Starship Krupa

Thanks for posting the solution. I can't speak for "everyone," and say "everyone has done this." But I will say that there is a very good reason that I knew what questions to ask. And I'll add that if I slapped my face every time I found a muted bus or zeroed fader or incorrectly assigned output that I had set and forgot about....I'd look like I'd been in a bar fight. And lost. ?

This, Vlad. My next suggestion is to install 64-bit SONAR 7 alongside your 32-bit version. I don't speak from experience, but I'd be very surprised if it didn't run much better than the 32-bit version. It will be able to do more with the extra memory it can use, and 64-bit Windows 10 runs 64-bit programs better, in my experience. One BIG reason is that also opens you up to being able to use 64-bit plug-ins. Often, I see plug-in developers stop supplying 32-bit versions, so it will help "future proof" your system, and you can keep using SONAR 7 longer. I really like Cakewalk by BandLab, but I wouldn't want to be forced into using it.

As @Xel Ohh mentioned, SONAR had Cyclone, which I just checked out some screenshots of, and it was replaced by a phrase/pad sampler called Beatscape. So historically, SONAR included a built-in phrase sampler for a long time. I don't know what they had in the way of integration and features. I'd sure use it.

IIRC, Senderspike is a Cakewalk user who has posted on this forum, too, so probably gonna work well in CbB. I just realized today that one of my fave freeware plug-in producers had never been mentioned in this thread, and it's over due for a bumpity, so: Check out ljkb Plugins. Their most famous product is probably the knob parametric known as Luftikus. They also entered a look-alike of the ProChannel Quadcurve EQ for the KVR Contest a couple years back. Their most ambitious, and I think unique in the freeware world, project is QRange, a 12-band linear phase paragraphic complete with realtime analyzer and mid-side capability. Luftikus spent some time as my favorite master bus EQ, and may make it back there. QRange is a great complement to the non-linear phase EQ's in my quiver of FX.

Ay-yi-yi, nightmare. Ctrl Z is of course the universal "undo last action" keystroke, but that whammy of having two different undo/redo queues in the plug-in and the host is a tricky one. I'm kind of appalled that Melodyne only has one level of Redo in their plug-in. The plug-in deletion behavior is not Cakewalk (or SONAR?) being "rude," BTW. If the host program's UI has focus, Ctrl-Z should undo the last thing the user did in the host program. If that last thing was putting a plug-in on a track because they're testing it (over and over and over, I feel your pain),. then it should undo that. So it pays to be really mindful of which window has focus. In the case of Region FX, an option to have it warn the user before deleting the plug-in and losing all their edits might make a good feature request. I have any uneasy relationship with Melodyne, partly because they've set up Essentials in such a crippleware-y way, with features greyed out, the manual being the same as for the standard versions but with notes saying that the cheapo version didn't have the feature I just read about how to use. If I hadn't gotten all my Melodyne licenses in bundles, I'd be irritated with it, 'cause it's never come close to coughing up $50 in value. The only thing I think that's cool about it is the audio-to-MIDI conversion. The "rollin' the golden turds" UI looks kinda David Cronenberg, like I'm using some grotesque living organism to manipulate pitch.

That's why my first question was whether you were running 32-bit or 64-bit SONAR. The SI VSTi's that come with Cakewalk are 64-bit. If you are running 32-bit SONAR and for some reason the paths setting got changed to load the 64-bit versions, of if the installation overwrote the 32-bit versions, 64-bit plug-ins will fail to load. I don't know how SONAR 7 handled this, but some DAW's, when they try to load a VST and it fails to load, they will mark it as broken and not try to load it in the future, in order to speed up scanning. Only you know whether you are running 32-bit SONAR, so I don't know if this could even apply. If you are, and you want to keep using SONAR 7 and not Cakewalk by BandLab, I suggest also installing the 64-bit version, as it will likely remain compatible with modern plug-ins longer than a 32-bit version.

The solution to the OP's issue was clicking a button. I suspect that your issue would take more work to fix, if there were anyone left around to help fix it. Maybe it's time to take that free upgrade. Cakewalk by BandLab. 'Cause it sounds like maybe SONAR Producer is starting to not work that well on Windows 10.

If you need Mellotron sounds, Plogue sofrzando is free, and has some that come with it. Plogue hosts good freeware Mellotrons in .sfz format on their site.

