Starship Krupa

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.

Thanks for pinning this down, @Ronny.G. I think this is the "sacrifice a chicken" bug that has bedeviled me since adopting Cakewalk. I called it that because of all the different weird steps that it took to get MIDI working again once the soft synth or effect stopped listening. I use nothing but split instrument tracks, which seemed to cool it down somewhat, but I like to experiment with replacing synths, and that sometimes results in the need for chicken sacrifice: close and reopen the project, if that doesn't work, replace the synth a couple of times, if that doesn't work, delete the entire synth track and create it again, if that doesn't work, copy the MIDI track and delete the old one, and so on until you get to the "nuke the site from orbit" step of exporting everything as audio or MIDI files and starting with a brand new project. The trouble is, I could never figure out the exact steps that led to the failure mode, so I couldn't submit it as a bug. It just worked until it didn't.

That's awesome. I'd love to get some music in movies or TV. My genres are EDM, electronica, post punk and indie rock (like The Replacements or Pavement, not that overproduced swill that goes by the name "Indie Rock" today). I come up with stuff and think "this sounds like what you'd hear when the detectives are poking around in the darkened warehouse." I don't think I could do well making it to order, though.

Wow, that's awful, I didn't know that ReWire was falling out of favor. I agree with you that interoperability and treating DAW's as modules is a great way to grow the market. Don't need to look any further than MIDI. There were companies that believed they should try to keep their customers locked inside their own ecosystems in order to sell more of their hardware. Then some brave people came up with MIDI and it grew the market unmeasurably. I say unmeasurably because how many people only got interested in making music electronically after they knew they could sequence via MIDI? How many current DAW's started out as computer MIDI sequencers? You were there at the birth, Craig, you remember. I met you not long after the start of MIDI (Electronic Music Expo, 1985, San Francisco) and bemoaned my lack of funds for starting to work with it (I was on starvation wages at Orban at the time, making less than the janitor). You grinned and said "get a CZ101!" I took your suggestion to be that with MIDI, you could start out with the smallest, cheapest synth and then add other toys as the disposable income trickled in. The Casio would not become an obsolete investment until you were tired of its sounds.

It's not a "bug" as in "error in the coding," rather it's a behavior that most of us would like to have changed. I know it might come across as pedantic, but there is a distinction when communicating with software engineers (I used to earn my keep as a pro QA engineer). "Not working as designed (I usually look to the Reference Guide and web documentation to see how it's supposed to work)" "unimplemented feature," etc. The bakers are fond of the "expected behavior/actual behavior" lingo. In our case here, expected behavior is that plug-in GUI's always sit atop any Cakewalk windows, actual behavior is that they drop behind floated windows on secondary monitors as soon as the floated window takes focus. Which reminds me, I'm still seeing the behavior with Synth Rack and Help where they shoot up to the upper left corner of my primary monitor regardless of where the Cakewalk main window is. Expected behavior is that the darn things would just float right where they are, like the Browser does.

I agree. What I and others are suggesting, rather, is that Cakewalk augment its existing workflow, or at the very least fine tune what's already there. After 3 years with it, I'm now to the point where I feel smooth creating drum parts with MIDI. For now, I've pretty much given up on seeing drum instrument names in the PRV, I've resigned myself to memorizing where they are on the keyboard. A sad thing is, a couple of the annoyances/speed bumps are bugs or unimplemented features. You can get drum names via the Drum Map feature, but my struggles with it are famous, and then once it's all set up, the Drum Pane omits mousewheel functionality, which is something I use constantly. You can also get drum names via the Note Names feature, but as soon as you close the Piano Roll view, it reverts to the standard piano keys with standard scale. Just fixing those two would help beat making. So I'm with @Mark Morgon-Shaw, nobody's calling for any changes to the basic workflow, which I love, I'd just like the existing tools to work better and possibly get more tools, such as a sampler. The hip hop/EDM people on YouTube seem to love Cakewalk despite its shortcomings for that style. I'll shout out @Xel Ohh, @AdK Studios and @Ewoof Music here. This has had the feel of a bunch of old dudes speculating on what "the kids" are up to, so why not ask the guys working in the popular genres? One last thing, the killer feature that attracts first time users is Cakewalk's free subscription licensing model. This surely leads a lot of Windows first-timers to check it out. Then it's a matter of user retention. This is something that only GarageBand, with its dongle being a Macintosh computer, can touch. I'm not a teenaged kid, and my budget doesn't get up to the FL Studio level. I'm in the REAPER/Mixcraft/Waveform zone.

I've been demoing Stutter Edit 2, which is an effect that utilizes input from MIDI notes to trigger events. When I play what I think of as C1 on my controller, it registers as C1 in the plug-in. I'm running into trouble with it in Cakewalk having to do with a seeming discrepancy in MIDI note names: in order to trigger the note labeled "C1" in Stutter Edit, I have to draw a C3 in Piano Roll. I'm sure there's some way to fix this or work around it in Cakewalk, but I'd also like to understand it. Do different bits of software call these notes by different names? I'm used to C1=MIDI 24 and so on. It seems odd to me that it could diverge by two whole octaves. When I'm recording MIDI, Cakewalk registers a C1 on the controller as C1 in the Piano Roll. What's going on here?

Nobody's using Stutter Edit 2 with Cakewalk?

There have been "kids these days" gripes as long as there have been kids. I can imagine Adam and Eve's children saying to their kids "whaddaya mean you're sick of apples, do you know the sacrifices your grandma and grandpa went through so that you could eat them? You don't like your loincloths? When I was your age I had nothing but a fig leaf to cover my junk." I remember people my parents' age scoffing at plastic model airplane kits that you could put together and paint in a matter of days. "I made my models out of balsa wood and it would take a month! Can you believe the short attention span of this generation raised on TV?" Then snap together plastic models came along and people scoffed at those for offering even faster results. One of the reasons that younger people might turn away from something that doesn't yield quickly gratifying results, and I'll take your example of the airbrush, a tool that I own and have used exactly once, to paint a gold Duco stripe on a vintage WFL snare I was restoring. For illustrations even I wouldn't try an airbrush. I only want the thing so that I can paint on objects. For anything else, I have Paint.NET and GIMP and Photoshop. They yield faster results and are way more forgiving of mistakes. The modern tools we are blessed with do yield quick results. A hand plane looks cool but there are multiple power tools I'd reach for first. I'm 60, and I recognize the tendency in myself to walk away from things that I'm not immediately good at. I have to force myself to power through when that happens, slog my way through tutorials, etc. My preferred way to learn is to start with a simple task I can apply the tool to and jump right in. Not everything lends itself to this approach. I've worked around it in different ways including deliberately choosing things that initially seem unfathomable and going nose-to-grindstone until I nail them. That goes opposite to my nature. And really, sometimes I find things that click right away, and that's how I find out things that I have an aptitude for. Your friend's kid will figure out eventually that to get really good at something takes time. Maybe airbrushing looks cool so he wanted to try it, but then realized that it's one of those things that will take a long time to master, and doesn't feel a pressing need to do any airbrushing. To anyone who thinks that "kids today" lack patience for mastering things, I suggest trying to play one of their favorite video games with them. ?