Starship Krupa

An electric tricycle and a pack of 4 St. Bernards. You obviously have your priorities squared away.❤ Did Cybertrucks just go on sale or something? I spotted my first one in the wild a couple of days ago myself. My reaction was laughter. It looks like a car someone in my 1970's grade school class would draw for an art assignment. And of course who can forget Elon Musk reminding the world of the great value of rehearsal at its introduction?

Be sure to read the entire thread, especially the information about the tweaks that I use. I've tried them on multiple systems. For heaven's sake, don't disable hyperthreading. Longtime Dell Optiplex user here, make sure you go to Dell's site and download the recommended drivers and BIOS updates.

With the Marble, it's thumb for the left button, forefinger on the ball, and ring on the right button for me. Middle finger assists with either ball or right button, depending. It sure beats trying to use a mouse on my knee.

Longtime fan of the Logitech Trackman Marble. My pointing device of choice in places where I don't have enough flat space to use a mouse. And yeah, for gaming, I can just about do my daily Elder Scrolls Online crafting writs, but any kind of combat would be out of the question. My biggest issue with the Marble in non-gaming use is the lack of a wheel equivalent. May I assume that the ring surrounding the ball on the Kensington acts as the "wheel?" @Jim Roseberry, if you have any condition that is aggravated (or even caused) by mouse action, check out either the Logitech Lift or MX Vertical. I went with the Lift because although it's less expensive, it looks like reviewers like it better than the MX Vertical.

Simple: I'd really like to be able to drag a synth from the Browser to a Track View folder (the header that is) with the resulting track(s) being inserted in the folder. Drag and drop operations make the DAW seem slicker.

It's a long-requested, much-needed feature. The XSampler is maybe halfway to the goal. At this point, Sonar is the only DAW that aspires to be mainstream that lacks a phrase/pad sampler. Freeware ones are, oddly enough in this time of abundant free plug-ins, still kinda uncommon, and of course they're such a joy to use when well-integrated with the DAW. For me it's not all about a build-your-own drum machine (although I would use it for that) it is for my beloved dialog samples. Being able to just "play" phrases from the keyboard wherever I want them in the song, that is really the way to do it rather than dragging clips around on the timeline. And dialog phrases can be fun to trigger with the step sequencer.... To this end I tried loading some dialog phrases into Session Drummer 3 and it dutifully played them back when clicking on the various pieces of the drum kit and from the keyboard. Sort of weird to see the kick drum wiggle as a 5 second spoken word phrase plays, but I could get used to it. It doesn't have the versatility of a full-featured sampler, you can't set the individual samples to loop or reverse or retrigger. You can do some fun echo-ey effects with it if you load a long sample.

This applies especially to lecturing people on what constitutes contributing.

Whoa, what?? I've been using Session Drummer and had no idea that I could drag and drop samples directly onto its pads. With the endless requests for samplers, why didn't the devs ever mention this? I'm gonna have to try that out immediately. I've been waiting for the pad sampler companion to XSampler to come along, but doesn't NuSonar already come with Session Drummer? I have a SONAR Platinum license, so I'm not 100% sure about that. I even made a skin for Session Drummer 2 to update it to the NuSonar flat dark look. Link is in my sig. This is material for the Tutorials forum.

Not great at all. The developers have shown no interest in the format. As mentioned earlier, they've developed their own file format, which allows projects to be opened in and from the only other DAW that matters to them, Cakewalk Next.

I just tried it again and this time it worked just like it's supposed to, with the usual exception that I had to open the Drum Map Manager and set all of the outputs to route to the Addictive Drums 2 instrument rather than my Saffire Pro's MIDI in port. I've always had to do that anyway, and it's a trivial procedure with a good success rate. That is, it's successful at getting the controller's notes mapped to the soft synth's sounds. So I think what I'll do going forward is, rather than having my heart set on using the drum pane with Addictive Drums 2, I'll just try it once at the start of the project, and if it doesn't work, fall back to using the keyboard view with the AD2.INS definitions. Then if that doesn't work, I'll fall back to figuring out where the instruments are on the piano keyboard with a bit of educated trial and error. And however I end up editing my drum track is how I will edit my drum track. The idea is that while using the drum pane is my first choice, it's not guaranteed that it will work on any given attempt. So rather than letting the failure blow the mood, I'll be ready with a backup plan and then a failsafe in case the backup plan doesn't work. So at least sometimes I'll be able to work in my preferred view. When I can't I can't, no sense getting my knickers in a wad over something that's out of my control. My distress came from believing that I can get it to work reliably if I just follow the correct steps, but observed time after time that this belief was not true. If I just let go of that assumption, I'll be fine. After all, if the drink I like best at my favorite restaurant is iced tea, and I go there and they happen to be out of iced tea, I don't let it ruin the entire meal. Sometimes the drum grid fails to display correctly, and that's okay. If today's a day when it works, well, super. If not, I can still edit drums. If the drum pane works, it usually keeps working, so that's not a worry.

