Starship Krupa

That is not what he is talking about. What he is talking about is one of those fundamental "good lord how can these people live like this" features that when Mixcraft was my primary I nearly wore the paint off my "0" key I used it so often and couldn't find when I tried Cakewalk. Every big program has (or rather lacks) at least one or two. (When I first started using Mixcraft they had just casually removed its ability to add a marker on the fly with a single keystroke. Which....um, I pretty much do it that way about 9 times out of 10, because I use markers for marking where flubs/edits are in takes and other on-the-fly things like that. Somebody got me going by helping me map a MIDI event to it, but whoa. I joined their beta program and the feature was returned for the next major version with the help of my plaintive cries) He's talking about a command that will zoom in or out to show the horizontal extent of the project (that is, from the beginning to where you go when you hit Ctrl-B) without affecting the vertical zoom. The use case for this is as follows: I am zoomed way way in to do some surgical clip editing, I've zoomed in and scooted over and zoomed back out a little and back in so many times I barely even remember where the heck I am along the timeline. I want to keep working on this track/clip/lane, so I'm going to pull back and see just where I am in the project along the timeline, get an overview, see if I missed anything, without disturbing the track and lane heights I have comfortably adjusted. Or, simpler, maybe I have everything in closed folders except one or two tracks, and if I Shift+F I'll get a screen with Attack of the 50 Foot Waveforms. I feature requested this on the old forum back in April 2018 and was told by two friendly users that CbB already had such a command, and they both told me about the command that zooms both the width and height. Even though I thought I was pretty explicit about stating the "no vertical resizing" part. (I wonder if it's like coming to a beach town and asking for directions to the fishing pier where the platypuses dance. People just smile politely and point in the direction of the fishing pier, because they want to be helpful and you asked them for something that sounded 75% reasonable and 25% WTF are you talking about) Now, I, on the other hand, have little use for a command that messes with my track heights when all I wanted to do was pull back to an overview of the timeline after doing close work. Maybe there are only 4 or 5 tracks in the whole project so far, and if I hit that "fit project" command, the track heights are going to grow to a giant height, or I have a lot of tracks, and I "fit project" and the track I'm working on shrinks down to a tiny little stripe. I don't want that, not now, hardly ever. Maybe in between demos at a trade show, or right before I save and exit, to tidy things up, but as part of my workflow, I can't see using it all that much. Nice that it's there, but much less useful to me. (For anyone who still doesn't get it, think of vertically resizing every track in your project to fit on the screen as "with ice cream." Now that might seem silly, who doesn't love ice cream? And who doesn't want to be able to view all their tracks top to bottom as well as left to right? But what if "it" was matzoh ball soup? That wouldn't be good with ice cream in it. Or Ethiopian injera bread? Delicious, but with ice cream on top? None for me, thanks! So for those of us who only want to fit our projects horizontally, that's like ordering matzoh ball soup. But when our tracks always get resized vertically along with it, that's like getting a scoop of ice cream dumped in our soup just as it's brought to the table. Ewww. Waiter, I'd like a feature request!?)

Nice video, and I like your track, too. Refreshing to hear something a little different from the usual genres used in tutorial vids. I also like your use of native plug-ins and freeware to get your sounds. You may know this already, but if you would like to have greater control over the individual parameters, I'm pretty certain the MAX Style Dial is a "front end" for either the TL-64 Tube Limiter/Compressor or the Boost 11 Limiter. These are part of the "hidden treasure" plug-ins that come with Cakewalk but that are disabled by default. It's a simple matter to enable them, as well as VX-64 and PX-64, using Cakewalk Plug-In Manager. The Style Dials are great because they're instant access to the important parameters, and it's possible to get at the "guts" behind all of them with those 4 hidden plug-ins. In any case, Boost 11 and TL-64 (click on the buttons that open the advanced panels) are also ways to boost loudness, and they come with Cakewalk.

