Starship Krupa

I'm guessing that this is the CbB installer. One of the dialogs is for the VST directory, which you may select on your first install, but only on your first install. Once you've installed the program on that system, however, even if you select "Custom Install," all choices will be greyed out and set to your original choices. Somehow, the OP's VST directory got set to the root of an E drive they don't even have, so the question is, how do they clear that.

Oh puh-leeze. Calling this out here and now. Tell me what I "dearly" "pay" by giving willing consent to Google to observe what I'm interested in when I engage in my pastime of web browsing? So far, it consists entirely of having the ads (and I will get ads in that place of one type or another) in my browsing experience targeted, which means that they're going to be ads for things that I'm interested in. So I might "pay" but only if I choose to buy something that I noticed in one of these ads. I'm also savvy enough that when I don't wish to be observed, I know how to switch into browsing modes or use browsers that allow me not to be. So tell me, because obviously I've been fooling myself and have been paying dearly all this time while somehow being unaware of the cost. Maybe you believe that your browsing habits are somehow critical and fascinating information? That they're this valuable treasure to be guarded fiercely? Oh dear. Companies just want to send you more effective advertisements so that you'll maybe buy more things or vote a certain way. That's it. You're just not that special. So unless this is just a "ha, you silly fools, I know more than you in your blind delusions" smug drive-by, please school me. Tell me exactly what my cost is in using, say, Google Chrome, to pick just one. How do I "pay dearly" for that?

I am really glad to hear that! I'm glad that your grousing only extends to the installer.? (I hope)

Yes! I'm sure you're right. Maybe you went to the NAMM Shows post acquisition. I didn't, but Cakewalk sure looked like it bumped traffic to the booth up. Big announcements on every blog, in every magazine. Suddenly everyone wanted to know who this company was. Pretty wise naming strategy, too, even if most people have settled into calling it "Cakewalk." I see it referred to by its proper full name "Cakewalk by BandLab" on compatibility lists, yearly best-of lists, etc., and every time that happens, more eyes on the name "BandLab." On the old forum, I remember some geezer said that he was taught that every single product needed to earn money for a business to thrive. I said that whoever taught them that was a prime example of "those who can't do, teach." Then I pointed to the example of the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl, where Tostitos paid many millions per year for the privilege of doing something that netted them nothing whatsoever tangible. The bowl game didn't give them any ticket revenues or anything else in exchange (maybe some VIP boxes for the corporate heads), all they did was let them add "Tostitos" to the beginning of the event's name. But they doubtlessly moved freight cars full of their tortilla chips before, during and after the game, and for fans of any teams who won the game while it was the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl, they'll probably never buy a competing brand as long as they walk the earth. Even typing this, I have an urge to go get a bag of Tostitos and a jar of salsa. And a bowl, 'cause, festive. Cakewalk by BandLab will have to be around for a while before it will have cost as much as one Tostitos Fiesta Bowl.

Your first statement is false. Cakewalk by BandLab uses a free subscription license. This is objectively, demonstrably true. Anyone with an email account and a computer that meets the requirements may obtain a copy and use it for free. There is no way that your experience of that fact being "good" in any amount can change it. Cakewalk is free, whether your experience of that is good or bad or indifferent. Have you not tried the process? Your second statement is odd, unless you're used to commercial software companies releasing their proprietary code as open source for no good reason. Of course they're hiding something, they're hiding the intellectual property that they've paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for and continue to invest in! Are you new to computers? Photoshop isn't open source either. Adobe is also hiding something, their valuable intellectual property. If the juxtaposition of the two statements is supposed to be meaningful, it still makes no sense. Does the licensing model for the software combined with the code not being open source lead to your suspicion? Does the suspicion come solely from it being free? If you had to pay money or perform a service in exchange for your license, would that reduce or eliminate your suspicion? If so, how much would you have to pay before your suspicion would be eliminated? How would it being open source change things? I rely on good sense and research in such matters. Cakewalk by BandLab has been around for over 2 years. If they were "hiding something," such as subjecting you to "targeted ads" aka "the unrelenting horror, degradation, and violation of changing the sidebar ads in your browser to being for things you're interested in," they'd have to be hiding it extraordinarily well not to have it turn up in a Google search or a malware scan. Moreover, spending all that money and going to all that effort just to pull such an easily detected stunt? Knowing that once it was detected it would turn the product and the company into pariahs? I took those odds.

