Starship Krupa

Been saying this for a long time: have separate email addresses for software purchases/downloading and for security-critical sites such as financial institutions, insurance, etc. They're still free at yahoo.com, and they even let you create multiple addresses for the same Yahoo account, so you don't have to hassle with different logins (or messina for that matter). This isn't because small plug-in houses are likely to swipe your info, it's because (as you say) their security is softer. One of the reasons that it seems like large institutions are the only targets is that hacks against credit reporting agencies and so forth get reported and hacks on Audio Masterclass don't. Another thing: if you can, use a unique password at every site. There are various ways of accomplishing this without the need to memorize dozens of passwords. Even if you just use the form mypassword*plug-ins or mypassword&banking or whatever, mix it up. This will go a long way toward thwarting dictionary attacks and social engineering attacks (fans of Mr. Robot have seen Elliot successfully use social engineering hacks to pwn everyone).

I will vouch for the usefulness of Fender Tune. Even the free version has a library of fun alternate tunings, like "Raga."

The default mousewheel behavior is to zoom tracks horizontally, if you have something similar to a Logitech Marathon with the super fast wheel turned on, it will zoom very quickly.

Another heads-up: I'm not an iLok hater, although I see no advantage to using it with iZotope products; even if I'm taking a project to another studio, they're probably going to have the same iZotope plug-ins that I do anyway. I have 4 computers, so their multiple seat licensing works great here at home. I decided to finally buy a used iLok dongle in order to be able to use certain licenses on my extra, third system. Unfortunately, I bought an original iLok thinking that the only difference was capacity, and it's now possible for companies to make their plug-ins require an iLok 2 (or PACE driver), so two of my most important iLok'd plug-ins, Phoenix Stereo Reverb and Excalibur (both iZotope, both single seat licenses) don't work with my iLok.

Thing is, I'm pretty much okay with how Drum Maps work once they're set up. The drum names show up over on the left, they don't disappear after you close the project, and unlike doing it the "note names" way, they don't usurp the note names for other MIDI tracks you may wish to edit. It's the obscurity/hassle/complexity/uncertain results I'd like to see reduced.

I don't have a "worst" purchase to share, but I got slightly "chumped" on one of my favorite purchases, Sandman Pro. In late November I remembered the $25 voucher I had for them from filling out a survey, minimum purchase $39. Since I'm getting more into in-the-box glitchy weirdness, I downloaded the trial for Sandman Pro/Instant Delay and it was love at first mix. $49, but I figured with a 15-day trial and all the sales coming up I would sit tight, worst case scenario it never goes on sale and I drop $25 on it. Sat out the "most plug-ins $29" sale, then a few of their subsequent ones where they were putting selected products on deep discount. Finally decided to just say the heck with it, Unfiltered aren't participating in the Dec. sales, my voucher expires on the 30th, so $24 for a pair of insanely great tools it is. Christmas comes and goes, and I get a no-minimum voucher for $20 and Sandman Pro drops to $19.99, making it effectively free. No skin off any body part, I paid the price of a trip for 2 to Burger King (or half the price of discount admission to Six Flags Marine World) to be able to use a great tool for 3 weeks, and I got Fault for free instead (oh did BYOME call to me). Still, worst deal on a favorite plug-in. But considering that I got enough plug-ins for free (Including the $29 Fault) this year that I will be literally unable to explore all of them as long as I live, I'm fine with supporting one of my favorite manufacturers. Now I hope that they don't renew that dang voucher code again so I don't have to struggle over whether to get BYOME....

Also access to the reverb parameter either via knob or automation. Their reverb algorithm is fantastic, but the presets tend to drench the sound in it. It was fun to go through Arturia's free pack of "ambient" sounds (and thanks to you, mate, for listing all the free packs) and hear the classic ambient synth sounds without all the modulation and reverb that those sounds are usually draped in. The silliest fun may be had in the Present to Future pack, where they nail a bunch of synth sounds from classic songs.

I mentioned this in passing earlier. There is even another way to get the drum names showing, which is to use alternate note names. Unfortunately just now that functionality is a bit broken inasmuch as applying those note names is not persistent across closing and opening the PRV. That's what led to this most recent match with the drum map demon. The other DAW's I've used also put the two things under one feature called "drum maps." If you want to see your drum names in Mixcraft, you use a drum map. If you want to do the MIDI note and port remapping, you use a drum map for that, too. I mostly just want to see instrument/note names, but of course I want to have the other part of the feature available. The instrument names part is why I think there should be access to the feature from the PRV/Drum Pane. If all you want is to see the drum names, it can be a heck of a lot of bother to go through. All I wanted was drum names and I wound up with a spurious patch/bank message in there somewhere.