You can do it with Meldaproduction's MEqualizer, which is one of the plug-ins in their FreeFXBundle. If you need to EQ each side separately, it can do that, but you'll need to put 2 instances of it on your bus and set them to L and R, respectively. Along with it, you'll get 36 other audio FX and tools (including oscillators and noise generators to help tune that room) to use for free. It's the second best deal in audio production software, IMO. You can upgrade the entire bundle to the Pro versions for about $50, or wait until they have a 50% off everything sale. QRange that Nigel linked to is excellent as well, and linear phase. You can get it and more from lkjb's page. That's guaranteed to have the latest versions. VST4Free are great, but sometimes their download links for actively developed plug-ins get a little stale.

The Project SAM Free Orchestra is a Kontakt Library, not a VSTi. You need to install it as such. Cakewalk can't load it by itself. Fortunately, it is compatible with Native Instruments' Free Kontakt Player, which you may obtain at Native Instruments' website. You also need to register at The Project SAM website to get a serial number for the library, if you haven't already done so. Instructions for installing it as a Kontakt Library should be in the download package, or from the Kontakt Player documentation. There are also plenty of Kontakt users on this forum. While you're at Native Instruments', go ahead and download and install all of their free instruments and libraries, they give away a great selection of sample content.

What Adam did with the C and the pan readouts is more of a feature upgrade to me than just skinning. It adds a function that isn't there in Mercury and Tungsten. And @Adam Compeau, it's time to update the Author and Description fields to say that you're the author, and that it was based on Jeremy Habetler's Dark Aqua. IMO, you've more than earned it. And really, his theme was based on the Glow effect, which looks cool except that I couldn't use it because I had a hard time telling active states from inactive states.

And the adorably fearsome Internet Tough Guys! I want to just take them out for a burrito and tell them that my dad was distant, too.? I kick the hornet's nest from time to time myself, so I've attracted my share of h8trZ. I tend to do it by being contrary or questioning to group assumptions, but it's not to get attention. Sometimes I get schooled, and I welcome that. The thread about DAW's sounding alike was a BIG learning experience, the pushback and history lessons caused me to research it deeper and even try the experiment myself (and I was correct, at least in the case of CbB vs. Mixcraft). Mea culpa, it was done to death in the past (on another forum), but after 2 1/2 years, I'm still a n00b. I haven't seen those old threads. All I was really doing with this one was putting content into a parody thread. I don't actually care about DAW trolls. I'll troll back if I'm in the mood. Plonking works fine if they're persistent. All the DAW's that are out there are great at what they do. We're incredibly fortunate to have so many of these tools for what is really, dirt cheap. I found the receipt for my Yamaha cassette 4-track the other day. $600 in 1987 dollars, $1400 in 2020 dollars. How many top-notch DAW's would $1400 buy me today? Off the top of my head, I could have Ableton Live!, Studio One, REAPER, Waveform, FL Studio, Mixbus, Cakewalk, Mixcraft, I'd be like mini- @Bapu. This is really one of the best and most helpful forums I've ever participated in. I was unfortunate in joining the old one only after the traumas had caused so many people to leave or become (justifiably) bitter and suspicious. I think it's cool that there are people who participate in the Coffee House who don't even use Cakewalk anymore, but come to hang with their old buddies.

The site says that SphereDelay is the "Free Product of the Month," so it looks like they're doing the Pluginboutique thing. I hung out on the site for a few minutes without logging in or doing anything other than poking around, and they popped up a message for another freebie, a loop/sample/preset pack. Then there's this humongous list of free sounds and presets (mostly Serum). I wonder if just getting a free sounds pack qualifies for the FPOTM. If not, just wait 24 hours before you get Combear!?

The first use case I have is where the first 2 or 3 measures are only intro or count-in. If you work zoomed in and need to make the journey back to the start of the song often, or even just want to start the "song" part of your song where it starts, the only way to make the trip instantly is RTZ (no longer bound to W but Ctrl HOME, or on my system, just HOME). When this is 2 measures before the start of the song, it becomes tedious to either wait through it or move your cursor manually up to where you wanted to be every dang time. It's a feature request, for sure, and the way I'd like to see it implemented is with a special "Start" marker that we could set wherever we want this point to be. Then any commands or settings that referred to it could be "Return to Start" when playback stops, or an RTS command is invoked with a keystroke, or whatever. Thank you Robert for the idea to use key bindings for the Prev/Next Marker commands. At least I can set up a marker at "Start" so that when I RTZ it's just another keystroke to bump to the next marker. The other use case isn't so much about navigation so much as it is about counting. One project might use a 1 measure count-in, the next I might use 2. But in musical terms I think of measure 3 as measure 3 no matter what the ruler says, so it would be nice to be able to bump that zero over a couple of bars. On the left side of the Start/Zero marker, everything would just read as negative.

