Starship Krupa

Sure it's possible. It's a decade-old hand-me-down Dell Latitude E6410. About a year ago, I upgraded it by replacing its original i5 with an i7. I'm using its onboard (not Realtek) audio with WASAPI. I figured that even if the clock speed were slower, twice the cores and more cache would help with DAW and NLE use. The A|A|S Player engine sounds amazing, probably because its algorithms are constantly crunching a ton of analog modeling. Likely similar with Phoenix Stereo Reverb. This makes sense, the more modeling of "real" objects and spaces, the greater the load. I usually kick resource-hungry plug-ins to the curb, but both of these sound better to me than anything else of their kind. I'll repeat the test on my main system and report back. I sort of recall that one of Noel's systems is (or was) an i7 3770 like mine, so it may yield results closer to the documentation. For me, this stuff is interesting to mess with, but I think the true test is to throw on my best set of cans, upsample every plug-in for playback, and A-B test playback with the 2X button. Or upsample them all for rendering and make two exports, one with and one without. If they sound different, even if it's a placebo effect, then the can of worms is open.?

I just tried all of those operations and they worked. Given the oddities, are you sure the clips you were testing with were linked? It was hard for me to know until I figured out the options, as shown above. The documentation is misleading. The dotted outlines are hard for me to see. To get what we normally think of as a string of linked clips that link to each other and the original, you have to tick both boxes.

Indeed, for which I thank you. ?

Maybe my posts were too verbose, but if you scroll up a couple, I quoted a couple of companies' take on what fx may benefit. It seems that the more a plug-in might generate harmonics above 22KHz, the greater the chance that this information, while inaudible to humans, will get aliased back down into the audible range. If Omni Channel generates saturation or other distortion, then it might potentially benefit. Vojtech Meluzin (aka Meldaproduction) states the opinion that running the whole engine at 88.2 or higher is the best practice. But he also says that listening to the results is the way to know. @Noel Borthwick mentions that oversampling (and presumably also running at a higher rate) may help with phase shift, which very much interests me. He also mentions reverbs as being a type that may benefit. If you take a look at the results of the tests I ran, I came to the conclusion that if you want to experiment with the possible benefits of oversampling, running at 88.2 incurred a significantly lower performance hit than enabling all the plug-ins. But the plug-in that caused the biggest hit (no pun intended) was a synth, not a processor. My Plugin Alliance elysia mpressor, alpha compressor, and Millenia NSEQ caused much less performance hits. AIR Hybrid, much less of a hit than A|A|S Player. A thing to remember is that all of this is only important during mixing and rendering, so if you crank up the latency in your driver settings, any performance hit will be less of an issue. Latency is usually only an issue during overdubbing, and recording soft synths, so during that process, you can hit the 2X button or just bypass your performance-hungry FX. I deliberately dropped my usual mixing latency on the laptop to make the results more obvious. One of the things that led to confusion when I first started using Cakewalk was its use of the term "global." I've always understood that to mean "in the entire program," but that's often not what it means in Cakewalk. If you turn your ProChannel off on one track, the button to do that is labeled "Global," but it only means that all ProChannel modules on that track will be bypassed, not in the entire project. With plug-in oversampling, "global" means that if you enable it in one specific plug-in, let's say elysia mpressor, all instances of elysia mpressor will be oversampled. The "2X" button better fits my usual idea of "global."

