Starship Krupa

Searching for the same string in the online documentation rewards us with this: https://www.cakewalk.com/Documentation?product=SONAR&language=3&help=Views.36.html

From p. 1650 of The Cakewalk Reference Guide: "Read Automation and Write Automation buttons are fully colored when they affect the entire channel strip. If only a subset of the channel strip’s controls are affected, the Read Automation button and Write Automation buttons are only partially colored." I found this by searching for "read automation."

I have an iMac with Logic Pro and Garageband, have installed Tracktion Waveform on it in the past (I should try Ableton Live now that I have my license for Lite). I've messed about with it, but it's never been part of my workflow. Money is very much an object in my life, and bang-for-the-buck, it's much easier to be a bottom feeder with Windows. As @MediaGary says, orphaned hardware from large companies and people upgrading is abundant. I have 3 Windows systems right now, 2 of which are used almost daily for music production. Those are my Dell tower and laptop. Both were given to me by friends who work for companies who retired them and let their employees pick them over. I even recently upgraded the processor in the laptop from a dual core i5 to a later generation quad i7. A cpu swap in a laptop?? The Windows world has much more free software available for it, Cakewalk being of course a prime example. Cost means nothing there, but it makes for a wider availability of software, music and otherwise. If money were no object, and I had to choose only one platform, it would still be Windows. I like to tinker, but if money were no object and remained no object, I presume I would be handing down my "obsolete" systems to friends who wanted to get into computer music, and Windows systems do that better than Macs. Apple is just so annoyingly worse at backward compatibility and forced upgrades. Older Mac, they stop allowing their OS upgrades to install, then they add bloat and hooks into the OS that encourage software incompatibility, which eventually forces the user to either upgrade their hardware or go without the latest software. I love using my iPhone, but I also do so with the dread that probably within a year Apple will stop allowing it the latest OS updates.

My suspicion is that it would be difficult to purchase a new Windows 10 Intel/AMD desktop or laptop that would not be more than sufficient to the task of recording a solo piano performance, be it mic'd acoustic, VSTi, or digital piano recorded direct. The only caveat would be that I prefer at least 12G of RAM, but even 8G would be fine. My 8-year-old Dell tower can do it without any strain; heck, my 10-year-old Dell notebook can do it with no problem. @Konskoo, one thing to know when reading our advice is that most of the people on this forum will assume that "build" means you wish to buy a separate case, power supply, motherboard, memory, disk drive(s), graphics card, keyboard, mouse, monitor and audio interface and either put it all together or have someone else put it all together. Is that what you mean? There is an advantage to buying a pre-configured system (Dell, HP, or smaller system integrator), which is that all of the components are guaranteed to function together. The specifications given by us can be applied to shopping for a system that meets them with few additions necessary (audio interface, 2nd SSD, possibly more RAM). Otherwise, if it is your intention to assemble a system from all these different components that you select yourself, go for it.

I should think it would not, as work has recently been done on it and the developers would be watching for regressions. Support would likely communicate your issue to them.

Considering that in order to even install and validate the license it used to be impossible on a computer that was not connected to the Internet, I would not characterize it as such. I've run Cakewalk for years and many times lost my connection to the Internet, and it never caused a crash. From what you describe, and from my Google search that revealed people having similar troubles with that CFND.DLL in other programs as well, I would say that Cakewalk will crash due to this defective .DLL situation. You also, BTW, are running CbB on an OS that is not officially supported. You do have my sympathy, I have friends who are clinging to old versions of Pro Tools, which in turn holds up their migration to current OSes. This is due to licensing changes and the lingering terror that upgrading PT and the OS will render their DAW useless. It looks like @Mad Musicologist figured out a solution to this a couple of years ago, as described in the Avid support forum. I will paste his entire message, with his solution, in the hope that it will help you. If it does, please let us know so that others may be helped by this thread:

I was going to ask you what you thought of Studio One, I tried the free version when I was DAW shopping back in 2013 and something about the UI put me off, can't quite remember what. Same with Cubase. I went with Mixcraft because of the friendly price, the contentment expressed on their user forum, and the no BS UI. I have a usability benchmark with DAW's, kind of like a first date, where you learn whether you're compatible at all. I open the main UI, plug in a mic and then see how long it takes (in time and frustration) to record a "test, test, one two three" clip (or region or whatever), then select a section of the clip and delete it. With Mixcraft, it took only a little bit longer than it took me to type the steps. With Reaper, I think it was 45 minutes, including poring over the (at the time) inadequate and poorly organized documentation. That thing where Reaper requires (required? Maybe they fixed it) you to create a clip before you record was my speedbump, and I don't like speedbumps when I'm trying to get ideas down. Reaper's great in other ways, I'm sure. The list you linked to seems as if it's influenced by certain....enthusiastic user communities that whipped up interest amongst the user base. I mean, LMMS beating out Pro Tools, Cubase, Digital Performer, Ableton Live? No way, the thing isn't even set up to deal with full audio tracks. I think these polls really amount to "which DAW's user community can get the word out that there's a DAW poll that they should vote in?" As many have noted, the "best DAW" is the one with the mix of features and UI design that best suits one's way of working. The "best DAW" for someone seeking a career in pro studios is still Pro Tools. Whatever floats one's boat, and we are lucky to have so many amazing ones to choose from, even if we restrict the choice to free licensing.

