Starship Krupa

The good and the possible gotchas: this seems more like a 2.0 than a dot release. The UI is entirely redesigned and now resembles Convex (like Convex it's easier to understand the routing and what the modules and controls do), and has what looks like a new set of presets as well. Also it's now a VST3. What I'm going to do is just keep 1.2 installed side-by-side with 1.3 for compatibility with existing projects.

Need to know which of Justin's tones you're looking for. Post or mention a song and I'll try to help. Big Moody Blues fan here.

I like this idea.

Another way to get a tempo tap without affecting anything in your project is to use MMetronome from the Meldaproduction MFreeFX bundle. No switching to another program, just insert it as an effect.

When working on a laptop with precious screen real estate, I know that I'll be scrolling up and down to see all the controls on the strips in Console View. However, when I scroll, the hardware output strips scroll along with them even though there's no useful control or info above the Mute buttons. I suggest that the hardware output strips have their downward scrolling limited so that it stops when the divider above the Mute buttons gets to the top of the window.

Being pedantic here, but SONAR and the company who made it have been gone for over 3 years. Avoid confusion. If you could mention what make and model of mouse you have, whether it's wired or wireless, whether you've tried swapping in another mouse, that would help us help you sort out the issue. It's probably confined to your system, unless you're trying to do it in the Drum Grid, where mouse scrolling is crippled. I mousewheel all day long with no hitches.

I'd like to talk about an important thing called the Search feature. It's up at the top of the forum to the right. That way you can find out if the topic you're about to post is already being discussed and then join the discussion. Many, me included, agree that including a feature such as Ableton Live and Cubase have would be a great asset. We are already discussing it and welcome you to join in and describe exactly which features you would like.

Thanks for the reminder I need to get his book. You are the first person I've seen on the forum or YouTube who already knew about the feature. Cakewalk is so deep and has been around so long that sometimes it feels like walking around The Mines Of Moria. Minus the Orcs and Balrog.

Data point: that's exactly what my Dell Latitude E6410 has and it does fine with Cakewalk. It has a quad i7 in it, replacing the i5 that came with it. I think it's about 10 years old now. For electronic music production, there's nothing wrong with it at all. For many-tracked audio with lots of FX, I might have to do some freezing, but that's all in the game. Humongous movie score orchestral libraries would be beyond its RAM and drive capacity, but I don't do that sort of work. I'm guessing that this Apple silicon is some pretty fast stuff, so that Mini should work better than my aging Dell, although still limited in the same way as far as storage and the ability to hold big instruments in memory. I don't know what kind of resource hog Logic is, but it would also run Reaper and Waveform. Still, if I were buying a new computer in 2021, I wouldn't bother with less than 16G of RAM and 1TB of drive, because why fork out money if I'm still going to be constrained?

Watched, and this video has a tip that I'm pretty sure nobody reading this knows about.

One of the things that periodically bedeviled my Dell Latitude until I got a handle on it was something I'd never heard of called On Demand Clock Modulation. HWINFO is one of the utilities that can monitor it, and another program called ThrottleStop is what I used to eventually wrestle it to the ground. I'd be cruising along just fine, running Cakewalk or whatever, and suddenly the system would bog down (Task Manager wasn't reporting a huge drop in clock speed, what ODCM does is start inserting idle cycles). I had to try a few different settings with ThrottleStop, but once I hit the right one, bye bye On Demand Clock Modulation. It's unclear, On Demand Clock Modulation is something the BIOS can do to keep your laptop from getting too hot or using too much battery current. Mine was plugged in and not getting overheated (according to HWINFO), so I don't know what was triggering it to drop down to 25% of available performance. I don't care either. What's important is that I made it stop doing it. This information about setting core affinities is new to me. It doesn't seem to make sense at first, I mean, why would restricting my audio process to a subset of my processor cores help with dropouts? The only way I can get my head around it is by assuming that cores 0 and 1 are likely to be busier than the other 2 or 6. It would be like daily air service from Seattle to Chicago: if you want faster service from the flight attendants, you should choose flights that are less likely to be busy. So if whatever it is that decides these things is more likely to put busy services like Wdf01000.sys on core 0 or 1, our audio services are more likely to get better service if we specify that they should run on 2 and 3 or 2-7. My question is: how do we know that the "busy" system services aren't going to be sent to core 2 or 3? Doesn't the thread scheduler assign them at random?

Here's a puzzle: I found out about the neato Assignable Controls feature today, and of course put on my purple wetsuit and took a dive to see if I could figure out how to set the colors for the text and sliders. No luck so far, haven't dived much into Custom Colors, but I did set them to "mono" and got no change. I know that at least the text color is themeable (or customisable) because in my themes, it uses the "racing green" color I set for text throughout the UI. The indicator slider shading looks the same across every theme I tried, so it's at least a color that people don't tend to change. Join the hunt?

I have one and can confirm its usefulness.

