Starship Krupa

Be careful. There have been reports of an odd grinding noise that some have said resembles the sound of Delia Derbyshire scraping a guitar plectrum across the bass strings of a piano.

I would discourage taking this viewpoint. The company to which @David Baay submitted that bug report hasn't even existed for the past 3 1/2 years. In that time, the entire staff was laid off, then some of the engineers got re-hired by a new company to continue development of a new product based on the SONAR code. Since then, new development staff has even been added directly from the Cakewalk user base. So a new organization, with visibly different priorities. Even if to us, who are using a program that looks pretty much like the old one, it's the same user experience continued. Something that was tabled as low priority in the Gibson years might be a bigger deal in these better days of BandLab, so take a few minutes and submit it. Worst that can happen is nothing. I understand the frustration of going to the trouble of submitting a good report and having it seemingly shrugged off. Believe me I do. But things are different now, and the current dev team seem to take a lot of pride in the number of longtime bugs they've fixed. They'd probably like to fix some more. Even if the old bug database survived the transition intact, there can be an assumption that if an issue has been sitting there for 5 years, it's probably not ruining everyone's day. So a ping about these old things might be in order.

Definitely not expected behavior, so it might be a nice thing to submit the project to the devs with instructions on how to reproduce the issue.

Ecclesiastes 1:9 "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun." The Buggles "There's no technology to make up a song." When I was born in 1961, the musical entertainment industry was ruled by singers who were told by their handlers what to record and perform, these "A&R men" as they were called at the time controlled every aspect, hiring the musicians, choosing the studio, choosing the songs, hiring the arranger(s). There was no assumed correlation between being a great singer/performer and songwriting or even musical ability beyond voice. If the performers managed to become successful enough to exert leverage, they could negotiate choosing their own repertoire Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland and Elvis Presley had supreme mastery of one instrument, which was voice. All of them could sit down at a piano and make it work, but virtuosos none. Sinatra and Garland never (to my knowledge) wrote a note. They hired the people who were the best at it. Presley has songwriting credits, but his manager was famous for buying songs outright and including the clause that the writers would give all credit to Presley, so who knows how much he actually came up with. Nobody gave a crap about where the particular input came from, good singing was good singing and the writing and arranging and playing was good and it didn't have to all be the same person doing it. My favorite pair-up from this era is probably Sinatra and Gordon Jenkins with all the great songs on September of My Years. I'm oversimplifying the evolution and leaving out but when the massive boom of teenaged kids came along, they got interested in music that "spoke" to the experience of being a teenager, with the usual feelings of confusion, anger, rebellion, and aimlessness. Jazz, Blues, and their descendant, Rock then came to the forefront and elbowed everything else out, became "the music industry." The kids wanted to see young-looking people who wrote songs and played instruments. Bob Dylan, who wrote lyrics vague enough that you could make them take on a meaning personal to the listener. The Beatles, who started out being very direct, then started listening to Dylan and adopted his lyric sense. All this started to be considered "authenticity," and artists who happened not to also be songwriters were considered somehow less authentic. There were plenty of artists in this rock era who still operated in the earlier fashion, but they've been relegated in music history (see Three Dog Night). The discussion we're into now is shot through with our (I have them, too) ingrained prejudices about "authenticity." The thing is, as Pink Floyd pointed out " It's alright we told you what to dream. You dreamed of a big star. He played a mean guitar...." The image and presentation of these rebellious rock heroes was just as crafted as that of the artists who preceded them, maybe more so because "authenticity" is more difficult to fabricate and maintain. Brian Epstein took the leather-jacketed rockabilly ***** Beatles and gave them the ***** eye for the straight guy makeover, early 60's London style. Cute moptop haircuts, tailored collarless suits. 