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Starship Krupa

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Everything posted by Starship Krupa

  1. Again: why does this matter? All it needs to know is whether a device is present. Two questions: First, why can Cakewalk (presumably) only enumerate MIDI devices when you first start it while other Windows programs can do it whenever they wish? Second, Cakewalk will keep track of which MIDI port(s) you had mapped in your project in the event that one of them becomes disconnected if you answer "no" to the remapping dialog. If you then exit the program, reconnect the device, and restart the program, and open your project, the mapping will persist and you will be able to use the device as before. Why does that process require exiting the program (I believe it has to do with the answer to the first question)? I emboldened "Cakewalk will keep track" because you seem to be convinced that for this to be possible requires the OS to hold Cakewalk's kite string for it. What's so important about maintaining a record of USB port travels? I know that some cases plugging a USB device back into a different port than the one where it was originally recognized could mean loss of contact between the device and its driver, but there's nothing Cakewalk can do about that and I haven't had that happen since I've been on Windows 10. I'm not a programmer, but I once held the certification of Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer, and as far as I know it works like this: I'll restrict myself to talking about USB. The user plugs a MIDI I/O device into their system, and it communicates with the OS via the device's driver. Thanks to the driver, the OS will know that it's a MIDI I/O port and it will have a "friendly" name, usually including the manufacturer and model. The OS reports this to programs that are interested in such things. 'Gotta "Whizzo MIDI In" "Whizzo MIDI Out" for whoever who grabs 'em first.' So Cakewalk comes along and claims Whizzo MIDI In and Out and then all Cakewalk needs to do is tell the OS "I have a note on 33 for Whizzo MIDI Out's Channel One" and the OS and driver take care of the rest. Do I have this right? Cakewalk keeps track of what MIDI ports it's been talking to using friendly names in at least one way I know of, TTSSEQ.ini, probably other ways that aren't as exposed to the user. It doesn't need the OS' help with this (except of course discovering them and supplying them in the first place) because as far as I know, Cakewalk doesn't dirty its hands with talking to USB ports. It talks to MIDI ports, which have friendly names that it can keep track of in a simple plaintext file. I mean, I could sit here with a scrap of paper and keep track of the MIDI ports Cakewalk is being shown by Windows, I don't need to know about the underpinnings. Now even if I'm completely wrong about this and there's some reason that Cakewalk must play pin the USB on the MIDI every time someone disconnects and reconnects their interface, I think it's still fine for Cakewalk to keep track of MIDI ports using friendly names. That's because the likelihood and the consequences of Cakewalk getting something mixed up after a multiple hot swap are both low. It's not of the utmost importance to be able to cover every different scenario, CbB only needs to cover the scenario of a fixed set of interfaces that a user has and is likely to disconnect and reconnect during a session, also the possible connection of a new interface, all with friendly names supplied by the OS. Why Cakewalk should care any more than I do which specific USB port that MIDI interface is plugged into escapes me, so please tell me. Even if it didn't work perfectly, the user would be no worse off than they are now (with needing to exit the program anyway), and how often would someone have the sort of setup required for Cakewalk to get confused? Maybe the user has two MIDI interfaces, both with the same friendly name, which is right away, a less likely scenario. So what? They see it's not working properly and switch the plugs or just restart Cakewalk like they do now. Reality check me: are there hardware and use cases I'm not considering where it would be more likely and the consequences more dire? @User 905133, that's interesting, I did a test and it worked pretty much like @DamianAdams says, Cakewalk maintained the mapping, but couldn't recognized the fact that the port had reappeared until it an exit/restart.
  2. No doubt so you can use as a series effect on a stereo track. Now you've made me curious: I want to see if MNotepad has any of the usual Meldaproduction way-too-many features like mid-side or oversampling or multiparameters. Maybe I'll try putting it on a bus and using it as a send effect.
  3. Forgive my own ignorance of Windows programming and so forth, but why is it necessary to know "what devices are connected to which ports?" Acoustica Mixcraft runs on Windows and if I plug in my Midisport UNO while it's running, a couple of seconds later it throws up a dialog telling me that another MIDI device has been added to my system. Then I go into Preferences and the Midisport is listed along with my Korg and PreSonus. Cakewalk itself seems quite capable of enumerating my system's MIDI ports after it's been closed and relaunched. Is there something that occurs to make it lose that capacity after it runs for a while? If so, can it be reversed?
