Starship Krupa

I am a big fan of their processors, especially Dumpster Fire, which I have in the category "Enhancer" in my plug-in list. After that, Backmask is really fun, and has some features I've not seen with other reverser plug-ins, like a randomizer. MISHBY is a combination broken cassette deck emulator and grain delay. I think. The cool thing about them is that they are made to turn tracks into smoking wreckage, but they don't do it in as jaggedy a way as similarly-intended FX from Glitchmachines and Unfiltered Audio. You might have to try them to hear what I mean. And the UI's are a treat for the eyes, with happy Lovecraftian horrors. Sure, this or that plug-in may be ROLI-compatible, whatever that means, but these have tentacles and levers that plead with you not to push them further and knobs that frown if you turn them toward their less destructive range. I think I got them all for $20 each in a Pluginboutique sale, so $30 for the set is a great deal. I like them so much, and also like their marketing anti-style so much (okay, videos that don't actually include demonstrations of the sounds?? That's so wrong that it folds back around and becomes right) that I am perfectly happy with having paid double. I know that our thing here in the Deals subforum is to squeeze maximum software for minimum bucks, but I get so much enjoyment out of Dumpster Fire alone that I thought they deserved compensation. The marketing, the website, the FX, they remind me of the feeling I got after seeing Devo for the first time on Saturday Night Live, doing "Satisfaction." Like lining up your homemade dragster at the wrong end of the strip, putting it in reverse and stomping the throttle, but then turning a decent 1/4 mile time. It's also fun to gently troll discussions of snake oil-y enhancers (whoo, it boosts the level and upper mids, Fletcher and Munson would be proud) by mentioning Dumpster Fire. It sincerely really is my favorite "enhancer," although I do also like Slate Fresh Air. Sometimes I put it on a track when I'm feeling frustrated, then after demolishing it for a while, remove Dumpster Fire and get on with my project. It lets off steam. Maybe I should put a Dumpster Fire bus in my templates so that I can do this more easily. The weird thing is that I don't think that, despite my obvious fanboy attitude toward them, I've ever committed any to a final mix. They're just fun to have around. Especially when other sick-minded people visit the studio.

This is what I do, except I export FLAC and then the freeware Mediahuman Audio Converter. I use MP3Tag to add tags before conversion, which Mediahuman passes through to the converted files.

Does MIDI export respect a track's mute status? If not, that seems like a snag.

As someone who's been deep digging into custom themes, I've become more aware of color choices in the Cakewalk UI. One small suggestion: the "toast" notifications have a background color that is seen nowhere else in the program (which may be deliberate so that they stand out). I suggest that the background be changed to "BandLab orange," which would be just as visible and would match the "by BandLab" branding. I don't have the color exactly right, but this is the idea:

Hidden gem.?

It looks like what you accidentally undocked was the Control Bar. Your Multidock is empty and docked at the bottom in your screenshot.

Spent some more time with it, and I guess my earlier impression was not fairly obtained. When testing a creative effect, I often fire up a MIDI file with some long Xpand!2 pad chords playing and run through the presets. This usually works pretty well, but sometimes it doesn't for FX that reward more abrupt envelopes. While SILO can bring something to the table with that kind of source material, if y'all ain't entirely sure what it's good for (and how could you be), put a rhythmic loop through it and stand back. I think the presets may have been designed around drum loops to put you in that "give me this thing NOW" frame of mind. Because doing that made me very happy for my $14.99 purchase and turned it into something other than just a possibly fun card in my Unfiltered Audio Pokemon deck. Tips: go to UfA's SILO resources page, where they have a bunch of videos that aren't on the PA site about how to use this thing. The "Oddiction" presets that they link to from the page are already included with the install along with the Richard Devine set. However, this YouTube review includes a collection of 40 presets free for the downloadin'. Although the guy seems to think the plug-in is as well-suited to mangling Ali G impressions as I think it is for drum machines, his presets sound great. He gets some cool Dumpster Fire-ish sounds in his demo after he gets past Da Ali G.

The logic of this little blue outline appearing when you hover a MIDI or Synth Icon: it appears when you hover your cursor over a track icon that when clicked, opens a synth UI. This can be one of three things: as you pointed out, a MIDI track whose output is pointing at a soft synth, a soft synth track, and a simple instrument track. @Colin Nicholls describes it on p. 49 of The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer to Creating Custom Cakewalk Themes. It looks like its color may have once been controlled by the Theme Editor color choice Track view / Track Pane / Open Synth Properties but isn't anymore: "Even when we edit the element to be bright pink, the button highlight on mouse-over remains blue." (because everyone was dying to know, this blue outline doesn't appear in the Piano Roll or Staff View track panes, only Track View) It's so subtle I never even noticed it until I read this topic. What Cakewalk usually does to make a button "change color" is replace one button image with another button image. When you hover the buttons in Control Bar modules, that's what it's doing. Each button image usually has 5 or so cells (or "imprints") and depending on the control's state, it displays the correct cell...most of the time. There are places where Cakewalk changes an element's appearance by altering hue, luminance and saturation (muted clips, selected data, header and strip colors, backgrounds, etc.), but for button-y things, even if it's just a plain round orange disk that turns green, they usually do it by swapping images.

