Starship Krupa

I do indeed.

I haven't tried either of them, so I can't say for sure, but I think I understand this. At the moment, I have more plug-ins than I know what to do with, literally. It's great to have an effect that is incredibly versatile and deep in features, but with that can come a danger of too much choice. I feel weird admitting this, but it was the default preset in Phoenix that knocked me out, and 90% of the time, when I use it, I leave it on that preset. On one hand, it seems kind of lame. Part of me says that as an amateur mix engineer I "should" be able to tweak all the parameters like pre-delay, early reflections, decay time, pre-EQ, post-EQ, etc, to get exactly what's right for the track. But then I remind myself that very many classic recordings were mixed using chambers and plates and even springs that had no or rudimentary parameter adjustments. Black boxes that you feed audio into and get a fully wet reverb simulation out of, and the most you can do is treat those signals on the way in and out. So I guess I'm using Phoenix on its default preset like that. It has a zillion other presets as well, which is great, and a big complaint I have with TrueVerb: I like the algorithm a lot, and I know it's capable of a lot more than I've ever gotten out of it, but the (in my eyes) too few presets that it comes with are not so great. Do I have time to delve deep into a reverb when I have yet to really get a handle on my Glitchmachines plug-ins?

You can add a post to the Discussion and mention it. Also, calling it to the attention of @Noel Borthwick, who maintains the KVR entry (and I see updated the version this round). ARA 2 is something that not every DAW has, to be sure, helps Cakewalk stand out from the pack. Also, while we have Noel's attention, the Cakewalk Studio Instruments entry lists the bundle as No Longer Available. I posted in the Discussion that it's actually now free via BandLab Assistant. And has CA-2A been included with CbB? I think it's now in CbB as a PC module, but I'm not sure about the VST. Since I own a full license for it, I don't really know. It's also listed as No Longer Available.

Hmm. Not sure that would be of value to me. Thanks for filling me in. I know you're a fellow Exponential devotee. I still haven't gotten over how Phoenix just humbles everything else I tried. I do find value in other, "character" reverbs like Valhalla SuperMassive. Oh man do I ever love that one.

No snark intended, why don't you make one? I'd like to see that too. The information is here, you just want to see it collated, right? It's true, that weekly dopamine squirt for $10 adds up to $500 over a year's time. But I look at it like this: how much does it cost to eat one meal at Burger King, or even just leave a respectable tip in a fancier restaurant? We toss that money around like it's nothing. "Gotta eat, after all." And then whatever enjoyment I had from eating the burger ends right there. We only notice that these "cheap" plug-ins add up because we get to keep them and, we hope, enjoy them. Ultimately, for people like me who are still learning, I try to move toward settling down with my favorite bread-and-butter ones, like my go-to compressors and reverb and EQ's. However, the ones that pull me in now are the "creative" or sound design ones. I'm especially getting into glitch-y sounds, so Glitchmachines running a $5 sale is just too good to pass up. Same with Trash 2. Not to mention all the fun toys that W.A. Production are cranking out. Would I pay $40 for 5 stompboxes? That's how many top-tier FX are in that iZotope Holiday Bundle.

I don't know, hence the "danger" I mentioned. That's about me personally, I have 2 licenses each for Excalibur and Phoenix, and as far as "natural" reverbs go, Phoenix handily trounced everything I've ever heard. I've never tried R2, and it's hard for me to understand how Phoenix could be improved upon. However, I am seeking to learn how to build very "spatial" mixes, I'm amazed by the sonic holograms created by the likes of Dave Tipper and Telefon Tel Aviv and a tool to help me place things in the sonic landscape would be a valuable thing to have. I have TrueVerb, which is supposed to be able to do that, but I've never been able to get a handle on that aspect of it.

Theoretically, yes, but it's kind of a hassle to do that each time. For the $10 that second licenses for Phoenix and Excalibur each cost me, it's worth it. Thing is, I have a total of 4 computers that I do DAW work on at least occasionally, if I count my iMac (which runs Logic, Garageband, Live, and Waveform). Pace announced this big deal, cloud licensing, but plug-in manufacturers have to specifically cloud-enable their plug-ins, and only two of my (relatively inexpensive) products have it enabled. Same with network licensing, which would be really great at my place. I have no beef with Waves' system, the ability to put your licenses on a generic thumb drive is great.

Worth every penny for the Exponential FX alone. Matter of fact, it's tempting to jump on it just to get another set of licenses for Phoenix and Excalibur, and have R2 to experiment with. Danger is in falling in love with R2 and then having only one license for it. With all the duplicate licenses I've bought for iLok'd products, by this time I could have paid for a dongle.

I'm with the OP in that I would really like to be able to do this in the Browser, without having to load the Plug-In Manager.

I was bummed about the loss of @Craig Anderton's column. I can't understand why they would drop it at this point, with the program better than ever and improving so quickly.

Oh, I know how to spot the Build number in the about box, I was referring to the "major versions" thing that other programs put in the name of the product. Done for marketing purposes. People can feel antsy if they're on an older version and enjoy feeling up-to-date if they're on the latest. ? CbB has been freed of having to use such tactics, but a side effect is that magazine editors don't quite know when to give it a review. Usually with a DAW, a major number release is when it gets a round of reviews, with corresponding jump in license sales. Otherwise, it will only appear in "DAW roundup" articles. So it's nice to see a magazine like SOS, one I respect very much, acknowledging that CbB deserves to be on the list along with other DAW's that had major upgrades in 2020. I've been watching the reviews roll in at KVR Audio since Noel B. created the page for Cakewalk by BandLab. I feel kind of embarrassed that mine is the only 4-star, but I think doling out the maximum is only for products that I think are perfect, where I wouldn't change a thing.