50-odd years later, my favorite pair of shoes is my Chelsea boots, the style that Epstein customized to turn into the famous Beatle Boot. Their iconic drummer, who has probably inspired millions to take up the instrument (including me) was replaced on their first couple big label sessions. (NOT by Bernard Purdie) Dua Lipa's job is to be the best singer and dancer she can be, and presumably to be smart about hiring the other talent (or she's hired a smart person who can do that). It's not her job to write lyrics and music or learn how operate any part of the studio other than the mic. More power to her if she does. The songwriting credits is because musician/producer/songwriter A has a cool set of changes, m/p/s B comes up with an awesome breakdown (I have two songs right now that have been waiting for months for my 60-year-old brain to come up with breakdowns), m/p/s C has a great suggestion for a bridge, the lyrics may have multiple authors, etc. Also, songwriter credits are often given out as pure compensation these days (which is not new either) because there's no other mechanism for people in certain critical roles to get paid. It's like actors and crew taking "points" on a film in lieu of cash payment. It also helps them get work with other artists. So if you're capping on multiple people getting songwriter credits, you might be capping on hardworking/talented people getting compensated. The thing is, it's hard work to make money in music these days, and it takes a lot of people to put together a package that the masses are going to like. In the past, the multiple people involved in recordings got onetime payouts as "work for hire." Session players who had more musical chops than the artists they were backing would come up with hooks and melodies during the sessions that made the songs (see Carole Kaye on "California Girls"), pick up their check for a few hundy and be pleased when they heard themselves on million-selling singles. Clare Torry improvised for the length of a song over a set of chord changes on Dark Side of the Moon and got paid 30 pounds. There is no "The Great Gig in the Sky" without her performance. She had to fight for a writing credit and royalties, and only got it 30 years later. (interesting story: she did her thing, the band and Parsons were awed into near silence, and she figured that their lack of spoken approval meant that she had botched the gig) One more thing: about whatever good old days we may be comparing today's pop music to, our brains tend to filter out things that we didn't like from the past because, hey why hang on to "Havin' My Baby," "You Light Up My Life," and "Muskrat Love?" But those hits from my childhood sold way way way more than anything put out by Thin Lizzy, Cheap Trick, or Pink Floyd. They even beat Fleetwood Mac in terms of sales of a single. I've noticed a musical cognitive error of comparing today's mainstream to the underground of our youth. Sure, cognoscenti music from 50 years ago sounds better than bubblegum pop of today, but there was bubblegum pop 50 years ago that sucked just as bad. And there's plenty of great new music out there today for those who aren't too lazy to dig it up. 40 years ago I was putting effort into digging up great obscure cognoscenti music, ordering Japanese imports of stuff you couldn't get in the states, etc.. Singles? Nothing under 12" thanks. If I turn on some TV awards show and the wind-up doll singer-dancers look like a joke compared to my favorites from back then, well, TV awards shows have always been like that and likely always will. Now, I can go on Bandcamp and be overwhelmed by the amount of great music currently being produced. South American Acid Cumbia, anyone? There's too much of it for me to take in! An overload of excellent, innovative, wildly creative music in so many genres.

I've been doing some pretty deep diving into images and backgrounds for the next release of my themes and I've run into a couple of images that I can't find either in Theme Editor or TYLIP. I'm getting my themes to the point where there are few elements that have been left to default due to not wanting to go to the trouble. Almost everything that's on the screens is stuff that I've either changed or examined. Unfortunately, it looks like there are a few pretty prominent fixed elements. As follows, in Track View and Inspectors/Arpeggiator: The background images for Vel, Swing, Dur, Pitch, Flam, Volume, Pan and Vel + (as well as Send Level, Send Pan and Key + but not Time + for who knows what reason) seem like they are going to have to stay chocolate brown. This is a drag if you're trying to use a nice dark black for high legibility. The only similarity I can see is that these are the only track controls where the user clicks and drags horizontally to change the values. The other (themeable) items are buttons or a secondary menu pops out. It is an undertaking to make such extensive changes, juggling color choices with the limited options. Yeah, I'd love to color more things royal purple in the EVA 01 themes, but it's tough to keep a color just where you want it. I found I needed to let the green and orange dominate for legibility, same with the dark black.