Okay, @aidan o driscoll, @lmu2002, and @StudioNSFW, since your panacea is for him to buy an audio interface when all he would be using it for is a playback device, please, explain, in detail why he needs to do that, and in particular, martsave, how doing so would "fix" the problem he's having with MSoundFactory. Every computer comes with a Realtek hardware CODEC on its motherboard, which can be run in WASAPI mode. Oscar, the OP, has stated that he is a composer/producer who works entirely via Piano Roll methods. He doesn't even require low latency for realtime MIDI performance. School me. Why does he need to drop over a hundy on an external interface just so he can listen to a 2-channel playback? I really don't know, you all obviously have more information than I do, you sound very confident. I only have my ears to go by, which tell me that when I plug my laptop into my monitoring system via its 1/8" out, using WASAPI in either mode or ASIO4ALL, it sounds fine. Excellent even. I've already heard plenty of times that all Realtek hardware CODEC's are inadequate to the task of audio playback, so I don't need to be told it again in some variation or other. Yes, I know, I just need to be educated as to in what way they're inadequate, how they're inadequate. If plugging my mixing cans directly into my laptop and going for it is compromising the final product vs. lugging around an external D/A converter, I want to know before I ruin any more mixes. I also want to warn my friends who don't read Internet forums and therefore don't know any better.

Oh man, thank you @Teegarden for speaking up in this thread. First off, to @Oscar Garzon, the OP, I hope you've checked with the Meldaproduction support forum on this matter. You may get an answer from Vojtech himself. Not so much on whether he is interested in using GPU cores to process audio, but rather your issue specifically. The advice you've gotten to switch to onboard Realtek sound, and especially WASAPI, is the best step toward helping your issue. There are many who will disparage Realtek's hardware CODEC's. They have been around for a long, long time, and have come a long, long way. People who cut them down probably haven't tried giving them a serious, critical listen in the past 15 years, and given how fast computer audio technology changes, well, that's kind of odd. It's like giving Behringer a blanket condemnation, IMO. Or, uh, SONAR. My opinion: with WASAPI, Realtek's hardware CODEC's are fine for monitoring and listening. If you aren't recording live audio, an external interface is a waste of money. To the topic in general, it is not an outlandish idea, as Teegarden has stated, for developers to use GPU resources to process audio. Anyone who thinks that just because CISC CPU's have gotten so fast they can do it all and that shifting the load to other processors doesn't matter, well, there are a lot of people giving UAD a lot of money for their dedicated processors who think otherwise. My video NLE's come with a variety of A/V rendering CODEC's, some of which can greatly speed the process of final rendering of projects depending on whether your system has an AMD card, an nVidia card, how many cores it has, etc. I can't say for 100% certain that those CODEC's are only using those cores to do the video part of the crunching, but it's not outlandish to imagine audio-only bounces benefiting from this technology. I say "bounces," because for whatever reason, even my video programs only use those GPU's in any meaningful way when it's time to render. Why they don't in realtime, I don't know, maybe because that would make the code less portable? There's an issue when you make your plug-in dependent on CUDA GPU processing, which is what of the user who doesn't have an nVidia GPU because they have a notebook with a Ryzen in it? Maybe they don't do it because it's too big a can of worms. The Bakers would have to chime in on this, but Cakewalk is a Windows program, and Windows runs programs better with video cards that have faster 2-D performance. Unfortunately, video card sales are driven by the gaming market, so development is driven by 3-D performance. Frustratingly, published specs and benchmarks are all about 3-D performance. I would love to upgrade my video card to a more recent one with better performance, but I won't do it unless I can rest assured that I'm going to see an improvement. But you ask on any DAW or NLE forum and the response is always along the lines of "you need yada yada yada yada yada to do decent gaming, but pretty much anything you get that will do decent gaming will handle DAW and NLE work." But the thing is, I don't care about gaming at all on this computer or at this point in my life. Maybe later. Other hobbies right now. I've observed noticeable differences between using the onboard HD4000 GPU, my nVidia card, and my AMD card. Things like palette flashes, zip noise (which is similar to what Oscar is getting), pops when I click on certain screen elements, responsiveness, draw times, all depending on which card I have installed. Another thing, in case anyone has the wrong idea: except for ones like UAD and others that are explicitly made that way, audio interfaces don't have processors in them that crunch numbers in plug-ins. What audio interfaces do is convert digital streams to analog audio and sometimes convert analog audio to digital data. They don't know anything about plug-ins and plug-ins don't know anything about them, except in the cases of UAD and similar.

