangles. I'll use them until I see something I like better. Either is better than the stock "+/-."

I don't know that any new art would need to be created rather than copied from Blue Ice and one of your themes (depending on where you want to get your Pre/Post and Mix Module images). Yeah, start with Blue Ice and do a flurry of "Removes." Depending on taste, I also duded up the otherwise blah (to me) Matrix and Step Sequencer Views and you can use that if you like. The only thing I can think of that someone might object to is my arrows. I do like them big. (It was hard for me not to do just a few color changes, like Alt Text 2 and Ruler Digits but I resisted temptation)

Oh dear, apologies! Should be okay now.

Per a suggestion by @Colin Nicholls, I've created a new custom theme, Tungsten RS. The "RS" means "revised standard," so named by Colin in reference to the popular Bible translation. It starts with Tungsten and stays there color-wise, but implements the same icon and button conventions that I use in all of my other themes. Several of these are what I consider "fixes" to the standard program. For example my buttons for Pre and Post are labeled "Pre" and "Post" (or "Pst" as the case may be) rather than having "Pre" be indicated by the word "Post" in greyed state. In the Mix Module, the state of FX or PDC being disabled is indicated by a red slash across the button rather than having "brightly colored" signify "disabled" while greyed out signifies that those things are active. For the most part, lit up means "on," whereas in some places in the stock Cakewalk UI, lit up means that bypass is engaged. The plug-in upsampling button says "1X" when there is no upsampling, and "2X" when upsampling is engaged. That kind of thing. Once you get used to it, which takes about 30 seconds, you'll likely not want to go back. It's stuff that IMO, should someday make it into the product, but hasn't for whatever reason. For the remaining stuff, if you like my expand and close buttons, my Browser and Inspector show, hide, undock, and options buttons, but you like good ol' Tungsten better than the idiosyncratic color combinations I've come up with, this is your theme. Or you can swipe my art and use it in your own custom theme, it's all in good fun. Oh, also, the grid lines in PRV stand out better in this one than in standard Tungsten. And I fixed the art in the Arpeggiator so that it no longer looks like poo (really, load Tungsten, set a track color to lime green and look at the Arpeggiator, it's awful).

Another one for the list: swapping the "x" of Remove Take Lane for the "-" of Remove Automation Lane.

P.S., I think the Mercury/Tungsten Revised Standard Edition is a great idea. I can do up the Tungsten if you want to take Mercury. There are lots of swipeables in Blue Ice that could drop right in. Blue Ice uses the same blue that Mercury does. For Tungsten-based themes, there are other little tweaks like clearer grid lines in the Piano Roll and darkening selected clip backgrounds so that it's easier to see which ones are selected.

Swipe away, mate. I consider image swipes from my themes to be high compliments. Also adding "Markers" to the Markers Module! The YLIP open padlock is incorporated everywhere there's a padlock in my themes. Arpeggiator, for instance. As far as iconography, I've gone with +/- in places where something is being added or deleted, X in places where something is being closed or cleared, adding a bar or bars to arrows that open panels, the turning triangle for panel expansion wherever appropriate, and no double arrows. I like to use as much of the arrow buttons' pixels as possible for greater visibility. Why would adding text to the Record button be controversial? Localization issue? I've backed off from adding text to buttons for that reason. Man, I would love to see or come up with a better way to indicate in/out of phase. I understand that in the Cakewalk visual language, grey=in phase, but if there were some more definitive way to show it, I'd like that. Here's what my current folder iconography looks like. Turny triangle to the left to open the folder, and arrow-with-bar to the right to expand and contract the header: It's not perfect, but given the constraints of having to overlay an existing UI, it's the best I could come up with. I like it better than the +/- for opening the folder, because to me, +/- means I'm adding or deleting something. Also, the stock tiny "+" is hard to see.

I just installed the latest and notice that you haven't implemented the obligatory Synth/Instrument track icon swap. Also: love what you've done with the zoom buttons.

The Browser buttons get messed up on changing theme. The way to shake it off is to click the Plug-ins tab. This is my current form of Dock, Drop, and Dockbar buttons: As you see, the "docking options" button is the "hamburger," a widely recognized icon for "options," the "Dockbar Left" button is a large single arrow with a bar to indicate that a panel will be closing or opening. I've also made the "dock" button as large as it could be for better visibility. The "docking options" button just had to go. Initially it looked weird next to the Track Inspector tab, whose stock icon is also the hamburger, so I made the Track Inspector icon a Big Mac, with 4 lines. I've gotten so used to my own themes with their customized buttons that the stock stuff looks odd to me. I guess that's a risk of customizing something to be the way I want it.

Can you share which ones did the trick? I recommend to all that they exclude their plug-in folders, project folders, sample folders, and the Cakewalk program folder. I run with Defender realtime scanning turned off completely, but I still sometimes get the slow opening Themes (although it's only a matter of seconds) and keyboard shortcuts. Not every time, just sometimes.

My first release as Superabbit! https://superabbit.bandcamp.com/track/sensation DAW: Cakewalk Instruments used: Hybrid 3, Iris2, Boom, A|A|S Masala FX: Meldaproduction, elysia, Valhalla, T-Racks, Cymatics, Unfiltered Audio, Lindell