Sure. The big reason that I have such an interest in this. After a few years of Mixcraft, when BandLab announced the free subscription license model, I was about ready to "graduate" to a DAW with a larger feature set. I downloaded a copy of the first rev of CbB/last rev. of SONAR and imported raw stems from a session I had tracked in Mixcraft, with the idea that I would see how good a mix I could come up with using mostly the supplied plug-ins. After I got all the tracks set up and hit Play to start mixing, the difference was apparent immediately, it was like the difference between high thread count cotton sheets and no-iron blend. It made it easier to sit and mix. And incidentally, it took me only a matter of hours to surpass the mix that had taken me days in Mixcraft. Mixcraft 8 still had what I refer to as the Fisher-Price mixer, pretty much useless for anything but setting up routing, IMO. CbB's Console View is my instrument when it comes to mixing. I wound up using the ProChannel FX pretty heavily on that first project. But yeah, immediately audible difference, and one in favor of CbB. And it helped me give CbB a chance despite the problems that first version/last version displayed on my system. Crashing, locking up, audio engine stopping all the time, screen artifacts. But I had a hunch that once they didn't have to chase license fees, things would change very much for the better, and I was right. People on this forum and the other one told me I was being overly optimistic, but everything I said came true and more. This is one case where I don't hate to say I told you so, and I don't think anyone will begrudge me that.? Except for the tighter integration with the other BandLab DAW's. That seems to be back-burnered in favor of working on basic functionality on Cakewalk itself, which I don't think anyone who's CWAF! minds.?

Thanks! It's me, from last December. Yeah, would that I were off-base. I've been in that engineering department when the marketing department came in and delivered a woefully incomplete spec or demanded a "spec" from us that only existed on scraps of paper and (if we were lucky) comments in code. It's conjecture out of thin air, but....not that thin. I've said before that if John Godfrey Saxe had lived to see the computer age, he might have added "software" to his famous “Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made” quote. (BTW, despite or because of the above, I have a lot of respect for the Cakewalk development staff and their process. They do it right, and seem to be correcting for some decisions that may have been made in haste when development was more sales and marketing driven. Just dig the list of fixes with every update!) And thanks for taking it in the spirit in which it was intended (lighthearted). Believe me, I wish it could be different, too. But it's also good to understand and acknowledge why it is like it is. Steinberg created VST to sell more Cubase. IMO, Steinberg went to VST3 to force plug-in vendors to correct for inadequacies in Cubase and Nuendo (specifically sidechaining and UI scaling) that most of them had already gone ahead and done within the VST2 spec anyway. Making VST3 conform to open source standards seems to me like a self-serving move to encourage more adoption. They're taking a page from Apple's book by forcing people to dump something they're perfectly happy with in order to get them to adopt a newer, overhyped thing that doesn't work as well. In doing this, they're making a lot of perfectly functional audio software obsolete because it will only host VST2's. VST3 is the future, just like iPhones without 1/8" audio jacks are the future.

Why can't a group of companies other than Steinberg band together and come up with an alternate, open spec? Look no further than the creation of the MIDI spec, which I and other MI veterans still see as a miracle. In the 35 years it's been around, it's been officially revised how many times, despite for example data storage and transmission technology advancing beyond the point of 1984 fathomability? There's MIDI 2.0, how's that proceeding? Well, I hope. Ever try to get 7 people from the same department at just one company to agree on where to go for lunch? I think getting people from half a dozen plug-in manufacturers to agree on which platform to use for the teleconference meeting might scuttle the whole thing before it started. One problem with any standard is that in adopting it, muchless creating it, at least someone is going to have to give something up, and that thing is going to cost them in some way. Even if it's just loss of face, or autonomy. Back before MIDI, synthesizer manufacturers could lock musicians into buying only their sound modules, their keyboards, their controllers, their sequencers, and so they could charge more for them. A LOT more. You may think that's laughable now, everyone knows that when everything got cheaper, it allowed so many more people to start playing around with music gear that it attracted more people, which attracted even more money, and everyone made even more money, and got even richer, and it was just in time for computers to get involved, so Cakewalk and Pro Tools and Cubase and MIDI made all that possible. It was freakin' awesome, and a great illustration of how going with standards vs. proprietary can increase the entire market enough that everybody benefits way much more in the long run. But the men who sat down over lunch to create MIDI didn't know all of that, it was a big dice roll, and not all of them necessarily benefited, a couple of them lost their companies a few years down the road anyway. They were brave, and we owe them gratitude to this day, no lie, they risked a lot for that vision. Hey, it's just really, really hard. Go ahead, try it. What's stopping you? Everyone would benefit, right? So stop playing music and working and all that and create a plug-in standard for everyone. There's another problem: who does the work? Coordinating email, keeping records, documents, etc., filing for non-profit status, legal status. Hmm. These problems, they sound more like the problems that companies solve. Company creates a standard, they know who's going to benefit, they know who's going to do the work, who's name is going on it, who's going to get sued if someone decides that it infringes on their IP copyright. There's another one, BTW. Risk exposure.