  4. Got nothing to add to this feature request save agreement, but I was wondering if you, my fellow notez nutz knew about other places you can make annotations in Cakewalk. I ask because I keep stumbling upon them, to my delight. So far I know about of course the Notes panel you are discussing, the big box in the Take Lanes headers, and my most recent discovery, Track and Bus Inspector/Properties/Description. Got any more? I guess having an entire separate Lyrics Track that can be linked to a MIDI track is pretty special. I'm used to DAW's not having places to make notes and using MNotepad.
  5. One might well ponder its expected efficacy in regard to encouraging those reading it to feel enthused about attracting users of a similar ilk to their DAW platform.
  6. Two swinging strikes. It's a feature request, not a tech support request. The screen cap of the disconnection dialog is to demonstrate how Cakewalk is able to tell us that it's lost a MIDI device, not to solicit suggestions for how to stop the MIDI device from getting lost. He may need help with that, but he wasn't asking for it here.? For the purposes of what he's saying, it doesn't matter why his MIDI devices get disconnected and reconnected, MIDI devices get disconnected and reconnected in the age of hot-plug capable interfaces like Firewire, Thunderbolt, and USB. All the time, at the worst possible time. He's saying that if Cakewalk can notice "on the fly" that a MIDI device has become unavailable, it seems like Cakewalk should be able to rescan for newly-connected or reconnected devices without having to exit and restart. Even if the user has to go into Preferences and trigger the rescan manually, it would be better than having to stop everything, exit the program, start it again, and reload the project just because a USB cable got bumped out. Or in the case of a virtual MIDI device, the program supplying it crashed and had to be restarted.
  7. Have you checked the configuration software for your trackpad? Look at p. 1087 of The Cakewalk Reference Guide for descriptions of the canonical multitouch gestures. It doesn't go past two fingers, pinching and spreading to zoom and adjust filter Q's. No fancy 3-finger deejay crab motions. If something else is happening on your system then that's not standard Cakewalk behavior and you should be able to correct it. See if your notebook (making an assumption here) has software that lets you assign functions to gestures, because if it does, its default setup might be making CbB do that stuff. My Dell notebook's touchpad software had The. Most. Annoying. Setting. Ever. And the way it was described was needlessly obtuse, so I had to go through one by one trying all these settings until I found the one that didn't send all my windows into the corner every time I slipped with my finger. No, sorry, I meant EVERY TIME I SLIPPED WITH MY FREAKING FINGER AND WHO WOULD EVEN WANT IT TO DO THAT?! It might be down in the tray at lower right.
  8. I have not personally, but if I wanted a platform for using a Firewire interface that was introduced in 2004 to record with a program that was discontinued in 2017, a Thunderbolt-equipped laptop would be a brave choice. Heaven knows, I'm running FW interfaces that old on a computer that's actually equipped with Firewire ports with a DAW that's still supported and I don't know how long it's going to be before those little blue sync LED's just refuse to light up. Good luck, and let us know if you get 'er working.
  9. Larry, I appreciate and have benefited from the effort you put into posting all the deals you do, and I am not suggesting you provide more information to save me the negligible trouble of typing my name and email address into a form, but. There is more than one website out there that is or was offering a "free" plug-in that I have an account on for the sole purpose of making it to their download page only to find out that I needed to own something else in order to get it or use it. It does amaze me how coy companies can be about this. The front page of the site: "This week! Free sampled Optigon!" I create an account, they send me a confirmation email, I go to the page for the "free" Optigon, read about how meticulously they sampled it, cool, cool, then click on the Download button and it takes me to another page that finally mentions that it's a Kontakt instrument or asks me to put in the serial number for my hardware product. And since I don't own Kontakt and use hopelessly outdated PreSonae, no Kontakt instruments or Plugin Collectives for me. Just an account on their server that will never be used for anything, because I opted out of all communication. "Be Sure To Drink Your Ovaltine" ? I'm not whining, when I see a post "free instrument," and it doesn't mention the K-word I think of Let's Make A Deal and how people would open a door and it might be a brand new car or it might be something....less desirable. So it's like throwing the dice. Will it be a VSTi or a sample set or even something that's ready to go with SampleTank or Kontakt Player? Hurrah! Or will it be a Kontakt instrument? Wah wah wahhhhh. So I have to do a bit of sifting to get my free toys, so what? All in good fun.
  10. It looks like you have to own one of their hardware products to get this?
  11. I use Gatey Watey on every project. Hi hat bleed in the top snare mic, snare bleed in the front kick mic are dealt with in seconds, and the sound I want to keep is left intact. In addition to its special feature of the frequency-specific gating, it's just a really good gate. I got it either in the freebie deal or for $10. Can't remember. For me, it's essential.