I like those knobs and processor skins. The +/- 3dB lines are also a great idea given how many tutorials give that number as a starting point for cuts and boosts. As far as the knob highlight colors, I like to stick to no more than 3 (4 if you count the neutral value background) colors in a theme. Background, Accent, Highlight. I like coherency among the different elements where I can enhance it. A different goal could be to make individual elements stand out from each other, which looks like the direction you're going with this. It's fun, like having more toys to play with. (Racing Green is my attempt to take coherency as far as practical without looking boring. Months after first issuing it I'm still finding things I want to turn green. With EVA 01 the challenge is to spread the theme colors around in a way that makes visual and functional sense. Racing Green is built for speed and function, EVA 01 is more for eye candy and to create excitement) So I would choose the theme's own contrast color(s), which in yours, seems like Tungsten orange is the highlight color. Tungsten also uses a lighter yellow for its loop markers, so if you want to emphasize that more as a highlight color, it could be fair game. Something bright to show off those knobs. Also, I really like a color for Alternate Text #2 other than plain white. Maybe the orange or yellow? Same for the Browser text. Do you have a name for it? Something-Console or Channel would be my suggestion, to give a hint that so much work has gone into the look of the ProChannel modules.

The entity with whom you had the contract, the Cakewalk division of Gibson Brands, no longer exists. However, you are entitled to continue to use SONAR, it doesn't require any reactivation. The core program and plethora of add-ons that you paid for should continue to function just as they did when you bought your license. Cakewalk by BandLab is licensed under a completely new and different licensing agreement. It's a free subscription that requires contacting BandLab's server once every 6 months to re-subscribe. BandLab is not affiliated with Gibson Brands or the defunct Cakewalk company. It bought some of the liquidated assets including the code for Cakewalk's old SONAR program and has now issued it under the name Cakewalk by BandLab. It has nothing to do with SONAR except for being still mostly derived from the old SONAR code and being compatible with SONAR projects and workflow. You have the choice to use SONAR under the old license terms or Cakewalk under the new license terms or even switch back and forth between both of them (if you take care to avoid certain Cakewalk by BandLab features that never existed in SONAR). Cakewalk will utilize the extra software and content that came with SONAR. There is no conflict legally or technologically.

On this forum?? I guess I was lucky enough to have missed that....or I already have the user blocked. ? As I've said previously, if having to authenticate once every 6 months is too high a price, then there are many other DAW's, probably even a couple that don't contact their home servers every time they start. We are blessed with so many alternatives. One thing that's great about the new BandLab integration feature is that CbB doesn't force the user to use or even notice it. It exists in the release notes and as two menu items under File (like the LANDR integration that used to be in SONAR that was a menu item under Utilities).

The theme creators in the UI Themes subforum are pretty diligent about updating our themes and putting that in the topics of the posts that link to our themes, so you had to browse past at least two dozen updated themes to find one that wasn't updated. The updated themes will have threads that have been bumped to near the top or state outright that they are 2021.04 compliant. If you still have an archive copy of your customized Tungsten theme, it's the work of a few minutes to export your Record Arm button image and then re-import it back into a stock Tungsten theme. Perhaps I don't understand what your issue is, Like Colin, I don't see how it could be made clearer or less ambiguous that a given track is armed. The button turns red in both Mercury and Tungsten. That's been an industry standard for over half a century, going back to the tape days. As a matter of fact, the MSR (RW*A) buttons are some of the few images still left unchanged in my own themes. I figured they were standard and should be left alone. Also, you definitely should not have been getting the "invalid theme" message just because you had a non-updated theme sitting in your Cakewalk Themes folder. One thing I found out the hard way is that I can't just rename a theme in Explorer, if I want to change its filename I need to open it in Theme Editor and save it with the new name. If I don't do it that way, Cakewalk gets confused about which theme is which.

