Starship Krupa

The trend I'm seeing is for computer systems to have longer and longer usable lives. Used to be if you went 3 years between upgrades you were babying it along. Now I'm seeing ones in demanding roles like DAW or video production going for 10 years. If your tuning skills are good, they'll last even longer before being "retired" to A/V server roles. My main system is I think one "tick" or "tock" newer than your Haswell and I find it very difficult to trip up. Plays every game I throw at it at ultra graphics, etc. I can get it to glitch if I crank the audio buffers way down, but that's about it.

I get them for free from my neighbor up the street who works as a facilities manager at businesses down in Silicon Valley. These places ask him to take them to e-waste facilities, they're perfectly good, functional high quality Dell monitors. 3 days ago he gave me a 24" and he currently has 3 22" in the back of his truck on their way to be scrapped. My main DAW system up until a year or so ago was a Dell Optiplex i7-3770 system that he gave me several years back. Since these just replace smaller ones I already have, I have 3 or 4 nice Dell monitors to get rid of myself now. If you were anywhere near the SF Bay Area, you could have them. I run 3 monitors, the biggest one is a 42" Samsung TV I got from a friend who replaced it with a 55" 3D one that a neighbor was putting out on the street before a move. The other 2 are 24" Dells I got from the neighbor. If you have Craig's List or something similar where you live, 22"+ LCD's are often on there for $20-30.

You mean a GM soundset virtual instrument supplied by Cakewalk? I've never seen a BandLab/Cakewalk employee even hint that there will be, and considering that the GM file format seems to have fallen off in popularity, my guess would be no.

I've had okay experiences and I've had....challenging experiences. The one that makes steam come out of my ears is when I patiently fill in their stupid form with all of the information, including the requested "detailed description" and I get a reply, possibly a series of replies, that indicates beyond a doubt that the person responding to my ticket didn't read it, rather they plucked a keyword or two out, made them into a new, simpler inquiry, and answered their made up inquiry instead of the one I actually submitted. The worst ever was an ISP I used about 25 years ago. The email "exchanges" were so hilariously moronic I used to forward them to my friends so that we could share in the astonishment. I think what they did was send your first inquiry to one sub-literate person, then send your reply to a different one, and each iteration was the "eternal sunshine of the spotless/empty mind." Paying absolutely no attention to any previous effort to explain the issue, just continued boilerplate from a very limited palette of boilerplate. Mostly of the "restart your modem" variety. And no amount of spelling it out to them pre-emptively that I had already tried everything on their standard boilerplate menu could stop them from repeating it. Each iteration quoted all of the previous ones, so with each support person who replied as if all of the other questions and attempted suggestions in the exchange didn't exist, they looked stupider and stupider. And I of course did not hold back from making sport of it, but at some point, you almost start to feel bad, because you're making fun of someone who is obviously....challenged, or at least behaving like they are. It had the effect of momentarily making me stop being concerned about my internet connectivity and start being concerned that these unfortunates might be allowed to do things like drive automobiles. Good for a laugh, though.

I guess they've moved all of the brands' tech support under one roof. When I recently had the issue of the latest version of elysia alpha master not being able to load its factory .vstpreset files, it took me a good bit of time to figure out how to contact support for Plugin Alliance, and part of that was sending email to the old support address and getting the reply saying that I had to use the form. I think I mentioned it in a different topic, once I filled out the form, I got a boilerplate response from a tech that indicated that he hadn't read my full description of the issue, he only pulled "presets" and "Cakewalk" out as keywords. That's a case for keeping a license for a "Big 6" DAW current when your primary is not a Big 6 DAW: I could have been shunted before getting a resolution if I hadn't been able to parry with "it's not just Sonar, your instructions for Studio One don't work either." (I eventually promised him I would leave him alone if he would just send me the installer for the previous version)

Since it's T RackS, I have to wonder if you can do it mid-side as well. 😄

Aw, c'mon. Satya gently ribbed and Peter gently ribbed back. I have a dozen T-RackS 5 FX which work as well today as they did yesterday. And they work quite well, no TRackS processor has ever crashed on me (wish that were also the case for SampleTank 4🙄). If they stopped working I might feel hard done by, but they haven't. The usual pattern for upgrade deals is that there's a discount at first release of a major upgrade, then 6 months or so later a repeat of it, and after that, any number of greater discounts as the market for licenses slows. IK is no different in this regard. After their products mature, they seem to be available at steep discount, which is nice. Not gonna be losing sleep over whether my T RackS 5 compressors have sidechain inputs or not. If I want to sidechain I don't need to do it with a meticulous emulation of a vintage hardware unit (I don't even want to do it, sidechaining tends to work better with more precise compressors). So far, I can't figure out how to get TRackS 6 Intro into my account. I clicked on the "Free" button last night and my browser just sat there in a state of loading. Today, I click on the same button and it sends me to the download page for Product Manager, which I already have installed. Whatever, I can probably limp along without Classic Compressor until such time as I (or they) figure it out. Suffering can make for better art so it's all good.

