Starship Krupa

My bad. When you mentioned excess noise, I somehow got it in my mind that you were working with a capture that was noisy, but looking back I see that's not the case. So at this point you can export mixes and they play well on other people's computers but sound quality is poor when you play them on your system with any software other than Cakewalk (Dopamine, VLC, MusicBee). However other music files play fine on your system with these music players. I don't stump or give up easily but this one's kinda got me.

There's nothing wrong with ASIO4ALL, it's just that, as I said, it adds another layer, and for the specific work that you're doing, audio restoration, it's not necessary, so for troubleshooting purposes, I wanted to set it aside. That's all.?Now that you figured out that you have a playback issue, you can go back to using it. To address that playback issue, my favorite music player app is MusicBee, which may be configured to use ASIO4ALL or WASAPI, just like Cakewalk, so it's very high fidelity, and runs less risk of the kind of issues that you ran into. It's free, too. Be sure to check over in the lower right-hand corner of your screen, the System Tray, to see if somehow there is a driver for your sound system running that provides sonic "enhancements." Click on the up arrow where the hidden icons are, click on the speaker icon. Sometimes there is software that is designed to enhance the headphone listening experience, and it makes the speaker listening experience sound like poo. MusicBee in ASIO or WASAPI Exclusive will likely bypass that.

I don't know that I do, actually, other than giving a critical listen (with a music player that uses WASAPI, not going through the Windows mixer) to the onboard hardware CODEC's in my Dells and Gateway/Acer and being surprised. Although my tone was confrontational, I really do want to hear from you guys, whose opinions I respect, and I thank you for answering, and especially for giving it such attention and actually listening. That's really cool. So if you hadn't used the Realtek's own amp, instead fed it to your monitor amp, which is what I tried, it might sound closer. Just for giggles, a couple of days ago I did a mix sitting up in bed, using my bedroom hi-fi system (Yamaha receiver and Infinity speakers) and Superlux 681EVO's as the monitoring systems, onboard chip, High Definition Sound Driver in WASAPI, coming out of the 1/8" jack of my antique Dell laptop. 3 tracks, my vocal and stereo mic'd acoustic guitar. The mix came out sounding ee-normous, and translates well to everything I've played it on. Best thing I've ever done, mix-wise. After being surprised, I checked to see what version of the CODEC was in each of them and went to the Realtek website to check the specs. Turns out they talk pretty seriously about providing high fidelity playback. Depending on how the motherboard manufacturer chooses to implement the IC, that is, what they hook up, that little POS chip on my motherboard could do S/PDIF in and out, 7.1, power speakers, etc. But since it's a Dell aimed at business customers, you don't get all of that, or maybe if I poked around the headers on the board I'd find the S/PDIF connector. Here's Realtek's 79-page data and app sheet on the hardware CODEC in my Dell Optiplex. But for those who don't wish to look at all that, I'll summarize what they publish: 98dB dynamic range at the input and output, 20Hz-22KHz freq. response, playback at 44.1/48/96/192, recording at 44.1/48/96. Headphone amp puts out 2W into 4ohms. I turn off all of the Windows driver "enhancements," but was amused to see that one of the ones in the custom Dell driver was Waves' (yes, that Waves) MaxxAudio technology. So, I dunno if any of that changes anyone's perception of "Realtekchipsuxgetaninterface!" It does mine. A lot of hardware development these days is oriented toward making gamers happy, and my guess is that gamers may have similar issues to the ones we do as far as audio playback. Do gamers use external DAC's to reduce latency? I actually don't know. Realtek's blurbs talk a lot about "gaming experience." However, many years ago a coworker of mine, who had been hired as the head of Quality Assurance at a then-leading musical electronics company said to me ruefully "a reputation for poor quality is the hardest thing to shake." I agree with the Realtek/High Definition h8t0rZ in that as recently as Windows XP, you wanted to get away from that onboard chip as fast as possible. I believe that that time period is when the truism was formed. I used to tell people that myself on the BBSes. Turn off the onboard chip and go get a discrete sound card, even a $20 no-name with a CMI8738 chip on it (remember those?) will sound better. The almighty 8738 was a classic. I probably have a card around here somewhere with one of those on it, I made a breakout header so I could use the S/PDIF to talk to my DAT recorder. For sure, if you're recording audio, you need something with XLR inputs, and with an onboard CODEC that will be a mixer running into the 1/8 stereo input. If you're going to spring for a mixer, you might as well spring for an interface that's made for the job and you'll be getting a 5-pin MIDI interface and maybe S/PDIF and zero latency monitoring and a non-buggy ASIO driver and bragging rights on forums and all that. I believe, however, that with the advent of WASAPI in Vista/7/8/10, as well as Realtek themselves getting their act together and just downright designing and making better CODEC's and drivers, that the truism no longer necessarily holds for people who only need a device for playback/monitoring. (And, this is very important, when comparing sound quality between two playback systems, make sure that the software used for playback is bypassing the Windows mixer. Musicians should be using a player like MusicBee or foobar2000 that can run in WASAPI mode for checking final mixdowns. The difference (to my ears) is enormous between that and something like Windows Media Player or VLC in default mode. Because sure, my PreSonus sounds way way better when it's playing music using ASIO than the Realtek CODEC does using DirectX, and I've never tried, but I might be able to tell the difference A/B'ing them both in WASAPI, but switch it around the other way and the Realtek would smoke the PreSonus. This is because the Windows mixer resamples and crunches audio streams and the less of that they get, the better they sound.) I'm still not saying it's not true that "you need to get an external interface," but I don't accept it as a foregone conclusion. School me. Take me to class. Tell me what I'm missing. Why an external interface if it's all playback and monitoring? Why does my digital audio stream need to that trip out the USB 2.0 cable?

