Starship Krupa

I think this is a critical piece of information: So unless the OP had licenses for the handful of Cakewalk, Inc. plug-ins that were Mac compatible (the LP EQ's and CA/2A, I believe), they're going to have a rough time of it to say the least. Who knows if that stuff will even run on Apple silicon.

The UA Arrow is a top notch interface that should work well with any audio software. Cakewalk is not known to have issues with (or work any better with) any specific audio interface(s). If it's set up to work correctly on the computer, it will work correctly with Cakewalk. It is however possible (even not uncommon) for there to be a configuration issue or two that can interfere with smooth operation. You don't say anything about the hardware specifications of your computer, although if you're dropping $400 on a UA Arrow, your system probably has enough juice. There are a number of things to look out for with Windows to make sure audio data flows smoothly.

There are multiple places along the way that can result in a mix sounding different in its final rendered state, and it's best to get a handle on exactly where things are going wrong. Depending on genre, you can go a long way without needing to get an external interface, as long as you run your onboard one in WASAPI mode. When you decide you want to record an audio source is when you need to look for an interface ?. There are whole genres these days where no microphone is used anywhere in the production. To me, the most important purchase you can make as far as being able to hear your mixes is a decent set of headphones. Since it seems like you won't get as much use out of speakers just yet. Read articles and if possible audition some owned by friends or at a store. I have a set of ATH-M50's, which are very popular and don't cost much over $100. Samson SR850's go for under $50 and are about the minimum I'd personally consider. They sound amazingly good for the price. If you have a good set of cans and you're not happy with how your output sounds, you're better able ask questions online knowing that at least your listening system is up to the task.

So you would say that the answer to my question is yes, it does affect rendering? Since the documentation doesn't say that explicitly I'm not 100% sure. It would be useful to know for sure.

1. The Cakewalk company ceased to exist 4 years ago. 2. Their program SONAR was bought by the company BandLab and was successfully relaunched as Cakewalk (by BandLab). Cakewalk runs on Windows only. 3. If you had other software from the Cakewalk company, try contacting BandLab's support desk. BandLab has kept Cakewalk's old licensing server running as a courtesy for the former customers of Cakewalk, Inc. and they may be able to help you recover your account. Good luck.

So Multidock/Track View switching works every time if you type a "D" on the keyboard, but less than every time if you assign "D" to a mouse button and use that? Are there other programs where you're using mouse-mapped keystrokes, and do the buttons work more reliably in them? I'm also fond of custom mouse button mappings and also find that they just seem to stop working or misfire from time to time. This is in all programs, not just Cakewalk. I've always just chalked it up to mouse/mouse software behavior. I use decent mice, always Logitech.

I don't know what Cakewalk Sound Center is, but when it comes to string VSTi's, I like one that's part of the freeware Orchestools Sections instruments. Had they been available half a dozen years ago, I would not have bothered with SONIVOX. Done by the forum's own @ilir bajri, they are great instruments. There are also Brass and Winds Sections.

Oh, I see. Looks like the slider image is a few pixels too wide?

It was a tough call. I couldn't fit all of the record mode indicators on a round button, and it really does look odd to have that one button with sharp corners when everything else in the module is round or oval. I'll revisit the round buttons and see if there's some way I can do the Record button mode indications on a round button. I dunno, they're kinda cryptic anyway. What looks glitch-y about John's slider to you? I think he's going for "minimalistic."

A great-sounding kit for Kontakt Player. If you were fortunate enough to get it during the years Sennheiser were giving away free licenses, you likely know that while it claims to follow the GM drums note assignment, it only mostly does for the first octave. After that, rather than the percussion instruments included with GM, DrumMic'a has couple more octaves with snare roll, snare flam, and multiple strike positions on the cymbals. Bells, edges, stick tips, it helps the kit sound even closer to a live drummer. Rather than arranging them by note number, this map is more logical, with the most-used instruments grouped at the bottom, the various snare and cymbal articulations together. Of course, it's easy to rearrange them in Cakewalk's Drum Grid. As with all drum maps, place it in C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Cakewalk\Cakewalk Core\Drum Maps. Enjoy! DrumMic'a.map

Glad you got it to work! Just to mention: one of the features of my custom themes is that the buttons for enabled and bypassed states are designed with more contrast, so as to be more obvious.

I tend to forget, Bakewalk by Canlab comes with two arpeggiators. There's the one in Inspector, but there's also a MIDI effect.

Depending on what kind of music you want to make, Creative Sauce is great for general info, XEL Ohh is also great and is more hip hop/electronic oriented. While the Reference Guide is absolutely essential, I wouldn't say that at this point it's the best for learning. The way I use it is to look up things when I get stuck. I like the YouTube and user-written tutorials more for learning. They tend to "put it all together," showing how to accomplish tasks end-to-end.

