Starship Krupa

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.

I recently had a horrible experience with this....well, I thought it was this, and then it turned out not to be this. I have a system in my bedroom with a 1/8" plug next to my bed running to an old Yamaha A/V receiver on my dresser, going into an older pair of Infinity bookshelf speakers. After I've wrapped it up at the workstation, I do love to plug the phone in, fire up VLC, browse on my home network over to my Mixdowns folder and listen to the fruits of my labor, lay back on the pillow and do a bit of referencing, check out the soundstage in the dark. It's usually a fun moment, my mixes translate well to that system. But this one time, I plugged my phone in, and everything just sounded like hell. And all those imposter syndrome "ha ha, how did you ever think you could be a musician or recordist or mix engineer, you suck harder than a Shop Vac!" voices were lined up in a mocking chorus. Oh man. How could I think such wimpy low end and weird phase-y rolled off highs were even acceptable? How did I miss that? What is UP with this? I was kind of in the dumps for part of a day about this. Then I went into my bedroom and decided to check on this situation. I plugged the phone in and played my favorite track from the last Dave Tipper album as a test and....hmm....one of the most amazing mixes I've heard in my life also sounded anemic. So I put on my glasses and looked, and somehow, probably me fumbling around in the dark, the processing button (which for some reason affects all inputs, not just the video ones) had gotten pressed and pressed again, to the point where the Yamaha thought that it was a 5.1 system decoding ProLogic. ?‍♂️

That's interesting, Tezza, my impression of Mixcraft vs. Cakewalk is just the same as yours, and I've heard it expressed elsewhere, too. Mixcraft, at least its playback, does (or did) seem to have an edge to it that became especially apparent once I got my hands on CbB. Cakewalk just immediately sounded....buttery by comparison. I'm now interested to try out the others you mention and see if my impressions are similar. But as I mentioned in my original post, what the audio engine does on playback is different than what it does on render. I'm thinking of all the options we get when it's time to export or mixdown or render or whatever your favorite term is for creating that .WAV file at the end of the project. I've verified this by testing between Mixcraft and Cakewalk. With the very first project that I imported via raw stems from Mixcraft to Cakewalk, using Windows' own Resource Monitor, I observed that when Cakewalk plays back a project, it always streams its audio from the disk, while Mixcraft somehow doesn't. It's true, on the same dataset, about 20 tracks of drums, guitar, vocals, bass, there was zero disk activity on the Mixcraft.exe process. Which suggests that they're somehow loading the whole project into memory and playing it from there, which also explains why dropouts are about as rare as women at a King Crimson show. When I got that first build of CbB I was astonished at the whole concept of the audio engine being this thing that could stop, and then I'd have to restart it, like pulling the cord on a lawnmower. With Mixcraft, if the audio engine stops, that's a crash, and you see if you can get it to happen again so you can file a bug report.? Thank heaven that Noel and the crew have gotten it not to do that so much. But it may be that the stability has a cost, which is that they might be doing some compression finagling to get all the project audio into memory for playback, and fidelity may be suffering as a result. But as I say, playback and rendering are two different operations. Yes, you touch on another aspect, the look, feel, workflow, and available tools naturally leading the users of them in a certain direction. I typically turn that Console Emulator on for all channels except for my Mix output bus, and I wouldn't seek out and use a console emulation plug-in to use in that role in another DAW. I use it because it's right there in the ProChannel, so why not? Similar with the QuadCurve EQ. It's knocked MEqualizer out of my top spot, which is a feat. If QuadCurve EQ were not such a top notch (pun intended) processor I wouldn't use it, but its presence (there I go again) will contribute to Cakewalk productions having a "sound." What I really wanted to vent about and get opinions on and headchecked about was what I consider the technical impossibility. I think it's probably true that they all record audio just the same, I would trust any of them to capture audio from my interface, but what I do with it after that? How is it possible that they would all handle it the same? Even, as @marled says, I agree, if they're using the same libraries, which I have considered when pondering this, libraries are a big deal with signal processing, the libraries are like using a certain company's tires on your automobile. There's still the rest of the car to consider. And why would I bring this up here and now, @ensconced? ? Well, because I like this forum, and the people who contribute, and I respect your opinions, and I've now been around here long enough for people to respond to a question I post, and I wanted to toss out my opinion and see what you all had to say. Your memes imply that this topic has been discussed to death here on this forum, but I missed those discussions. Seriously, all I've seen on this is people on other forums saying as an aside "of course all DAW's sound alike, that's been proven" and I don't know what "proof" they're referring to, it seems unlikely past the point of impossibility. Is that opinion universal? Happy to see it's not. Do you have a take on it (other than you think it's already been discussed too much?)? In the end, I do absolutely agree with @mettelus that the question itself is so, so not worth losing a minute's sleep over. Don't get me wrong on that. My rant had more to do about the idea of it than putting anything into practice. The perception of a sonic character is merely one thing to consider, along with ease of use, reliability, etc. and I am sure that any of us in this thread can make a decent-sounding mix using any DAW with sufficient familiarity (just as long as I'm not the one who has to use Reason).

