Starship Krupa

Not so long ago I spent a lot of time trying to chase down a difference in sound I thought I heard between CbB and Mixcraft. It was weird, like chasing a phantom, but I trust my hearing. Initially, I wasn't testing side by side trying to find a difference, quite the opposite. Ultimately, after trying to set up an objective test, using VSTi's, in REAPER Mixcraft, Studio One, and CbB, my conclusion was....that it's really difficult to come up with an objective test, even if, like me, you use software that double-blinds the files. It's sometimes said that you hear a difference because you want to hear a difference, but for me the opposite is true: I want there to be no difference. Cakewalk feels more comfortable to me than Mixcraft. If any difference I hear is all in my mind, why would listening on the less comfortable program sound slightly better? I know that it's possible for audio playback engines to sound different from each other because I can hear differences between various music players. My favorite so far is JRiver, followed by AIMP and Music Bee. They all claim to provide bit-perfect playback (which means that they feed your ASIO or WASAPI driver the exact ones and zeroes that they read from the file, bypassing Windows' mixer), but they all sound different as far as detail, soundstage, and transients. in all of my many years of participating on music software forums, nobody has ever taken my suggestion to just try one of these bit-perfect music player programs (AIMP and Music Bee are free, Jriver has a trial period), and I don't expect that to change now, but if you do, set them up to use your ASIO driver or WASAPI Exclusive. If you try this, and A-B it vs. Windows Media Player, you may get a sense of what the differences are between playback engines. Listen closely for "masked" elements of the sound, like when an artist mixes in sound effects or brief little ear candy samples. Also reverb tails. Some players reveal those, others bury them. I'm not knowledgeable enough to know why this is, but I can hear it. Whether the player is better at suppressing jitter, or what, it's there.

I'd like a definition of "jibba jabba," and I don't mean reposting my "Old Euthymia" bourbon label. ?

Last I saw he was calling it "feature complete." From Wankipedia: "A feature-complete (FC) version of a piece of software has all of its planned or primary features implemented but is not yet final due to bugs, performance or stability issues. This occurs at the end of alpha testing in development.."

Yeah, it doesn't seem to choke other hosts. My guess is that, if Windows barfs upon encountering that situation, it's passing the barf on to Sonar. Cakewalk is probably using a system call to get the file list whereas other hosts may be doing their own thing. For who to realize? Plug-in manufacturers such as IK Multimedia seem to have gotten it wrong, and innocent end users can't be expected to check for it. We have a situation where some installers seem to do this. It would be great if vstscan.exe could handle it more gracefully.

I haven't noticed this, but then again my system has 20 virtual cores, 32G of RAM and a 4GHz CPU to play with, so performance differences kinda get lost. The current Sonar is supposedly still a preview and not a fully released product, so who knows. As ever, if you've done anything to tune CbB like plug-in load balancing or thread scheduling model, make sure to apply those settings to Sonar.

Wow, this is old, old news. HG Fortune definitely came up with some idiosyncratic UI's. At least one of them allows the user to choose the number and behavior of "spooks," Halloween ghost like sprites that float about. They are on the crash-y end of 32-bit synth plug-ins. Use at your own risk.

I'm going to make some assumptions here, so correct me if I get it wrong. 1. You want to record the PSR's audio via its own USB audio output. 2. You also wish to be able to play to a metronome beat while you're recording. 3. You don't want the metronome to be audible in your recordings. In order to help, I need to ask a questions. Do you have speakers (or headphones) connected to your computer's audio output jack or are you listening to the metronome and your playing through the speakers in the PSR? It looks like the reason you are recording the metronome along with the music is that you have Cakewalk set to use the keyboard's audio to play the metronome as well as recording the keyboard's audio, so of course the metronome will be recorded along with the music. It's coming from the same device. In order to be able to record the audio from your keyboard and listen to the metronome without also recording the metronome, you will need to have speakers connected to your computer's output and use those speakers to hear the metronome. I'll assume that you already have this set up if you've been using Cakewalk to record guitar. Generally speaking, you'll get better results using WASAPI Driver Mode than MME. MME is very old technology, it's been replaced twice. WASAPI is current technology. Once you set things to use WASAPI, set the track's input to be the stereo output from your keyboard's USB. You currently have it set to record only the left channel, it will sound much better if you record the stereo output. Then route the metronome bus' output to the speakers connected to your computer. For monitoring the keyboard's output you may use either the keyboard's audio (through its speakers) or the speakers connected to your computer (Realtek, if you don't have an external interface). Going forward, you may wish to look into getting an external 2-input audio interface with ASIO support for recording and playing back audio. They may be had brand new for as little as $75, and even less money if purchased used.

So you've been using Cakewalk by BandLab for the past 6 years and you have always had troubles when using virtual instruments? And you're asking whether the developers have plans to improve the performance of Sonar in hosting virtual instruments. I can only speak for myself, Cakewalk and Sonar seem to be not much different from other hosts for this use.