  12. Soundspot Cyclone is currently on sale for $8. It's very well-regarded and rarely goes on sale. I can vouch for it, it has a great-looking UI and the controls are many and work well. Great combination of vintage/modern. Currently my favorite bus compressor.
  13. I knew you knew what it meant, I mean, you're you. ? I just had polished off a glass of iced coffee and really wanted to riff on my "sense of place" thing. I think I need to get it out in essay/article form. It's an odd term, but then, using a single word to describe something that's such a complex feeling/sensation like that is kind of inherently silly no matter what word is chosen? The bus compressor is giving the tracks coming in and leaving a sense of cohesion, belonging, unity....I picture sound coming from a room, it has the character of the room. I don't know if I've ever read that tip in an article on mixing, to close your eyes and see if your mix creates a clear image in your mind. Been listening to David Tipper's latest album and that man creates holograms, what he does between two speakers is astonishing, like the "id monster" from Forbidden Planet could appear. Up, down, front, back, total control of sound placement. I get that it's got something to do with delay, and mimicking reflections and tiny differences, but I don't know what yet. He's in complete control of every sound on those recordings and it's all electronic, yet it creates the most believable synthetic space.
  14. I must check Snare Buzz.
  15. So you mean all someone needs to do to stave off their Windows 10 forced updates is have hardware with non-updateable drivers? ? See my last post for the list of peripherals that might be scaring Microsoft. As New Order's fellow Mancunians 10cc once said, "Oooooh, you'll wait a long time for me." Well, better that than killing my system or having my system work with whatever dipsy-doodle new features they want everyone to have but no longer recognize my video card or 10 channel I/O interface.
  16. Hey, however my fellow former/present psychedelic ranger tech loonies in Redmond and Santa Clara want to put it, seriously, kudos to designing an AI that looked at a repurposed business productivity desktop that was originally designed to run Windows 7, sports a PCI (hold the "e") Firewire card from heaven knows when, a video card from 2009 with a driver from 2015, and the most crucial bit, a pair of daisy-chained prosumer audio interfaces that date back to the George W, Bush administration and said "hold off on this system, maybe it's not ready for the latest whiz-bang update."
  17. Of course always when someone asks to change the way a feature works, there must be a consideration of "is there any use case for it working the way it does now?" Because if there is any use case, someone will be using it that way and it will break their workflow. When you mentioned this, I thought of one where someone could have a locked clip 1 measure long, then cut out a measure 2 measures directly in front of it, then, with Ripple Edit enabled, insert 3 measures somewhere further toward the beginning of the project. If the locked clip stays in place, it will end up in the gap left when the measure was cut out. But as the saying goes, when in doubt, read the manual, and since Ripple Edit Selection works that way, Ripple Edit All doesn't need to and I guess isn't even supposed to. For anyone who wants to suggest a feature request here, I recommend checking the Reference Guide first to see what it says. I've found more than one feature that's in the Guide but that was never implemented or, as seems to be the case with Ripple Edit, was implemented incorrectly, making it as much of a bug report as a feature request. You want it to work as (apparently) designed. For instance: the Ref Guide says that Quick Grouping works on take lanes, and you can select multiple take lanes as if it does, but if you select some take lanes, hold Ctrl, and then try something like hitting the Mute button on one of them, it's no go. The only thing you accomplish by selecting multiple take lanes is making a rectangle in their headers turn a pretty blue color. That just doesn't seem like enough.
  18. Not faster than ASIO, and long supported by SONAR and Cakewalk, so it couldn't have been WASAPI.
  19. Considering that the Reference Guide and documentation say: Either the documentation is misleading or the program isn't working like it's supposed to, because it only points out what is ignored in each mode.
  20. I am so heartily in agreement with this request. At least for now, it would be helpful to know which operations are and are not undoable. My vote is, if the change is enough to make the "unsaved" asterisk appear up on the title bar, it should be enough to Ctrl-Z out of.