I'm in agreement with you: what is the "Instrument Tracks" selection on there for if you can't have it checked, uncheck the other two types, and still have Instrument Track strips showing? Mostly, I don't need MIDI strips in the Console. I use the Console for mixing, and any fancy MIDI stuff, I open the Inspector and do it there. I no longer use Simple Instrument Tracks, but if I did, I'd feel kinda frustrated that I couldn't use that menu to get only my Audio and Synth/Instrument strips to show up, the strips I actually use for mixing. I brought this up years ago and it was explained to me that since "Instrument Tracks" (not "Synth Tracks") are a combination of a MIDI track and a Synth track, hiding MIDI tracks must hide Instrument Tracks. At this point, I still think at least the nomenclature should be changed to reflect what the selections actually do: "Instrument" should be "Synth." So the user will at least be able to understand what these checkmarks do.

I have seen this in the past but unfortunately can't remember what conditions or solutions were involved. I think maybe it just happened, then stopped happening as it is with your system. Sorry I don't have more.

Another thing, especially for those like @treesha who are getting the message that the installer is corrupt, open Windows Explorer, right click on your C drive, select Properties, click on the Tools tab and then click on Error Checking. This will scan your drive for corruption. It may be going bad or you may have something wrong with the file system.

As you know, I'm sympathetic to people who get started with onboard sound. I still want to perform the experiment of recording an entire audio project by running the output of my Yamaha mixer to the line in on my laptop just to see how it goes. As you point out, if someone's doing electronic type music with MIDI and samples, they don't really need to invest in an external interface (put the money into a good set of cans first!). I'm such a geek that I downloaded and read Realtek's datasheets on their hardware CODEC. They'd have us believe that they've been working on it like it's the cure for cancer. There are many features like S/PDIF that every current Realtek chip can do that just aren't used by the people who design them into their motherboards. Based on that, I suspect that in current systems the noise floor issue might be more down to the motherboard manufacturers' implementation than something inherent to Realtek's CODEC. Still, it's not like we can go in and change anything. Love to have access to that S/PDIF, though. Can you imagine being able to connect an external A/D directly to your laptop without going through USB? I've long suspected that the other interface manufacturers are paying off Realtek to keep them from coming up with a functioning ASIO driver. It's certainly not like they haven't had enough time.? To anyone reading this, I too can start getting the "hit Play and instant dropout" if I run Cakewalk in WASAPI Shared vs. Exclusive. It's also essential to launch the Sound applet in Control Panel and make sure that Properties/Advanced for your output device has both Exclusive Mode boxes checked.

Interesting metaphor. I'd speculate that for those of you fortunate enough to have the Platinum suite, maybe it's like having an earlier loaded model of a car you keep around so that you can salvage parts from it. ? I sure wouldn't mind having that Cakewalk LP Multiband EQ around to play with. It's too bad that I can't pick up some Studio One convert's used Platinum license to pull parts from!

John's video is pretty comprehensive. I have another method to add. That is to put a gain knob plug-in in the FX rack. My favorite is BL Gain, which is free and comes in different flavors depending on how much gain you want to be able to add. I stick with the 12dB version. Kilohearts also have a simple one that comes with their package of free FX. The utilities he mentions, SPAN and Youlean Loudness Meter, have counterparts in the Meldaproduction FreeFX Bundle (which comes with 35 other useful FX and utilities). I'm also fond of TBProAudio dpMeter. We're blessed with so many free loudness meters it's good to try different ones to find which one gives you the easiest to interpret results.

Michael, Ed, I'm curious how these compare to industry fave headphones like ATH-M50, Sennheiser HD280, Superlux 681, etc. If you have experience with those. I'm big on detail and soundstage. The M50's are the best I've heard at that. I also have the same $10 Sony cans that Paolo uses, surprisingly not bad for a dime if you want some lightweight on-ears. If you get the impression I'm a headphone 'ho, that's....not inaccurate. All the way back to many hours spent with The Moody Blues in my teens. P.S. If I'm ever called upon to come up with a brand name for a line of cymbals, "Status" is my first choice.