For anyone who's interested, I tried the Snip & Sketch trick, and it didn't work for templates. It worked per the documentation for the Recent Projects screen, but not New Project. I sure can't figure out the logic of the New Project screen's icon assignment. I renamed the stock Basic template and it retained the "studio monitor" icon, but when I opened it and modified it and saved it as Basic.cwt, it came up with the generic icon. On my notebook computer, my self-created Drums.cwt shows a Slingerland kit (as befits the former Gibson ownership of both brands), while on my main system, Drums.cwt shows the thumbnail view of the Track View. I think this has turned out to be a feature request, to allow custom Start Screen icon assignment for user-created templates.

If you would like to be a voice for change, please say something in the Feedback sub. You went to some trouble to make that nice animated picture. I and others will likely chime in, and who knows, it might get amended. As I said, I would at least like the dialog to stop misleading the user as to what it's going to do. If it must create a whole new directory tree below a folder I specify, then it should say so: "Specify where to create the new project structure" I don't want it to pretend to give me control over what's going to happen and then override it without telling me (I won't make the obvious joke here because it would likely violate forum rules).

Sigh. No, it's not you, it's designed this way. Even though you can specify the path in the dialog, and the dialog accepts it, it goes ahead and does what it wants. It thinks it's protecting you by always creating a file structure below where you create the project every time it creates a new project. I and others have complained about it to no avail. I would like it to at least not lie to us and tell us that it's going to do one thing and then do another. It's supposed to prevent people from losing track of their files, but in my case it had the opposite effect until I figured out what it was up to.

Okay, that's great. Looks like you're doing everything right up front, so let's address it downstream. This is where I ran into issues, so let's go.... Do everything the same, except: 1. In Preferences, switch your driver mode to WASAPI. Either shared or exclusive, doesn't matter for the purposes of what you're doing, mixing and playback. ASIO4ALL is for trying to squeeze the last little bit of latency out of your Realtek hardware CODEC, but latency isn't an issue for your application, and WASAPI can get pretty low anyway. The default export mode for Cakewalk comes from the hardware out, and ASIO4ALL adds another layer of complication to that, so we'll eliminate it 2. Use the File menu instead of the Export module. The Export module is handy, but it uses a lot of "default" settings. You have more control over your export when you use the File/Export option, so if you're having issues, try using that instead, and pay attention to the options in the dialog. It gives you more control over things like whether you want to print FX and automation and so forth. Also you get more options regarding format, such as FLAC and AIFF Have a nice hot output level set when you do your export unless you are planning to use another program to normalize it. In other words, don't have the hardware output or Master bus in Cakewalk turned down, because if you do a "complete mix" export (which is what the module does), that's where it comes from. For comfortable monitoring levels, use your computer's volume control to turn down the speakers instead. If that still doesn't do it, I have other things to try, but this should put you on the right track (pun intended). BTW, I can't resist: if you do a lot of this audio restoration/cleanup stuff, field recordings with your Zoom and the like, Pluginboutique are running a deal right now where if you buy anything from them, you get a license for iZotope RX7 Elements, which is a very good tool for audio restoration work. They have many items in their store for $5 and under. Quite a deal. You have until the end of August to move on it.