Dawg, I got more plug-ins on my laptop than 1K. I wouldn't think so. "Dry" suggests that the recording room was deadened, "dead" makes me think that the drums themselves were tuned for minimum sustain and/or had muffling applied.

Those of us who take our laptops out to coffee houses and don't wish to lug around our Studio 2|4 or Scarlett 2i2 thank you in advance. 😍 That said, I see improvements on my 2017 Dell Latitude with a 2-core i7 using WASAPI Exclusive. If any performance tuning has been done by a user within CbB, checking that AUD.INI is important. Thread Scheduling Model is key here.

Long requested feature, and one I would love to see. Since plug-ins are initially slotted into whatever category they report, and the display name of the plug-in is usually at least shortened, it can be a pain to see if a new one was successfully installed for Cakewalk. I usually switch my layout to "Sort by Manufacturer" to make it easier to track them down and edit their display names and/or put them into my preferred categories. Even a "New" category or indicator that only appears the first time a plug-in is scanned by Cakewalk would be so handy.

Nah, once I get the drum pane set up, it tends to keep going okay. The problem isn't getting sound to come out, it's getting a drum grid with note names on the left. And I don't use the note remapping feature for any synth that's not a drum machine. You're thinking in terms of "he's having trouble with drum maps." The "map" part of the feature is the part that actually works for me. Remapping controllers to different MIDI note numbers. Nice feature. A bit clunky, but it works solidly. The feature that tends to fail miserably is displaying the drum pane with the names of the notes on the left. They are two different aspects of "drum maps." Note mapping and drum grid editing. One works fairly well, the other one is frankly such a mess that even veteran, savvy Cakewalk users have given up on it. How many people chime in to say that the drum grid works just fine for them vs. how many say that they use Instrument Definitions or just memorize the note locations on their MIDI controller? I myself have a strip of board tape on my keyboard controller with the GM note numbers written on it. Which I submit is a less common goal than wanting to edit drums on a nice compact grid with note names on the left. One good thing is that XLN just issued a free upgrade to Addictive Drums 2 that makes accessing its own internal MIDI mapping more inviting, so I may be able to just use an extended GM mapping with AD2. Or, since they've made their own drum editing grid more inviting, I may get more into editing patterns with that. For AD2 users: this upgrade is a must, it has so many new features and such an extensive UI update that it could have been called Addictive Drums 3 and been a paid upgrade. It functions as a great preview of things to come when AD3 ships.

Not in decades. LibreOffice or Google Sheets here. What does Excel use Scroll Lock for?

I'll give credit where it's due and say that it's been quite a long time since I've had to sacrifice a chicken to Cakewalk's MIDI routing. You know the scenario, where a MIDI track and a synth track are happily joined and cooperating, but then....something changes and the synth stops producing sound. You check everything, all the inputs and outputs are set correctly, nothing solo'd, nothing muted, lights on the MIDI track indicate that data is flowing, yet somehow no sound is being produced. Then you start Trying Things, and eventually some combination of saving/deleting/exiting/reloading/reinserting the project/track/computer makes it start producing sound again. The sound comes back as mysteriously as it went away. There was a time in the past where you would try to retrace the steps that led to the dysfunction, in the hope of avoiding the situation in the future, but it is now as impossible to break as it was to fix. All you can do is Save As and thank the spirits that control such things for allowing you to continue. Anyway, I'm holding you to your earlier pledge to help more when you were back in the studio, assuming you are now back in the studio. How do I get my spiffy diamond drum editing grid without having to piddle around with forcing it to use Channel 10 or some such?