I realize that I may be kicking a hornet's nest here, and if I were a mean enough guy, I would just state that it makes no sense to believe that all DAW's sound alike and then wait for people to disagree with me and then say why. However, whenever I see this stated in online forums (and it's never challenged), I roll my eyes so hard that it rearranges my mic locker. The person stating it sometimes says "it's been proven." It would be nice, we kinda all want it to be true, it would be one less thing to worry/obsess about. But under a little examination, it's just not even possible. I'm not a software engineer, although I have worked as a QA engineer at some large companies. The following is merely based on my considering what is likely and what is possible. First off, let's examine the methodology of what such "proof" might be. The only thing I can think of that would serve as objective proof would be to take an audio file, import it into the DAW, then without adding any effects or panning or mixing it with anything, render it back out to a lossless format and do a bit-to-bit or audio summing comparison. Anything else would introduce listener subjectivity. If there have been tests of summing engines, I am not aware of them, but the issues I bring up may also apply to those. Now if that's the criterion for proof of sounding alike, which, BTW, not all DAW's can even do once their engines have to up or down sample (don't worry, Cakewalk's engine handles it like a champ), then it's an operation that uses the DAW in a way that nobody actually does in real life. So the "proof" proves that they all sound alike as long as you don't do anything but import and export audio files without doing anything to them. In the actual world of using DAW's, and for the sake of my illustration I'll just talk about audio, a DAW has to do so much more with audio than that. And each operation has to be handled in a way that will affect the way it sounds. How could it not? The decisions that the algorithm makes, the panning, the way plug-ins are applied (Cakewalk has its own 2X upsampling!), how it's sent to the rendering CODEC, the way all of this is combined together to create a mix at the end. The potential for a difference between playback quality and render quality. We may not be hearing the same quality from playback that the rendering engine applies. How the engine handles clipping. Does it have its own high and low-pass filtering? DC blocking? Do they contribute to possible non-linearity? These and so many more are issues and choices that must be faced by DAW developers, and they are not all going to make the same choices. One would have to believe that every software development team for every DAW has made the same decisions about all of these things for "all DAW's sound the same" to be true. And I just don't believe that, as a matter of fact I think it's impossible. MAGIX, makers of Sequoia, Samplitude, and Music Maker (freeware DAW said to be popular in Europe) made a big deal with their last releases about having reworked their engine so that it "sounded better," and that they had applied the changes all across the product line, from Sequoia all the way down to Music Maker. I'm very curious what they did, but somebody thought there was room for improvement. So, am I off-base here? Am I not considering something crucial? If so, I welcome the trip to school. I'd love to believe that all DAW's sound the same. It would go against the empirical evidence my ears give me, but I'm open to opposing viewpoints.

Considering the subject matter of "Greensleeves," which many are not aware of, as it's usually played at Christmas time as an instrumental, "Jilted John" could be seen as an heir to it, or at least proof that some topics for popular song lyrics never go out of fashion: "Alas, my love, you do me wrong, To cast me off discourteously. For I have loved you well and long, Delighting in your company. Greensleeves was all my joy Greensleeves was my delight, Greensleeves was my heart of gold, And who but my Lady Greensleeves. Your vows you've broken, like my heart, Oh, why did you so enrapture me? Now I remain in a world apart But my heart remains in captivity"

Messed about with it a bit in standalone mode last night. Noticed the layout is rather reminiscent of SONAR, with the Browser and Help modules over on the right and a multipurpose area down at the bottom. Couldn't figure out how to adjust the master volume. The mixer was difficult to navigate. Was charmed to notice that the built-in collection of FX seem to be the AIR Creative Collection minus their UI's. Unfortunately they are only available within the DAW itself. One of the built-in synths seems to be a similarly stripped-down Vacuum, another, Hybrid.

How about report it in Feedback Loop, to the Cakewalk developers, to the Akai developers, so they can get together and make it work? ?

In many cases, that's also "the future." ?

Well, I hope VST3.5 is the future, because VST3, the New Coke of plug-in technology, has been nothing but a headache so far, the sole exception being that it has a canonical location for the plug-ins themselves, which of course some people don't like. The touted new features were either already well-implemented by most developers in their VST2 plug-ins or, like the one where the plug-in is supposed to suspend itself when its not processing audio, pretty much not utilized, at least so far. And having gotten everything to play pretty nicely together with VST2, host and plug-in developers are still having troubles with the new format. I always try the VST3 first, and if it doesn't work, fall back to the VST2, which usually does.

I wasn't aware that VST3 conformed to free and open source software? Did Steinberg change the licensing? So far I haven't run into VSTi's being the buggy poop in VST3 form that FX can be. With VST3 vs. VST2 the dance is: "plug-in developer announces favorite effect now available as VST3, try VST3, VST3 crashes or otherwise has horrible results in Cakewalk and/orMixcraft, revert to VST2 version, VST2 version is solid as a rock." I'm sure they all work fine in REAPER, but I don't.?

As suggested by @Brian Walton, here's a bump to alert you all to the newest version of the amazing freeware synth Surge: https://surge-synthesizer.github.io/ New features including a theme that complements CbB's Tungsten very well. If you haven't checked this pup out, it's a freakin' powerhouse.

Okay, I'm going to have to stop recommending plug-ins to you, other than Meldaproduction stuff, you seem to have everything else.? If you record audio with multiple mics, MAutoalign is a must, regularly discounted for $25.