Starship Krupa

I like correct punctuation, so I, too, am wondering. Also, my melodies and beat pattern ideas might achieve festival anthem status on occasion, but I'm not into shaking clubs (unless I get frustrated while playing golf). I wouldn't mind topping a chart, although I don't know what those look like these days. My skill isn't exceptionally mad, nor are my melodies and beat pattern ideas, although the latter two are sometimes rather dope, if I may say so myself. I aspire to have all aspects of my compositions be as lit as possible, but not to a fault. I suppose I shall download and try it anyway. I'm always up for an audio tutorial course, and WA Production's offerings in general range from good to excellent.

I like doing "theme" themes, and I like this BandLab-themed one. Any chance of putting your orange/white art changes into a Mercury-based light theme? Singapore Flowers? ? I found with Nickel Mint/Racing Green and Blue Ice/Midnight Blue that I was able to reuse a lot of button and other art between them.

It's been a great couple of months for A|A|S Swatches, their freeware VSTi that contains sounds from each of their soundpacks. Daniel Stawczyk, my favorite of their sound designers, released a soundpack a month or so ago, and has now released another. A|A|S update Swatches every time a new soundpack ships to include sounds from it. Currently there are 554 sounds in Swatches, and if you're a fan of what A|A|S' synths can do, as I am, you'll find many useful sounds among the 554. It's obviously supposed to act as a demonstrator so that you can hear how the sounds in the soundpacks actually sound in your projects, as well as how the sound engines for their various synths sound (how they manage to get the playback engines for 4 different softsynths into this player is a mystery to me) and what you get is 7 or 8 from each of their soundpack sets. So, the should be 8 (or 16 depending on whether you grabbed the last one) new free sounds are in Swatches. If you don't have it, get it, especially if you do any kind of EDM, especially ambient. IMO, there's not much that can touch Chromophone and Ultra Analog for those kinds of sounds. I'll get the full versions of them someday, maybe if they put it in a Humble Bundle.

Not an effect as such, but I wanted to mention a very useful audio utility that I use on every project: Mediahuman Audio Converter. It very quickly converts just about any audio format to any other audio format, with lots of customization of settings available for bit depth, rate and other parameters. When I do an audio export from Cakewalk or any other DAW, I do one export in one lossless format and use Mediahuman to generate any other formats that I need. Since many of the effects and instruments I use include randomization elements, if I went back to the project and did an export for WAV, then FLAC, then MP3, then AAC or whatever, chances are high that each of those exports would be different, in varying degrees of perceptibility depending on what plug-ins I used. Check it out, it's really invaluable for my workflow. Also very handy to have when preparing files for distribution is Mp3tag, which I use to edit metatags in audio files. Right after I do that export (which I do as FLAC), I open Mp3tag and add Artist, Title, Year, Genre, etc. to the file. This way, when I do my conversions with Mediahuman, the tags will already be in place and Mediahuman will add them to any files it creates from that master. One more very handy free utility for analyzing media files of any kind, audio or video, is MediaInfo, which they describe as "convenient unified display of the most relevant technical and tag data for video and audio files." I install both MP3tag and MediaInfo as an Explorer extensions so that I can right click on a media file name and run them. MediaInfo can tell you what bit rate and sampling rate the file uses, also which CODEC(s) and displays tags. I really wouldn't want to be without any of the three.

Well, consarn it then, they should have called it a "pull!" ? Doesn't punched paper tape predate magnetic tape as a data storage medium? A reel of tape for sound recording gets loaded on to a "deck," while a reel of magnetic tape for binary data recording gets loaded into a "drive." A DVD (or CD) can go into either a "drive" or a "player," depending on whether it's hooked up to a computer system (including when that system is a game system like an Xbox). I think "deck" should have been the term; I'm old enough (just barely) to have submitted computer programs for class in "decks" of punched cards. Innovation in computer systems was moving very fast back then; less than 3 years later I was in Silicon Valley doing printed circuit design for a modem company on an IBM XT-based CAD system, and those punched cards seemed as distant and archaic to me as they do now.