That would be sweet indeed.

Also, while I do like the way Quiet Music's instruments sound, they do have some quirks. For what I suspect are ROMplers, they are surprisingly resource-hungry, and with a couple of them, they'll make no sound until you open the UI and click "Start," as you noted, which is unusual and unnecessary. Not hatin', I use them for some stuff, but there are caveats. If you want to start learning how to use 3rd-party FX and instruments, the Dead Duck collections of each are a great place to start. Really good sounding Rhodes-type piano and some straightforward bread-and-butter synths, and one each of every basic audio processor there is. All free, too. Search for "Dead duck vst."

"NatLife" sounds like you might use it to make music for insurance commercials! Not that there's anything wrong with that....

I would say not always, but music is a form of communication. As such, after people have used certain sounds to communicate, they become part of the feeling that's being communicated. The first time this argument came around was 60 years ago, when transistor amplification came out and was said by everyone to be "superior" to tube amplification in every way. Less harmonic distortion, transistors "never" wore out, were lighter, gave off less heat, used less electricity to put out more audio level, were much cheaper to manufacture. You name it, the transistor did everything tubes did, better. My electronics books from the era concur: tubes are gone, transistors are better in every way. The big blind spot in this was that the people (who dealt mostly in theory) making these statements didn't know how musicians were actually using instrument amplifiers. The venues at the time didn't have "house PA's" where all the amps and drums were mic'd up, they were big halls with, if you were lucky, a mic each for your singers. So the amplified musicians were cranking their amps up way into clipping just to be heard over the 500+ kids in the ballroom. Under these conditions: Tubes: still sounded okay, because the harmonic and clipping distortion was already recognized as part of rock 'n' roll. Could handle being run past clipping all night long without burning up. Sounded louder because their clipping waveforms were comparatively rounder than the transistor amps'. Could be easily serviced. If one power tube blew up, the amp would still make sound without the missing power tube, and then just plug in another one, and if you knew what you were doing, adjust the bias, if not, well, it'll probably be at least okay. Since they are imperfect, do not reproduce extreme highs as well, adding pleasing softening and compression effects. Transistors: sounded buzzy and thin, because they clipped hard when driven out of their linear region. Burned up because while they initially run cooler, once they start heating up, they really heat up. Much harder to service, because when an output transistor fries, it often takes out the rest of the output transistors AND the driver circuitry, all of which is likely on a printed circuit board that has to be completely removed for servicing. Are very accurate at reproducing higher frequencies, which can come off as shrill. Can produce unwanted phase shifts and group delay when used in the massively fed back designs that most high-powered SS amps use. Even if the difference in price between a tube amp and a transistor one were substantial (and of course at first it wasn't, because the makers of them needed to keep that money to cover their development costs), who cares if you saved $200 if the thing goes up in smoke in the middle of the first gig and you can't be heard over the drummer? As we now know, if you understand the application, you can design and build solid state guitar amps that sound great and are reasonably rugged and serviceable (overdesign your heat sinks and socket the transistors, please). I've serviced 50-year-old Acoustic SS amps that could still be working after I'm dead. We're now generations into electronics engineers who wanted to both play rock 'n' roll and design amps starting when they were kids. Understanding the differences in the technology is critical: tape has similar charms to valve technology, when it gets too hot a signal it's more forgiving, it has a harder time reproducing high frequencies, which we experience as pleasant, it has a built-in compression, very much similar happy accidents that these technologies' shortcomings happened to do things that turned out to be pleasing to the human ear, and that we've incorporated into how electronically reproduced music is "supposed" to sound. So we put computers inside solid state guitar amps to make them sound like tube amps, and we have little plug-in programs in our DAW's to make them sound like tape recorders. There's no paradox there, just us making our new stuff sound like older stuff that we're used to and still think sounds good. That old gear colored the sound. A lot of smart people put a lot of work into making sure that if it couldn't reproduce 100% accurately, at least when it fell short it would sound good doing so. I don't think most people are going to use the IK Tascam package to create the hissy frequency-choked over dbx'd sounds that we felt were holding us back. But it turns out that our brains do like a bit of constant white noise in the background (like those rain machines that people buy to help them sleep, maybe because nature always has background noise, who knows?). And our ears like a bit of compression and harmonic complexity. And different tape decks had different sonic signatures. Nothing weird about sprinkling some of that on our modern productions. The ear likes what it likes, even when our minds don't fully understand why.

Cakewalk by BANDLAAAAAAABPBPLB!! Mixcraft does not.

Hello, Josh. Big fan of W.A. Production's products. Very underrated, IMO. I own licenses for many W.A. fx and have recommended them several times in the past. It's good to see you all having more of a "presence." For me, it really helps inspire confidence in the products and create a friendlier feeling. Which of course equals more sales! More comprehensive documentation for the products that lack it, as mentioned earlier in this thread, would be my only request at this point.

