Starship Krupa

Oh yeah, Bass Professor Mark II on every D.I. bass track, FTW. In other news, Tokyo Dawn Labs have released Molotok, an updated version of Molot, a freeware "character" compressor. I was a fan of Molot for a while, but found the GUI rather ugly and clumsy to navigate. Molotok remedies this and so much more. I only wish that more compressors had UI's and metering like Molotok's. It's hard to describe exactly how it works, but it puts some handy metering right at the controls where it's needed, so you don't need to move your gaze back and forth between the Threshold knob and a meter when you're making an adjustment. The main gain reduction meter is also a masterpiece of usability. So much so, that however it's supposed to color the sound, I'm going to find ways to use this thing just because of the UI.

This is a great idea I hadn't thought of! Yes, Cakewalk should be able to handle this just fine with the help of Melodyne. Then you can go into PRV and pitch the notes down an octave. Another possibility not mentioned is to use loops. There are some included with Cakewalk by BandLab, and you can find many more free (and pay) sample packs at places like W.A. Production. W.A. Production's kits usually come with bass line loops. Right now their monthly giveaway is "Savage Bass House Bundle," and all you need do to qualify for it is download one of their free plug-ins like Combear. Cakewalk handles loops like a champ. Pitch 'em, stretch 'em, whatever.

It's odd, I have 15 Waves plug-ins and they are all the result of some giveaway or other, starting with TrueVerb on Black Friday a few years ago. Magazineware, whatever. The original licenses didn't cost a cent, but I think I dropped about $12 updating my v.9 plug-ins to v.10. I might do that again to bring the v.11 ones up to v.12, 'cause of the resizable GUI's. I have primary licenses for all of them on a thumb drive, then a combination of primary and secondary on the hard drives of my various DAW systems. I've only had to invoke license recovery once, due to ignorance on my part about needing to move licenses before a major system rebuild, and it went reasonably smoothly, much moreso than with the iLok'd licenses on the same system. Their way of loading plug-ins via that shell/wrapper thing is a little weird, but since v.10 it's worked just fine. My Waves plug-ins never crash the host and sound fine, although the Element 2 synthesizer is the only one of them I couldn't find an easy substitute for. People moan about the WUP, but nobody is forcing them to buy it. My Waves plug-ins that are out of WUP and in v.10 and 11 work just as well as they did when those were the current versions, and it's pretty obvious to me that they don't spend a lot of time changing the code in the oldies.

What Steve said. I don't know what plug-ins were bundled with Home Studio, but I wouldn't be surprised if their functionality was surpassed by what comes with CbB and what you can find as freeware elsewhere. This forum has threads for posting freeware FX and software instruments, and they are many pages long and cover just about any category you can imagine.

If you still have Home Studio installed it's not necessary to do anything but go into Preferences/File/VST Settings and add a path to the folder where your old VST's are. Cakewalk supports import and export of MP3's natively, so no external decoder or encoder should be necessary.

I had to vote "None" on almost all of them because I don't have experience with hardware that came out this year. Everything I use is tried-and-true. I'm glad that they put CbB in there even though it's not "versioned" in the standard way (which if it were, I think it would be considered at least Cakewalk by BandLab 2.0 by now). That acknowledges that it is a current product that had a couple of major feature upgrades in the past year (Arranger, Articulations). It will be interesting to see how these polls shake out.

Oh, I see, these both relate to external inserts, which I don't use. I thought that "external inserts" by itself was the first item in your list, as I am aware of other issues with them.

I dunno, sometimes it's difficult to figure out where to post something. This seems like a bug or unwanted feature, so Feedback.

Also know that the handshake that BandLab Assistant must do to re-authorize is a tiny amount of data transfer. You are not forced to update the software, so it's friendly to lower speed and metered connections.