Yeah, Mike really knocked it out of the park with Assignable Controls. I wonder how he found that feature.

Ah, that's what Racing Green is for. Check it out if you want to try a dark theme. It's designed to be easy on the eyes and let me focus on the clips and notes. As flat as I could make it, and it's all soothing green buttons. The other one is for when I want to tickle my visual centers. Other themers have created light ones that try to emphasize "clear and functional." I think there's even one that emulates the 8.5 colors.

I have no problem whatsoever with the idea that the appearance of the tools one uses to create music (or anything else) is important. If it weren't, all solidbody electric guitars would look just like Telecasters. The appearance of my music-making tools should be as stimulating as possible, for my definition of "stimulating." That's why I've put so many hours into custom Cakewalk themes. I spend more time looking at Cakewalk than anything else on a screen, so looks are a consideration.

RFK

Oh man does it ever warm my heart that a member of the development team has a rig that is in the same class as mine. I have the same processor and RAM in my Dell Optiplex. A neighbor gave it to me about 6 years ago because it was being retired at his place of work in Silicon Valley. My guess is that some manager dumped it as soon as it was no longer the slickest Dell in the office. I figured out how to nail the CPU clock up to 3.67, probably the closest you can get to overclocking a Dell.

Learning to use Theme Editor and a pixel editor program is the only way. Theme Editor allows us to set colors for many of the elements, mostly text and backgrounds/borders. The buttons may only be changed by using "paint" programs like Paint.NET, GIMP, or Photoshop. A good bet for what you want (a dark theme with light blue elements?) might be to start with Tungsten and just delete the button images that were changed from light blue. They'll be replaced by the Mercury buttons and you'll have your light blue elements. After that, if you can operate a pixel editor, or want to learn, then you can start changing the colors of the buttons in that way. An essential resource is The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer to Creating Cakewalk Themes.

Hey, similar to my drum names workaround, writing them on my controller keys with a dry erase marker. I'm intrigued by Mr. Cook's reference to "the new note names feature." I would indeed love to see such a thing implemented.

Presumably no known issues with Cakewalk. Well, I'm probably going to jump on it. If issues persist once I'm licensed, I'll point out to them that they advertise compatibility.

Hello, today's lovely freebie is Cymatics Space Lite reverb. I don't get excited much about reverbs since I got Exponential Phoenix Stereo, but this one includes something that few freeware 'verbs do: a spring algorithm. Having tried it on some source material, I'll say that it's a nice enough sounding free 'verb, and the spring algo, while not sounding exactly like a spring, will probably be useful for when I want that sound and don't feel like hooking up my old handmade spring reverb box.

Very comprehensive explanation, Colin. I think it explains why certain soft synths, when I use "bass" patches are either not that bassy or seemingly below the range of human hearing. And sheesh, for a couple of the companies that founded the MIDI standard in the first place, it makes me wanna clonk their corporate heads together. Once the standard was defined, they did their level best to diverge from each others' efforts to expand upon it, like GS vs. XG. Reminds me of spouses who apparently used the extent of their relationship skills to get married and then develop none subsequent to that. "Got a standard, now it's time to get back to work making working with our stuff harder for other developers." It would appear that Stutter Edit uses the Yamaha standard (I would have thought during the Roland ownership days, Cakewalk would have had the Roland one thrust upon it). So if I set Base octave to -2 it should start lining up with the plug-in and I can stop getting lost in the MIDI tutorial and focus on getting lost among the plug-ins myriad controls. (How charmingly quirky that this setting appears under Display rather than say, MIDI.)

Yes, there are some VST's where I keep the VST2 version around because one of my hosts crashes with the VST3. VST3 is the New Coke of audio plug-in technology. Nobody asked for it, everyone except the company who made it prefers the earlier version. However, if you're getting three scans, that's one too many. I bet one of them is for a 32-bit version. Not hurting anything, just unnecessary. Not everyone (I'd say few people) are as fussy about this as I am. I sent a letter to A|A|S asking them to stop spamming my C: drive with copies of their plug-ins. Their installer used to put in multiple copies of the 64 bit VST2, the 32 bit VST2, the 32 and 64 bit VST3's, 64 and 32 bit AAX, and even the RTAS version. Just in case I had a 20-year-old Pro Tools system I guess. At its worst I counted over 12 different install locations where I would delete the extra plug-ins. I had a folder called "A|A|S Wipe" that had shortcuts to every location on my drive where they put their plug-in, and I'd go in there after every A|A|S install and weed them out. Now they've stopped with the redundancy, and no longer even supply 32-bit versions. All the weeding I do is for the VST2 and AAX versions, which is much more manageable.

As an experiment I tried deleting the VST2, AAX, and all 32-bit versions of the WavesHell dll and it had no ill effect. Now CbB and others scan only the 64-bit VST3 versions. If you have different versions of Waves plug-ins, you do need to keep the multiple VST3's, but otherwise thinning them out worked fine on my system.