FL Studio = Skittles Ableton Live! = Electric Kool-Aid Serious, not smarty or rhetorical question, Brian: how new is "new?" If Cakewalk is the benchmark, then I think we're left with Cubase, Digital Performer, and Pro Tools. My experience with multiple DAW's is limited, and some of it comes from half a dozen years ago, but I would go as far as to say that the less time a DAW has been around, the more closely I'd want to examine whether it hadn't yet implemented or developed features I hold dear. Comping in Ableton Live, mixing in Reason, these ideas bring a shudder. But then I look on Wikipedia and see that they've been around for 20 years. Fruity Loops started 23 years ago, and became a "studio" 17 years ago. Yikes.

"Requires Ableton Live Standard 9.0 or better" ?

Unfortunately true, and really the only drawback I see to the BandLab lean and mean development freeware era. There is no longer a Cakewalk, Inc. with a staff of people to handle bundling deals with hardware and software companies, as well as doing things like encouraging use in educational institutions. Not that I would want it to go back, but it is a negative side to SONAR withdrawing from the payware world. We'll always think that BandLab could be doing more to push our favorite DAW, but that just doesn't seem to be their style. I'm happy that it even exists and is being developed with greater attention to excellence. Every time I work in another of the DAW's I have (Mixcraft, Reason, Logic Pro X, Garageband, and now Ableton Live), I appreciate what a good thing we have in Cakewalk. I get exasperated by things like the kluge-a-rama that is setting up drum maps, but it's a....cakewalk compared to the klutziness of trying to make a comp track in Ableton Live, and the last time I tried Logic, it locked up trying to load a Meldaproduction plug-in.

I guess that would be as opposed to MME/DirectX, which is supported, or ASIO4ALL, which is suggested in an onscreen tutorial within the program itself. I see where a couple of people chime in with how poorly WASAPI performs on their systems. Probably as long as there have been standards and commercial software, there have been users who defend their favorite programs' failure to support a technology by saying that the technology is crappy anyway. Latency with Cakewalk and WASAPI is just fine on my 10-year-old Dell notebook. Given the number of Ableton Live users who use the program on their laptops with no external interface, it seems like a big omission. It won't keep me from using it, it's just a pain and a WTF from an otherwise cool, really well-put-together program. It's probably something as mundane as their engineering department not wanting to bother with implementing it (although it's not as if there aren't canned libraries and sample code), their QA team not wanting to test it, and their helpdesk not wanting to support it. The company culture may play favorites with which OS platform gets the attention.

Is that because of the "flat" look? The default orangey colors? I just installed it and poked around a bit and the UI got a lot prettier when I started adjusting the theme in Preferences. I'm interested to take it for a spin, and it will be fun to explore some of the further features of things like W.A. Production loop packs where they include Ableton Live templates and sample projects. Obviously, Ableton Live is a very happening DAW, but it seems like every program has its basic sillinesses. Two that jump right out at me are that it only allows the user to specify one VST2 folder, and no support for WASAPI. Really, Ableton? On the other hand, I was able to switch the driver mode from MME/DirectX to ASIO with the transport running, without a hiccup. I guess if your program was built with live performance as its basic function, audio engine stability is foremost.

I snagged it at 11:57 last night. I'm away from the studio for a week, so doing everything on headphones, but so far I like the positioning ability with the head graphic. That's really what I'm after, spatial positioning capabilities, but if it turns out to be a threat to Phoenix (in my mind, unlikely in any product that doesn't have "Bricasti" in its name) as an all-around reverb, so much the better.

iZotope is one of my favorite plug-in houses because their products combine new-user friendliness and once you're not a n00b anymore, world-beater processors. When I was starting out with this DAW stuff half a dozen years ago, Ozone Elements with its presets and Mastering Assistant was educational. As in this is how good I can make my stuff sound, and what a difference mastering makes. Once I got to the point where I felt my own efforts at mastering were better than the Ozone wizard, I knew I was getting somewhere! My .02 as far as Neoverb vs. R4, I got iZotope/Exponential Phoenix Stereo when it went on sale for $9.99 and the default preset, Neutral Hall, sounds so good that I rarely even switch presets. So I'm not even a preset jockey with it, I'm more like a single preset jockey. So what I'm saying is that Exponential's presets are so good that I find it hard to imagine that you wouldn't find a perfect fit somewhere in R4. Neoverb interests me just because I'm curious to see what iZotope have done with the Exponential algorithms, but even an iZotope/Exponential fan such as me doesn't feel the need to acquire it.

Fixed. I'm giving serious thought to the $16 MReverbMB deal just to be able to mess with the 3-D spaces, but the fact that I have a couple of Phoenix licenses is slowing me down.