From The Cakewalk Reference Guide: "You can also render at 64 bits for greatest precision." Now as to what precisely is meant by "greatest precision," the documentation seems to be silent. ? Also, from the online documentation, "If you don’t usually run Cakewalk in 64-bit mode in order to save CPU, you can turn 64-bit mode on when you export audio by enabling this check box. Remember to turn it off after you export your audio, if you don’t want to use it during tracking or mixing." No hint as to why you would want to do this. I usually select the option because, hey, it's free and it doesn't seem to affect anything in a negative way. If the feature didn't exist I wouldn't miss it, because I have to trust my ears that my mixes sound like I want them to. If I heard aliasing distortion in my mix, I'd do something to get rid of it at that point (like enabling oversampling in the plug-in itself), not rely on oversampling in the rendering engine to clean it up. There's the possibility to consider that a plug-in might not function the same way if you feed it 88.2KHz. I've only run into one that didn't behave, and it was obvious.

This is how it looks on my system:

I know, huh? I've been participating in online discussions for over 30 years and this is the first place I've seen it happen where someone started a rant that deteriorated into to a level-headed discussion. This isn't the first time, either.

BYOME is amazing, so I figure I'll like TRIAD. I would have already snagged TRIAD, but I demo'd it back before I had a handle on multi-band processing. The crazy deep discount will come around again, I'm sure.

Or if PA do another of their "basically getting things for free" no-limit sales this holiday season. Once I get TRIAD, there's nothing left that I want from them. I ran through the presets, and a bit of advice for anyone who might find them on the shrill or crunchy side: as with all grain makers, turning the pitch knob even just a little yields big results. I noticed that a lot of their presets responded favorably to turning it just a few notches either way. So if you do as I tend to do and cruise through the presets with a big pad looping, and you are underwhelmed, try touching the pitch knob just a little. Not unusual for UfA stuff, it has jillions of controls and variations, so it would be difficult to cover all of them in presets. Also, if you just hit the preset advance buttons, I think it might skip past the Richard Devine subfolder, where the best ones are.

I'm getting it without bothering to try the demo. UfA, Glitchmachines, and Freakshow Industries are like that with me: when the cost hits $15, I'm buying it. For the price of a movie ticket, which I haven't shelled out for in 2 years now, just running through the presets will be enough enjoyment. edit: I dozed off and woke up at 11:53, still managed to snag it. Yeah, drones and sound design.

Doug, I'll also welcome you to the (potentially) all-consuming hobby. I'm 60 and have been recording myself (and others) in some way for 50 years, starting with a mono Sony cassette recorder I got as a gift from my grandma. A small Sony mic mixer followed and with the addition of another I could overdub. Anyway, in order to help you with anything, it's best if we can know exactly what equipment you already have, along with the specs of whatever computer system you are using. Check my sig for an example of this. Include which model of mic you have. It looks as if you don't have an external audio interface as such, and since it looks like you wish to record vocals (and probably MIDI), it's essential to get one. The standard recommendation is the Focusrite Scarlett. Focusrite claim it is the best-selling interface in history, which I don't doubt. Either the Scarlett 2i2, which has two mic inputs, or the Solo, which has one, plus a higher impedance input for electric guitar or other instrument. However, the two base models don't include a MIDI, which your Pianovelle requires to be able to record MIDI into Cakewalk. For the same price as the Focusrite Scarlett Solo, PreSonus make a 2-mic input interface called the AudioBox USB 96, which also has the 5-pin MIDI jacks required by the Pianovelle.

When I create an instrument track, the default track name for the synth output is way too long to be useful. As an example: Xpand!2 1 Primary Output That's 24 characters, including the spaces, when the field can only display 14. All I really need is Xpand!2 1, which would fit easily. I don't need to see the "Primary Output," actually I can't see it anyway because it's hidden. It's a tedious pain to have to change it every time. Is there some setting I can change to suppress the "Primary Output" part of this? If not, I'll feature request it.

I first made this request back on the old forum, 3 1/2 years ago, and it still pesters me every Cakewalk session. I doubt I was the first ever to request it. As we have the Replace Synth command for virtual instruments, so we should have a Replace command for FX. Pretty much simple as that. Each time you use it, it would replace 3 clicks (delete effect, effect rack, select Insert Audio Effect) with 1 (replace effect). If you're anything like me, replacing effect plug-ins is something you do a lot in every mixing session, especially if you're making electronic music or sound design, where the line between effect and instrument is blurry. I'm sure it's already been endlessly requested, but the way it gets done is to keep it at the top of the stack, so if you'd like to see this, please reply here.