I especially enjoy seeing the Slingerland logo on the Cakewalk drum icons because I, like my namesake and drum hero, Gene Starship....sorry, Krupa, play a Slingerland kit. Still waiting to see what DW do with the brand. I think they got it at the same garage sale where BandLab picked up Cakewalk. I'm sure by this time, Slingerland consists of the name and logo and that's it. It might include the trademark "Radio King."

To be more specific, when you do the Import, it will place your kick sample in a Clip. From there, you can copy the Clip and paste it. Depending on what beat(s) you want to place your kick, setting the Snap to 1/8 or 1/16 notes can help with positioning.

The recruit understands, Sergeant! The recruit has lost editing moves to friendly fire as a result of his neglecting to notice the state of the Ripple button, and has set punch-in points when he meant to turn on Looping. I always like a bit of colour in my Alt Text #2. Has Sergeant noticed that the Add Track and Duplicate Track buttons don't seem to ever use the colorful images in the 4th position? Not even in Mercury nor in Tungsten. In Mercury, the hover goes to the very pale blue in the 3rd position, but never the bright blue. It looks like you went to the trouble of colouring the button set, but it's not showing up. All the states are grey, it never goes to olive. If I'm correct, that might be one for The Young Lady's Illustrated Guide. Looking at the button convention in TYLIGTIC (pronounced TIL-ig-tick or ti-LIG-tick?) suggests that Cakewalk usually uses the 4th position to indicate "Active," but there is no Active state for those buttons, they're not toggles. It's off, hovered, pressed, and back to hovered and off. Two of the squares don't have states to go with them. But Mercury has a nice blue square and Tungsten an orange one in the 4th spot.

The biggest issue is with the rounded/gradient ones, but I've managed to screw up some flat buttons, too.

Welcome to the forum. Lots of good help available here. Are you having problems with only this one project you have been working on, or can you create a new project and play an audio clip or soft synth? Have you checked the Hardware Outputs (it's a pane on the far right in Console View)? Make sure that your playback device isn't muted or turned down. Is your Master bus set to output to your playback device? Do you see any movement on the meters in the Hardware Outputs section when you play your project? When you open Preferences/Audio/Devices, is your output device listed there and enabled? Onboard hardware CODEC's are fine for playback and monitoring purposes. It's only for recording audio that an outboard audio interface will become necessary. The fact that other sounds in Windows are working means that whatever device you're using to listen to playback from your computer is functioning, so the thing to figure out is what's gone wrong with Cakewalk and/or your project.

I mean, what's up with those people who show up and just b1tch and whine about how Cakewalk isn't a professional DAW or R3AP3R is so much better or whatever? I've got a couple of them on my ignore list. Is it like gang members tagging other gangs' turf or something? Or is it just the usual troll attention-seeking disorder?

So I would marquee select an individual button, then shift the hue in that selection? Or do I need to do more magic with selection tools?

I would like some help with using GIMP or Paint.Net or whatever to change the colors on buttons. I used to do software QA on a photo editing program, so I know there are tools for replacing one color with another, but that was almost 25 years ago and I've forgotten. Where I run into trouble is on buttons that have a gradient or shadow or 3-D effect, where the original color isn't consistent across the whole image. For instance, let's say I want to alter the Tools Module buttons from Mercury so that they are bright green instead of bright blue. If they were flat, no problem, but they have a gradient. What do I do? I have been using GIMP, but I'm open to other free tools if they are more suited to the task. This is the biggest issue holding me back from doing themes of my own.

Sergeant, the recruit has a new favorite "flat, light" theme, and would like to especially thank Sergeant for swapping the Instrument and Synth track and header icons! The recruit cannot fathom how the default got to be the other way around, Sergeant! Impressions: I like the colour scheme you used in the Tools Module and would like more of the rest of the theme to use the "grey=off, olive=on" motif. For example, in the track headers, the buttons for expanding lanes are blue when the lanes are expanded. I think it would look great if they were your same olive. Same with the Input Echo. Really, anywhere bright blue or pink or lavender is used to signify active state could be olive. Similar for the Loop Module, Select Module, Marker Module. I like the look of the Auto Crossfade button, I think using the same colour instead of the....less "military" pink would be good for the Ripple Edit button. I know the Snap Module is "brass," but I'd like to see the olive there, too. Also it looks sharp when I set Alternative Text #2 set to 9BCEB1, which is your olive colour. This is a great theme! I really love how you start out with a fantasy concept like "Military" or "Steam Punk" and build a theme around that idea.

Sergeant, no, Sergeant! The recruit understands that it goes with the terrain and is grateful to Sergeant and others like him who have a commitment to excellence, Sergeant!

I don't know of a specific one yet (go for it!), but in the meantime, check out some of the "light" themes like MIL-SPEC Alpha, Boston Flowers or M-Titanium.