Starship Krupa

6 hours ago, Craig Anderton said:

First of all, I'm glad you enjoy the book! As to the status of an update, unfortunately that won't happen unless BandLab gets behind it in some way (putting it in a Cakewalk Store, advertising it in the magazines they own, or whatever). Books take a lot of effort, and if they don't sell at least several hundred copies a year, they're not worth doing. Although it sold very well back in the day when Cakewalk put it in their newsletters and such, it's only sold about 8 copies in the last year. But you never know - I hope that someday, BandLab will open a Cakewalk Store

As I've mentioned before, Craig, I bought my first Craig Anderton book in 1982 and it literally started my career in electronics (first project: Tube Sound Fuzz, which I still have around somewhere). Which eventually led to me having my own stompbox company 20 years later when the boutique boom started (I still have parts purchased at Mike Quinn's!). I have a lot to thank you for. I'll start recommending your book more to newbies. There are so many things in there that aren't covered in the Ref. Guide.

I hear ya about the marketing frustration. I would love to be able to buy official Cakewalk t-shirts and stickers (for my laptop lid of course). Which are, of course, great advertising in and of themselves. Even just setting up a Zazzle store would be great. Takes less than an hour and you kick back and collect the earnings.

I suppose it's the price we pay for the awesome developer-driven path Cakewalk is now on. Bandlab having hired the cream of the engineering staff but none of the marketing staff. ?

It seems like all Bandlab do to promote Cakewalk is give the bakers rein to keep making it a better program, which is AWESOME for people who are already hip to it, but not so great for getting the word out. Such a mystery why they don't do any of the things you mention which seem simple. Publishing music magazines and not advertising your own products in them seems so odd. Noel himself maintains the KVR page. Just having someone on an intern level to do a newsletter or whatever.

It's a pity this person seems to have disappeared after one single teaser post back in April (this was their only message on the entire forum). They even influenced the round buttons for Yellow Submarine and EVA 01.

I wouldn't hold out much hope of ever seeing this one released to the public. If you want the round buttons, you'll find them on EVA 01 or Yellow Submarine.

They're also of course swipeable, just like any theme element.?

On 9/3/2021 at 1:37 PM, Craig Anderton said:

There's also a workflow tip about using them on page 77 of The Huge Book of Cakewalk by BandLab Tips.

Finally belatedly pulled the trigger on the book, and within 5 minutes, mind blown.

This is from someone who has been using Cakewalk almost daily for 3 1/2 years.

I'd love to see an update or addendum with the Arranger Track and Articulation Maps.

Only when I have View/Display/Show Muted Takes in Parent Track turned off.

The clip isn't getting deleted, it just doesn't show up in the "comp clip" anymore. Open your take lanes and you'll probably see it.

I tried opening library.db in DB Browser, did some searches, and there are categories in Cakewalk that don't show up in library.db, so I suspect that they are stored in some other location. Either that or my searches were faulty somehow, but I spent some time with it.

23 hours ago, Nich0las said:

There does not seem to be a way to drop them into Take Lanes.

There is.

The way I would go about this is  to create 12 tracks. Within each of these tracks, create 3 empty take lanes. Then drag and drop the files one by one onto the appropriate take lanes.

After this, select the 12 clips from the first take and group them, then same with the second and third takes.

At that point, the comping may commence.

(Save early and often; Ctrl-Z is your friend)

I voted for Cakewalk in Favorite Audio Software and Favorite DAW, because as we know from the tinfoil hat brigade, Cakewalk isn't REALLY freeware, because you have to register an account at Bandlab and connect to the Internet every 6 months blah blah blah. ?

But yeah, excluding free software from the DAW categories, and "ghettoizing" other categories by having separate (but equal) ones for freeware is lame.

I just ignored the guidelines. If they get lots of votes for freeware in other categories, even if they don't report them, it at least sends a message. Which may be that users of freeware don't bother to read the rules. ?

On 9/6/2021 at 9:47 AM, Will_Kaydo said:

its not necessary to have a multidock to open these normal. Almost like a ghost/phantom multidock behind the scenes. The extra bar at the bottom looks unattractive and taking space. 

You are aware that you can drag tabs out of the Multidock? Unless you mean that you'd like a way to open these windows without having to do that.