Being exposed to the excellence of their products via the Elements series has unquestionably led to me spending money on other iZotope products. My budget is very tight, but I don't need to vet their stuff. It's uniformly excellent and useful. Meldaproduction is my favorite loss-leader marketing company, with their 37-plug-in FreeFX Bundle. I've often said, give me that bundle and the stock DAW plug-ins, and I'm good to go. I 'll pine for Phoenix Stereo Reverb, but I'll give you a mix.

I'll chime in with another recommendation for Phoenix Stereo Reverb or any other reverb product by iZotope Exponential. Pluginboutique seems to have the Exponential Audio line on sale in rotation lately, I got two licenses for Phoenix at $10 each recently, then two more for Excalibur. When it went on sale, I downloaded a trial, and the first time I tried it, I was just floored by how 3-D my mix sounded. Even if all it had was the default Neutral Hall preset it would still be my favorite, go-to reverb, but it has something like 600 presets.

Much as I am an advocate of augmenting CbB with whatever freeware is out there, and I love my Break Tweaker, there is just no substitute for a native, well-integrated phrase sampler. Emphasis on the "well-integrated," which to me means you can select regions and clips and right click and send the audio to the sampler, drag and drop clips, operations like that. Mixcraft has a nice one and I miss it.

To better answer the questions about your computers that helpful people will be asking, you can download and run HWINFO64. It will give you every specification about your computer, from how much RAM, what kind of hard drive, what kind of processor, everything. To answer your question, if what you want to do is Deadmau5 style EDM, no, you don't need to worry about ASIO at this point. Just use the onboard Realtek/High Definition CODEC that comes with your notebook computer(s) in WASAPI Exclusive or Shared modes. ASIO is the best driver mode to use if you have an external audio interface, which a beginner does not need for EDM. If you are not recording audio, and especially if your note entry is all via piano roll and loop manipulation and not keyboard performance, the onboard hardware CODEC is fine. There are people who will try to tell you otherwise, that for "serious" work you must obtain an external interface. If you ask them to explain exactly why that is they will turn silent and leave you alone. If your systems are running sluggishly, it's good to see what's running in the background with Process Explorer. Once you get sound coming out, you need to go check out this thread and start downloading and installing some instruments you can use: Also, PluginBoutique have iZotope Iris 2 on sale for $9 for the next week. There's also an instrument there called XPand!2 that you can pick up for $14.99 that is a pretty essential buy, it's a virtual ROMpler with about 2000 patches.

Please describe the steps you took when doing your Export. What's important is the selections you made in your Track View before you selected Export Audio from the menu, and then the choices you made in the resulting dialogs, especially regarding "Whole Mix" vs. "Buses" and whether you checked the various boxes. There are a couple of things that can go astray in the process, and I had a spot of trouble with it myself when I was new to Cakewalk. The documentation leaves out a bit of critical information. I've since developed a more fool-resistant process.

Maybe I'll just make a bunch of dummy templates called "mixing board" and "monitor speaker" and "rock guitar" and so forth and if Cakewalk assigns the icons, I can Snip & Sketch them.? I'll try using some images that are 600x600 bitmap, too, I have a hunch that startscreen might take to those better than large JPG's that it has to crunch.

What would be great would be if zZounds' computer's algorithm picked up on this and started partnering with Amazon to sell cat food. We would know whom to blame/thank. If it took off, we'd eventually see Fender and Gibson branded pet food (why not, they have their logos on so many knickknacks), then, inevitably, Behringer, at half the price.

I know that that's how it's supposed to work. My issue is that it isn't working that way for me on two different systems. First, when I assign an image as described in the link, it doesn't appear as the Start Screen icon. I get the ugly icon as seen in the picture. Second, I don't even know where to find those good-looking images that the stock templates use. Cakewalk assigned one to one of my templates automatically, which was weird, but not unwelcome. Maybe this is more bug report material than how-to.