So I can't be the only one who sees "Modern Trailer Percussion" and wonders if it's like one of those Spitfire Labs things where someone took a bunch of expensive mics and a sack of mallets to a "vintage Airstream mobile home."

OB "I hope they null each other." Maybe that'll be a new catchphrase for me. C'mon, that thing is the Jackalope of flying insects. I tell ya, humans moving cargo around is sure handy for invasive organisms. I live next to San Francisco Bay, and there's so much stuff that's carried in bilgewater. You have to be careful about wading at the beach where I live because sometimes slimy snail snot will float on to you and cause a rash. Not harmful, just a little red and itchy, but those snails got here in bilgewater. But hey, guitar parts get here super quickly from China, 'cause I'm a stone's throw from the Port of Oakland. "Out For Delivery"

Ah, I know, it's all in good fun, and thanks for showing interest. I knew it would kick the hornet's nest, but was kinda surprised to find out that the subject had been so "done to death." People have such long memories! Although, well, that just means I get to hear about whatever conclusions were already drawn without it devolving into a screaming match. I don't mind being the poster child for cluelessness. Think of it, though, I'm a "new guy," I only showed up with the advent of BandLab, but that was over 2 1/2 years ago, which is actually a long time in computer years. I've worked for software companies that came and went in that time frame. 2 Christmas parties and they were done. O Addstor, The Learning Company, O Berkeley Systems, who, after all, remembers them? Anyway. You think some sly dogs might have added some non-linearity? That actually would not surprise me to find out. I'd be disappointed but not completely surprised to find out that someone had erred on the side of even-order harmonics in their summing/resampling algos. I hadn't thought of anyone except maybe Harrison doing that until you said it. Considering all the effort, or at least the hype, that goes into "making digital sound analog," no, it wouldn't surprise me at all.? I usually don't get too wound up about someone's 19th nervous Neve emulation, though. My "rational" side suggests that it's the 21st century and that it seems weird to be limited by what was possible in hardware in 1972. But then I get the Beat Magazine free license for T-Racks VC-670 and throw it across my drum bus just to try it and ?. So much for that concept.

You should read pp. 320-325 of the Cakewalk Reference Guide. I'm not saying this in the spirit of "RTFM," but rather to confirm or not my opinion that the behavior is not consistent with, or not described, in the manual. Under the topic header "Inserting tracks," it describes highlighting the track where you want your new track to go, then pressing INSERT or clicking on the Add Track ("+") button or right-clicking to insert a single track, with the described behavior: "Cakewalk shifts the current track and all tracks below it down by one, and inserts a blank, new track at the location of the highlight." I just checked, and this is only true for MIDI tracks, Audio tracks, and Folders, and only when they are inserted via the right click menu. Instrument tracks, and any tracks "inserted" via any other method, including pressing the INSERT key, using the global Insert menu, and clicking the Add Track button, are all added as you describe, down at the bottom of the Track list. Either the Ref. Guide has it wrong or Cakewalk does (I think). So you all may have a bug fix, not a feature request. Happy day if so, 'cause I expect those probably get a faster track.