That's the "canonical" method, I think developed because of course that's how it worked if people did it "naturally," so therefore how it was designed to work. It's proven, if anything goes astray, the forum folk who have firsthand knowledge are best equipped. Also, if you uninstall the later installed programs, there is some unpleasantness, I do know that firsthand. I am saying this not to you, Studio, that would be geeksplaining, but rather for the lurkers. I have phuqall firsthand knowledge of the process having only installed magware Home Studio and then uninstalled it. I wound up with the extra plug-ins that are just now being included with CbB, so that was cool, but the aforementioned uninstall thing was no fun. All that happened was I lost some custom settings, templates, and plug-in layouts, but that customization takes a long time. Also, installing versions with fewer features later can cause .INI files to be overwritten that don't have sections in them to handle certain conditions, so I suggest sticking to the canonical order when possible. Or at least backing up those .INI files.

Sigh. Well, at least as has been pointed out, the information is now all right here in this thread.? I hope you're enjoying Cakewalk, anyway!

I'd like to point out here that Salieri was actually a great composer in his own right, there's no historical evidence that he and Mozart ever even met, much less that he was bitter enough about the younger man's superior talent to goad him into working himself into an early grave. That movie was total BS. ?

Well, I'm glad I didn't get any further with what I was just working on. ? Since I felt kind of silly about posting that image in your thread, I was going to touch up the Add Track box a bit, get rid of the magenta tick boxes, add some aqua to the tabs. I had just made enough progress with GIMP and gotten frustrated that I figured it was nap time in this heat. So, check to see what these notifications are....yep, proves my point for me. Why bother even trying? Ladies and gentlemen, a star is born!

Bought it from Guitar Center. The usual iZotope routine, but in this case it's supposed to include Yet Another License For Melodyne Essentials, any quick hints on how I obtain that?. I think I already have 2 of them. I'm starting to think I could perhaps defray some of my cost of Nectar 3? Wow, this feels like an iZotope graduation. Even though I own licenses for Iris 2 and Breaktweaker, as well as Phoenix Stereo and Excalibur, this is the first non-Elemental iZotope suite I've obtained a license for.

And what city?

I thought this thread was going to show a photo of a woman at a Rush concert at first. Wow, Absolute Music is a retail palace, innit? Really happening drum department. I need a new pair of Vic AJ3's and there's nowhere to get them. I was hoping the camera would, uh, follow...keyboard lady around the entire place, but following main guitar room lady around was nice, too.

Okay, Adam, I just looked over your posts in this forum and 10 days ago you had to have someone tell you how to download the Theme Editor. Sorry, but you're not allowed to get this good in a week. I've been at this for over a year and a half and my buttons still look like someone ran over a jelly donut with their skateboard. I think we have a Lord of the Sth here.... It's people like you who make it so that I'll probably never "release" a complete, finished theme of my own. By the time I'm 3/4 done slogging my way through it, one of you Sth Lords will drop a group of 3, one of which will be very close to the one I've been working on, except yours will have a custom graticule for the Quadcurve EQ or something.

Whoa, duuuuuuuude, I see you did change the flyout! You are a madman of the first stripe! There are so few themes that bother with this....you have done it.

