Starship Krupa

What exactly do you mean by "the extra stuff?"

On my iPhone and iPad, BandLab is an app that I got from the App Store. Downloads and installs just like any other. Also true for Android phones and tablets. On Windows and MacOS, BandLab runs in a web browser.

If I like it, I'll definitely write him and say thanks and suggest that he at least put his website address in the body of it somewhere.

Both of these. Thank you! The MIDI volume faders on the tracks control that volume control in the Kontakt instrument. My Kontakt is set to initialize at -6dB, so "0" on the MIDI fader=-6dB in the instrument. Once I whacked the faders up to 127, that took the volume up to 0dB. In light of this, the question should be "why wasn't the 2nd instance also doing it?" And my answer is "who cares?"😄 I got it working correctly, with your help I figured it out, and all is happy again. If I run across the phenomenon again, I'll know where to look.

Someone who calls themselves "CMDess" has written an extensive guide to getting the most from MeldaProduction plug-ins. I haven't read it yet, but the more documentation for these complex tools the better. Also, this week's Eternal Madness 50% off sale includes MAutoAlign, which I consider a must for anyone doing multiple-mic'd instruments, and MConvolutionMB, a very well-regarded convolution reverb (I can't personally vouch for it because I use MTurboReverb and Exponential Nimbus exclusively).

No, it's not. Next runs on MacOS and Windows.

I have a project with two instances of Kontakt Player 7, along with A|A|S Player and Hybrid 3, each synth having its corresponding MIDI track. They are set up as "split," where the synth tracks and MIDI tracks are not tied together in an "instrument" track. Somewhere along the way, an event has crept in, either automation or MIDI I can't tell because I can't find it. It acts like automation, but I won't be able to say for sure unless I manage to figure out why it's happening. What happens is that on the first Kontakt instance, Kontakt's master volume gets turned down to -6dB as soon as I start Sonar's transport. It doesn't matter where in the project I start it from, as soon as the transport starts, the volume drops to -6dB. Once the transport is rolling, I can open the plug-in UI and set the volume wherever I want and it will stay where it is, but as soon as I stop the transport and restart it, boing, back down to -6dB. It can loop all day long and be fine, it's just the act of starting the transport that makes the volume drop. I've been poking at and beating on this project for a couple of days now trying to get this not to happen. Your first thought was "simple: he has somehow put in an automation lane that controls that parameter in the plug-in." That was my first thought as well, so I turned off the reading of automation and it persisted. Then I examined automation lanes both in the MIDI track and the synth track, and while I did find that automation had somehow been written for the MIDI track's volume parameter, I deleted all of it and it still does this. I've examined the MIDI event list for the track, automation (which if it were that would be a bug, seeing that I turned of automation read). So I'm tossing it out to the hive mind: what could cause a synth parameter to change every time the transport is started? The other instance of Kontakt Player behaves just fine, the synth's volume stays wherever I set it. I'm going to save the project as it is and then create new tracks, copy the MIDI data to the new track and delete the "haunted" track(s) and instance of Kontakt Player. I doubt the issue will survive that. The only reason I'm asking at this point is out of curiosity. Is there something obvious that I'm missing? Keep in mind that I have two instances of Kontakt Player going and one of them is behaving normally. I never even moved the plug-in's volume control until after I noticed that the track was playing back at a lower volume than I expected. I turned automation off. Nothing weird shows up in the MIDI event list for that track, just the expected notes.

BandLab already has a DAW for iOS. It's called BandLab.

Especially in situations like yours where there may be a performance issue, you really should post your system specs. See my sig for an example. What processor, how much memory, what type of disk drive (spinny or SSD), what graphics (in your case, probably onboard in the CPU), what audio interface, these are all crucial to helping figure out what the issue might be.

Has clip gain automation somehow been accidentally applied?

Well, I kinda can't resist an offer like the one he made in the email, so now I must decide which of his plug-ins....