This. I install my W.A. Production plug-ins on 3 systems, but it's only humanly possible for me to use them on one of them at a time. I treat them as if I had an imaginary iLok. W.A.'s authorization system has yet to block my installations.

Excellent, these are two of the dwindling list of W.A. plug-ins I don't already own. Thinking of using the Mutant Bundle as my qualifier, fast developing a fondness for W.A.'s creative tools.

Do you count the swapping of Instrument and Synth track icons as one or four? How these got to be the other way round in the stock themes is a source of bafflement to me. Why an icon that pictures both a MIDI symbol and an instrument (keyboard) would not be used for tracks that consist of both a MIDI track and a synth track....it almost seems as if it went out in error, then the documentation was written around it and by the time it could have been amended, it had Just Always Been That Way.

I just handed my punball crown to you.

Fun track, reminds me of Foreigner 4. Yeah, hammering that 8th note for an entire song is harder than it looks (to keep it on time and musical). Bassists and rhythm guitarists tend to fade into the background behind the lead guitarist and vocalist in rawk, but that pulse is important.? Since you're playing to programmed drums, my approach to this would be to record a measure or two of each bass section and just copy and paste and/or groove clip it. That way I could get it as precise as I wanted (with energy variations going into and coming out of changes) through repetition. Record each section in loop mode until nailed, then comp. Were it a human drummer, I'd want to chug the whole song to follow their push and pull. Warning: I can't resist making a couple of other observations/suggestions. I'm a drummer, so it's part of my job description to pester with "helpful" ideas when I'm not practicing stick tricks. The MP3 peaked at about -6 dB. I'd either fix that in CbB by turning up whatever bus you're rendering from or put it into Sound Forge or Audacity and normalizing it up to -1 dB. Saves people from having to crank up their playback volume to hear you. Performance-wise, your chuggery actually sounded pretty okay to me. As noted, you're playing to robo-drummer. However, you're doing a style of music that predates the obsession with tight quantizing, so somebody in your one-man band has to provide a human feel, and letting the bass player dance around the beat a bit makes it sound less robotic. One touch I'd make to the drum track is tweaking the velocity and timing of the first snare hit in that little fill going into the changes. Having them too close in timbre shouts "MIDI drums." Bah-bap instead of Bap-Bap, if you get me.

They make cool droney trip toys, and I find the marketing/delivery system interesting. I also like the music Micah makes, so I dropped something in the hat

Is this in the United States? That seems like at least 10 years too late. I wonder if it might be like my grandma's place, built in 1950, where the outlet boxes were properly grounded, but for whatever reason the outlets themselves were 2-prong. I had to wonder how that came to be, maybe the regulations allowed for using up old stock of 2-prong receptacles. It's been years since I've even seen one of those awful 2-to-3-prong adaptors, the ones that were (wink-wink) only supposed to be used in 2-prong receptacles with "a properly grounded" cover plate screw to attach the little wire or tab to. Which caused me to wonder why, if the box were grounded, it would still have a friggin' 2-prong receptacle in it anyway. Then I had occasion to swap out one of the receptacles at grandma's place.

TAL- Vocoder II is the only vocoder I've ever gotten to work. Until iZotope and Pluginboutique put VocalSynth up for $9.99, it's my jam. One thing I'd like to be able to do is use something other than the internal synth as a carrier. I've tried a few times and always had to fall back to their internal synth, which is great for its purpose, but still, I'd like to be able to feed it other sounds. If anyone has successfully worked out the routing, please let me know.

I may be one of the few recordists in existence who feels that he already has enough mics, but there is some good value in these packages. The shock mount, the pop screen, the arm (if you need these), and then the mic's housing and circuit boards. Microphone Parts sells a compatible upgrade capsule for $30. A circuit board with upgraded components would be another $120. They use the same Schoeps clone circuit as half the Chinese condensers on the market, in surface mount form. I've done the most basic mods on my Chinese condensers, swapping in higher-quality caps made a readily audible difference (use of surface mount components makes the job more difficult, but not impossible). The other mod I like is to lightly pack the inside of the mic body with shipping foam to lower physical resonance within the hollow mic body.

This. Warranty considerations aside, you want to avoid pushing the loose tip further in past the jack and having it wind up loose inside the case. This is of course because it it is conductive metal and can cause a short circuit. While the suggestion to push it out from the inside is a good one, it's possible that your jacks are mounted to the PCB and not open at the tip end. In this case, there would be no way to get an implement in there to push the piece out. If this is the case, one trick of mine is to take a sheet metal screw small enough in diameter and long enough for the tip to grip the inside of the broken-off piece, carefully insert it in the jack until you feel it make contact, then turn it clockwise just enough for the tip of the screw to hook the inside of the piece. Then pull the screw out slowly with the plug tip (we hope) stuck to the end of it. If you want to try the adhesive route, a tiny blob of 5-minute 2-part epoxy would be my suggestion. Cyanoacrylate (Super/Krazy Glue) is unlikely to stick to shiny metal very well; the most reliable applications I've found for that stuff are guitar nut slot and finish repairs and gluing human fingers to each other.