This is a most confusing topic. My understanding of Quick Grouping has always (in 6 years of using CbB and Sonar) been that you select the tracks you want to participate in the Quick Group, then hold Ctrl and grab whatever control you want to adjust on all of the selected tracks. Am I to understand that it used to adjust similar controls for all tracks in a project regardless of selection status?? That would make it pretty much useless for me. I'm glad it was changed.

Since you bought a BSP subscription just to test this, that's the best way to find out. If you skipped past the past 6 years of Cakewalk by BandLab, the engine was given many optimizations during that time, so you should see a noticeable difference between SONAR and Sonar. I've been using Cakewalk the whole time, and in my observations and testing, the engine is more stable and uses fewer resources than it did when Cakewalk by BandLab was first released. It's more "it has already been" than "will be" optimized, but I'm sure that the developers will take whatever opportunities they can to improve it even more.

I'm not seeing this behavior with Sonar on my system. And it's not standard expected behavior. Please tell us what your display and scaling settings are, as they might be affecting this. Include as much info as possible, including display adapter, monitor resolution, etc.

kHs Gate, which comes in the free Kilohearts Essentials bundle has a bypass that can be automated. There are also over 30 other FX in the bundle. It's very useful.

Whether they fall short is a matter of opinion. I don't agree that they "often" make things sound worse. As with any effect you put on a track, it's up to your ears whether they make the audio sound "better" or "worse." Most of them are pretty subtle, like the console emulation in Cakewalk's ProChannel. Since a well-designed physical analog channel strip shouldn't add much color to whatever audio is sent through it, the same goes for an emulation. The design goal of a channel strip is usually to color the sound as little as possible. Accurately emulating a piece of hardware that is designed to have as little effect on the audio as possible seems like it wouldn't be that big a job.

What are you recording? Music, voice over, etc.? How many tracks?

It's my favorite clip of theirs because it shows them on the threshold, so to speak. They've just made the major shift in direction from trying to be a white blues band to experimenting with the prog direction? "Peak Hour" is sort of a Who-ish track, but "Nights" and "Tuesday" point to where they're headed. Here's another of my favorite Moody Blues tracks. "Lovely to See You" is their most "what if the Men of Gondor had a rock band?" song, IMO. And a beautiful, open hearted lyric. When I started writing lyrics myself it helped show me that writing emotionally honest and vulnerable lyrics, especially positive ones, is really hard to do. In the little sketch at the beginning, it's Mike Pinder who comes in with the "there you go, man, keep as cool as you can" bit. Here's another favorite clip where they're miming for a TV show. Still showing the beat influence, but now has the 4-voice male choir lead vocal, and is a showcase for Justin Hayward to rip an Indian-flavored guitar solo. I love their clothes and hair and the way they move.

You mean video products? Surely Samplitude, Sequoia, Music Maker and Sound Forge would have their futures secured.

AIEEEEEEEEEEE! Justin is one of my few musical heroes I'd be interested in meeting. Oy, that Graeme grudge. I guess he really felt like Mike pulled the rug out. So you must have lived in Santa Barbara? I lived there from 1981-1983. My hippie period. Worked on an organic farm, took LSD, got WAY into The Moody Blues (Long Distance Voyager was just out).

It's kinda turning into a romano clef.

Fears, realized. Why would I want a license that expires after a year? There goes my update-by-Humble Bundle routine....

The thing that confuses me is that since Windows 10 is malware, and Windows 11 is even worse malware, why wouldn't Microsoft want the worse/better malware on the greater number of systems? Or do you suppose that they make more money off of kickbacks from the hardware manufacturers than they do from the improved data gathering? Data mining vs. kickbacks. I'd hate to be the one who had to make that decision over at Microsoft!

That's already my plan. Anyone who wants to freak out and wring their hands before then, go right on ahead without me.

Here's a clip I find interesting, must have been just after Days of Future Passed came out, they seem to be on a European TV show, and from what Pinder is saying to them, the audience must have been rude to them before the tape started rolling. When he asks them how many people can make their dickie-birds go 'round, for the non-Brits, "dickie-bird" is a slang term for....well, say it without the "ie bird" part. Kinda clashes with their mellow hippie image. Anyway, they do pretty well with "Peak Hour," Tuesday Afternoon," and "Nights in White Satin" from the new-at-the-time album. When John Lodge was still able to hit those wailing high notes.

Sounds like one of those times when you know you're doing something right if you're p'ing off certain people.

He's magnetic ink. Huge fan here, both of The Moody Blues and of Mr. Pinder's contribution to same.

I don't need to travel to their world, they seem to be determined to endlessly try to bring it to mine. The point that most don't seem to get is that in order for a switch to make sense, the target OS would have to work better than Windows 10. It's not like Windows 10 is going to stop working. As far as malware paranoia, there's too much 3rd-party malware protection software to even list.