Starship Krupa

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.

What's weird is that my brain seems to have decided that Cakewalk already has this feature and at least once a day, in the heat of battle, I'll right-click on an effect name in the bin expecting to get "Replace effect."? If you like the idea of this feature, do reply.

Wow. we are doing some serious spelunking here. Actually, it just comes from "auditing" my themes. Since I theme as a means of taking a break from stuck projects, and after 3 1/2 years I'm still exploring features in the venerable beast, sometimes I'll open up views I never use in order to see if I missed anything. Hence the Video Thumbnails findings. I haven't used this feature in battle yet, so let it slide as long as the colors came out some shade of either green or blue, depending on the theme. I can't even get my head around that yet. But it seems like the obvious solution is just to make all of those color values the same, like Mercury does. I like a unified look to my themes anyway.

Addendum: Track view / Clips Pane / Track View Clips Pane Background is also used to set the background color of the Video Thumbnails track.

Errata: Track View/Disabled Control Text is not used for the data readouts in the Video Thumbnails header. It seems to only be used in the Track Folder description box, to show zeroes when there's no track of that type in the folder Track View/Control Text and Values is what is used for the data readouts in the Video Thumbnails header.

Looks like he might be the only hope for this thread.

And of course my favorite soundpacks are the Chromophone ones. Y'know, the thing where Player can (presumably accurately) play back patches from any of their instruments suggests that they have one engine, and the various instruments just emphasize or give access to different aspects of it. Player is just the version of the core engine with nothing but a patch browser. Could be. It can certainly chew up audio engine resources. I switched on Cakewalk's 2X oversampling and whoa. Sounded great, but I'd probably want to keep it down to a single instance, or only oversample on rendering. BTW, for those who (like me) got free or bundled Strum soundpacks, or want to use the Strum patches that come with Player, I'm working on a how-to for that. It's similar to how it's done in Strum, but it's not done with switched articulations. Great fun once I figured it out. It's kind of odd that A|A|S sell Strum soundpacks without any instructions on how to use them with Player alone, but whatever.

I like to think that the polite but firm email that I wrote them detailing the mess that their installer made had some effect. I went into how after every single install of even just a soundpack I had to go around and delete all these megs of unwanted .dll's and 32-bit VST3's. Two releases later, and there's not a single spurious file left after an A|A|S install. Bravo to those brilliant Canadians. Having said that, though, the first time I open an A|A|S UI takes longer to display the UI (with all other visual elements in the DAW static until it finishes) than it takes to start Cakewalk. Same in Mixcraft. I don't know what they're doing, but it's annoying. Subsequent openings of the UI are fine, it's just the first that sits there. And if you're seeing performance hits with Player or probably the full versions, cutting the number of voices down from 12 to 8 helps immensely. Some of their pad sounds have really long tails that can stack up.

Yes, Vegas Pro Edit. I started years ago with Sony Vegas Pro, then upgraded via Humble Bundles. Feature-wise, I can't tell the difference between Edit and the full deal. I did a bit of hacking and copied the Vegas Pro FX to the same folder under the Movie Studio Platinum program directory and they all showed up and work perfectly. I realize that there could be an issue with my older nVidia card and using video editing programs: it's the older Fermi architecture, and supposedly Kepler was a huge improvement for video and photo editing. I used to have a point of frustration when video card specs and reviews were all about gaming performance, when I want something that will be good at running a preview window on a second monitor while applying effects. Also rendering, which can take hours on my current system. If I had known, I would have spent a little more and found a Kepler card. I just checked, and there are now sites that talk about which cards are good for video and photo editing and encoding, which is great. Even nVidia's site has banners for "Studio" solutions. I'm about to hit eBay up for a used card that has Kepler and DDR5 RAM. Should be an improvement.