Yeah, sadly true. Also compounded by the fact that Synthedit, a very popular development tool for freeware plug-in developers, lagged behind and could only build 32-bit until very recently. I remember searching high and low for a freeware 64-bit B3 and there were just none. Lots of really cool, oddball synths and FX, but all 32-bit because of Synthedit, I don't know what the issue was, if it was abandoned for a while or what. Me, I only ever post 64-bit FX and instruments in this and in the freeware FX thread, things that I have vetted in CbB. My primary imaginary audience is people who are thin on plug-ins and need to augment Cakewalk by BandLab with the assortment of goodies such as were bundled with SONAR Platinum or come with Studio One or Samplitude or Cubase or whatever. Secondary audience is us plug-in ho's who love to try anything.?

To better illustrate what I'm talking about, what is going on, and what I'm trying to accomplish, here's a screen grab of part of my Start Screen. It shows a couple of templates that are altered versions of Basic, with the generic ugly icon. It shows Basic, with a nice picture of a studio monitor. It shows a few of the stock templates, and then most odd, it shows one I rolled myself, Drums, with a picture that Cakewalk inserted all by itself. I guess there's an AI in there that tries to parse the name of the template and sticks an icon to it if it can match it. I also have a couple that have the "screen grab of the Track View" icon. I'd like to have control over what these icons look like, preferably the pretty, hi-res vignetted ones like the ones that come with the default templates.

That's not working for me, @scook. Maybe I'm choosing the wrong pictures. I used a large JPG, but now I wonder if it has to be a BMP or PNG? Or within a certain size? Where did you get that nice picture of the Les Paul? Is it in the track icons folder?

Dang bdickens, you sure can whoop up on those straw men. And I'm actuaLOLing at the flurry of questions at the end of your post. For those of you following at home, the argument fallacies he's engaging in are: "reductio ad absurdum," "straw man," "appeal to authority," and "begging the question." Well it looks like you say it even when nobody has said that. But don't let it slow you down. Continue to attempt to provoke only fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and offer no solutions. You may have a future in television news. No you don't. Nobody in this thread said that (straw man). I know you won't answer this because answering direct questions isn't your style, but since the Internet is such a scary place with all these threats lurking everywhere, and obviously, since you are here you must have a browser and an email address, do you just live with the existential dread and inevitability that disaster will surely befall you, or do you take steps to prevent these awful things you describe from happening? If so, how about sharing those instead of trying to stir up fear? I mean, it does seem kind of odd, you talk about all of these terrible things that happen, and although you are not quoting me, I know I am the biggest naysayer in this thread. I've been Internettin' for 25 years and I don't do it in a constant state of hypervigilance. By rights I should have fallen victim to at least one or two of these awful occurrences. How do you explain this? Is it all done so covertly that I don't even notice it? If so, I must ask again how "dear" the cost actually is, if I haven't even noticed it. BTW, what's your take on those "loyalty cards" that stores like Safeway hand out to give you deep discounts so they can track your shopping habits? My guess is that you think I'm a chump for paying a boatload of money less for my groceries when I use mine because it allows Safeway to analyze my valuable data. But here's the thing about my data: no matter how much money Google or Safeway make from selling what I'm interested in to advertisers, it doesn't come at a cost to me because I can't sell that information somewhere else. In effect, I'm selling it to Google and Safeway in exchange for using their services and getting discounts on my food, and they're reselling it. In exchange for use of this or that, I'm granting them the right to watch what I'm up to when I use their services or shop in their stores. That's kinda the way the world works. I'm ever surprised by people who seem to have only recently figured this out. "They're making money off it!" Well, um, have you been living in Mommy'sMagicPurseLand? Cakewalk seems pretty dang free so far, about as free as a trade show tote bag on the scale of "free." I haven't had to grant them or give them anything meaningful in exchange for the use of it (and I get to keep what I put in it: hmm, good metaphor). We can never go back to how things were when I was a child. I imagine that someday, in order to even have a phone, we'll only be able to go through one government-sanctioned monopoly, we'll have to use their equipment, and everyone's name and home address will be published in hard copy volumes that will be distributed everywhere, in every business and home and will even be dangling from cables in public kiosks so that anyone who wants to will be able to know our phone number and where we live and where to send us mail, and the only way we'll be able to opt out of having our information published will be to pay a monthly fee to The Phone Company. Oh wait.