Read-the-thread-ing is best practice. In the post you quoted, my first sentence was "The thing to do is try it and see." I can't put it any more simply than that. There is no risk in trying it. It's as easy to turn it back on as it is to turn it off. Either you will see performance degradation or you won't. Just be sure to change ONLY that parameter, otherwise, you won't know if it was the hyperthreading or something else that made a difference. Every time I have tested it, my systems performed better with hyperthreading enabled than with it not enabled. Others say the opposite is true for their systems and their projects. If I were to guess, maybe the fact that I use so many MeldaProduction plug-ins helps? They work hard to squeeze every last benefit out of processor technology. Maybe it's not a factor at all. I don't know. I don't tune for theory, I tune for observed performance. Sometimes I've tried things that should have improved things in theory, but in practice, they either had no discernable effect or they degraded performance.

I loved Time Tunnel when I was little, so I loved seeing him as Vic Fontaine. Time Tunnel was such wonderful Irwin Allen cheese. The time tunnel itself was like the TARDIS, the lads were never randomly transported, it was always some famous historical event like the sinking of the Titanic. When they'd travel to the future, it was always to some important nexus like a journey to Mars.

This is really cool. It relieves the load on the host system, obviously, and I can see where the server systems don't need to be powerhouses in order to do their thing, they don't have to do any of the heavy lifting of drawing the GUI, etc. They can even be headless. I have a nice fast hard-wired ethernet network in my home and always have another system sitting there for file server/backup duty. Didn't realize that I could also utilize its otherwise mostly idle CPU to offload audio processing. I thought GPU Audio was an interesting concept, but now I see why so many people think it's kind of superfluous. If you really need to offload number crunching, hook up another computer to your network and the sky really becomes the limit. I'm going to try this out, I'm very curious about it. Among other things, I set up and managed a high-availability Citrix Winframe cluster, so this stuff is right in my wheelhouse. I wonder how it handles things like load balancing among multiple servers, how much admin must be done either at console or via remote desktop, etc.

I seen people refer to this, plug-ins running on servers, but I've never seen a company offering such things for sale. I know about hardware coprocessors a la UAD. I've heard about server clusters for rendering video FX. I'm interested to learn about it. I used to be in IT so I'm familiar with client-server applications. How do you offload audio signal processing to a server? Who makes such systems?

I think a big part of the issue with experiencing these performance gains is that we're all used to staying inside the constraints of whatever hardware we've been using. Being conservative with the number of plug-ins, freezing tracks, favoring plug-ins that are less resource-hungry, mixing at higher latency, getting used to whatever speed editing operations happen at. We've developed good habits. 😀 Also, just because Sonar's plug-in handling has improved, that doesn't magically make all my iZotope plug-ins leaner. It only means that Sonar itself is more efficient at hosting them. The rest is still up to the plug-in developers.

I've been trying to compare performance between NuSonar and CbB and had to create a project with 20 instances of A|A|S Player (which is a soft synth that used to challenge my systems) in order to force either one of them to drop out on my laptop. My laptop is a 7 year old 2-core i7 with 16G RAM. Forget trying to force it on my main system, which, although in its day was a Concorde, is not exactly bleeding edge. I'm always amused when people ask about whether this or that system based on a current processor is sufficient to run Sonar or CbB. One of the devs uses an i7 3770 system as the main computer in his studio! I myself only upgraded from my i7 3770 system a year and change ago because parts got so cheap (I got the processor for free from a generous forumite who was upgrading). It becomes, as you say about Arturia Augmented Whatever, a matter of how efficient the plug-ins are. I've messed about with Thread Scheduling Model and the results seem to point to model 2 being the sweet spot with NuSonar. Once you load it up enough to be at the edge, it's interesting to add plug-ins to see which ones bring things to a halt. Sometimes having the plug-in's UI open makes a difference, so that's a test for whether the plug-in devs are making use of OpenGL to offload GUI processing to the GPU.

Well, even if it wasn't the original intention, the two longest topics in this subforum refer exclusively to 3rd-party plug-ins. Those would be the Favorite Freeware lists.