I may have been thinking of some ProChannel panel images. There must be something, it's a dark theme and you are the Dark sth lord. I'll special thanks for anything I cop. It's a unique enough theme that at this point it's not even "inspired" by anything other than me looking at Tungsten and thinking that I'd like to have one where everything is green instead of orange and blue. Later on some brown crept in around window borders. It's started reminding me of a 1960's Jaguar sports car, so I'm going to call it Racing Green. I thought I had it almost ready then (and I'm sure I'm not the first one who's done this) noticed that there was still a pocket of images that I hadn't converted to my theme color (green). I also want to change some button state images; that's one that can get mixed up when putting hundreds of images through the hue-changer into the wee hours of the morn.

I actually have no plans at this time to use any; I think there's all of one image in my theme that I'm copying as-is and it's from Colin 'cause he made the browser folders tan like real life folders and I like his browser icons for VST3's. Both of these design elements happen to be in the same image. I'll credit him.

I use both Home and Pro, but like others, only because my laptop is a corporate hand-me-down that had Windows 7 Pro on it when the upgrade came around. There is nothing, including the "advanced" settings (such as disabling real time malware scanning), that I can do with Pro that I can't do with Home. It took some finagling to enable the more advanced settings on the Home systems, but it is possible. The few that exist are just not enabled by default, and they have little to do with DAW performance except for my disabling of realtime malware scanning, which most people are afraid of doing anyway. Microsoft have even given Home users greater ability to defer updates, so I wouldn't worry about that.

There are several available in the thread below, and I second Meldaproduction Monastery Grand as an excellent option. Freebie Sampletank 4 SE also comes with an excellent sampled grand. https://discuss.cakewalk.com/index.php?/topic/5229-freeware-instruments-thread/

Welcome. What you're likely running into is that first, while even low end Yamaha keyboards have excellent built-in sounds, TTS-1 dates back a lot longer than 16 years. The default piano sound in TTS-1 is....a lackluster mono thing. Fortunately, you can easily change to one of the other piano sounds in it, and things improve. Just switch the sound to Piano 1 st. and you'll get a stereo sound. An even better option is to get a 3rd-party freeware piano VST. There are excellent ones available. My favorite is the Meldaproduction Monastery Grand, but at this point in your learning, installing it is kind of involved. Check this thread for a ton of freeware instruments including sampled grand pianos: One I suggest is IK Multimedia Sampletank 4 SE, which comes with an excellent sampled grand. Native Instruments' Kontakt Player also comes with a decent sampled grand. Both of these free products come with a ton of other useful sounds as well. As for the note plunk factor, one of the differences from playing on your velocity-sensitive keyboard is in expressiveness. You play with dynamics and slight timing variations that sound good. When entering notes by hand one at a time in Piano Roll, they all go in at the same default velocity setting. Assuming that you have Snap enabled, they go in "on the grid" as well. One remedy for this is to use the Humanize process command, which adds velocity and slight timing variations. Another is to manually adjust the notes' velocities. As for the disconnect between the chords and the melody line, I don't quite understand the issue, so I can't speak to it. If your Yamaha is 16 years old, its lack of "modern inputs and outputs" can actually make things easier for you, as it likely has a 5-pin DIN MIDI out jack on it. You can get a USB MIDI interface and instead of having to draw notes on the screen, play your whole song into Cakewalk as MIDI using the Yamaha. I bought this one when it was $15 and it works great. You can get it now for $11: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B08549TD7G/ As for using the internal sound chip, that's fine for what you're doing, but of course if you want to record any audio, then it's time to step up to an external interface. You'll get the best results using it in WASAPI Exclusive mode, and turn the latency down to 10mS or below. Your Dell is new, so should have no trouble getting quite low latency with the Realtek chip in WASAPI. Avoid ASIO4ALL, it won't give you anything that WASAPI Exclusive doesn't.

I got the Earos and have tried them out a few times at the drum kit. Impressions so far: I prefer these to anything I've used in the past as far as fit. The Etymotics and Earasers never quite felt like I got a consistent seal. As far as attenuation and clarity, they seem about on par with the Earasers, which I liked better than the Etymotics. There aren't little pieces that can fall out and get lost, either. Conversation is easy to hear. They come with 2 sizes of insert, the default ones work great in my ear canal. Unless you don't care about (or can't tell) the difference between ear protection designed for jackhammer operators and ear protection designed for musicians, check them out. Otherwise, rock out with your foam in.

This is just crazy great. Like their version of A|A|S' Swatches.

I trialed it when I was looking for a straight up vocoder, one where I could feed it an external carrier and vocal track modulator. I couldn't really get it to do that. TAL Vocoder 2 turned out to be the answer. It seems to do a lot of other fun stuff. Try before you buy if you're expecting to get a certain sound from it. As always, YMMV, and just because I wasn't able to figure out how to get it to work that way doesn't necessarily mean someone else can't. It's supposed to be able to, I think, according to the user guide.