Your pain, I feel it. Just don't trip on how the Track View has a "Tracks" menu and the Console View has a "Track" menu and the Track Manager is in the Tracks menu in Track View and in the Strips menu in Console View.

It would be really nice to be able to add tags to my exported files without having to call up a 3rd-party tag editor. This would be for every file type that supports tagging in whatever way. FLAC, MP3, M4A, etc.

To me, it looks cramped and unbalanced to have the icons on the Browser tabs jammed up against the left edges, as seen here (I'm showing it with a couple of them in narrow mode, but it applies to all of the tab widths): Notice how there's plenty of real estate available to the right of the icons? To the point where they're almost touching the left edge. This is especially true for themes derived from Tungsten, as Tungsten doesn't have that vertical line separating the icon/text from the expand arrow. What I've taken to doing is moving the icons to the right by several pixels so that they're more centered. As seen here (using Midnight Blue as an example): If you have the images open in an editor anyway, try it.

If you select the clip you wish to normalize, then from the Global menu, select Process/Apply Effect/Normalize, does that not do what you want it to? (this action is also available as a keystroke binding)

I do it all the time, and on a 15" too. Despite the fact that my main system is a dual monitor system, and when I'm in battle mode, Track View on 1, Multidock on 2, I've worked out a single-monitor method. The Skylight interface Main points: Keep the Multidock docked at the bottom and drag it as high as you need it to go to be able to edit Piano Roll or mix on Console or whatever. Then use the "D" key to quickly switch back and forth between Track View and Multidock. Also, if I'm working in the Track View and need a channel strip and Track View at the same time, I can have it with Inspector. If I want to I can go mobile and still work in Cakewalk.

Just got mine, go to: https://www.mastering.studio/ and sign up for an account and they'll send you a license code to redeem at Plugin Alliance.

I have no worries at all about any of my aging computers being able to run Windows 11 or not. I ran Windows 7 on them up until Noel and Co. ended official support for Windows 7. I'm rather looking forward to people dumping perfectly good systems because they don't have a TPS chip or whatever. All of my computer systems are ones that someone gave me because whoever owned them felt they "needed" an upgrade.

Hmm, I wonder if there's a requirement like you have to have bought a MeldaProduction license from Plugin Boutique before....which I have, a few times. I can't really test it myself, 'cause I already have all of those licenses. Sorry if I got anyone's hopes up for no reason. There's no statement saying that the codes only apply to me or that they are non-transferable. They don't make codes much more generic than those (maybe Plugin Alliance does).

I think I got it in another irresistible deal for about $25. Plugin Boutique or another dealer. Leaving me with a fairly useless extra license for MDynamicEQ, but hey. MAutoDynamicEQ has the resonance sniffer.

Got this email from Plugin Boutique early Sunday morning. "As a Meldaproduction user, you are eligible for these exclusive upgrade coupons." Then it says by using the codes I can get any of the following for €19. MAutoDynamicEQ: PBAutoDyn MSpectralDynamicsLE: PBSpecDyn MTurboEQ: PBTurboEQ Wouldn't you know I already have each of them. But if you don't, they are all quite worthy, and they're not likely to get discounted further.

I doubt that it's sinister, but did you watch the vid? It's not like Cakewalk or most apps that just phone home to give the devs crash reports or anonymous usage info. With this one, it's kind of a client-server thing, where he plug-in sends whatever musical phrase you select to their server, which does the heavy lifting and sends it back. Heaven knows what kind of processing muscle it takes on the back end. Maybe it's my time in IT, but I like my programs to be more self-contained than that. I am sometimes out with my laptop with no network connection, and there are still plenty of people who turn off their wi-fi or even hard Ethernet to avoid interrupt issues (I'm not one of them).

What would concern me more is that the company would go casters-up and take the servers off-line. Since it looks like what happens is that you send it data and then it sends it back in a form that you then import into your project (where it becomes part of the project), it seems that all that would happen if the servers went offline is that you wouldn't be able to get your data converted any more. My guess is that their business model is to allow certain features for free and then charge a subscription for access to premium ones, or they'll limit the number of processing sessions per month or whatever. It became much less interesting once I figured out that your computer sends them the data, then their servers process it and send it back. And yes, the URGENT!! in the video title gives it the fragrance of Astroturf.

