Starship Krupa

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.

Perhaps not as sexy and new as some of yours, but no contest, iZotope Exponential Phoenix Stereo Reverb, which I got for $9.99 and is currently on sale for that. There's not a reverb I've tried that can touch it as far as making my mixes sound like they are in a landscape, and that includes MReverbMB and TrueVerb, both of which tout their talents at spatial positioning. I just slap the default preset into my reverb bus and that's it. After that, iZotope Exponential, same price, also now on sale. It's a multieffect. For advanced sound design glitchy warp sync delay pitch shift sexiness: Unfiltered Audio's Sandman Pro (with Instant Delay bundled) If you are doing electronic music with any kind of glitch delay sauce, this thing will rock your world, and it's on sale for $15. I bought it when it was at $49 a few weeks ago and used a $25 voucher. I had been waiting patiently for a holiday sale on it, but could wait no more. I do not regret the $9 extra I paid to be able to use this monster (Instant Delay alone is worth more than the $15). It combines power with the ability to get good results quickly depending on which work mode I'm in. I also took full advantage of the big sale on Glitchmachines plug-ins at PB. I now own all of them except the Subvert distortion, because I already have plenty of weirdo distortion FX. $60 to get the entire Glitchmachines suite of tools! And I bought them one by one so as to savor the dopamine rush of buying a new plug-in and to collect each of the December goodies.

Yes, all excellent as well as inexpensive. I'd recommend checking out Surge as well. Vacuum Pro, Hybrid 3, and Surge are great for diving in and learning programming. Development stopped on the AIR products a few years ago, but they sound great. Surge is open source and gets better with every release.

Note: it appears that closing and opening the project makes it switch back to Farfisa "bass." And yes, what solved it was deleting the drum map. Now the custom note names bug needs to be squashed pronto.

I've thought of putting together some kind of filter box, but I just use the TenCrazy MIDI plug-in. Happy Chrimble, BTW.

On any MIDI channel strip or track header, click to open the FX rack and you should find a collection of 7 MIDI FX that will do stuff like apply patterns and randomization to velocity, volume, etc. There's a chord analyzer and a MIDI event filter, too.

I've been using Cakewalk by BandLab since the first release in April 2018 and I still have a zero batting average for trying to apply a drum map successfully without anything going wrong. No matter how many times I've thought I figured it out, that I finally understand how it works and what to do, the very next time I try to use one, it turns to shiitake mushrooms. I finally just gave up and used this method where you can put drum names on the piano keys in the PRV, which works perfectly, but CbB has a bug where that doesn't persist through closing and reopening the PRV. So I gave up again and have gotten pretty good at remembering which piano key corresponds to a General MIDI drum kit. Or I just tap on my controller until I find the drum I want and then count keys on the screen. Isn't that a fly workflow? I might as well put some of those binary switches on the front of my computer case and use those to program beats. Every once in a while, I get tired of counting keys and think "hey, let's throw a drum map on there so we can just see the instrument names right there on the left side of my screen." Just to see what happens. It's kind of like going on a date with your crazy ex to confirm they are still very bad news. It can be anything from just forgetting how many times I have to return to the MIDI track (first you launch the Drum Map Manager, then you "create a new map," then you call a preset up from a list and apply that to the new map, then you click okay and close it all, then after that you go back to the MIDI strip and tell it to use the drum map that you just created) to it just. not. working. and sound stops coming out. Tonight I found out that Drum Maps have the ability to fudge up tracks that are just innocent bystanders. This time I did the create, call preset, apply preset, and it set all the notes to output to the interface's MIDI out port. Why? Because it can, I guess, and what am I going to do about it? Go buy Studio One? Use Mixcraft? Deleted the map, created another new map, preset....bang, same deal. Okay, so let's go in and set the ports to XPand!2 which I'm using for the drum sounds. Open the manual to see how to change all the entries at once, click, apply....and.... No. Drum. Sound. At. All. Just the bass synth track playing in Analog Lab, which has somehow changed to a Farfisa patch. And no drum names in the PRV. Drum Map Manager, you little tease! Set the synth back to the right patch, cool, huge bass sound, still no drums. Go back in, delete, create, apply, save, exit, apply to track and....all Farfisa, no drums. Back in the Drum Map Manager, I notice that somehow I've got the channel assignments wrong, which should in no way account for the patch change in Aisle 4, but I fix them, and go through the dance again, and yay, we get drum names, but still no sound, and Farfisa Syndrome. Out the hole and round the tree again with deleting everything and reapplying, and now we get names, drum track playing....and a Farfisa organ playing the bass part. This all takes the better part of half an hour, at the end of which, you can imagine, my enthusiasm and creativity levels for tweaking my drum part are just off the charts, so far off the charts that I don't care about cymbals any more and am wondering what I can watch on Netflix. As it stands right now, I can apply the drum map, get note names in the PRV and drum sounds in the speakers, but Farfisa in the bass. I can easily go in and manually set it back to the ripping detuned double sawtooth bass patch, but the world wonders: after all of that why do I still have to prop it up with a stick? How can a drum map cause a program change on the bass synth just by being applied to the drum track? I've examined the drum map and the program and bank have not been changed, not been set to anything at all. So a warning: drum maps aren't just an overcomplicated, counterintuitive, fussy, clumsy, ugly trip to Windows for Workgroups 3.11 land, they are also capable of getting loose and messing things up in other tracks. Now I have to get back to my project of writing GM drum names on my MIDI controller, need to decide: Sharpie or P-Touch, so Merry Xmas! Sleep well, sugar plums.

Thanks, Jim, I have a K1 sitting right in front of me. It's my main MIDI controller because I like the action so much. Of course, every track where I use it I have to filter out those blasted "All Notes Off" messages that it sends out whenever it detects that I've lifted off the last key. Otherwise my ambient pads get staccato and I get ugly clicks elsewhere. Years ago, before I figured out what it was doing I rejected a number of freeware synths because I thought they had crackling problems. It turned out to be my "All Notes Off" spewing controller. Can't seem to get it off the desk, though. Such a nice action, not too springy, not too much inertia, I can fly on the thing, nice rounded keys for organ smears....

My favorite right now is: "Register at https://soundbetter.com and get Arturia's Analog Lab Lite and Izotope Ozone Elements 9 for free as member benefits." If you don't have Ozone Elements 9, well, duh, get this. I was kinda blown away by the great sounds come with Analog Lab Lite. They are many, and sound really good. An incredible selection of Vox Connie and other combo organs. SoundSpot Propane? Maybe if you only need it to fill up your SoundSpot bingo card. It's a mid-side panner like Voxengo's free MSED except it doesn't allow you to individually adjust the levels of mid and side. A mid-side panner is a good tool to have. One that allows you to individually adjust the levels of the mid and side is even better.