This is a strange quirk of Cakewalk's behavior that I ran into when I first started using it almost 3 years ago. I have been asking on and off since then (including sending screenshots more than once) why this happens and if it is there for some reason. I've also asked if we can have an option to turn it off. I have looked at it from several angles and can't figure out why it would do this, it seems to serve no purpose and is a nuisance at best. At first I thought that maybe it was a byproduct of an "automatic comping" workflow or something, but the developers could not say how the behavior got there or if it originally had a purpose. People made guesses, but none of them really made sense. And I guess that since it doesn't crash the program and nobody else complains, it's not a high priority to investigate. Since I am a drummer and record myself in loop mode with 4 microphones at once, I wind up with these spurious splits across 4 tracks/lanes. I have given up and am resigned to my workflow being: 1. Record as many takes as I need, making sure to Group All Clips when recording 2. Open the first track's take lanes and swipe across one of the intact lanes with the Smart Tool in "Comp" mode to heal the split and get the takes ready for review and editing 3. Un-mute whatever take I want to listen to first by clicking in it with the Smart Tool in Comp mode In my way of thinking, I should not have to do steps 2 and 3 before I am able play back my last take. I don't understand why more people aren't bothered by this. Most new users won't know that you can fix the split so easily and bottom line, it's unnecessary extra work that I have to do each time I record.

I would looooove this. I like to layer synth sounds with different instruments. I was kind of surprised when I discovered that Cakewalk doesn't already have that feature.

Can you elaborate? I'm interested, but I haven't run into issues in these areas.

I already use a limiter on my master bus and am happy with the audio results. The issue is level, not loudness. The situation I'm talking about is that my exports test just fine for loudness (which is what the limiter is for), they just peak at about 4dB below full scale.

I don't see any reference to Realtek hardware CODEC's in your experience. I, too, had a Soundblaster Live PCI card and couldn't get good low latency performance from it. I can only report that my experience with Realtek CODEC's is similar to Noel's. They work fine.

This is, of course, speculation based on the past 3 years of observing the course that Cakewalk development has taken. Speculate is all we can do, 'cause we're not Meng and we're not BandLab employees. If I had billions to mess with, I would probably want to do some things that I thought were just cool things to do, even knowing that they'd not directly make me money. Paul Allen rescued the Cinerama Theater in Seattle just because he thought it was cool and didn't want to see it go dark. 3 years ago there was a great deal of speculation about BandLab's motives for picking up the Cakewalk Inc. IP. My best guesses were that they wanted to add functionality to develop it into an offline front-end to their existing platform and to promote brand awareness. Time seems to point more to the latter than the former (so far, anyway), and as far as I can tell, Cakewalk has earned its keep in that regard. After all, most of the regulars on this (and the old SONAR support forums) had never heard of BandLab 3 years ago. And we're people who spend time at other forums, and online in general. It would be interesting to check search engine queries to see how searches on BandLab have increased, what kind of bump they got 3 years ago. We've not only learned about BandLab's other DAW's and online platform, but the more curious among us have poked around and found out more about the company and its many other brands. It's now apparent to me that just giving people a tool that encourages us to make music is good for their business(es). Whatever, what's most important is that the program has improved from SONAR and continues to improve. Even if development stopped completely, it's a great program that would continue to be great, and a capable and useful tool for some time to come.

Windows 10 has a reputation for taking some time to "settle down," especially in the area of constantly accessing the system drive. You can help things with Cakewalk by accessing the Windows Security Settings and excluding the folders that Cakewalk uses from being scanned by Windows Defender anti-malware. On my systems, I exclude my Cakewalk projects, Cakewalk content, and Cakewalk program folders as well as my VST folders. This stops Defender from doing a realtime scan on files accessed from those folders, which it would otherwise do every time you read a file from them. Other than that, make sure your video and audio drivers are up to date

Someone left its cage unlocked.

Yeah, that's the big drawback to the CWAF Tool, it enumerates everything. Being able to easily get a list of the files used by a single project is something that I have feature requested in other DAW's to no avail. Considering that the information is embedded in each project file, you'd think it might not be that hard to do, but there it is(n't).

Due to my being so out of touch with what Kids These Days want, it's never occurred to me to wish for these things in association with a software support forum. I had no idea that my considering having iMessage, SMS, Telegram, Messenger, and Google Hangouts all on my phone and tablet to be sufficient for my messaging needs was such backward thinking. Heck, now it seems that if I'm not going to adopt every messaging platform that comes along I may as well go back to tin cans and string or smoke signals! Thanks for keeping this old fogey up to date.