Title says it. When I'm at the Start Screen and click on "New Project," the stock templates that come with Cakewalk have these lovely hi-res photos of mixing desks and so forth. When I alter them and save them under different names, I get a plain generic icon. I want to assign the purty ones. I know how to add my own pictures for .CWP files so they show up in the recent projects screen, but I want the nice vignetted pictures on my templates, darn it. How do I work this?

It is a fact that Waves have an idiosyncratic way of installing their plug-ins. They put "shell" loaders all over the place, then the individual plug-ins are loaded from within the shell. They don't give the user a choice of whether they want to install the 32-bit shell loader, the AAX loader, etc. No matter how much one likes the plug-ins themselves, this does incur costs. For instance, my notebook computer has a single 250G SSD, and every MB counts. Every stupid AAX plug-in that some installer puts in is another step toward me having to replace the damn thing. For 32-bit plug-ins, it has a double cost, which is that DAW's like Cakewalk that have built-in bridging systems automatically enumerate every plug-in on startup, which slows down their startup time. I'm not singling out Waves here, A|A|S and Meldaproduction are two of my favorite plug-in houses and they are hilariously guilty of shoveling useless nervous nellie versions of their plug-ins all over the place when all I want is 64-bit VST3's. My Waves FX plug-ins I can take or leave, but my favorite soft synth of all is Element 2. I choose to suck up the idiosyncratic install/licensing method. They've flowed me plenty of freebies. I like the USB dongle vs. iLok. If it breaks, Waves support have a policy where they will grant you a "scout's honor" restoration, I think you can do that once, or once a year or something. It has its drawbacks, I was mixing on my laptop sitting up in bed and it wound up buried in the covers for a couple of days. Fortunately, I have critical licenses installed on the HD of my main DAW. A few years back, I had just a couple of Waves plug-ins, and somehow they lost the script and every time my DAW started up they would ask me for the location of their own folder over and over and over. They fixed that in v.10. Using their product comes with the annoyance/drawback of having those shells all over the place, but I suck it up because the product is useful. I completely understand that some might not find the cost:benefit ratio as favorable. It's not "brain dead," it's well-considered. I'm with @mibby on that. If having a bunch of crap all over your hard disk is more of a bother than the joy of being able to use a certain company's take on a compressor or delay (Waves ain't been that big on "unique" so far), then screw it. I used to use TrueVerb, but now I have Phoenix, which smokes it. I'm also with @ensconced in that I don't get what the big deal is that people have with the WUP. Sure, most plug-in houses seem to have a default "lifetime" update, but my Waves plug-ins are very stable, don't cause trouble, I don't care if I'm on version 10 of TrueVerb, which is never going to be updated anyway (except to say version 11 in the about box). There seems to be this fear that once the update plan expires they'll stop working or something. Has yet to happen for me. I think I once paid them about $14 to re-up my WUP because they actually made some meaningful changes to the antique plug-ins I have, but that was a special case. Don't worry about it and enjoy your plug-ins that have been working great. They'll still work great "out of warranty." It's like shopping at Best Buy, just politely tell the salesperson you decline the extended warranty.

I saw this. The coding elves over at W.A. are cranking this stuff out. Now a vocal cleanup tool? I have a bunch of their stuff, obtained on deep discount or PB freebies, and I think they shine when they stick to their EDM creative tools, but who knows. I'll probably get this in order to qualify for next month's PB freebie, whatever it may be. These vocal cleaning tools seem to have varying degrees of efficacy. I'm disappointed so far in the results I get with Nectar's breath control. BTW, I have Sphere Delay, and it's off the dang hook.