Oh yeah, Bass Professor Mark II on every D.I. bass track, FTW. In other news, Tokyo Dawn Labs have released Molotok, an updated version of Molot, a freeware "character" compressor. I was a fan of Molot for a while, but found the GUI rather ugly and clumsy to navigate. Molotok remedies this and so much more. I only wish that more compressors had UI's and metering like Molotok's. It's hard to describe exactly how it works, but it puts some handy metering right at the controls where it's needed, so you don't need to move your gaze back and forth between the Threshold knob and a meter when you're making an adjustment. The main gain reduction meter is also a masterpiece of usability. So much so, that however it's supposed to color the sound, I'm going to find ways to use this thing just because of the UI.

This is a great idea I hadn't thought of! Yes, Cakewalk should be able to handle this just fine with the help of Melodyne. Then you can go into PRV and pitch the notes down an octave. Another possibility not mentioned is to use loops. There are some included with Cakewalk by BandLab, and you can find many more free (and pay) sample packs at places like W.A. Production. W.A. Production's kits usually come with bass line loops. Right now their monthly giveaway is "Savage Bass House Bundle," and all you need do to qualify for it is download one of their free plug-ins like Combear. Cakewalk handles loops like a champ. Pitch 'em, stretch 'em, whatever.

It's odd, I have 15 Waves plug-ins and they are all the result of some giveaway or other, starting with TrueVerb on Black Friday a few years ago. Magazineware, whatever. The original licenses didn't cost a cent, but I think I dropped about $12 updating my v.9 plug-ins to v.10. I might do that again to bring the v.11 ones up to v.12, 'cause of the resizable GUI's. I have primary licenses for all of them on a thumb drive, then a combination of primary and secondary on the hard drives of my various DAW systems. I've only had to invoke license recovery once, due to ignorance on my part about needing to move licenses before a major system rebuild, and it went reasonably smoothly, much moreso than with the iLok'd licenses on the same system. Their way of loading plug-ins via that shell/wrapper thing is a little weird, but since v.10 it's worked just fine. My Waves plug-ins never crash the host and sound fine, although the Element 2 synthesizer is the only one of them I couldn't find an easy substitute for. People moan about the WUP, but nobody is forcing them to buy it. My Waves plug-ins that are out of WUP and in v.10 and 11 work just as well as they did when those were the current versions, and it's pretty obvious to me that they don't spend a lot of time changing the code in the oldies.

What Steve said. I don't know what plug-ins were bundled with Home Studio, but I wouldn't be surprised if their functionality was surpassed by what comes with CbB and what you can find as freeware elsewhere. This forum has threads for posting freeware FX and software instruments, and they are many pages long and cover just about any category you can imagine.

If you still have Home Studio installed it's not necessary to do anything but go into Preferences/File/VST Settings and add a path to the folder where your old VST's are. Cakewalk supports import and export of MP3's natively, so no external decoder or encoder should be necessary.

I had to vote "None" on almost all of them because I don't have experience with hardware that came out this year. Everything I use is tried-and-true. I'm glad that they put CbB in there even though it's not "versioned" in the standard way (which if it were, I think it would be considered at least Cakewalk by BandLab 2.0 by now). That acknowledges that it is a current product that had a couple of major feature upgrades in the past year (Arranger, Articulations). It will be interesting to see how these polls shake out.

Oh, I see, these both relate to external inserts, which I don't use. I thought that "external inserts" by itself was the first item in your list, as I am aware of other issues with them.

I dunno, sometimes it's difficult to figure out where to post something. This seems like a bug or unwanted feature, so Feedback.

Also know that the handshake that BandLab Assistant must do to re-authorize is a tiny amount of data transfer. You are not forced to update the software, so it's friendly to lower speed and metered connections.

This is a strange quirk of Cakewalk's behavior that I ran into when I first started using it almost 3 years ago. I have been asking on and off since then (including sending screenshots more than once) why this happens and if it is there for some reason. I've also asked if we can have an option to turn it off. I have looked at it from several angles and can't figure out why it would do this, it seems to serve no purpose and is a nuisance at best. At first I thought that maybe it was a byproduct of an "automatic comping" workflow or something, but the developers could not say how the behavior got there or if it originally had a purpose. People made guesses, but none of them really made sense. And I guess that since it doesn't crash the program and nobody else complains, it's not a high priority to investigate. Since I am a drummer and record myself in loop mode with 4 microphones at once, I wind up with these spurious splits across 4 tracks/lanes. I have given up and am resigned to my workflow being: 1. Record as many takes as I need, making sure to Group All Clips when recording 2. Open the first track's take lanes and swipe across one of the intact lanes with the Smart Tool in "Comp" mode to heal the split and get the takes ready for review and editing 3. Un-mute whatever take I want to listen to first by clicking in it with the Smart Tool in Comp mode In my way of thinking, I should not have to do steps 2 and 3 before I am able play back my last take. I don't understand why more people aren't bothered by this. Most new users won't know that you can fix the split so easily and bottom line, it's unnecessary extra work that I have to do each time I record.

I would looooove this. I like to layer synth sounds with different instruments. I was kind of surprised when I discovered that Cakewalk doesn't already have that feature.

Can you elaborate? I'm interested, but I haven't run into issues in these areas.

I already use a limiter on my master bus and am happy with the audio results. The issue is level, not loudness. The situation I'm talking about is that my exports test just fine for loudness (which is what the limiter is for), they just peak at about 4dB below full scale.

I don't see any reference to Realtek hardware CODEC's in your experience. I, too, had a Soundblaster Live PCI card and couldn't get good low latency performance from it. I can only report that my experience with Realtek CODEC's is similar to Noel's. They work fine.