Starship Krupa

Wow. That is weird. Thanks for posting the solution.

Once I learned about the PreSonus extensions, I asked the Cakewalk devs about it and they had a similar response, but pointed out that they had already implemented some of them. Of course, ARA began life as a PreSonus-led extension, and Cakewalk has always been solidly behind that as well. An issue they cited was the one you flushed out, which is that the plug-in has to make use of it for it to be of any use to the host, It's just the same as with VST3: if the plug-in isn't supplying the information, there's nothing the host can do. To be sure, the ability for a plug-in to pass things like articulations and instrument names (a la drum maps) to a host would be reeeeeally useful.

When I save a preset in Cakewalk Sonar's own preset management system (the menu at the upper left of the plug-in UI) it goes like this: Double-click in the preset name field Type in the new name Click on the "save" icon (floppy disk icon) Currently, if I hit <enter> before I click on the save icon, the preset still isn't saved until I click on the save icon. The program gives no indication that further action is needed. I think that if the user types in the new name, then hits <enter>, the preset should save immediately. It's my instinct to hit <enter> after completing typing in a text field, with the expectation that <enter> will save the information. It would also be nice to have more definite feedback from the UI indicating that the preset has been successfully saved.

All of these are features that have been implemented in VST2 plug-ins, and they are all features that vendors aren't required to implement in their VST3's. They aren't "features of VST3," they're features that were already built into some VST2 plug-ins, then Steinberg wrote up a spec that recommended how to implement them going forward. All Steinberg did was decide how they would prefer other people to implement certain features, then they wrote that into the spec. A big chunk of it came from the PreSonus extensions, most of which were originally conceived and implemented during the VST2 era. One of the big "new" features that Steinberg claimed for VST3 was sidechaining. I don't know when sidechaining first appeared in VST2's, but I do know that it was around a long time before the VST3 spec was published. I have yet to see any plug-in with features that only became possible post-VST3. My system counts off over 600 plug-ins when the DAW does its scan. My toolkit of plug-ins includes suites from iZotope, MeldaProduction, and IK Multimedia, as well as a large number of plug-ins from brainworx, Waves, and other heavy hitters. With all of them, I can still install the VST2's if I choose, and with all of them, there is no difference in function between the VST2 and VST3 versions. I once heard that with some Waves compressors, in order for sidechaining to work in Cubase you have to use the VST3 version, but that's it. Ask yourself: if VST3 allowed plug-in and/or host developers to do things that they couldn't do before, wouldn't they tell us how great their new VST3-only features were, to encourage us to upgrade to the latest versions? To my knowledge, the only company that's ever talked about how great the VST3 spec is is Steinberg themselves. Everyone else seems to see it as a pain in the *****, and it even inspired some companies to form a group and come up with a competing standard. I guess it's insurance in case Steinberg decides to pull the same stunt in the future. In the long run it may save work for developers who want to implement features that depend on a lot of host communication, but I doubt that will ever make up for the extra work developers had to do to comply with a new plug-in spec. Their testing load for VST's effectively doubled once they started supporting VST3. As someone who used to make his living testing software, I can tell you that that extra labor is very much not free. More work into development and testing=higher prices for the end product. I've yet to see any benefit to consumers or non-Steinberg developers in the move to VST3. There may someday be, if plug-in and host developers start actually using the extensions, but I won't hold my breath.

I don't know if there's any way to test a plug-in to see if it's shutting down when there's no audio. Usually the people selling the plug-in make a fuss about it in the marketing blurbs. Yeah, quick scanning, it's why if a plug-in installer doesn't allow me to install only the formats I want, I'll go in search of the unwanted formats and delete them.

You'll probably hate to know that most VST3's still don't implement the feature where they shut off when not passing audio. I've only seen one developer implement it, and that developer also implemented it in their VST2's, AU's, and AAX's. That ability is just a possible feature, developers are not required to implement it. Same with the other "new" features like UI resizing. Steinberg only create the standard. They don't enforce it. It's up to the individual plug-in (and host) developers to implement the available features or not. It's also possible (even common) to make VST2's that implement the "new" VST3 features. MeldaProduction's VST2's do the shutting down when not passing audio trick, and any number of developers' VST2's feature UI resizing, sidechaining, etc. VST3 doesn't really add much, if anything, to what's possible within the VST2 spec. It did create a canonical location for the DLL's, which was great, cured the eternal support issue of "I installed the plug-in and it doesn't show up in my DAW," but it also seemed to coincide with developers no longer supporting the API that populates hosts' preset managers with presets from the plug-in. VST3 uses an external preset system that fewer developers implement. It's turned into a situation where each plug-in has its own proprietary preset manager, which is a pain, 'cause you have to figure out where it is for every developer. Sonar doesn't populate its native preset menu with the VST3 .vstpreset files, I know that at least S1 and REAPER do. As long as your host(s) still support them, and they still function, there is no practical reason to stop using VST2-only plug-ins. I think Cubase and Nuendo are the only DAW's that stopped supporting them. And there are still some plug-ins where the VST2 version works with certain hosts while the VST3 version doesn't.