You have to make sure that the free product "Orchestral Mega Pack" has been removed from your cart before the coupon will work.

I like correct punctuation, so I, too, am wondering. Also, my melodies and beat pattern ideas might achieve festival anthem status on occasion, but I'm not into shaking clubs (unless I get frustrated while playing golf). I wouldn't mind topping a chart, although I don't know what those look like these days. My skill isn't exceptionally mad, nor are my melodies and beat pattern ideas, although the latter two are sometimes rather dope, if I may say so myself. I aspire to have all aspects of my compositions be as lit as possible, but not to a fault. I suppose I shall download and try it anyway. I'm always up for an audio tutorial course, and WA Production's offerings in general range from good to excellent.

I like doing "theme" themes, and I like this BandLab-themed one. Any chance of putting your orange/white art changes into a Mercury-based light theme? Singapore Flowers? ? I found with Nickel Mint/Racing Green and Blue Ice/Midnight Blue that I was able to reuse a lot of button and other art between them.

It's been a great couple of months for A|A|S Swatches, their freeware VSTi that contains sounds from each of their soundpacks. Daniel Stawczyk, my favorite of their sound designers, released a soundpack a month or so ago, and has now released another. A|A|S update Swatches every time a new soundpack ships to include sounds from it. Currently there are 554 sounds in Swatches, and if you're a fan of what A|A|S' synths can do, as I am, you'll find many useful sounds among the 554. It's obviously supposed to act as a demonstrator so that you can hear how the sounds in the soundpacks actually sound in your projects, as well as how the sound engines for their various synths sound (how they manage to get the playback engines for 4 different softsynths into this player is a mystery to me) and what you get is 7 or 8 from each of their soundpack sets. So, the should be 8 (or 16 depending on whether you grabbed the last one) new free sounds are in Swatches. If you don't have it, get it, especially if you do any kind of EDM, especially ambient. IMO, there's not much that can touch Chromophone and Ultra Analog for those kinds of sounds. I'll get the full versions of them someday, maybe if they put it in a Humble Bundle.

Not an effect as such, but I wanted to mention a very useful audio utility that I use on every project: Mediahuman Audio Converter. It very quickly converts just about any audio format to any other audio format, with lots of customization of settings available for bit depth, rate and other parameters. When I do an audio export from Cakewalk or any other DAW, I do one export in one lossless format and use Mediahuman to generate any other formats that I need. Since many of the effects and instruments I use include randomization elements, if I went back to the project and did an export for WAV, then FLAC, then MP3, then AAC or whatever, chances are high that each of those exports would be different, in varying degrees of perceptibility depending on what plug-ins I used. Check it out, it's really invaluable for my workflow. Also very handy to have when preparing files for distribution is Mp3tag, which I use to edit metatags in audio files. Right after I do that export (which I do as FLAC), I open Mp3tag and add Artist, Title, Year, Genre, etc. to the file. This way, when I do my conversions with Mediahuman, the tags will already be in place and Mediahuman will add them to any files it creates from that master. One more very handy free utility for analyzing media files of any kind, audio or video, is MediaInfo, which they describe as "convenient unified display of the most relevant technical and tag data for video and audio files." I install both MP3tag and MediaInfo as an Explorer extensions so that I can right click on a media file name and run them. MediaInfo can tell you what bit rate and sampling rate the file uses, also which CODEC(s) and displays tags. I really wouldn't want to be without any of the three.

Well, consarn it then, they should have called it a "pull!" ? Doesn't punched paper tape predate magnetic tape as a data storage medium? A reel of tape for sound recording gets loaded on to a "deck," while a reel of magnetic tape for binary data recording gets loaded into a "drive." A DVD (or CD) can go into either a "drive" or a "player," depending on whether it's hooked up to a computer system (including when that system is a game system like an Xbox). I think "deck" should have been the term; I'm old enough (just barely) to have submitted computer programs for class in "decks" of punched cards. Innovation in computer systems was moving very fast back then; less than 3 years later I was in Silicon Valley doing printed circuit design for a modem company on an IBM XT-based CAD system, and those punched cards seemed as distant and archaic to me as they do now.

Your pain, I feel it. Just don't trip on how the Track View has a "Tracks" menu and the Console View has a "Track" menu and the Track Manager is in the Tracks menu in Track View and in the Strips menu in Console View.

It would be really nice to be able to add tags to my exported files without having to call up a 3rd-party tag editor. This would be for every file type that supports tagging in whatever way. FLAC, MP3, M4A, etc.