More impressions: ACID 11 is likely a dead end for me at this point as a DAW. To the extent that I'm getting into that style of work, I'm more interested in using tools like Break Tweaker inside Cakewalk. And since Cakewalk's mighty Console View is the True Love of My Life, it's tough to open the mixers on these other DAW's and have that "how do these people live with this?" impression. Maybe they export stems to Mixbus or Pyramix or something (I really want to know what Dave Tipper uses, that guy is my mix engineer idol). Similar impression I had with the MPC Beats DAW. Maybe if like most of youse, I had more seat time with Cakewalk/SONAR itself and wasn't still learning it, I'd be more interested in these, but even though it's been years since the BandLab release, I'm still learning CbB and its strengths and limitations. Movie Studio Platinum 16 was a pleasant surprise. Whereas the last version I had suffered from being an obviously dumbed down version of Vegas Pro, this time around it's more of a targeted version of Vegas Pro. There is the dumbed down mode, but also Advanced mode, and rather than just turning things off, it also simplifies the interface to eliminate distractions, but in a good way. I may be spending some time with this one to see if I prefer it or Video Pro X. Seems odd when I have Vegas Pro, but I don't really use the features that are missing from Movie Studio. Vegas Pro comes with more FX, but just like with SPlat/CbB, install Vegas Pro, then install Movie Studio, there are your FX. Speaking of FX, MAGIX USA seem to have been working out on their little minimal UI DXi audio FX, and it installs a bunch of those. Paragraphic EQ, multiband compressor, etc. DXi lives on at MAGIX. Maybe that's their copy protection. If you're on the fence about getting this for some reason, spend the price of dinner for two at Burger King on it, make some delicious spaghetti marinara instead, and get a bundle of amazing programs.

This....this is...a very good deal. I initially looked it over and kinda tossed a mental coin, y'know, I got the last one and the update from Vegas 10 to 15 was great, and I settled into Sound Forge Studio 12 as my go-to audio editor, but they're both working just fine, Movie Studio is for the laptop and I don't know if I've ever even done a full project with it. But it was a huge value for the money, and this one seemed a bit less of an addition to my toolset. I thought it would be fun to try out ACID, though, and maybe I'd like this Video Pro X, and shoot, if nothing else, it's a version upgrade to my favorite audio editor. BUH-DANG! I'm kind of shaking at the idea that I might have passed on it. I could tell within 5 minutes of opening Video Pro X that unless the program is crashy, Vegas would likely be fading into my past. Sound Forge 13 is an insane leap feature-wise, now it has visual themes and a video track and 5.1 surround sound and tempo mapping and LUFS metering and too much other stuff to take in, so if you've been using Sound Forge 12, it's well worth the quarter for that upgrade alone. If you do video, it's a way to check out Video Pro X, which is probably less capable than Vegas Pro in the sense that it may not be as suitable for tackling network TV kinds of productions, but it has a much smoother and intuitive look and feel to it without seeming dumbed down. And I haven't even installed ACID or Movie Studio Platinum or Music Maker Plus yet, in descending order of anticipation. I watched the promo video for Movie Studio, and even it had some interesting looking new features. Music Maker is of little interest, but I think Plus may come with a few VST or DXi plug-ins that work outside the DAW. And I like to see what's out there for people who want to get started.

Sure, as you both point out, Ed and Jeremy, neither hardly add up to "paying dearly." Having your email pwnd is a reminder to go around and change your passwords, which, admit it, when was the last time we did that? And Ed, speaking strictly for myself, I can't entirely fault them for not knowing that they're sending email to such a rampant plug-in 'ho. ?‍♂️ BTW, I'll say it again here for anyone who isn't already doing it: email addresses are free (except the ones that mine your precious personal info oh noes). Create a "low security" one that you use for things like getting free plug-in offers, Denny's Rewards, Baskin Robbins Birthday Cone, whatever. Use a different one for banking, insurance, IRS, mortgage, etc. This isn't necessarily because the people who issue freeware are inherently "suspect," it's because they can't afford to harden their servers and username/password lists against attacks as well as the big dogs. It's just going to be plain easier to hack SoundSpot than it is Wells Fargo, but if you're using the same email and password at both places, bingo! So be "dingdongdawdaddy AT yahoo dot com" for things like BandLab and PluginBoutique. Yahoo allows multiple email addresses. Use one of the "5 free email addresses" your cable TV company gave you that you never use. Whatever. The companies giving you the freebies don't mind, they can still send you the offers, and when you feel like browsing, you'll have a dedicated inbox to open like a catalog. Also, if you're getting too many offers, for heaven's sake unsubscribe. Although with some of them (cough Waves cough) you have to put up with what seems like a daily dose of junk offers (2 FREE plug-ins!!, um, that is if you spend more than a certain amount) to get the occasional true gem.