I'm working on my 10-year-old laptop, and, inspired by this thread, decided to use it to see what performance hit I might see from enabling upsampling for the plug-ins in this project. It uses 4 synths and 6 FX, and the laptop can play it back fine with no upsampling engaged. Onboard audio CODEC, 736 samples. 8G RAM, i7 760 processor. Kinda old by current standards, but I keep it optimized and so far it has refused to fail to perform whatever tasks I've thrown at it, including DAW and video NLE work. It has a discrete nVidia GPU. Results: With no upsampling, engine load hovers around 45%, with a spike up to 62%. With all 10 plug-ins set to upsample 2X, it hovers around 80%, with multiple late buffers, stutters and usage spikes up to 146%. Clearly, this suggests there is some expense involved in upsampling. One of the synths, however, is A|A|S Player running a String Studio patch that arpeggiates. A|A|S's engines, while they sound amazing, are also the most demanding I run on my system. I limit them to 8 simultaneous voices so that they won't bring the show down. Turning it off for just that synth restored gapless playback with spikes up to 82%. Also turning it off for iZotope Exponential Phoenix Stereo Reverb brought the spike down to 72%. I was just guessing at what would be the most expensive plug-ins. Interestingly, switching the sampling rate in Preferences to 88.2KHz resulted in smooth playback, with usage spiking up to the high 90's. Barely viable, but less expensive than per-plug-in upsampling. This suggests that the tradeoff will be as Chris says, the amount of room that recorded and rendered audio will take up on the hard drive. If space on your SSD is dear, but you have a faster, modern processor with many cores, per-plug-in may be the answer. Since for me it's the other way (as it is for me, I just swapped my DVD+R drive for a second SSD on the portable and don't need to archive projects on it anyway), if I wanted the potential benefits, I'd run at 88.2. Rendering at that rate would mean an extra rate change before distribution, though. I'll try the same project on the main DAW and see what it says. It may just be that the upsample button on the laptop will have to stay off. I always do final renders on the main system anyway. Jury's still out on whether I hear any differences, but I will do further tests, including with headphones. Thank you, @LittleStudios for bringing this up. I've long wondered what the performance hit might be.

No, not at all, Chris. And I certainly apologize if I gave the impression that I thought you were "wrong" about anything. You've definitely experimented more with plug-in oversampling than I have. I come here for discussions, and I usually assume that "why are you seeking that feature?" when I don't understand, is a fair matter for discussion. I've learned some things from people that way. I understand that it can come off as "why the heck would anyone want to do that??" You said in your first post that "Upsampling plugins instead of a high sample rate on the project keeps audio file sizes wayyyyyyy down, keep the audio quality as good as digital can get it," which sounded simplistic to me. There are many things that influence keeping "audio quality as good as digital can get it," and from what I've read elsewhere, plug-in oversampling is a pretty minor one. YMMV. I don't really know much about this topic except what I've read in articles that all take pains to warn against seeing plug-in oversampling as a guaranteed positive thing and what I've heard switching it off and on myself. Which was nothing, but then I don't use a lot of guitar amp sims. Supposedly one of the best tests of whether a distortion plug-in is aliasing is to play a double stop and bend one of the notes. Never tried it. That's why I quoted articles and asked questions. I wasn't coming from a position of knowing it all, rather the opposite. Also, my ears turned 60 this year, and I played in rock bands for about 1/3 of that time, so if the aliasing is up above 15KHz, I may be missing it entirely. However, I'm one of those people who must set his computer's music playback up to have as close to bit-perfect reproduction as possible. I can hear the difference between CD audio played back via ASIO or WASAPI and via Direct Sound, and it's a big one. The former sounds "3-D" and has "depth" to me, while the latter sounds "blurred" and "flat" by comparison. The night that I first set my system up that way I stayed up until dawn listening to my favorite albums because I was hearing so much stuff in them I never had before. This effect is as apparent to me on the onboard sound in my laptop as it is on the interfaces in my studio, so I'm always watching out for this "blurring" being introduced by software I use and want to know about any tips for preventing it. I only wish recording and mixing at 88 or 96 made a difference I could hear, I'd do it every time. As it is, CD quality is plenty as long as it's reproduced correctly, without further conversion. I have witnessed the effects of aliasing via a spectrum analyzer while QA testing DAW software. I ran some tests of sine sweeps through a DAW's (not Cakewalk) sample rate conversions and found that a couple of the permutations resulted in visible (and in the audible range, 10K area) artifacts. I was inspired to do so by this page: https://src.infinitewave.ca/ If you're inclined, you may find it as fascinating as I did. And notice that SONAR, as it was when they tested it, gave some of the most crystal clear results. I have had one effect, ADHD Leveling Tool, a very nice LA/3Aish compressor, mess up badly when Cakewalk's 2X and 64-bit engine were both engaged. Its output level dropped way down. This suggests to me that there may be other, possibly negative, side effects to oversampling certain plug-ins, and I don't know which plug-ins or side effects they would be, so I keep cautious. I turn on the plug-ins' internal 2X oversampling for my Meldaproduction fx during rendering only, because what the heck, it's free, and I trust Vojtech to code the function correctly. I listen for unwanted effects and don't hear any, so it's all good. I have to confess that I don't hear any positive effect either, though. If anyone else wants to let it rip with 16X oversampling all their plug-ins, it ain't up to me to tell them not to, but I myself approach it with some caution and wanted to say so. The possibility exists, at least in my mind, that feeding audio into these things at the rate they're expecting might be best practice, at least for some of them. I'm not sure though. I doubt the Cakewalk engineers would create such a feature and make it that easily accessible if there were too many possible drawbacks. By all means, carry on, I'm glad that you had the experience, as I have many times, of finding out that the feature you were looking for already exists in Cakewalk. And if you can share more specific experiences with plug-in oversampling, I'd love to hear about them.