Hmm. Best sells a certain PreSonus product I won't name in the hybrid version. I'll wait for Black Friday and see if I can snag both of them. Messing about with this freebie has shown me how they set up the layered arpeggiators, which can translate to other synths. Their samples and presets are awesome, but I'm not sure there's anything there that can't be approximated with some effort in other products that include arpeggiators, like Miroslav-on-SampleTank.

I'm really digging what this thing does with just simple chords, but digging deeper I'm confused about certain aspects. There's no documentation I can find except for the comparison chart on their website. The main question I have is whether its preset slots and articulations can be accessed via keyswitching or automation or whatever. For instance, I'd like to start a piece with a 3 chord loop, go for a few times on one pattern/preset, then switch to another pattern/preset using the same 3 chords. Can this be done without having to set up another track with the instrument set to the patch I want to use? Most orchestral instruments that I've seen, even the simple ones like Orchestral Companions, allow keyswitching. I can't find any evidence of it with Elements or Essentials. If there isn't some way to switch articulations/patches on the fly, that kind of limits the use of its sounds outside of the "animated orchestra" trick. I'd like to find out before I drop the fiddy on it. Seems like it would be a pain to have to use multiple instances of Kontakt Player, each one set to a different patch. I'm not familiar enough with Kontakt to know whether I can set up multiple instruments within it and access them on different MIDI channels. Can you set it up with multiple NKI's and use it multitimbrally as you can with SampleTank? That would be one possible way to get around the absence of keyswitching in The Orchestra Essentials (if it's actually absent). The comparison chart also says that you can't save user presets in the Essentials version, which seems like an odd thing to leave out in a paid version. The workaround would be to use the DAW's own preset manager, but why force people to do that? It definitely has great honeymoon appeal, but before I invest, I want to know how much I'm confined to using the 99 presets it comes with (33 voicings, 33 rhythms, and 33 complex "animated orchestra" presets) and how easy it is to use multiple of them in the same song. If it's too limited I'll just stay with the free version.

It is so great that you do these, and continue to roll them out. Is there a standard for MIDI FX the way that there is for VST, or is the API different for each DAW? Seems like there should be a standard if there isn't already one, it could open up a whole new market for plug-ins.

Wow. This is amazing good fun. It has me contemplating buying the next step up, The Orchestra Essentials. I trust that there's no "GROUP" or whatever discount available at JRR or Best or Larry would have mentioned it. Is the current discount price the usual price or does it actually usually sit at $99? I definitely want the Essentials upgrade. What I like: the articulations sound great, and I was able to grasp how they're pulling off "play a chord and get an instant arrangement," which is layered arpeggiators. I love synth patches with layered arpeggiators, it's one of my favorite things about Hybrid 3 and the A|A|S synths. The different instruments and articulations also load instantly, which is a big advantage over SampleTank/Miroslav. @PavlovsCat, the way that it's limited is that you can't change what instrument is loaded into each slot. Try clicking on the little arrow to the right of an instrument's name and you'll see what I mean. So I'll guess that Essentials does let you do that. Even if I stayed with only their programmed arpeggios, it would be nice to change out say, the trombone bass sound for a cello or oboe.

"In typical imperial British fashion, Fallout: London will take over your Fallout 4 installation."?

No more than iZotope Ozone put mastering engineers out of business. Just go John Henry on it. In creative pursuits, the machine can always be beaten. If what you've been doing can be bested by an algorithm, maybe it's time to change up what you're doing?

Are you using a crossfade? That's what crossfades are designed for, to smooth that kind of transition.

One of those old school camera cleaning brushes with the integrated squeeze bulb blower is a good bet for getting rid of dust. They're made for the delicate mechanisms and mirrors of camera gear, the optical equivalent of microphones.

Headphones. Good ones for mixing and listening and inexpensive over-ear ones for tracking. I like Sennheiser's low end over-ear models for this, but there are many options. Mic stands, cables, adaptors. Hard to have too many of them. Patchbay if you use outboard gear.

Would handle it (and much more) easily.