Whoa, Hillmy, that looks interesting indeed, and they mention Cakewalk compatibility, good on 'em. Ob. pun about being stoked-a55 about Stochas. All groan. In other freeware news, thanks to @Fleer, we know about OB-XD 2.0. I haven't tried it yet, but I've been sprinkling some Synthwave sounds into things lately, so an Oberheim tribute will be a welcome thing. It is free, the button that says "49.00" is for if you want to donate $49.00. If you want to download it, click the appropriate download button. Also, for fellow ambient droners, a company called Quiet Music just released an instrument called Serenity, which isn't as sleepy as it sounds. From what I can make out it's a ROMpler with 3 drone waves in it that you can mix, plus some other basic things like an LFO, filter, reverb. Like a SONiVOX Orchestral Companion but with only 3 samples in it. Maybe "SONiVOX Hippie Companion." It's actually capable of darker moods depending on how you mix the waves and set it. C1-F1 are mapped to field recordings of crickets, birds, then 4 different water sounds, rushing, splashing, rain, waves, and these may all play simultaneously. Someone could, for instance, hold down C1 and C#1 to get the crickets and birds chirping, then bring the water sounds in one by one, then play some ominous intervals with the ambient drone section to evoke God's wrath upon the Earth for the sins of mankind. The UI actually kind of encourages that:

ActuaLOL. And about as euphonious.

Would you call it Schrödinger's Deal, when one of your favorite plug-in houses runs a big sale and you are simultaneously, in equal parts bummed that you can't afford to take advantage of, and glad that you can't afford to take advantage of it? Fortunately, these conditions do null.

Are they deliberately trying to be retro? Has it been long enough that plug-ins can be retro to earlier plug-in UI design? 'Cause these things are partying like it's 1999. Those knurled knobs hurt my cursor, and the glare from the shiny pushbuttons hurts my eyes after a while. But I am happy for the giant segmented LCD "SHIMMERVERB" because sometimes I forget what plug-in I'm using. The demo does sound pretty frickin' great, though....as a handy, inexpensive way to get some classic Eventide algorithms, more power to 'em.

I'm not clear on what is meant by "over the phone using my DAW." When someone proposes an unusual process, I usually want to ask why they aren't doing it in a more conventional way. Considering that Cakewalk is freeware you can send them the project, or if they don't want to use Cakewalk, you can send them your raw stems. Why wouldn't they just have you send your files and do a mix in their studio on their hardware, with their fancy plug-ins, their high-end monitors? They send you a mix, you approve it (or suggest tweaks), they master it, you approve it (or suggest tweaks), you get a finished product. As far as I know, that's the common way to go about it.

Wait, are you saying that the sound of my voice droning on about this has perfectly nulled itself? In that case, I accept the award!

Except I...uh....just tried it and it didn't work. ? Conditions were: dataset of three sine waves, 1K, 440, and 30, panned 50, 50 and C, and the 30 fader pulled down 5dB. Render 44.1/32 bit float. I tried it with CbB and Mixcraft, using both Mixcraft 8 and 9 to provide a bit of methodology reality checking for myself. Made it a 3-way test to make sure that my dataset and methodology were at least on planet Earth. Mixcraft 8 and 9 null each other out, although not down to "absolutely," but reasonably so. A barest flicker of activity on Audacity's lowest meter bar. Between Cakewalk and either of the Mixcraft results I can fiddle with the level and make them null each other so that it reduces about 12dB when they're mixed, but they really don't null. Does this "prove that Mixcraft and Cakewalk sound different from each other?" Of course it doesn't. It suggests to me that they are likely to produce results that sound different from one another when put to practical use. Which is what my empirical observations and those of other similarly experienced observers also suggested. It also suggests that what may be true when comparing Studio One to SONAR to Pro Tools may be less so when comparing SONAR/Cakewalk to Mixcraft to Wavelab to Pyramix to Vegas to Audition to Samplitude....you get the idea, there are so many pieces of audio software out there, maybe he got lucky and found the ones that played by a particular set of rules. Maybe I botched my tests in some way....which would at least demonstrate how easy it is to get two different DAW's to produce different results even when you're throwing sine waves and numbered knob settings at them.