Why would you enable oversampling for a gate? A gate is a utility that is either in a state of passing or not passing audio, otherwise in the most linear way possible. Which is one of the reasons oversampling is optional: it sometimes makes plug-ins do weird things, and that can even include weird things that you can hear and see on an analyzer. You seem to be so concerned with this, how much have you read up on it (and I don't mean amateur opinions on web forums)? From Meldaproduction's documentation: "Oversampling can potentially improve sound quality by processing at a higher sample rate. Processors such as compressors, saturators, distortions etc., which employ nonlinear processing generate higher harmonics of the existing frequencies. If these frequencies exceed the Nyquist rate, which equals half of the sampling rate, they get mirrored back under the Nyquist rate." Got that? If you're using a processor that happens to generate frequencies above 22KHz (assuming you're recording and mixing at 44.1K), then you will potentially get harmonics back down below 22KHz. Also: "Finally, and most importantly, oversampling creates some artifacts of its own and for some algorithms processing at higher sampling rates can actually lower the audio quality, or at least change the sound character. Your ears should always be the final judge. As always, use this feature ONLY if you can actually hear the difference. It is a common misconception that oversampling is a miraculous cure all that makes your audio sound better. That is absolutely not the case. Ideally, you should work in a higher sampling rate (96kHz is almost always enough), while limiting the use of oversampling to some heavily distorting processors." Got that? Mr. Meldaproduction says that the ideal practice is to record and mix your whole project at a higher rate if you really want to eliminate it. Most importantly, he suggests only using oversampling if you can hear the difference and prefer the sound with the oversampling. From Sonarworks' site: "Oversampling benefits the kinds of plugins that change the shape of the original waveform or create new frequency content....Plugins that benefit from oversampling include compressors, limiter, clippers, amp simulators, saturators, and exciters, but not usually equalizers or time-based processors, unless they also provide some kind of saturation." Moreover, the people who code plug-ins tend to know their stuff, and they're not helpless to prevent anti-aliasing in the plug-ins' internal algorithms. They can put in filters that contain the overtones to the safe range. When they are coding their processors, they expect that they're going to be used normally, which means at the same sampling rate that the rest of the project uses. If we use them outside their design parameters, results are not 100% predictable. Ideally, external oversampling makes it easier to stay away from the Nyquist frequency and therefore avoid the possibility of aliasing artifacts, but that's not guaranteed. There could be some filter or other process in the code that behaves differently, even in an undesirable way, when the plug-in is presented with oversampling. A frequency response curve might change, level might change (I had this happen with a compressor plug-in). Speaking for myself, I think I'd do better to put the effort into working on my mic placement than trying to figure out oversampling my plug-ins.

Huh. I thought the referral discount was only good for your first purchase. I had no idea you could bank it for later use.