Your external drive may be transferring too slowly. Make sure it's USB3 and plugged into a USB3 port on your system.

Cakewalk can absolutely do what you want, and is the right tool for the job. John's videos are a great way to start. The Cakewalk Reference Guide PDF is the best manual.

Unfortunately MIDI instruments only respond (via MIDI, anyway) to global panning messages. So you can tell it to pan a certain amount on a particular beat, but it will pan all of the notes that it's playing on that beat the same. The way around that is to use an instrument with its own mixer. You can then use automation to control the mixer. Most drum plug-ins have mixers or at least volume and pan control of individual instruments.

My goal is "drums in a room." I want to capture what it sounds like for me or another drummer to be playing the kit in the room, rather than trying to get the best possible capture of each individual piece of the kit. Snare and kick getting their own mics is fine. Do you put that 3rd mic on the bass drum? I'd expect MDrumStrip to be good, the founder/chief engineer of MeldaProduction is a drummer. I'll surely give it a try when I start recording drums again.

Actually, I haven't used MDrumStrip at all except to just try it out. ?. Mostly because I haven't been recording live drums, but also because I have a hard time cozying up to channel strip plug-ins. Which is what MDrumStrip is: it's a collection of drum-specific channel strips. It's a completely different concept and function from MDrumLeveler and they're intended for different workflows. MDrumLeveler takes a unique approach to dynamics, and dynamics only. It levels out the sound of your drum hits and separates them from the rest of the kit. My drum kit mic'ing is simple, just 4 mics in my interpretation of the "Recorderman" setup. A mic each for kick and snare, and overheads set up asymmetrically. Each of MDrumStrip's channel strip devices gives you EQ, compression, reverb, saturation, and limiting. It's like MTurboEQ in that there's no "edit" mode where you have under-the-hood access to the individual elements. What you get is 9 channel strips, each for a different piece of the drum kit, plus bus and master. My mixing flow for live drums is MDrumLeveler on kick, MDrumLeveler on snare, EQ as needed on each, compression and EQ on the overheads, and then one last compressor on the whole drum bus. MDrumStrip could sub for whatever compressor and EQ I use on the overheads. That's about all it could do for me. MeldaProduction's plug-ins aren't necessarily designed to complement each other, many of them are aimed at dissimilar workflows. That's the case with these two. MDrumStrip is part of the initiative he's taken in latter years to also accommodate tastes outside his original philosophy. Doing the "devices" was the first step, then the skeuomorphic devices was the second step and then making plug-ins that were only devices, with no "edit" mode was the most recent step. I clicked with MeldaProduction's original utility-overkill design philosophy. And I don't care so much for their take on skeuomorphic. A lot of them look like what you'd get if you asked an AI to do a skeuomorphic plug-in UI, except I think they're actually done by humans who haven't necessarily actually seen the physical devices they're trying to imitate. Here's my candidate for the worst example, from MDynamics: A de-esser in the body of a Marshall practice amp (complete with handle and reinforced corners). Someone who had never seen an actual de-esser might come up with this. Fortunately, even for the "devices only" ones there's a toggle setting for "enable custom GUI for devices" that will banish this sort of thing and get you to a more utilitarian UI if you prefer. Anyway, MDrumStrip is part of their attempt to cater to people who are put off by the standard MeldaProduction UI. I'm not one of those people, and when it comes to channel strips, I usually end up choosing individual discrete processors.

Not that I'm against the use of anti-malware software, but IME, measures taken to combat malware have done worse harm to the end user experience than actual malware. I'm ever fascinated by the fear of something causing more damage than the thing itself. My favorite case: in 2002, Americans stayed away from airline travel in favor of automobile travel, this being of course due to the Sept. 11 tragedy the previous year. Due to the relative safety of car travel vs. plane travel, more Americans were killed on the highways as a result of the shift than were killed in the Sept. 11 event itself. It's good to take precautions, but it's also good to take caution about taking precautions.

I'm interested to hear what you think of it.

Not at all. While it does control dynamics, it's nothing like a compressor emulation. I used to have a whole chain worked out for my live drum tracks, using Boz' Gatey Watey, elysia mpressor, etc. Then I got MDrumLeveler in one of my Melda bundles and....whoa. It replaced all of the track-level dynamics processing I had been using. It takes care of everything but EQ. If you're mixing live drums, run, don't walk. Unequivocal recommendation from this drummer. Makes it so easy that it almost takes the fun out of it.?

Reading this it's apparent which other DAW probably inspired this policy of theirs, and I'm sorry, but ?.