Starship Krupa

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.

MTuner from the Meldaproduction MFreeFX bundle has, as one of its functions, an audio-to-MIDI converter. I've tried it and it works pretty well.* (*what you should really do is grab a bass and practice with a metronome until you can nail the part with impeccable precision. Then set Cakewalk to record in loop mode until you get a take that will require no quantizing, comping, or copy-and-pasting. Ideally, your playing should be so precise that even compression would be superfluous. This is because acquiring skill playing your instrument is inherently better than acquiring skill using your DAW and it is always futile to try to salvage imperfect recordings. You must go back and re-record, even if doing so would require rounding up multiple musicians or inventing time travel, the latter of which is likely to be the easier task)

Mixcraft comes with a UI-less GM synth that has some decent sounds in it (especially drum kits). It behaves similarly to Cakewalk/TTS-1 when bringing in MIDI files.

? This is huge! Who is the man? Why, I do believe it's you!

Of course, and it figures that Reaper has it, it's such a "roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty" powerhouse. Their unfortunately named scripting language even lets you create your own effects. "Cakewalk/Sonar not mentioned" is par for the course these days, innit? I don't mind so much, it's kind of a secret weapon thing. We CbB users tend not to pester publications about covering it, which may have contributed to the unfortunate demise of Craig's column. I've been meaning to drop Admiral Bumblebee a note suggesting that he update his review of CbB. He dinged it for fragility and crashiness and it's become so much more robust since then.

Hmm. How do other DAW's perform these tasks? Cakewalk is the only one I've used that even has a scripting language.

I'm late to the thread, but I have a Zoom Q8 that's not only a video recorder, but has a couple of XLR inputs with phantom power. The switchable onboard mics are great, so you can get both a room sound and 2 channels of board mix or vocal mic or whatever.

"I'm ready for my PluginBoutique freebie, Mr. Shelby"

Same here, and I have it all pretty much running smoothly. Since I have Windows 10 Home, I had to take extra steps to enable Group Policy Editor, but it does come with it. It's not a big deal to do so. It's funny, it reminds me of how CbB comes with TL-64, PX-64, and VX-64, but in order to use them, you have to go into Plug-In Manager and take them off the Excluded list. Enable Group Policy Editor in Windows 10 Home Edition (at Major Geeks) The first best thing to do as a DAW user is to get Windows Defender out from between your disk and your DAW. By default, Defender is configured to scan every file that every program accesses, in real time. That means every plug-in, every sample, every library, and even the audio and project files. I discovered this while using Process Monitor to see what my disk access looked like during a Cakewalk session. There was Cakewalk doing its expected thing, but then there was this other process that was accessing the same files. I'm a curmudgeon, so I disabled all realtime scanning on my system using Group Policy Editor. If you would prefer to color inside the lines, it's a simple matter to go into Settings and exclude your plug-ins, DAW programs, DAW projects, and audio folders from realtime scanning. As with all such tuning steps, any performance difference will be more apparent on resource-challenged systems, but I figure I might as well give the heavy hitter programs the cleanest environment possible. There's just so much background crap going on all the time. I also found a program called Process Lasso that, while it makes some disputed claims about increasing realtime response for foreground programs and their children, has another very handy feature where it will terminate any process that you tell it to. With extreme prejudice. It will take down things that Task Manager or even Process Explorer won't. It shows a list of running processes, you click on them and tell it to exclude them and it will kill them whenever it's running, and if the processes re-spawn, it will kill them again. I once watched Process Lasso duke it out with Apple mobile device services and iTunes Helper. Trying to shut down background Apple services is like playing whack-a-mole, because terminating one will trigger a launch of another, which will check to make sure its fellow services are running and start them again. The Apple services would restart in less than a second, and Process Lasso would smack them down every time. This went on for about 2 minutes, which in computer time is a long time. Then the Apple Services just gave up in defeat and stayed down. I don't know how or why, but ever since then, when Process Lasso knocks out Apple Services, they stay down. Maybe there was some learning going on on one side or the other.

One issue in the past with trying to use Workspaces has been that too many of the settings I've already set up get changed. Window position, etc. At the moment, I think I've figured out how to not have it shuffle my windows around when I don't want it to (mostly I do, after all, it's a custom view). However, one of the important things for me is which strips are visible and not visible in Track and Console Views. Specifically, in the case of Split Instruments, I always set the MIDI tracks visible (and Synth hidden) in the Track View so that I have access to the clips for editing. Conversely, I show the Synth strips and hide Midi in the Console View, as my focus there is audio mixing, and I'd only ever change a setting in a Console MIDI strip by accident. If I need to work with a MIDI console strip, I do it in the Inspector. I have a workspace for "Erik's Mixing," and it's mostly working as I would like, meaning that it eliminates various elements that I don't need at mixdown and pops open the Console maximized on monitor 2 for really getting my mix on. The one thing that's still not what I want is strips visibility. The Workspace always turns on the MIDI strips in the Console. This seems like something that Workspaces are aimed at addressing: making elements visible/invisible. What do I need to do to either stop this from happening, or better still, set up a Workspace that hides and shows the types of tracks/strips I want to hide or show?