  21. My device "isn't ready" according to my Settings page. Interesting way to put it. My computer is going to sit here, and nothing at all about its configuration is going to change between now and when Microsoft finally pushes out an update that will reliably not result in my 7-year-old Optiplex going casters-up. Yet somehow it's my device that "isn't ready" and not the update. Fascinating. I'm trying to work this out on a metaphysical level. The computer is sitting here, plugged into the internet, waiting for the update to arrive. It would seem to be the epitome of "readiness" as in "ready when you are, update." The only way this makes sense is if Microsoft's update already exists in the future in a state of readiness, and my computer hasn't yet arrived in that future. The update is waiting for my computer to arrive where it is. Not where in space, but where in time. To arrive when it is. The update and the computer will come together at the point of readiness. It's like the "bro speak" expression "I'm there!" where the bro is so enthusiastic about a proposed activity that he verbally projects himself in time and space to the scene of the activity. The update is, literally, "there." My computer is still "here." But, actually, they don't explicitly say that it's not the update that's "not ready." Perhaps it's as I have said, and "ready" describes the point of their convergence, but they only differ in that the update still remains in a state of change. Yes! The update is in a state of change, the computer is not. When the update is no longer in a state of change, it will be ready, and as yin becomes yang, it will cease to change and then the computer will start to be in a state of change. Mind. Blown. This must have something to do with that microdosing that is so popular with people in the tech industry these days. (really, really glad that they're being cautious about rolling it out after reading your tales of BSOD's and pulled expansion cards)
  22. Gotcha. Driver support is always hanging over the heads of us audio/video production people with investments in "legacy" hardware. I, too, run Firewire interfaces on Windows 10, and the drivers for them are supposed to work with Windows 7 or 8 at the latest, I think. Still, they keep on going. For now. I have a tendency to hang on like a pitbull to functioning hardware. I had this old but fully functional Canon scanner that I could never really get to work reliably in Windows 7. Canon stopped supporting it after XP. But I never tossed it, it sort of worked on one of my Win 7 systems. On a whim I tried plugging it in after I upgraded to Windows 10 and ba-ding, my little Canon scanner is back in business. Works a treat. Windows 10 downloaded and installed a driver for it. So sometimes it goes the opposite way. A newer version of the OS starts supporting hardware that the older version abandoned. Your "corrupt driver" message would wind me up. I guess my attitude is "my hardware is obsolete when I say it is." ? I have a somewhat different attitude toward software, although if your laptop can't handle W10 you're kind of stuck there. There's nothing wrong with throwing CbB on that Windows 10 box and playing around with it. No rule says that we have to use the same program to record, edit, comp, mix, master, etc. Since they're file compatible, you can copy a project over after you've finished tracking (or MIDI note entry) and try editing or comping or mixing or mastering or whatever. Lots of people have a two or three-DAW workflow. You can have the best of both worlds, the old program you're familiar with and the new one with the improvements. What stuck me to Cakewalk like velcro after I first downloaded it was the mixing. I imported dry stems from one of my projects in another DAW and put together a ferocious sounding mix in a couple of hours using only the plug-ins that come with it. I could see myself using other DAW's for tracking, editing, comping, MIDI note entry, beat making, but for mixing....gimme my Cakewalk Console View. Most of the other mixers look like Fisher-Price toys in comparison. Harrison Mixbus looks good, but not much of the rest. Give it a shot: get the project to the point where you're ready to mix and see which program's mixing facilities you like better. If you already installed SONAR 6 on the Windows 10 box, followed by CbB, you can use all your plug-ins in both of them. One of the bits of wisdom that the SONAR Platinum crew had for their comrades in the DAW world after the Gibson announcement, and I took it to heart, is that it's always a good idea to learn our way around a second DAW. We never know what's going to happen with our favorite. And if you've already tried this, I'm curious to hear your impressions.
  23. I would love for Cakewalk to be able to accurately list my interface's inputs rather than calling the input to my Firepod that has "4" printed on it "Right Firepod ASIO Input 3L." And I have actually armed the wrong input because I didn't interpret this gibberish correctly, fortunately it wasn't a critical recording. I'll settle for making the "friendly names" feature versatile enough to allow me to do it myself.
  24. "Glue" means that it helps the diverse sounds that are being mixed together at the bus sound more like they are coming from the same imaginary source. Compressor off=some things poke out, some things are kinda loose, some things maybe don't feel completely in time with the others. Compressor on=poky things are brought in, loose things firmed up a bit, timing feels lined up a little closer, all these different things move together (assuming the compressor is set up correctly!). If there is "character" in the form of noise and distortion and non-linear frequency response, all of the elements are treated with that same character. What was separate recordings of instruments becomes a bundle delivered through this process that lets them share similar dynamics and sonic footprint. That's bus compressor glue. Too little and it doesn't come together, too much and the elements lose their individuality. One of my theories of mixing is that my goal is to create a picture. I should be able to close my eyes and "see" a good mix, it should create a cohesive sense of place and space in the listener's mind, even if it's a place that could never actually exist. The bus compressor helps the sounds that are coming into the bus sound like they plausibly belong to the space I'm trying to create.
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