I suppose I'm interested in producing sounds that other critical listeners can enjoy. And the others can get the gist, or maybe even experience it subliminally. Being able to pick out detail and soundstage in a recording is an exhilarating experience, even an emotional one. I've read people on hi-fi listening forums use the term "tearjerker" to describe the experience of listening to a favorite recording for the first time on a really good system with bit perfect playback. I've experienced it myself. It has an emotional impact, realizing how much is in there that I had missed. Just because most casual listeners won't notice it doesn't mean that nobody will hear it. And even for them, I do believe that aliasing and compression artifacts can lead to ear fatigue. Radiohead's "Everything In Its Right Place" is the song I use to test sample rates and compression, and it has so many little hidden things in it that I can only hear with a good setup. Tiny little reverse reverb on the lead vocal. Little sound snippets hard panned. When I first got a bit perfect setup going, I called my housemate down to listen to the song, and he did literally get tears in his eyes. It's one of his favorite songs. I'd like to create music that can help people have that experience, that rewards critical listening. It creates joy in me, and I'd like to do that for other listeners. My ambitions are humble, I guess. I'd just like to get my songs up on Bandcamp. Bandcamp has a really good sounding CODEC for their website, and they featured FLAC downloads. I spend money there because I can get my music in the format I prefer. So, to me, not moot. I'm not producing music aimed at teenyboppers (although I love it when my friends' kids listen to my stuff and like it). People don't stay teenagers forever (in numbers, anyway), and perhaps when they get older and we don't need to compress music to fit a thousand songs on a phone, they'll learn to listen closely. Whatever I put out there, I don't want it to sound crappy in 20 years when (I hope) playback systems will have advanced. My stuff may be forever buried by the sands of time, but who knows.

This song is great. Traditional Country seems to be such a rarity today. When I check out "Country," it just sounds like rock with a Southern accent. The world could use some more of what you do! Also, from a mix/mastering viewpoint, it's excellent. And condolences about Maggie. I used to have to close the door to my studio space to try to keep my dog Kittery out while I played drums, as I didn't want to injure her ears. She would then go around the other side of the house, through my workspace, through the guest bedroom, through the kitchen just to be with me while I was playing. She outsmarted me. Some say that dogs have the intelligence of a 4 or 5 year old human, but I swear, with my baby girl, it was more like an 8-year-old. My girlfriend moved out, and we shared custody for a while, then she moved to Seattle. I went up to visit them a few months before Kittery passed and we had some fun, took a trip to Don Bennet's Drum Shop in Ballard. She followed me into the vintage drum parts room, we found some parts I needed for the Slingerland kit, and then I sat down to have a tap on a Gretsch kit they had. Same as ever, she wanted to be by my side while I was playing, so I had to tie her off to a shelf in another part of the shop. BTW, for any drummers in that area, the shop is not only amazing, they love doggies. Amen to this. When it's going well, musicians (and other artists) seem to channel the spirit (by whatever name). I don't know if it's possible to be a musician and not be in touch with the infinite. We are given the gift of speech, but there are things that can't be communicated by words. When we're with a loved one, it's touch. A hug or caress says "I love you." I'm with you and Shane on the inability to recreate guitar solos.?I've done more than one "scratch" take on guitar that I couldn't top after several tries. And then I had to go back and learn it the same way I'd have to do with another player's part, note by note. And I think "where did that come from?" In my mind, John Coltrane, especially in the years with the quartet that included Elvin Jones, is one of the best I've heard at channeling it. There's even a church in San Francisco (where else, eh?) that considers him a saint. I didn't know what they were on about until I started playing drums 9 years ago and got into Elvin Jones. The gentleness and yet sometimes ferocity with which they play touches me in spiritual way.

What operating system are you using? Windows 10? Put some more information about your system specs in the post (see my sig for an example) and it will make it much easier and more likely for someone to be able to give you good advice. I Googled the error message (just put quotes around it before you search) and got lots of hits, many of them saying that it happens when some app or other (maybe a plug-in) tries to talk to the Microsoft Access database connector. Somehow the database connector gets corrupted. Then they outline how to repair the database connector.

That must be it. Find by trial and error which ones make a difference and only upsample those. The thing is, in my testing, the ones it made the most difference with (A|A|S Player, Phoenix Stereo Reverb) are ones that really challenge the audio engine. My Plugin Alliance fx seemed happy either way, and didn't really impact the engine either.

I use buses exclusively. The only time I use aux tracks is when I want to bounce some audio to one so that I can apply special effects like reverse reverb. One of the things that I like about buses in Cakewalk is that they are separated from the other tracks. Opposite from what you like. As far as templates go, yeah, I guess it's a tradeoff. I have tried to create templates whenever I notice myself repeating actions during a project. Such as putting my favorite compressor on the snare and kick, or my favorite reverb on a send bus, or setting up a bus for monitoring, my typical master bus chain, etc. The repetitive drudge work at the start of most projects. The more different a project is, the less valuable templates are to me. I have yet to get going with track templates, but there's some promise in that concept.