Thank you, lads for making me aware of what was discovered in these old discussions. Yeah, it may be annoying to have it brought up yet again, but how does someone like me learn of the research that people like Jeff have already put into the subject if I don't ask? This forum hasn't been around that long. Neither have I. I just got back into DAW recording about half a dozen years ago. I feel like I know diddly compared to you all. I'm happy to be made aware of information that runs counter to these particular expectations of mine. It makes for a much simpler world! And it helps to feel more confident as well, that I can go between DAW's and not be so concerned that their rendering engines are going to gank the sound. Still, even after reading Ableton's paper, and being made aware of Jeff's tests, I hold that it's possible that the playback engines are not necessarily playing (heh) by the same rules that the rendering engines are. This might be the case if the programmers are playing (ugh) tricks in order to ensure gapless playback. Like my observations of Mixcraft's playback vs. CbB's, where I saw CbB directly streaming every file in real time, where Mixcraft had no disk read activity? Something is different there. Also, look how many user-facing choices there are between playback quality and rendering quality. We get to choose whether our plug-ins are upsampled, which stretching and pitch shifting algorithms the DAW uses, etc. Given what I've learned here, DAW manufacturers seem to take more care than I thought about keeping things clean in the realm of render. When it comes to the land of playback, however, I'm still not so sure. And it's playback that we're thinking of, isn't it, when we talk about the "sound" a DAW has? Or is it? But when it comes to audio playback, I'm very picky. I use Music Bee in ASIO or WASAPI mode or VLC in Audio Memory Output mode so as to minimize meddling from Windows as much as possible. I try to obtain my music in lossless form if possible. When I found out about "bit-perfect" playback and learned how to eliminate or minimize resampling, that was what made the difference in my listening experience. Even with a Realtek chip, getting past all the fiddling that OSes do is what makes the biggest difference (to however my ears listen). I'm also pondering the matter of MAGIX (and Ableton themselves in that document) stating that they "improved" the sound of their audio engines, which of course implies that there was room for improvement. That's straight from the horse's mouth. And still they don't say if it was playback or rendering or both.

Wow, of all the people I've seen, you are so far the most enthusiastic user of BandLab's complete ecosystem, and I really, really hope you check in the forum from time to time. I suspect you probably have a lot of wisdom to share with people who might want to start using more of those features. I have page open right now, and there is a http link on it to the Feedback Loop subforum, so that you may call it to the attention of the CbB developers. Post over there, and emphasize that you are trying to use the full ecosystem, so that people like me will know that it's a Cakewalk/BandLab interoperability issue, that your goal is to import a .BLX file into CbB and BandLab Assistant isn't delivering the .BLX file as it's supposed to. Cakewalk/BandLab interoperability is still, as described on that page, a Preview Feature. Not yet release status, and that goes for the server side components as well, so the developers need to know if you're hitting snags.

Ah! Thanks, Ed, this was exactly what I was looking for. So someone supposedly did, back in the mists of time, do something similar to the test that I outlined. I'd really, really like to know who, when, and how, y'know? And what DAW's they tested, and if they published the results on a website or what. I was just poking around the www to see what had been written about this and found a fascinating section in the Ableton Live! manual that goes into great detail about exactly what operations do and don't affect audio quality (their words). They have a suite of 473 tests that they subject the product to with each build to make sure that any changes haven't accidentally degraded some aspect of the measurable audio performance.: https://www.ableton.com/en/manual/audio-fact-sheet/ In the course of describing this, they do say that they made improvements after v.7, so they are in effect saying that v.8 sounded different from v.7, no way around that. You can't be "better" without being "different." Also, I've been keeping this in my back pocket, but here is a site that shows the visual results of having different DAW's perform the simple task of downsampling a swept sinewave file from 96K to 44.1K. We're all pleased to see that SONAR has had nothing but that one ghostly harmonic from day 1, while some others were fireworks shows at first but cleaned up their acts, likely as a result of looking bad on this site. Take a look at earlier versions of Sequoia! https://src.infinitewave.ca/ I am sorry to say that I downloaded their file package and ran the tests on Mixcraft 8 and they were not 100% linear. I submitted the results back to Infinitewave, but they've never published them. Maybe I botched the submission somehow, but I was pretty fastidious. I also told the devs at Acoustica about my findings and they were silent. No reply at all. I could play those converted sweeps up to 20K and using Voxengo's SPAN, see (and hear) the harmonics starting to kick off around 10K. And they were up high, but I could hear them affecting the audible range with my over-50 post-punk hearing. So therein might be some explanation for Mixcraft's edginess, or maybe not. I could only break their conversion algorithms in certain directions, in others they were clean as a whistle. Would this indicate any non-linearity in the main audio engine? I haven't a clue.