It did get airplay, just not on the radio station I was listening to at the time. MTV was still years away. The single came out in 1979, the subsequent album in 1980. The whims of program directors. It was what used to be called an "album rock" station, so they may have passed on a single-only release and then gone with the follow-up single when the album shipped. By the late 70's, I had stopped listening top 40 radio, something that has persisted. The downside is that I've missed out on some good things that the radio stations I was listening to deemed too "mainstream."

All too true. I'm usually really good at search terms in say, Google, but in this forum, I have a hard time finding the information I'm looking for. It doesn't seem to obey "exact phrase" quotes, rather searches on the individual words. What I do wish people would do is scroll through a few pages of topics before posting their question(s). Again, not something that comes naturally to someone not familiar in the ways of forums. As for newbie shoving and shoving the newbie shovers, in the words of Rodney King, "Can we all get along?" Everyone was a newbie at some point, everyone gets grumpy sometimes. There are ways to express this stuff with a positive spin. I hope my "starter kit" helps other people in the future.

I decided to just go ahead and do it the hard way and try all 3 permutations and see what I got. Here's what happened: First, I tried making 3 repetitions, and chose only "Link To Original Clip(s)." This resulted in having 4 clips (the original plus the 3 repeated ones). I'll call them 1-4. Clips 1&2 had the dotted line around the outside to indicate they are part of a linked group, and only clips 1&2 (the original and the first copy) showed any of the linked behavior I expect. If I moved notes around in 1, they moved in 2 and vice versa. Clips 3&4 showed no linked behavior, each of them seems to be independent of the others. If I moved notes in clip 4, that move didn't propagate to any other clip. Also, when I selected clip 3, no other got selected, if I moved it to another lane no other got moved, same with muting and unmuting. That's consistent with the definition I understand of "linked" vs. "grouped." From this, it looks like selecting this option gets you one clip that is linked with the original and then the rest are not. Second I tried the same thing, but with only "Linked Repetitions" selected. Clips 2-4 appeared with dotted outlines. This time, clips 2-4 behaved as if they were linked. Event changes in any of them were reflected in the other two. Moves and mutes/unmutes had no effect on fellow linked clips. Clip 1 was not affected. Third, I tried checking both boxes. Again, the result was a row of 4 clips with dotted outlines. This time, however, all event changes in the clips propagated to the other clips in the group. Change the pitch or length of a note in clip 1 and it changes in 4 and vice versa. Still no propagation of moves or mute state. Conclusions: Although the use case seems thin, "Link To Original Clip(s)" by itself gets you only the original and the first copy linked. The rest are not linked, to the original or each other. "Linked Repetitions" is, intuitively, what you want if you want only the copies to be linked with each other. The original clip will not be part of the linked group. Selecting both gets you what I initially wanted, which is that all copies are linked to the original and to each other. In none of the cases were mute and unmute linked, nor were moves or slip edits, so maybe you were mixing up the two terms? The behavior you described is the difference between Grouped clips and Linked clips. There seems to be only one kind of Linked clip, the only difference in all of these options is which ones end up being linked when you create them. I guess I'll submit my findings to the writer of manuals so that he can use them as he sees fit, if he thinks, as I do, that the documentation on this is vague.

Cakewalk's handling of MIDI port changes is way better than it used to be, at least. It used to be that if I unplugged my nanoKONTROL II, Cakewalk would automatically map the next MIDI port to control surface duty, whether it was already in use or connected to an actual control surface or not. Which in my case meant that the MIDI input in my main interface would stop paying attention to my keyboard. This caused me much wasted time and frustration trying to figure out why all of a sudden I couldn't get MIDI data into Cakewalk from the keyboard controller no matter what I tried. It was because Cakewalk had stopped listening for notes from it and started listening for control surface commands, which it was never going to get. Now it doesn't remap, and it at least tries to correctly map reconnected USB gear. Looks like it's not always getting it right.