As a pro QA engineer for multiple companies, and a beta tester later, the reaction I usually get from software engineers when I refer to those is along the lines of "yeah, yeah, nobody likes a smartass." 😄 I'm not sure why this is so, perhaps by the time it's brought up they are so far into the design process that an outsider saying "no need to reinvent the wheel" is....unwelcome. Cakewalk was around long before Windows, so it mostly gets a pass on keystroke standardization. It's still the only program I've ever seen make use of Scroll Lock (and a damn good use it is), so deserves an award for avoiding a missed opportunity. Many programs could benefit from stopping scrolling, there's a dedicated key right there for it, so why is it so seldom implemented? As most people do, I use multiple programs, and every time I want to Deselect All I'm reminded of how miserable it is not to have a standard keystroke for such things. Interestingly, Google's AI Overview for "keystroke select none" currently show, in order, Adobe Lightroom, Cakewalk, Google Docs, and Microsoft Excel as its examples to demonstrate "The keyboard shortcut for "select none" varies depending on the application." I would chalk Cakewalk being in the #2 slot as due to how often I search Google for Cakewalk, except for the fact that I don't remember ever Googling Adobe Lightroom or Microsoft Excel.

At this point I'd say a brute force workaround is your best bet. What would you do if you had old projects on tape, with EQ settings written down by hand, and the hardware EQ now no longer functions properly? Probably duplicate the EQ settings as much as you can on your newer piece of gear. If the EQ settings are that critical to your old projects, either bounce the tracks with the EQ baked in or take some screen caps of the EQs' UI to transfer to a currently-supported EQ. My favorite is Soundly Shape It. For projects that I want to be more able to handle future twiddling, I try to avoid DAW-locked FX. You're fortunate in that you have an older version of the DAW to use to prepare the projects for your current DAW.

I've wanted to be able to do this from about day one with using the software.

I do like this new look for AD2. I didn't like plug-in GUI's made to look like 3-D brushed aluminum when they were new and they look even worse now. When AD2 first came out, even a real life drum machine that looked like that would have looked cheap and dated. And I don't think that was what they were aiming for. Don't get me started on simulated simulated woodgrain. At one point it was neato for something on a computer screen to resemble a real life object, but we are long past that point. For emulations of things that actually exist, like the faceplates of vintage compressors, it's still okay because it contributes to the sensory illusion of using the old piece of gear itself, but it's not so great for processors that are trying to be a whole new thing. My only complaints about NuSonar's look are that text is smaller in several places and I can no longer set grid lines to higher contrasting colors. Other than those things, it looks great. I did a facelift on Cakewalk Session Drummer to help it fit the new look, a link to the files is in my sig.

Most likely this. What a nightmare for someone doing keypad math. The software for my Logitech mouse has the (default) ability to throw a similar pop-up every time I switch on Caps Lock. Not so great in FP games where Caps Lock is used for "always run."

Just want to update this topic with a shout to the folks at Plugin Alliance. I didn't realize that the bundle of PA plug-ins that comes with the upgrade was identical to the one that came with 5.5 before I went and blew my registration number at the PA site. I wanted to pass it along to a friend and they kindly responded to my ticket their next business day with a replacement number, no further questions asked. Not a big deal, but they didn't have to do that and could have told me that the bundle wasn't intended to be split up anyway and I would have been fine with that, but they reversed my blunder and my friend was pleased and surprised. Regardless of how often I use the main iZotope components, a hundy well spent for an extra pair of licenses for the Expo 'verbs and some NI FX to mess around with (I think NI's FX are kind of underrated due to being in the shadow of their excellent instrument products). As an upgrade from versions even earlier than 5, it's a fine deal.

Burned CD-ROM's Zip drives, Jaz drives, 320K floppies, 1.44M floppies....

You are not. Anyone who DAW's on a laptop knows the woes of bumping up against drive space and having no easy way to remedy it. Suggestion: rename this topic "favorite Windows utilities?" LatencyMon and others that Cakewalk users find particularly useful.

That's how I read it. So you're almost definitely looking for an issue with VSOC on the dedicated computer. I hope there's a way to pre-load the samples.