On 9/6/2021 at 9:15 AM, Kevin Perry said:

They are actually ones I've added (I assumed Ctrl-F4 was there by default as it's the standard for closing tabs in an MDI application), but they do work once so added (when docked into the multidock).   I think I probably added them because it annoyed me I couldn't close them easily!  Annoyingly, you need to add them to every view that you're going to dock.

The panes that pain me are Help, Synth Rack, and (less often) Browser. This is mostly only for when I'm working on my 15" laptop, where real estate is dear.

My 6th custom Cakewalk theme has shipped: Racing Green fans, I introduce to you another one along the same lines, a truly dark theme except blue in the places where Racing Green is green.

Like Racing Green, selected clip backgrounds are black for greater event visibility.

Midnight Blue:

On 4/16/2021 at 12:21 AM, Kevin Perry said:

Doesn't CAL use RPN which Forth also used?

On 4/16/2021 at 1:55 AM, msmcleod said:

Yes is does, but then so did old HP calculators.

Ah, RPN calculators. They were my first introduction to the way (many) engineers think about things vs. regular people. It was 35 years ago, when HP still made them, of course, and I was just getting started in the hardware electronics industry (incl. Orban and Nady).

I was (among other duties) a draftsman, and one day I needed a calculator to perform some simple multiplication and trig problems, and had left my trusty TI-30 at home.

I asked an engineer friend if I could borrow a calculator and he handed me his HP. Imagine my surprise. I brought it back to him and told him I had no idea how to get any useful results out of the thing. He swore up and down to the Earth and stars that HP calculators with RPN were "way better" than TI's with their algebraic entry.

I was bemused for years about this, and similar exchanges took place between me and other engineers. Finally, an engineer colleague, upon my asking him why engineers would think that calculators with input systems that were impossible for at least 99% of the population to grasp were "better" than ones that almost any grade schooler could get results from. He explained what I had suspected, that for figuring out certain things (I think he referred to calculus), they kicked butt, but you also had to first have an understanding of the advanced math they were made for. I still can't get my head around "base 8." A friend of mine who became a nuclear power teaching engineer for the US Navy gave me a way to get myself through the tests by counting on my fingers, I think.

This whole thing helped me a great deal in most of the disciplines I entered after that. It helped me as a software QA engineer dealing with programmers, with electronics engineers dealing with them, as a musician dealing with differences in taste between me and other musicians, all over the place.

With a lot of things, due to the great variety of people and their great variety of needs, there is no "best" or sometimes even "better." There are people with a variety of needs and there is a variety of solutions.

As much as I dig Cakewalk, I might not recommend it to a young person who wants to learn how to produce EDM. Ableton Live! or FL Studio might be better, if they could afford them. Obviously, if someone wants to work on the Mac platform, Cakewalk is not in the picture at all, and they have access to Garage Band.

Best Audio And MIDI Software: KVR Readers' Choice Awards 2021.

(and or other software, depending on your preferences)

I suspect it's just that their commerce server is overloaded due to the initial rush. I got the blank screen when I tried to go to my cart for checkout. If prior purchase or some other condition had not been met, I should think I would get an error message.

I mean, a €1210.00 processor for free?? Imagine the fortunes we shall all make once the giveaway is finished and we flip our licenses on KVR.

On 9/3/2021 at 10:19 AM, abacab said:

risk getting lost in the endless pile of cool random sounds

Despite having over a dozen A|A|S soundpacks and loving the sound, I only have the "Session" bundle. I only wish there were some way in A|A|S Player to "star" favorite patches. I have been knee deep in creating a massive, evocative soundscape and unable to locate the Chromophone patch that sounded so amazing.

The soundpacks done for Chromophone are my favorites, so if I were to buy one of their synths, that would be the first.

Everything they do sounds like a million bucks, but what's up with the GUI's that take 5 seconds to appear the first time, longer than it takes Cakewalk to start?

Yay, another Unfiltered Audio effect. One of my favorite plug-in houses.

43 minutes ago, Kevin Perry said:

Does Ctrl-F4/Ctrl-W not work?

Not when it's docked. What I want is not to have to float a window in order to banish it.

As it is, in order to completely get rid of a view, one must undock it, then click on the "X" to banish it.