It seems like a sudden rash of people clamoring for Cakewalk to help with some angst they are experiencing around the possibility that unless the DAW allows for upsampling plug-ins, their productions will be plagued with aliasing. As far as I know, I have never experienced "nasty sounds coming out of the speakers" due to a plug-in being insufficiently sampled. Intersample clipping, yes, indeed, but not this aliasing they speak of. Wouldn't it result in certain plug-ins being less popular? Why wouldn't plug-in manufacturers build it in to their own products?

Oh, now you've gone and gotten me started. Here in the US the entire record save "Video Killed the Radio Star" seems practically unknown. I think this is in contrast to how influential it was and is in Europe (without this record, Air's Moon Safari never arrives, nor does Daft Punk's Discovery, "Digital Love" is practically a direct tribute to "VKRS"). I got lucky and when it came out, apparently one of the programmers or dj's at the album rock station in Little Rock, AR fell in love with "Clean Clean," so I got treated regularly to that grimy bit of power chord-infused new wave. It was actually played more than "Video." I bought the single copy they had at the more adventurous record shop on the main street of Hot Springs, brought it home, listened to it once, hated it, then threw it on again, and then again and it took up residence on my turntable and in my head for days. Gary Numan's Replicas put the next stake in my rock 'n' roll dirtbag status shortly thereafter. "Down in the Park" smacked me on the head, wherever that park was and whatever "death by numbers" was, they sounded way more interesting than the parade of Trans Ams and airhead girls with feathered hair that was the big weekend entertainment in Arkansas. "Down in the Park where the chant is 'death death death' 'til the Sun cries 'morning'" was way more cool/evil than whatever Ted Nugent was going on about. Both records conjured up visions of a dystopian sci-fi future in different measures. The Age of Plastic was a wistful world of missed opportunities and regret about choices taken, from the viewpoint of an upper middle class man looking back, and Replicas sounded like what you'd get if one of the demi-humans on Diamond Dogs had gone dumpster diving behind Kraftwerk's studio. Both of them had electric guitar power chords that sounded like they were being dispensed from a soft-serve ice cream machine in neat blobs. "Elstree," and "Clean Clean" are my favorites on the album (I love them all, though). "Elstree" and "Clean Clean" both contain themes of desensitization to images and acts of war ("all the bullets just went over my head"). "Clean Clean" was my favorite at age 19, but the emotional landscape described in "Elstree" is more familiar at 60. The idea that whatever we have now, while it may be fine, still isn't what we had before we became aware of our limitations, when the future was wide open. Sadly, both the Essoldo and the Giocondo were gone before I learned what they were. It just came this afternoon, and yeah, quite worth the $12 I paid for it on Amazon. The mix and levels don't sound much different, but they nuked a ton of tape noise, so everything just sounds clearer. It's a light-handed remaster like the Police box set, they didn't go crazy with the limiter, EQ or exciters. You really hear the horse gallop at the end of "Elstree" and the dog barking at the end of "Johnny on the Monorail." And not incidentally, what a motherbleeper of a bass player Horn was on this record. His playing on "Astroboy" reminds me of one of those Who songs where they solo the Entwistle track. (Ha, I Googled "Essoldo" right after this and with the results, Google said "People also search for "Giocondo." Awesome.)

I've only ever unknowingly purchased one duplicate plug-in, Boz' Little Clipper. Pluginboutique even warned me that I already owned it and I plowed through anyway. I don't even remember what I was thinking, I was probably hot for whatever the BOGO was that month. I don't even use clippers. My tool for that job is a limiter. There's a thing about buying duplicate discs, or books, or in my case, boxes of Pop Secret. Since I know I'm forgetful (I'm diagnosed ADHD), I hammer into my brain "I need to buy popcorn/the remastered Buggles CD/whatever." Then I buy it, and where the scheme breaks down is in remembering that I bought it.