No, it's only their latest product, drum machine Battalion, that is excluded. It's not unusual for UfA's latest product to be excluded from promotions. Everything else, have at it.

Spill.

Charts for those aren't difficult to find on the interwebs. I don't know of any plug-in that can convert piano chords to guitar chord diagrams (not to say that there isn't one, just none that I know of). Me, I usually search YouTube for "how to play [name of song] on guitar."😆 It's getting to be that no matter the original instrument(s) for a song, someone will have worked out a guitar arrangement and posted it to YouTube.

What do you mean by "horsepower?" It won't drive your headphones loud enough? Or something else? If the issue is volume, there are any number of small, inexpensive USB dongle headphone driver/amplifiers available at such sites as Amazon or eBay. If the issue is latency or timing, what others have said about entry-level small audio interfaces. Mackie is another brand that sells a small interface for $50.

What do you mean by "actual symbol?"

Now is the time to pick up some Unfiltered Audio processors, for those so inclined. Who was asking about BYOME/TRIAD? TRIAD+any other Unfiltered Audio plug-in is a deal for $39.99. My favorites (other than BYOME/TRIAD) are Sandman Pro (which comes with Instant Delay as well) and G8. G8 is for real the best all-purpose gate plug-in going. The display is what is really special about it, lets you dial in a threshold very easily. It also has many options such as peak vs. average detection, can put out a MIDI note each time the gate closes, etc. But there aren't many clinkers in the bunch. There are some that I hardly ever use, but that doesn't mean that someone else won't find a crazy use for them.

Nice! I was probably one of the people who recommended the TruOil finish. Amazing stuff that can be wiped on with an old t-shirt. It's also great for the impatient because you can throw on the next coat within hours. The interior of my car smelled like it for weeks because I was using it to cure my TruOil'd guitar in the summer sun.? And you can either do what I do and just throw it on and come up with a lovely semi-gloss finish or polish between coats and build as high and deep a gloss as you want. Then after all the coats are on, it continues to cure to a rugged, ding-resistant finish. What kind of wood is the body? This. Leo Fender was the Henry Ford of the electric guitar manufacturing process, got it down to interchangeable components. Yet there can still be variations 70 years on. The ones put together by Sally or John in America have the fewest, followed by the ones put together by Rosa or Jose in Mexico, followed by the ones put together by Thuy or Zhiyu wherever in Asia. But if Zhiyu has the skill and intuition to pull bodies and necks off the pile that "go together" and that axe goes to his friend Mei on the final finishing line, who knows enough to spend an extra 5 seconds taking the fret ends down, you can wind up with an amazing guitar. Case in point: I have the cheapest of the cheap in Fender's line, a Squier Affinity Tele made in China. When I bought it, it was literally in pieces. Some dirtbag had tried to smash it on stage (I can tell from the placement of the dings), the pickups and tuners were missing, neck and body apart. A pile of the cheapest possible parts in maybe the worst possible condition. But it had found its way to the guitar rescue ranch. And I subscribe to the Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang theory: "....you will never regret buying that car. She’s going to give you the time of your lives. You’ve saved her from the scrap-heap, and I’ll eat my hat — if I had a hat to eat — if she doesn’t repay you for what you’ve done today.” Sure as the sun rises n the East, once I put a $20 AlNiCo pickup in the bridge, a set of used Schallers I had in a drawer, got the neck back on, controls wired up with the volume knob toward the neck as all Teles should be, holy mother. It must have at one point had a pro setup, because I didn't have to touch the frets and the nut was just right. The guitar just has it, that quality you can't quite put into words, but I can say that there's a "waiting list" about 5 deep of friends I've handed it to for a twangle, and they got this look in their eyes and said "if you ever go to sell it...." And some of these guys are corksniffers with guitars in the over $1000 range, who research for hours trying to find the best kind of bridge for their Jazzmaster, new pickups in the Flying V, etc. People who actually make money playing music among them. One even owns a beautiful Affinity Tele, similar model but clear butterscotch finish. "Doooood, you already HAVE one!" Nope. She had big chunks of that thick poly blonde finish, deep and sharp-edged so that it scraped the inside of my right arm, so I have dripped Krazy Glue into the divots layer by layer and polished it out. Not so much "relic'd" as "abuse survivor'd." My thanks go out to the skilled workers in that Chinese factory, who I just hope are making a decent living from what they do, hope at least some of them are guitar players who are interested in their jobs. She's not the only one, I have a Johnson Strat with the mojo, and even a Behringer that I refretted. The best-playing and sounding guitars in my collection all originally came with crappy practice amps.? I think I will go play her right now.... Post glamour shots of the final finish!