You should post your code. ?

Nah, I paid $24 for a $49 bundle and got to use it for weeks. That's my philosophy/consolation in situations like these, by which I mean getting a big discount which is then followed by the vendor issuing an even bigger discount. Would I give back those hours of insane fun and learning and inspiration to have my $24 back? Heck no, I'd pay more than that to go to a theme park for a day. Would I have waited if I had known I could soon get it for free? Sure. But I just snagged Unfiltered Audio's Fault for free instead. PA has their strategies and we have ours. I'm sure what they're doing now is the scenario that got my money: they're extracting the last few dollars from people who bought stuff at higher prices. Brick and mortar dealers do the same thing, sure, I could have waited until after the 25th to get the candy I brought to my mom's for half price, but....not quite the same as having it on the 25th. I get so many freebies and BOGO's and this and that, I literally have more plug-ins than I can possibly learn how to use. Especially with something as deep as Sandman Pro, and the W.A. Productions creative EDM stuff, I've barely scratched the surface as it is. Moreover, these people need to make money somehow, and I'm okay with throwing down for Unfiltered Audio especially. Years ago they did a Computer Music version of G8 that I used on every project until Gatey Watey came along. If they renew the voucher again, it'll be tough not to pull the trigger on BYOME. I made the mistake of activating the trial.?

I don't know, but the current program, the successor to SONAR, Cakewalk by BandLab, includes support for encoding and decoding MP3 natively, without needing to activate any special encoder.

The MIDI standard has been updated multiple times to accommodate changes in the way people use it. I'd like to see Cakewalk's workflow for using drum maps get updated, too. I'm a middle-aged guy with no kids, so I don't necessarily have my finger on the pulse of modern pop music. If constructing rhythm tracks using a computer program is something that has fallen out of fashion, then maybe it's not important to update Cakewalk's workflow in that area. We may disagree on principles of software UX (although it would surprise me if we did), but to my philosophy, in 2021, the less someone must refer to a manual in order to use a program, the better. In some other DAW's, using a drum map is a trivial task. Click a button or right click in the PRV for "Drum Map," you get a list of available ones, pick one, and you're done. My issue with the process is that you may only initiate it from a Track Header or Channel Strip so if you're working in the PRV Drum Pane and decide "hey, I'd like to have a drum map here so I can see my instrument names over on the left," the means to make this happen are over in the next window, and if I need to change anything from a stock map I then wind up fiddling around over there because there are extra steps after working in the DMM. Connecting a track with a drum map could be made more intuitive right away just by adding a few menu items and taking the "New" off of "New Drum Map." It doesn't have to have a complete retool, nothing I have suggested is major. Just some menu links so that we can set up the process from the Piano Roll View if we choose, and maybe a preference item for having the map apply to the currently active/selected track.

Yes. However, they have big ramifications in the PRV when working on tracks use a drum map. Without one assigned, you don't get drum names in the Drum Pane. I'm advocating for a more intuitive connection between the two. For instance: you have an active MIDI track in the PRV. Right click in the blank space at the left of the Drum Pane and access the presets and DMM from there, and have the map assigned to the active track. Or maybe from the PRV Track List. Just somewhere the user can find it in the PRV. Yes. However, that's where I believe there's a nomenclature issue. The menu item to assign an existing preset is "New Drum Map," which, to me, implies that I would use that to create an entire new one, like what you do when you select "New File" in a program. Yes, and that is as it should be. I'd just like that to be available in the PRV (for starters).

Do you mean that as a compliment? Mentioned by folks having difficulty, indeed. "Stable"=not updated since the '90's, "well-documented"=you have to go to the manual to even know where to start.