If you're in doubt, it's easy enough to create a BandLab account for your singer and use that account to install and authenticate Cakewalk. It's still your computer, but the software itself is registered to your partner. 100% within the license terms as I understand them: BandLab don't care who owns the computer, rather it's who has the license subscription for the program and is using it. Why do they care? As stated from on high, they just want to know how many people are using the program in their own studios/home studios/coffee houses etc. At the minimum, the software needs to check in once every 6 months. They also want to keep us informed about the current build. We're not forced to update to it, but they want us to know if there is a newer release. That said, I'm pretty sure that there's no mechanism for them to detect that 2 installations registered to the same user are in use at the same time. So no software police will be knocking on your virtual door. But playing by their rules costs nothing and is a nice gesture to those who are providing this for no charge.

I'm currently working with the trial version of Stutter Edit 2, thinking of picking it up in the iZotope Community Appreciation Bundle. I love it, it's something I've been looking for, as long as it works. But I've been running into issues where parts of the UI become unresponsive and I have to remove it and put it on the track again to get it to start working again. iZotope explicitly say that it's compatible with CbB, so I'm wondering whether this is something to do with the fact that I'm running it in trial mode or if there's some other issue. If you're using SE2 with Cakewalk, please chime in.

You get Stutter Edit 2 in that Community Appreciation Bundle.

Hmmm, thinking about TRIAD over here....

Ah, found it:

Which is of course the usual state of things during rendering, when we need the processor clock the most. I'll see if I can find Pete Brown's guide to Windows system optimization for DAW use. Pete is our resident Microsoft employee.

It seems more that the days of widespread forum participation are slowly passing away. I do wonder, though, these youngsters who consider forums to be an outdated form of community information exchange, what platform(s) are they using in place of them? Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, there's nothing that I've seen that can touch the encyclopedic density of persistent information that a forum generates (which the young ones also benefit from via Google searches). As far as I know, I can't topic search a Facebook Group. Nor a YouTube comments section (I notice that YouTube added a "community" tab to channels that functions more like....a forum). Reddit discussions seem to have a much shorter half-life than in a forum. Besides the ease of information access, there's the sense of community that's like walking into a favorite cafe where you've gotten to know the regulars. I guess since I started out as a BBSer 30-odd years ago and still have IRL friends from those days, I'm pretty used to threaded message communities. FIDOnet, then usenet after that. For anyone concerned about Cakewalk attracting a younger user base outside of this forum, check out the views counts on X.E.L. Ohh's YouTube channel. His tips on Piano Roll View got10,000 views, his one on using Graillon in CbB got 27,000, how to record vocals 16,000, and weirdly enough his video on making a beat using only TTS-1 got 4,300 views. He has 3,000 subscribers, which isn't exactly Rick Beato territory, but that's 3,000 people who want to know whenever he drops another tutorial. Another YouTuber is Mike of Creative Sauce, whose CbB videos draw in the tens of thousands, and his Cakewalk Basics video has drawn almost 250,000 views. I don't know (and don't really care) how those numbers stack up against, say, people who do Cubase tutorials, but I like the idea of a quarter of a million people watching a video about how to use Cakewalk. BandLab sure don't seem to be throwing money at advertising, the budget looks to be going to pay developers, which is fine with me. REAPER looks to have a solid place in the market based on being a quality product at a low price, and I think they've relied on word of mouth (to a fault at times).

How nice that I didn't notice that, due to the diligent efforts of the development team. 3 years ago I would have spotted it very quickly.

Your best bet at this point is probably to revert to the earlier version. For future reference, normalization is best applied at the beginning of the mixing and editing process. I never use it myself, I prefer just cranking up the Gain knob on any tracks that were recorded at a low level. Also of course, in addition to duping tracks to try things out, Save As is your friend, as well as possibly enabling versioning in Preferences. I try to remember to Save As before making any big moves, especially on a mix that's nearing completion (completion, HA).