@LittleStudios, The odd thing about it, which @Teegarden points out, is that the Cakewalk documentation specifically says that plug-in oversampling on playback is supposed to be less of a processor hit than running at 88.2 or 96. The results of my testing (albeit on older systems) indicate otherwise. I'm not so concerned about the size of the audio files; 500G SSD's go for about $50. I have a 3TB backup drive. Of course, reading them is potentially another performance hit, but I have an SSD, so I'll just have to see. My current strategy is that I'm going to enable 2X on most of my plug-ins (except the Meldaproduction and other ones that have internal sampling) during render only. At this point, with the trailing edge hardware I have, it's more important to me have stutter-free playback while mixing than it is to have the quality bump. At render time, it doesn't matter, I can crank my buffers up to 200 and let it churn. Then I can be pleasantly surprised after rendering at hearing more detail in the finished mix. ?

@Teegarden, you were curious as to whether the performance hit results I saw were specific to my vintage laptop. I repeated my playback experiments with running the project at 88.2 vs. upsampling all the plug-ins, and same thing, switching the rate to 88.2 incurred less of a performance hit than 2X'ing all the plug-ins. And, when I played the project at 88.2 and all the plug-ins 2X'd, I got the same "bum note" in my bass arp track as I did when rendering that way. Did you read my post where I tried various forms of higher sample rates (plug-in and project)? I must be in the top.1%, because I can hear a difference, and to me it's not even that subtle. Yes, I agree that after going through <256 lossy conversion, the differences probably wouldn't be audible, but I buy FLAC's on Bandcamp and purchase uncompressed or FLAC albums and songs from sites like HDTracks (OMG, Radiohead's Moon Shaped Pool at 48/24). This is becoming more of a trend. If you look at the Cakewalk documentation, one of the benefits of higher sampling rates is said to be "Phase shift is drastically reduced." p. 976 of the Ref Guide. Now I've speculated about how it can be that two power amps can sound different, how it can be that there's so much of a difference in detail and image. In my studio, I have two power amps for powering passive monitors. One is a Crown D60 amp from the '70's, designed for radio station studio monitoring and other pro audio uses. It's "only" 30 watts per channel. The other is an Alesis RA-100, originally designed and sold as a mate to the Alesis Monitor Ones that make up one of my monitoring systems. It's rated at 70 watts per channel. I tried an experiment where I switched my Monitor Ones and my Boston A70's back and forth between the two, and the difference was stunning. I had another musician friend in the studio at the time and he was also blown away by the difference. He's by no means any kind of audio freak, but he described the speakers being driven by the RA-100 as "squeezed" or "choked." or just "smaller." Even in mono, the Crown had a more vivid image. I suspect that the Crown was designed with a lot of attention to phase distortion and maybe group delay. I think something similar goes on with lossy compression and plug-ins that may sound optimal at higher rates. So why would lower rate lossy compression sound "2D" rather than "3D." Theory says that since humans can't hear anything above the frequency range, it's not possible to hear a difference. My (fully admit self-educated) theory is that there are other factors like phase and group delay that get messed up. It's not just about frequency response. @bitflipper suggested that I read Fletcher and Munson to get a better understanding of it, but I haven't yet. Another factor is what genre we're talking about. I'm in awe of artists like Tipper and Telefon Tel Aviv, who create detailed sonic immersive spaces. There's a higher percentage of their fans who know that their stuff will sound better in lossless and with bit perfect playback, on a system with less phase distortion, etc. I'd like to impress those people too. Even for people who don't listen "critically," I think the extra detail can come through subliminally.

@LittleStudios, can you try your experiment but turn off upsampling at render and instead set your export rate to 88.2 or 96? I tried my experiment with playback in my MIDI-only project, and exporting at 88.2 gave pretty much the same psychoacoustic results as upsampling all the plug-ins at 2X. I know that you're trying to avoid the larger rendered file sizes, so just as an experiment. A possible benefit to rendering at a higher sample rate is that any ProChannel plug-ins will benefit. And those include an 1176 clone, a console emulator and a saturation effect, all possibly able to generate frequencies beyond the Nyquist. And Chris, thanks again for opening this topic up. As you know, I was skeptical, but I can hear a difference.