I, too, picked up that freebie. Was it Beat Magazine? Whatever, I wish that I could find more use for it. It does exactly what it says: it's a 909 and not much else. If I could load samples into it as I can do with Audio Realism ADM CM, and if it could switch between sounds (808, 707, 606, CR) but it can't, it's....a 909. I guess if it could do all that it would have the exact same feature set as the full ADM, but that's out of my range at $95.? BTW, if you're into this kind of slavishly-imitated Roland beatbox, check out the Computer Music version of ADM. It can do everything the full version can except that it comes with a 606 kit and can't switch to other Roland sounds. You can make a kit for those out of samples.

Give my regards to SC.

I'll watch out for them next time I watch 24 Hours of LeMans! (bucket list: camp at LeMans)

He didn't say that he stopped and grumbled. ?

It's not tied to any particular iLok account until you put in the activation code, so if your um, housemate got another activation code and um, gave it to you, and you used it to activate on your iLok account, the iLok'd license would be yours. It would still be in the cloud for the laptop, but at least it wouldn't make you kill the session on the other computer every time you wanted to use it.

Stephen, Your system should run any of those DAW's just fine, so I'd go with the one you like best. If I were you, I'd check to see if that Ivy Bridge motherboard of yours can take an i7. My main DAW is an Ivy Bridge with an i7 3770 in it. These older CPU's can be had for very little, and the more cores the better for DAW use. I even pulled the i5 from my ancient laptop and put an i7 in it, and it runs Cakewalk pretty well with 8G of RAM (maxed out). The fan runs more and battery life went to heck, but Cakewalk likes having twice the cores to play with. Both of my systems do have discrete GPU's. I'd also get a cheap second hand nVidia card to put in there. Either or both of those upgrades will be easy on the wallet and give you a perceptible increase in smoothness. The internal HD4000 graphics could barely keep up with displaying Console View or Piano Roll on a second monitor. Nothing bad happened, it would just take longer for it to page the images in and out of memory. You could see it putting up a grey box and then filling it in with the various screen elements. Sidenote: we call solid state storage devices "hard drives" because they are physically hard, as opposed to flexible, which was the most widespread non-volatile mass storage technology before drives where the medium was hard metal disks. Flexible plastic disks with rust on them gave way to hard disks with rust on them, which gave way to hard slabs of melted sand. Why a mechanical box with a whirling plastic disk in it would be called a "drive" is the big mystery to me. I get the "floppy" vs. "hard" thing. But "drive?" What is it driving? Container, tank, cache, box, locker, these are all terms for storing things. Now we're stuck with a plastic-encased bit of silicon being called a "drive." It goes back at least as far as paper tape.

So....you decided to try letting it expire and see what happened. You knew ahead of time that use of the program requires an activation that expires unless you refresh it, and you let it expire, and were totally surprised that there were negative consequences. As far as there being no warning that saving is disabled once activation expires, that information is all over the forum that you've used to complain about it. If you start the program in non-activated mode, this is prominently indicated on the Tools Module, which is the most used Control Bar module other than the Transport. The current version of the software does start warning the user as the re-validation date approaches. Of course, you have to run the program to get the advance warning, you can't just install it, wait 7 months, then start it up and have it work without first connecting and re-activating. Cakewalk is licensed under a free subscription, like Tape Op and other trade publications. You don't have to pay any money for it, but you do have to re-verify every so often. With Tape Op, it's a year. With Cakewalk, it's 6 months. It's not "free software," where you don't need to give any consideration at all in order to use it, you have to create an account with BandLab and at least every 6 months connect your system to the internet and log in to BandLab's site with a browser that's compatible with it. If that is beyond what someone is willing or able to do, they should choose another program. I have declined "free" software when I've decided that there are too many constraints or hoops to jump through. Not because I was "scared," but because there are many available options and everything has a cost:benefit ratio. Accept one of Waves' freebie licenses, you will be required to create an account with a valid email address, through which you will be bombarded to the end of days with offers to purchase more of their products, license extensions, subscriptions, etc. It's all in the game.

Unless they become part of the YLIP.