Wow, you have really gone to town on this theme. It's a good one, I like dark themes. I've been putting together one of my own, a mod of Tungsten with turquoise/aqua accents. Since it looks like you're wading into the deep waters of things like the virtual controller, and I didn't know where else to post this, over the years I start noticing when there are certain things that theme authors just never seem to touch, that always alike in every theme. So I used the sort of retro trapezoidal fader knobs because nobody else seems to have used them. One of the dowdiest and hard-to-read (for me) dialogs because it's all shades of grey is the Add Track flyout, so I decided to make one for myself that was at least more legible and had some color to it, although @Colin Nicholls hasn't yet been able to suss out all the text colors. I finally got around to it and it makes things much cheerier: The "Create" button is still dire, with its dismal spirit-crushing grey-on-grey motto snuffing my urge to create every time I press it, but I managed to put some color in the number of tracks, and the background at the bottom, and made the whole main window "none more" black, which since I couldn't change the text color, at least makes it legible. I bet you could do something cool for your Dark Aqua, with a translucent blue-green band across the bottom and the theme text color in the number of tracks counter. You seem ambitious enough to maybe even work on the "Audio" and "Instrument" tabs at the top, but they each have 4 states.

Yes, thanks, the Master bus. That is one place where agglomerated single-source plug-ins seem to shine. As in iZotope Ozone.

Since I've never preferred the "rack within my rack" paradigm (perhaps someone will one day explain the advantage(s) of it), I've only ever used my T-Racks processors as regular plug-ins. Weeding the unregistered demo plug-ins out of my VST3 folder is a chore that I have performed willingly because I've gotten so much top shelf processing from IK Multimedia for free over the years, but if I were more of a paying customer, it would start to bother me to have so much unusable software cluttering up my plug-in menus. It's fair to shovel some demos in with my freeware, but I can see where it would make for a negative user experience with some otherwise excellent software. IK have certainly come through with some amazing processors. I'm usually a bit dismissive of the whole thing of plug-ins chasing after the sound, look, and feel of old rack hardware. Why should we, with all this computing power, constrain ourselves to what was possible with 1972 physical components? Give me one of my Meldaproduction compressors so I can make my track sing and breathe. But then IK Multimedia had to go and put a freebie of their Fairchild 670 emulation in some magazine, and I had to throw it on my drum bus just to see what the fuss was about. ??? Nice compressor, that. Very nice.

How about BandLab? I mean, the DAW that runs on Android and iOS phones and tablets. BandLab had years of developing and marketing their other DAW's before they picked up SONAR and dusted it off. A friend of mine bought an iPad and Apple app-blocked him from installing Garbage Band because his iPad could only take iOS 12, so I mentioned BandLab, and he's loving it.

I'm just glad I could help clear things up for anyone who may have thought that Theme Editor was for film scoring.

Seriously and sincerely, snark and sarcasm aside, to the OP, you seem to be of a cautious nature about what you install on your computer, and rightly so, and so am I. Rather than going through what was obviously an upsetting experience and then ranting about how BandLab should have protected you from all that uncertainty, how about doing some research ahead of time? That's what I do. It seems like you actually did, at least enough to know that Cakewalk was now freeware. It didn't have to stop there. Whenever I'm looking for a program to do whatever task, a small utility, preferably freeware, I check out reviews to see if they have offers in their installers, adware, etc. Makes for peace of mind. You could have paused your installation at any point that you were concerned, opened a browser, and Googled "does Cakewalk by BandLab install adware?" and gotten your questions answered right away. Same with any questions about the add-ons. Google "do I have to use BandLab if I want to use Cakewalk?" if you want to know about that. These questions have been answered endlessly, over and over. You're upset about not knowing all this ahead of time, well, the solution is to find out. Look before you leap. It only takes a minute, if that. No need for the angst and confusion. The information is readily available. Since you seem upset about having to create an account on a website that offers other services besides the specific one you wanted to access, I also suggest having an email address that you use just for the purpose of getting free offers. I have three Yahoo addresses for different purposes. That way I need not be concerned about junk mail clogging my main account, nor the company's user list being stolen, misused, etc.

Thank you! That was the phrase I was trying to remember....

On there now. Thanks!

Me, too. Does anyone buy W.A. Productions, SoundSpot, SONiVOX, or AIR plug-ins during the brief periods when they are at full price?