Note to anyone having trouble getting Instachord to do anything: you must select a "strum pattern" before it will make a sound. In its init state, you can bang on the keyboard all day long and get nothing. Even then, though, it's a solution in search of a problem at my house. My DAW has a very nice built-in arpeggiator.

Another thing to try is making sure you have all of the Microsoft Visual Studio runtimes installed on your system. Never had this problem, so I'm not sure, but I have seen it happen when programs change installers. The developers' systems of course have every C++ runtime known to the computing world, so they don't find out that there's a problem.

There's a pretty good double bass that comes with Native Instuments' Komplete Start, and it's free.

Some folks worry about updates getting forced upon them, others worry about not being able to get updates. ?

I wanted to like this, as I like to experiment with machine generated and arp'd sounds, and I have found WAProduction's plug-ins to have very high value for the money. Wasn't my thing, though. Still waiting to find a use for Instachord and Instascale. ?

Congratulations, you are experiencing the Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt that they want you to experience. If you aren't aware of the term, "FUD" is a common competitive marketing tactic, where one company siezes upon some aspect(s) or other(s) of a competitor's product and uses "weasel words" to try to get consumers to be afraid of trying it. They don't go as far as saying anything definite that will get them in trouble, but they'll say things like "it's anyone's guess whether it will work in your environment, whereas our product is guaranteed to." When of course the other company also has the same guarantee. Waves are brilliant in being the first consumer software company I've seen who spread FUD about their own products. Although they're by far not the first company to put people in fear of not upgrading or having a valid warranty (witness how much pressure there is when buying electronics to spring for the extended warranty), they're the first "shrink-wrap" software company I've seen do it. They are good at it, I've seen people in this forum getting way bent out of shape that the Waves stuff they bought was going to become "unsupported," as if that would make it suddenly stop working. The WUP is similar to the "extended warranties" that get pushed hard on you when you buy a laptop (or really anything electronic) from Target or Best Buy. I have fun with the poor salespersons at those stores by asking them, "now wait a minute, are you telling us this model isn't reliable as it is?" It's interesting to watch them shift gears. To your questions, I am 99.99% sure that the answers are "no," and "nothing." I'd feel safe guaranteeing you that they didn't open the code for every ancient effect all the way down to TrueVerb and SuperTap to fix imaginary issues with Windows 11. As others have mentioned, they'll be weaselly about it if you ask them, but really, a plug-in that runs inside a host that is straight up VERY much optimized for Windows 10 and 11 is going to be one of the safest bets. And as much as they want your WUP money, have we ever heard of a Waves plug-in that was broken by a Windows upgrade? Are other plug-in companies making a fuss about how they had to fix their stuff to be compatible with Windows 11? None of the ones I use have issued updates for Windows 11. They haven't even mentioned it. Meldaproduction, Plugin Alliance, WAProduction, Arturia, Softube, Eventide, IK Multimedia, Wavesfactory, none of them have implied that my plug-ins from them have or were going to have any issues with Windows 11. It's only the company that charges for bug fixes that's left it in question.? Microsoft have a lot invested in being the safe, stable, long-term solution for businesses. The do NOT want their OS to break existing software. I guarantee that there are plenty of enterprises out there who are still running lots and lots of Windows 7 systems because they get the task done and their budgets are allocated elsewhere. How many times have you had a plug-in stop working due to a version change or update of Windows? For me, it's "never, not once." It has sometimes been the case with me that an update of a DAW has broken compatibility with a plug-in (even with our beloved Cakewalk), and when that happens, maybe Waves will fix it or maybe they'll finger-point and say it's up to the DAW manufacturer to fix it. What you get for your WUP dollars is reassurance that you'll have whatever features may be added (scalable GUI's was one well-worth-it feature), and that the versions you have will be tested under the latest versions of the DAW's and OSes they test with. I think they also shoot you dupe licenses that are valid for as long as the WUP is, so if you have a secondary system, that might be a good deal. Waves themselves have a reason for even their "out-of-warranty" stuff not to break with newer versions of Windows: if that ever happened, and they said "tough luck," that would have the effect of making people less likely to invest in their products in the future. This might be balanced by selling more WUP, but maybe not. All this fuss makes it so that I've never purchased a Waves license in my life, although I did spring for WUP for a couple of freebies that I wanted to have scalable GUI's. The silly WavesHell thing, the inability to uninstall individual plug-ins, it adds up to "meh." As ecosystems go, give me Meldaproduction, iZotope, and Plugin Alliance. IK, too. None of them nickel-and-dime me, they get my money by making great products at fair prices and supporting them.