It was so bad in the wee hours this morning that I started wondering if somehow it was getting knob-twisted by a spammer or DoS'd by whomever. I looked up the "too many connections" error and it seems to be a MySQL thing. Happens when it hits 100 connections. I don't know if that translates into 100 simultaneous users or some condition where the forum software would be making too many connections due to misconfiguration. Not likely that there were 100 people all trying to post or fetch a post at the same time in the wee hours of the morning.

This is only possible with the use of 3rd-party plug-ins (I can't remember which ones, but there are free ones that will let you accomplish the task). Maybe some aggressive use of the search function would turn it up. The person who told me about it was @scook, if that helps. It's a feature that I have long requested.

Yeah, I don't care much for that myself, especially when it depends on servers maintained by a brand such as AIR. The only thing that seems to have changed with these classics is that they're VST3 and have Apple Silicon versions. Still iLok. I'm not an iLok hater and I never had the issues with AIR's installer that some people did. The only thing they really need to make them top notch (and more future resilient) is UI scaling.

They sound crazy good, especially considering that you can regularly pick them up for ten bucks apiece. They must have been outrageous compared to the competition when they first came out. Hybrid 3's ability to layer arpeggiators means that you can have patches where you hold chords and get a melody and bass line along with them. I built an entire song around that feature. For AIR to go to the trouble of making VST3 versions must mean that even at the bargain bin prices, they're still cash cows, which is great.

He's definitely missed. I suspect that the June 2023 announcement followed by months of silence finally did him in. Without him and John Vere, I pity the n00b who can't work out the forum search function.

ACDSee, that's a name from the past. I was using ACDSee (their original program) 30 years ago when I was working at Macromedia (now part of Adobe). Gemstone seems to be two products rolled into one, there's a RAW editor (which the review focuses on), and then a conventional photo editor in the Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop vein. I got Paint Shop Pro in a Humble Bundle with Painter last year, and while I was interested in it, my attempts at trying to use it to replace Paint.NET have been futile. I just can't get cozy with its way of doing things. It's always asking me if I want to convert this or that either to a bitmap or a vector layer because it supports both of them, which is supposed to be a big deal but means diddly 5hit to me. I just want to edit images, I don't care whether intermediate steps are vector or bitmap or whatever, I just want to crop, rotate, adjust color, add text, etc. Maybe I'll warm up to this one better. I'm running up against Paint.NET's limited feature set.

Now up is an orchestral Kontakt Player instrument that has been my favorite new toy for the past few days. Sonuscore The Orchestra Elements is a great-sounding, useful (and downright fun) instrument. It comes with 30 presets, including 10 for strings, wood, brass, and combined in sustain and a variety of the basic tremolo, marcato, and staccato articulations. The samples sound pretty good, but the really cool part comes in once you encounter their arpeggiator and envelope programming. This happens with the next 10 presets, which offer the instruments in a variety of 8ths and triplets. The presets that made me fall in love and want to buy the paid version are the last 10 where they combine the basic articulations with some awesome 5 layered programming, using 3 arpeggiators and 2 envelopes in various combinations. The free version doesn't allow you to change which articulations are stacked, but you can re-program the arps and envelopes. The odd thing about it is that there's no keyswitching until you go a couple notches up the product line. That can be worked around, Kontakt is multi-timbral by itself and even if it weren't, you can always use multiple instances.