As for the aforementioned 1st time buyer 20% off referral code, mine is MELDA1923165. Also, if you're not already on their mailing list, sign up for that and get a coupon for €10. If you go for the MComplete Bundle, that will save you over $260, bringing the final cost down to just over $1000. I like the new "device" UI's for functionality and inspiration, but maybe the best thing about them will be the end of the cries of "they need to change that godawful UI." ? Er, what I mean is that it's great that it will open up a big swath of customers who have been put off by the clinical look. One of my issues about getting the most out of their plug-is is that there are so many controls and options I can fall down a rabbit hole trying to find something simple like how to change the speed of a modulator. The new device UI's group the parameters into sort of macros so that you still get the great-sounding processing but with controls whose functions are easier to grasp. Yes, it will be a great day when Vojtech puts out the call for tech writers like he did for UI creators. Just last night I was struggling with MSpectralPan because I wanted the top frequencies in a sound to swirl back and forth. The manual was useless, I finally got it with a combination of a Chandler video and my own flailing around. Sure, it's part of the FreeFXBundle, but I upgraded my FreeFXBundle so now they are the "pro" versions. There's not "pro" documentation for them. I hope that the success of the new UI's will hip him to the fact that people who aren't up on all the terms and concepts need help getting started. I've debated him on this and his stance is that he doesn't know where to draw the line as far as teaching vs. describing, and it's not his job to teach. I say that if you want to sell something called "MSpectralDelay," you should at least tell people what it can do. He can wave off describing EQ and compression, but wave folding is a different story.

That's awesome, Reid. I'm imagining you as the film biz version of Mixerman.?

It's Wane's world, we just live in it. I'd say that it depends on the individual, their genre, their temperament, ability to change gears, etc. For some people, their drive and hunger and ability to create comes at an early age and they have a hard time maintaining that same drive. For others, it just comes when it comes, and they develop the skills necessary to execute the ideas that come to them. I'm in the latter group. When the time comes that I run out of things to express musically that I can't express in other ways, then it'll be over, but I don't see that happening. As long as there are feelings that words alone can't communicate, music will have to be there. I turned 60 this year. After having exercised my post punk and indie rock muscles off and on for 35 years, I'm returning to an interest I developed 20 years ago, and another I developed 35 years ago. This would be downtempo electronica and experimental noise, respectively. Different people have different goals. For a very creative (IMO) friend of mine who dropped by my house and in about 5 minutes cooked up a perfect New Order-alike bass line/lead, he's not much interested in playing unless it's in a band context. This frustrates me, because he has so much talent. I helped him set up a new computer and update an older one and couldn't resist putting CbB on them. For me, I get a buzz from coming up with something I like, that tickles my ears. I've always set small incremental goals for myself musically. This time around, I want to get one of my songs in regular rotation on an ambient chill station. After that, who knows, maybe there will be other goals. If nothing else, I know of the phenomenon where someone recorded a bunch of great stuff back in the '70's or whenever, never got a record deal, or got one with a company that didn't promote them, and then 45 years later, some tastemaker discovers them and they wind up playing festivals to adoring fans. A favorite band of mine, The Free Design, had this story. They even put out a new record after reuniting 30 years later. A thing for me is keeping a sense of play about it. About half of my current output is in project folders with names like "Ambient Patch Testing," or "Breaktweaker Test," because I start out slapping down a couple of cool-sounding chords that I can stand to listen to while I browse patches. Then, inevitably, one or more of the patches inspires me, and I'm off and running. This is part of why I'm such a plug-in 'ho. A good one can provide the spark that creates a song. Another big factor is that I put in the effort to seek out new (to me, sometimes it's a decade or more old) and inspiring music. This is something that I harp on to grumpies who go on about how music was so much better when we were younger, bla bla bla. All right, Mr. Nostalgia, how much effort did you put into finding music you liked when you were 25 vs. now that you're in your 60's? My guess is that 35 years ago they were getting turned on to new stuff by friends, listening to alternative or metal stations every day, really putting in the work. And they're comparing this stuff, which required digging, to some pop twerps on award shows. News flash: there is so much great new music out there for the finding, in any genre you want. Like classic hard rock? Check out The Darkness. Shoegaze? It's been in a state of revival for longer than it was around the first time, and artists in other genres (like Ulrich Schnauss) even incorporated it into electronica at some point. But you have to seek it out, look on Bandcamp or streaming Internet stations and it's there. Once you find your source, it's like trying to drink from a firehose. We're fortunate that audiences now are much more tolerant of artists being of more advanced age. Kids these days (who I love) just don't care as much because they've grown up with hip parents and love artists who are now past middle age. And if you care about that and you're doing EDM, do like Daft Punk and Deadmau5 and wear a helmet so that nobody can see the wrinkles and grey hair. Another factor is generational: Boomers tended to be more hung up on the image of the rocker as a youngster, while Gen Jones (1956-1966, give or take) and Gen X (1967-77) tend to take longer to hit our stride. See Karl and Rick of Underworld, who were once Freur (hit with "Doot Doot") but didn't find themselves as Underworld until they were in their 30's. I recently ran into a guy in his late teens wearing an MDC t-shirt and told him about how my band opened for them at Gilman in '90. He was knocked out. I got a whiff of "rock star" 30 years after the fact. ? My relationship with music is like other romantic relationships: it takes work to maintain it, but it's so worth it. And hey, if it stops working, I've had "breakups" where I put myself into other interests, but then I seem to always come back to music. She's my first love. My life has been saved by rock 'n' roll over and over again. P.S. Props to all of the artists listed so far. To them, I'll add Gen Jones band Massive Attack, who dropped the masterful Heligoland when Daddy G was 50 and Robert was 43. And one of my favorites, John Prine, who dropped The Missing Years at age 45. Check out the combination of trip hop with ferocious hard rock in this one from the Heligoland tour: And the amazing lyrics in this track from The Missing Years (if I ever come up with something as good as "Sally used to play with her hula hoops, now she tells her problems to therapy groups," or "As if by magic or remote control, he finds a piece of a puzzle that he missed in his soul," I will have grabbed the brass ring as a lyricist):