To clarify, I'm not talking about subjective tests, I'm talking about bit-for-bit and audio nulling tests, things that you can see on test equipment and analysis plug-ins. That's the kind of proof I'm interested in, otherwise, I'm with you, listening tests are subjective. And then, who cares, Studio One has flat graphics, so I think it sounds precise, and Cakewalk has rich 3-D graphics, so I think it sounds round and full, and Ableton has bright high tech graphics, so I think it sounds "in your face," and Mixcraft's graphics are kinda jaggy, so it sounds "grainy." ? I've designed boutique guitar amps, I'm no stranger to silly corksniffery, ceramic capacitors vs. film vs. silver mica when it's a shunt going to ground? I was actually bummed when I had to admit to myself that ceramic caps actually do sound harsh and grainy when used as couplers. Ugh. At least I can see it on my oscilloscope. I had been thinking that designing the test was not trivial, but you're right, it ain't all that. How about we start by giving our DAW's three audio files. 30 seconds each. A 440Hz sine wave, a 1KHz sine wave and a 30Hz sine wave. All 44.1/24. We import them to 3 tracks, pan the 30Hz center, the others at 35L and 35R (uh-oh, pan laws), send them all to a stereo bus, then render the output of the bus to a WAV file. Then compare the resulting waveforms. Using an audio editor or spectrum analyzer or whatever analysis tools. If we really wanted to get gnarly, we could start tossing in square waves and see how their mix engines handled those. Thanks, Wibbles, I might try this and see what happens.

Never metaphor I didn't like!

When they're Yakkin'

S'More's the pity....

I certainly haven't. How would you even design such a test? I suppose it could, if one is looking to put things down. If a person is convinced that "they all sound the same" and without benefit of controlled testing tries a few DAW's (we'll give them similar program material in their own studio), and comes to the conclusion that yes, indeed they do, their findings would have the taint of "confirmation bias" as well. Perceived differences in sound between DAW's can only be attributed to "confirmation bias" if one assumes they are designed or claimed to sound exactly similar in the first place, and there is no expert or authority that I know of that says they are, just random forum hearsay. I don't know of any DAW manufacturer who has made that statement, to the contrary, MAGIX, who make 3 of them, made explicit claims otherwise. And they made the claim about one revision of their own products in relation to a previous one. That is to say, the people who make these things say that they build them to sound different from the next company's offering. Qualitatively "better," in their collective opinion. I have seen laypeople making the claim that all DAW's sound alike on discussion forums, accompanied with the statement "it has been proven." I am perplexed by the former claim and curious about the latter. If some people believe that this (to me, unlikely) claim has been proven, I want to know how. I'm curious why this is such a common belief among DAW users. I've already said why it doesn't seem very likely to me, I would love to hear a credible explanation to the contrary (it would make life so much simpler). I question whether DAW's are designed with that goal in the first place. I think that it's probable that the people who program Cakewalk have no interest in making sure their product sounds like REAPER and vice versa. I doubt that the programmers at Avid regularly give an A/B listen to Logic Pro to make sure that Pro Tools is still conforming to Universal DAW Soundalikeness. However, they might very well sit down with it to make sure that by their standards Pro Tools still sounds "as good" or "better." My contention is that too many unrelated people would have had to go the same way on too many independent decisions for it to be even possible for 2 DAW's to sound exactly similar. And by "exactly similar," I mean in actual use, mixing and panning, using plug-ins, and rendering out a mix from all that.