I don't understand that last sentence. Gamers discuss audio when they are having problems with it, just like audio people. Motherboards aimed at gamers tout how they use fancy "audio grade" capacitors made by Nichicon (which is indeed a superior brand of cap) in the audio section. The motherboard on my own main gaming/DAW rig has a big thick aluminum shield over the audio section to keep out interference from the other components. And unlike my PreSonus Studio 2|4, it has enough outputs to do 7.1 mixing if I wanted to. From the ad blurb: "Realtek ALC1150 115dB SNR HD audio with built-in Rear Audio Amplifier." Also : Independent Right and Left Audio Channel PCB Layers High end Nichicon audio capacitors LED lighting for the audio guard light path and the back panel LED I just bought a game the other day that has a popup screen saying that I should use headphones when playing it because it uses audio in a special way to enhance its gaming experience. It's important to gamers, but as pwal said, it tends to just work.

Well done!

Maybe through empirical observation? The built-in hardware CODEC in my laptop works great for monitoring and playing virtual instruments using WASAPI Exclusive. Realtek haven't been asleep for the past 20 years, the PC component market is driven by gamers who also want to have the clearest audio at the lowest latency possible. Are musicians are the only computer users who care about latency and audio quality? Not even. A lot more game software is sold than DAW software, and the people buying those games won't put up with laggy, gappy, crackly, noisy audio. A lot of gaming is done with the user wearing headphones, which are even more revealing of audio flaws. It's when someone wants to record audio that they'll find that they need an external interface with decent preamps, phantom power, etc. If they're building songs out of samples, loops, and virtual instruments, I don't know that the audio advantage of an external audio interface is going to outweigh the fact that you probably won't be able to take it with you to the coffee shop. The external interface with its own ASIO driver is still the ante for being able to capture audio, to be sure. People who want to have the very best as far as jitter and DAC quality should still invest in an external interface. But it's not a requirement for all audio production tasks.

Actually, it says at the top "the use and integration of plug-in instruments and effects in Cakewalk by BandLab." I've never taken that to mean only the ones that come with CbB/Sonar, but rather all plug-ins that one may use with CbB/CS.

Is there a feature comparison chart for Sonar vs. Cakewalk by BandLab? For instance, I see Cakewalk LP equalizer and multiband compressor in photos/screenshots on the BandLab website. Do they come with Sonar? I can't tell, because I have a SONAR Platinum license, so I have all of the SPlat goodies.

"Posts for competitive products will be removed."

Led Zeppelin were the biggest plagiarists in rock history. Well, maybe until Oasis came along....😄 They lifted the main riff of "Stairway to Heaven" from a band they opened for (Spirit), covered "Dazed and Confused" (with altered lyrics) by an artist who opened for them (Jake Holmes) without giving him credit, and ripped the lyrics of "Whole Lotta Love" from Willie Dixon. In all these cases, Zeppelin only compensated and credited these artists after the artists brought suits against them.

I also refer to my own empirical experience: in twenty years of downloading and using installers and individual plug-ins from all manner of developers large and small (I am a freeware maven), I have yet to get any malware on any of my computers via a plug-in installer. IMO, not only have malware threats been exaggerated by malware protection companies and media in order to further their own ends (fear sells!), malware is more of an issue inside larger organizations where a lot of computers are connected to each other inside the company firewall. I don't like to cop a position of authority, but I am a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer and used to be an IT professional at a security company. That said, if installing a program that has triggered what is obviously a false positive on one malware scanner out of 75 will keep you up at night, don't do it. The latest version of a plug-in company's installer shell is not critical path software. Unless MeldaProduction have added anything to one of your bundles that you're really hot to check out, v. 16, with its legacy installer works just fine. So no compelling reason to jump at v. 17 anyway. MCenter is a useful tool if you have material that has its low end information that is too spread out. We've somehow managed without it up to this time. The advice from MusicMan to wait a while and check it again is excellent.

You may have just given me the key (no pun intended) that could unlock the door. Truth is, I rarely have occasion to use it these days. The only vocalists I'm likely to be dealing with have taken serious training and would never submit a performance that wasn't absolutely where they wanted it, and me. I need the practice, so I'm happy to do a dozen takes until I get it right. That's part of my problem with gittin' gud with it: I don't use it often enough to learn it well.

I wasn't suggesting you use ASIO2WASAPI with Cakewalk. What I mentioned was that if you have other software that can't use WASAPI (such as Ableton Live), ASIO2WASAPI is a better bet than ASIOALL. As you have seen yourself, Cakewalk works great with WASAPI. IIRC, Cakewalk, Inc. worked closely with Microsoft while WASAPI was in development, so no surprise there. For interfaces that don't have their own native ASIO drivers, such as my laptop's internal Realtek CODEC, WASAPI is absolutely the best way to go for software that can use it. But there is software that can't use it, even though it's been around for an eternity in computer years. I don't know what Ableton's problem is. Considering that Live! must be rock solid in order to fulfill its intended use as a performance tool, continued failure to support WASAPI boggles my mind. The time to explore ASIO is when you grab one of those Mackie interfaces. I've seen them as Amazon Refurbished for about $30.