Thanks. You mean if I get the 1176ish compressor. I passed on that one due to already having access to approximately 37 different plug-ins that claim to emulate the 1176 to one degree or other, For that matter, before this non-purchase I already had a number of vintage board input emulators and more than one Pultec-alike, none of which I use very much. If I want to use an inaudible (to me) processor, Cakewalk comes with three flavors of console emulation, and the TE-100 fulfills whatever needs I have for counterintuitive EQ.

Went for the Lindell PEX-500, which is supposed to be their take on a Pultec EQ, and the Lindell 6X-500, which is their take on a channel strip, I guess. I don't usually get excited about "analog mojo" FX (more oriented toward the Meldaproduction mindset and reproducible results), but I like their TE-100 (which is pretty mojoriffic), and hey, free high-end plug-ins. So far, whatever. I guess they're supposed to do their thing subtly? Maybe with acoustic sources? Perhaps a later project. I'm not a skilled enough mix engineer to sit here and think "nice enough sound, but a bit of simulated transformer saturation would really polish it up."

Thanks. Sorry, I should have mentioned that this is a MIDI clip, not audio. What you say seems to imply that there are different kinds of "linked clips." To me, "linked" means that what I do to one affects all the others. What is the point of making linked clips if edits don't affect all of them?

I think I know the answer to this, but I'm not 100% sure, and the manual is vague. Okay, great. I have a MIDI clip. I want to copy it 10 more times along the timeline. I want all 10 copies to be linked to the original clip. I can choose Linked Repetitions or Link to Original Clip(s) or even both. Both choices sound like they'll do what I want, so what's the difference? Linked Repetitions would cause the copies to be "linked with the clip copied." I want that. Link to Original Clip(s) would create a linked clip. "A" linked clip, singular, as in only one of them would be linked to the original? What about checking both? Aha, closer inspection of The Reference Guide says on p. 485: So with the first, the original is left out? The description in the online documentation seems wrong. If these two are exclusive, why can I select both of them? I'll try the second option first, by itself, and see what happens.