I'm finally getting a handle on loudness vs. level (after years of reading primers on the subject), and have set up my loudness metering so that analysis programs like Expose think my mixes are okay. However, I am still struggling with getting the level I want from exports from Cakewalk. I have it set up so that my Master bus goes to a bus called "Mixdown," so that I can do exports from the Mixdown bus. My loudness metering and other final mix analysis plug-ins go in the FX rack of the Mixdown bus. My issue is that when I back off the Mixdown bus fader to the point where its meters (the native Cakewalk ones) are not hitting the red, the resulting exported files are lower in level than I'd like. I usually import them into Sound Forge and normalize to -1dB to get them as hot as possible without chopping the peaks. What do I need to do in order to be able to skip the Sound Forge step? Am I being too conservative with the Mixdown bus fader? Should I be using something more accurate than the native meters?

As far as I know, that is the only way from inside the project. Another tool is the Cakewalk Audio Finder, which you can access from the global Utilities menu as "CWAF Tool."

Also, for improved instrument sounds, AIR Xpand!2 is a favorite upgrade in Cakewalk land. It is on sale right now for USD $4.99 at Plugin Boutique. It has some pretty good sounding drum kits in addition to synth sounds, basses, strings, world percussion, organs, etc.

Staying up to date is a chore with plug-ins that don't have a feature that allows you to check or don't have a manager shell like iZotope, Waves and Native Instruments (not that I particularly like all of them). The rest of them, all I can do is go down my list and then visit the developers' web sites. It can be quite the time sink. Some plug-ins don't even have a feature where you can check their version, but I keep all my installer downloads and can usually go by their dates. At least check the ones you're using in this project.

See my above post, which applies to FX rather than inputs at least (I'm still lobbying for the ability to fully rename inputs). If you create your own category or categories that start with the letter "A" and select Sort By Category, you'll get those categories up at the top. I only have one of these, which is "A-List," and I put my most-used FX into that category (in addition to the usual categories of Compressor, Reverb, Utilities, etc.). As workarounds go, it works pretty well in practice. Instead of scrolling all the way down to Spatial or Tools or Transient Shapers to get my most-used FX in those categories, Sidewidener, MAutoAlign and Imprint, they're all in the top pop-out menu.

Couple of pleasant surprises when I went to W.A. Production to cash in on this. First, I noticed that despite never having spent an actual dime there, I had one of their "chips" that could be flipped for $4 credit (probably from rating and reviewing the freebies I got). I did this, and bought the Mystical Bundle plus Vocal Compressor. After that, I had been given yet another chip, so I cashed it in and got The King 2. Because my order came to $0.90 the order processing algorithm just gave it to me for free. I came out of the whole thing with 5 new plug-ins, plus the monthly giveaway sound pack, having spent just under $11. I guess I got a whiff of what IK Multimedia is like for Larry. ? Moral of the story is that if you're a W.A. Production fan like me, buy your stuff from them direct so that you can rack up those chips. Also rate and review, because that gets you even more credit. The other pleasant surprise was that Screamo, the plug-in I was least interested in from the bundle, turned out to be really cool. I ran a drum loop through it and got an instant "We Will Rock You" drum sound. Each of the plug-ins turned out to be fun and potentially useful. Vocal Compressor on the drum loop on the "Punk Rock Vocal" preset was monstrous. Dodge Pro is way more than just a fake sidechain effect, it has 3 filter bands to go with the volume band, each of all of these independently drawn, with template shapes to start from. I also got around to trying W.A. Production Venom for the first time, and that is a really cool effect. Hard to describe what it does (it has several different modules), except to say that I'm going to put it in my "reverb" category for now. For software industry geeks,this all made me curious so I poked around a bit and their plug-ins seem to come from at least 4 different distinct sources: there's Rahman Fotouhi, the guy who does Instachord/Instascale and Dodge Pro, then there's Re-Compose, which is where Venom and MIDIQ are from, then there are the ones with the SoundSpot-esque UI's like The King and Vocal Compressor, then the Sphere Series and ComBear and PunchyWorm, their single control cartoon Sausage Fattener things. Wherever they're getting them from, they've shown good taste so far.