In order: 1. Another reason for my occasional rants is to push the issue to the top, as it were. The bakerdevs go by what we clamor for, and a thread like this that indicates pretty much nobody who has checked in actually uses the feature as it is....if that doesn't tickle their fancy, I don't know how else. Is a single user, one who uses drum maps, satisfied with how they "work" now? I've posted before and heard nothing but agreement that the process is heinous in the einous. There's a catch 22 here: people don't complain about drum maps because drum maps are so complicated and weird that we all give up and find ways around it. Nobody says anything, no attention is given to the issue. 2. That's only true for some, not all drum synths. For instance, my favorite for sounds, SONIVOX' Blue Jay Drums, has no facility for programming beats. I don't know if it's even possible to program beats in Sampletank. I use Xpand!2's drum kits a lot and it has no onboard programming. TTS-1 has no onboard programming. Even some of my ones that emulate beatbox sounds don't emulate their ability to program. I think my Drumazon 707 is actually the only one I have where I can program in the plug-in. Moreover, I often program a beat using something "light" like Xpand!2 and then switch instruments after I get the beat programmed. That would be impossible using the drum machine's UI. And who wants to learn to program in 5 different drum machines' UI's when they could do it in their favorite DAW? 3. Some of my suggestions, such as being able to access the DMM from within PRV would not require anything more than adding a context menu and a menu item or two. Just the ability to right-click in the blank Drum Pane space and see a menu item for "Drum Map Manager" would have saved me hours when I was new and staring at it trying to figure out how to add a drum map. Having it automatically apply the map to the active track wouldn't either. And besides, as mentioned earlier, the PRV got the Articulation Map, so they don't seem to be too averse to opening the code for the PRV. I put myself in the head of a 20-something who downloads this awesome DAW and immediately wants to start programming drum parts. Everything looks great, you put your notes in here, etc. But then I want to go beyond the piano keys, I know DAW's have this thing called a drum map that lets you see all the drum names in the piano roll and sends the right notes to your drum plug-in. Where do I go from there? I click on Open Drum Pane and it gives me a blank space instead of piano keys. After that, what? You can't even get the nightmare started without consulting the manual, which leads with "Drum maps are virtual MIDI ports that you create and edit." Whaat? One of the issues is that (I think) most people who want to apply a drum map primarily just want to see the correct note/instrument names at the left. All the other things that drum maps can do, mapping to different instruments and all that, are not as important to them (me), if at all. The current process assumes that you're using a Sequential Circuits Drum Trax or something and need to re-map all your MIDI notes to work with it. That functionality should absolutely be there, but in an "advanced" menu. Most people don't want or need to roll their own drum maps. These days, maybe a dozen canned ones will do it. EZDrummer, General MIDI, 808, etc. Call up the dialog, select one from a pick list, and go. If the one you want isn't on the list, or if you want to do fancy stuff with multiple instruments, then you go into the advanced dialog.

Well, this post here in Feedback is kinda to that end. After almost 3 years with CbB, I feel like I'm not a n00b any more and start to wonder: if I'm still messing things up this badly, newer users don't stand a chance. This isn't the first time I've posted about this and gotten responses from power users saying that they either avoid the feature or have workarounds. When @Xel Ohh speaks up, I'm reminded how clumsy it is to set up the Piano Roll View for beat making, and the PRV is where I feel more comfortable doing that. It just works for my head better than the Step Sequencer (at least now). I won't get started on issues about switching back and forth between Step Sequencer and PRV. Beat making is HUGELY IMPORTANT in 2021. I've suggested simple changes that could help, such as, for instance, being able to launch the Drum Map Manager from the Piano Roll View. There's a menu item for "Show Drum Pane," which results in a big blank space at the left, and that's it. At the very least, you should be able to right click in that space and get a context menu with "Drum Map Manager" on it. You use Drum Maps in the PRV, but there's no way to access them from there. Also, if you launch the DMM from a given MIDI track, CbB should apply the drum map you create to that track automatically or with a dialog where you can pick the track, rather than having to go back to the MIDI channel and re-route the output. That last bit is one of the most crazy-making parts of it. The bottom of a track's channel strip is really not the first, second, or even third place I'd look for setting up a Drum Map. Furthermore, the language is counterintuitive. It asks you to "Create a New Drum Map." I don't want to "create" one, I just want to use one, or apply one, or whatever. "Create" sounds like you're going to make one up from scratch. The whole business of "create," only after which you are able to select from the list of existing drum maps, is superfluous anyway. They should be two different operations: "create" a Drum Map should be the activity of creating and saving one, while what we do now should be called "use" or "apply." 99% of the time, all the user wants to do is call up an existing drum map and apply it to a track. That process should be straightforward and streamlined, and it should start in the PRV, not at the bottom of a channel strip. Mixcraft, for instance, has a button at the top of their PRV that says "Drum Map." You click on it and get a list of available drum maps, you select one, and that is it, the track you're working on is now using that drum map. I know of one Cakewalk veteran power user who started using Mixcraft and couldn't find drum maps because it was so easy. He was expecting it to be a big rigmarole, not just pressing a button at the top of the PRV. I can see where the current process is a leftover from the days of external drum machines, even before General MIDI, where a drum map was critical for a lot more than just making your drum names show up in the PRV. You needed to be able to translate to all these different companies' note numbers, and you probably only had one or two drum boxes. These days, I have half a dozen virtual drum machines, and some of my other synths and samplers have drum kit patches. It's past time for this feature to get an overhaul, but even a few small things would improve it a great deal.

Whoa. This is great. I bought Sandman Pro/Instant Delay a few weeks ago for $24 using a voucher and have no regrets that I could now get it for free. So, so worth it. Unfiltered's G8 is also excellent.