I usually jump in first and then hit the documentation when I run into a snag or just want to dig deeper. Very seldom read the manual first, unless it's necessary to get started. For this reason, good indexing is very important to me. I want to be able to find the section that describes the feature I'm trying to navigate. I've submitted pages of errata to Morten Saether so that he could amend the Cakewalk Reference Guide. The removal of the ancient (not kidding, this section had to have been Windows 98-era at the latest) advice about how your modem might call AOL in the middle of a session and how to set the IRQ jumpers on your sound card and to disable AHCPI on your motherboard, and how plug 'n' play doesn't work properly, and how WDM is the cutting edge in Windows driver modes, I'm pretty sure that was at my suggestion. The only people I rough up are the tinfoil hatters who are sure that BandLab must be up to no good, that it's a data-gathering scheme, that the product can't survive, etc. Fortunately, almost 4 years on, with absolutely zero of their predictions coming true, and my (hopeful) speculation coming true beyond what anyone thought was possible, we don't get too many of those anymore. Somewhere around here is a post from 3 years ago where I suggest that there might be very good things to come and I kind of get shot down. I'm happy to have the laugh on that one. With noobs and youngsters, hey we need that fresh blood on forums, so I try to at least welcome them while telling them that they'll get better help with their audio interface issues if they post in the General forum rather than the Themes subforum.

This is wonderful. I don't speak or read Italian, but if I did, this would be a godsend. Something it's taught me is what it must be like for non-English speakers to have access to hundreds of great Cakewalk tutorials and not be able to understand the narration! ? Fortunately, one can get a lot out of just watching what the instructor is doing onscreen. The YouTube closed caption idea is great.

I've stopped poking at people for not using the Search function because as I understand it, there's a generation or two that hasn't grown up with threaded discussion forums being a thing. And one of the big things about threaded discussion forums is that the knowledge in them is way less ephemeral than on Discord, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram or wherever else, which is what frustrates me about those ways of communicating. All the great info that just scrolls away. So they may not even know about the power of the Search Bar. They're not only new to Cakewalk, they're often just as new to this type of communication. I try to be gentle. Yes, people should at least browse the first couple of pages of threads, should use the Search Bar, but you have to know that you can do those things before you do them. Anyway, @SKATOR, welcome, and yes, that thread that @Michael A.D. linked to will keep you busy for days downloading goodies. You don't mention a specific genre, but I'll assume EDM. Here's what I would get first: In that thread, you'll find a link to Sitala, which is a sampler. Since Cakewalk doesn't yet have an integrated one, for the kind of work that I think you want to do, you'll want some way to load up and use the one-shots you find in sample packs. Sitala is probably the most popular one around here while we wait. You can drag clips directly from Cakewalk's timeline to Sitala's pads, and it comes with a usable sampled 808. Gotta have a sampler. After that, Surge is probably the most powerful freeware synth around right now. Tons of patches for it, it's in constant development. Meldaproduction's Monastery Grand is hands-down the best free grand piano, and while you're at Meldaproduction, you can also download their FreeFX Bundle, which has 37 really useful effect and utility plug-ins you can use for free. Dead Duck E-Piano is the best-sounding free Rhodes-like electric piano I know of. Dead Duck also has a large package of basic bread-and-butter FX plug-ins, also free. If you have $5 to spend, AIR's Hybrid 3 is a great synth for electronic music, tons of arps, leads, pads, sounds really good and you can get a bunch of free patches for it if you do a little searching. For another $5 you can also get AIR's XPand!2, which is a ROMpler that comes with over 2000 sounds, including multiple really good drum kits. A|A|S Swatches is a great way to get over 500 sounds for free. Pads, leads, arps, hits, and the quality is the very best, IMO. That's my suggested starter kit. Any links I didn't supply are in that other thread. The reason I've listed specific ones is that there is so much information in that thread that one can get lost in it and not know where to start. This is the condensed "starter EDM toolkit" version. The two payware instruments are almost free. Hybrid 3 is the closest you can get to Serum or Massive without forking over way more cash, and XPand!2 is a Swiss Army Knife of excellent sounds.