I would like to be able to completely close, not just minimize, panes/views from the Docking Options menu:

Other essential (to me) PA plug-ins:

Millennia NSEQ-2 EQ rules the school as a knobby M/S EQ.

Lindell TE-100 is a new favorite character EQ. Does certain tricks to bass similar to a Pultec, also can add air and many other tricks. If you haven't tried it, install the trial and mess about with the presets (yes, happy day, it's one of those VST3 unicorns that comes with presets).

Unfiltered Audio G8 is my favorite general purpose gate. Crazy amount of features, and the rolling display helps dial it in better than anything else I've tried. Also, if you're into glitching and mangling type sound design, Sandman Pro, Fault, SpecOps,and of course BYOME/TRIAD. Collect 'em all.

Also, a tip for PA plug-ins that don't do their own preset management: look in the "VST3" menu. Most of them come with a couple dozen presets.

4 hours ago, Bapu said:

Got the mpressor for 2999

Well done, Eduardo. Worth every penny of that. When I ran the trial I did a shootout on drums against my (former) favorite compressors and it handily mopped the floor with them on snare and kick. Ended my search for the perfect dbx 165 clone. Maybe because mpressor can do the fast times and feed forward modes, but whatever, it's better than any dbx 165 clone I've tried.

It (and my new favorite bus compressor bundle, elysia alpha) can look intimidating at first due to all the knobs, but whatever you don't want or can't grasp right away, you can just switch those modules off and stick to ratio, attack, release and threshold, and fiddle with the other stuff later.

There are some sweet deals in that sale, especially for the bundles.

I did not use it. I only tried to use it the evening of the 31st, when the checkout told me that it wasn't valid. Despite contacting them and first getting a "tough luck" reply, then getting the email that we all apparently did about the reset, I still get the error message.

Okay, I got the email about my August $25 voucher being "reset" and that it "allows [me] to get the best deals during [their] current 'Any Sale.'"

I am not that wound up about this whole thing, but I would like to snag TRIAD for $15 cash if I can.

Thing is, apparently my voucher didn't get reset or something because when I try to apply it to anything, even without first using ANY-3999, I still get the "voucher is invalid" message.

You all have been successfully stacking the ANY vouchers and your $25 ones, right? I just contacted them, but it's the weekend and I imagine I'll get a message on Monday saying that my voucher has expired AGAIN.

5 hours ago, Bill Phillips said:

What is the keyboard shortcut that "fits the project horizontally without expanding track height?" I can't find it in the documentation or in Keyboard Shortcuts.

Ctrl-Alt-F

This was my very first feature request, over 3 years ago, and I wear shiny spots on those keys.

I think I get it: you save and exit with your windows arranged a certain way (undocked) and when you come back and reopen the project, they are back in the dock. Like there's a phantom screenset being applied.

Yes, zooming in Cakewalk has improved, especially with my favorite command, the one that fits the project horizontally without expanding track height. How I would love to have that in the Piano Roll. But it's still touchier than in most programs, it just seems fidgety, like I can't keep it centered. Improved, but still fidgety.

I think the matter of vertical real estate, with lanes opened and closed, will get better under my control if I can manage to learn the keystrokes and so forth to close all lanes and the like. My poor brain can only seem to handle learning a few keystrokes at a time, so it's been slow.

22 hours ago, Kevin Perry said:

"healing" clips often results in more splits elsewhere, leading to an even bigger morass

Right? There are any number of slips with the mouse that can happen when dragging across multiple clips. Unwanted moves, fades, whatever, if your Smart Tool happens to grab a hotspot.

The way I look at it is pretty simple: classic boards have a certain character, whereas most current audio interfaces are designed to sound as clear and neutral as possible. Virtual instruments, especially orchestral and piano, are also usually designed to sound as pristine as possible. The sound comes in as clearly as possible to let the mix engineer add character to it with whatever tools they have.

Console emulators are supposed to add the character of various classic mixing desks' input and preamp circuits. Inputs on classic boards were sometimes included transformers, which in my opinion, sound really sweet.

If you want your stuff to sound like you recorded or mixed it using a classic console, a good console emulator will help get you there.

Something to remember, though, those old boards were also designed to sound as clear as possible, so the effect is probably going to be subtle.