Starship Krupa

Noticed as in you can't tell just by listening to it, but I had the misfortune to try MAutoAlign when it came up during one of his 1/2 off sales. Put it on my drum overheads. Analyze, chug chug, doing! overheads go from sounding good to having this 3-D soundstage they sure didn't have earlier. Acoustic guitar mic'd with 2 close condensers, whoa, it's this 30' foot guitar in my monitors. You get the same effect lining it up by eye, just not the "wow" moment when the plug-in kicks in, and it depends on how far off and the program material, etc. I am a big fan of sample-level alignment. I am glad that you are starting to bother with it!

It would be possible for Cakewalk to make the naming of the inputs much friendlier. I don't know how the other programs do it, but I know enough about programming to know that it can be done via parsing and translation of what Windows is giving it from the driver, via brute force with a database of interfaces, or what the coders seem to have tried at one point, simply allowing the user to rename the inputs and outputs. That last doesn't work because Cakewalk doesn't allow us to rename the individual ones, only do it at the pair level, so input 2 still can't be called "Input 2." According to Cakewalk, there can be no such things as Inputs 2, 4, 6 or 8 on my FP10's.

I just realized that I had forgotten to post my favorite tremolo/panner, Pecheneg Tremolo. Small plug-in house. Really cool GUI, even though the plug-in is 5 years old, I'm a sucker for that glowing diving watch thing. Lets you tune shape, symmetry and phase in continuous flow between the settings, kind of like Soundspot Nebula, if Nebula only did volume and panning. (sorry, it's 5 years old, not 15!)

What a great resource! There are also these two ongoing threads in the Instruments and Effects subforum, they're both on the first page right now. I've lobbied for stickiedom, nothing yet, so they rely on bumps. Between them over 11,000 views so I hope they've been helpful. They're a tiny bit different from this 400 list, as everything in them is vetted by someone who's used them with Cakewalk so we know they're compatible on at least one user's system!:

Assuming that the 1818VSL is what it appears to be, a direct descendant of my FP10's, and the expansion chassis, which I assume is a PreSonus DigiMax or something similar gives you another 8 mic pres and inputs, similar to what I get when I daisy chain my 2 FP10's, you already have an interface/mixer with 16 inputs in your studio. PreSonus marketed the 1818VSL as an interface/digital mixer, with the accompanying wireless controller app running on an iPad. Have you ever used that? (I like the Firepods' output routing, there are 8 TRS outputs in 4 pairs that appear to Cakewalk, plus a stereo S/PDIF, so I have 4 pairs of monitors that I switch back and forth between for referencing mixes using the I/O selector on the bus, all inside Cakewalk. With both of them hooked up, and amps and speakers, there's no reason I couldn't do up to 16-channel surround mixes) The 24 doesn't look like it would get you anything you don't already have as far as recording interface/inputs, except for being limited to 44.1/48KHz. Its defining feature is really the fact that it can record to an SD card, so if, as you say, you have no interest in that, and you already have a 16 input interface that probably has better performance as an interface, it seems to me that the recording/interface capabilities of the Tascam are superfluous. That is, unless you'd see a great value in not needing to bring the PreSonus to live shows when you want to record, but then you could probably find a nice, compact mixer that would do the same mixing job as the Tascam 24 and have less mixer to schlep. The Tascam seems purpose made for one use: record to the card while you're doing live sound, then transfer the files to a DAW. They probably only made it a recording interface because in order to make a Portastudio they had to build most of the electronics of a recording interface into it, so why not. And that's why it only goes up to 48, because as a recording machine, it cares most about writing to that card. As far as the other people in this thread who are reporting that Cakewalk names the inputs using the odd-numbered ones, maybe you can access Input 2 under the name "Input 1L" or "Input 1R" or something like that? On my system, my first 2 inputs (which are labeled 1 and 2 and paired by having a bracket silkscreened around them) are named by Cakewalk "Left Firepod ASIO 1L" "Right Firepod ASIO 1L" and "Stereo Firepod ASIO 1L." So if we translate this all out, input 2 shows up in my list of choices as, literally, "right Firepod ASIO one left." Then the next pair are "Left Firepod 3L" and so on. Now if you told your sweating new tape op to make sure that the channel inputs are correct, all 16 of them, hmm, the XLR cable plugged into the bottom FP10, last input on the right. marked #8 is it supposed to be "Right Firepod 2 ASIO 7L?" This has caused me to fail to record things I wanted to record. Fortunately not vital things, just practice sessions, but still, I looked up at the end of 5 minutes and the wrong input was armed for recording. I brought it up with the developers in this forum and was told that Cakewalk regurgitates what the driver tells it and that was the way it was. However, Cakewalk is not the only audio program I run that uses ASIO inputs, it's merely the only one that allows the input labeling to remain indecipherable. The other programs have implemented the avant garde AI 2.0 algorithmical ability of Reformatting What The Driver Reports. I would like to see Cakewalk gain this feature, so feel free to register your displeasure and lobby for its addition. Here is an example of the input names looking much more understandable:

It's funny, I have had this odd prejudice about MAGIX, thinking of them as some kind of bargain basement toymaker. I don't know why exactly. Maybe because of Music Maker? I had this idea that once MAGIX bought a platform that it was all over. They seemed too quick to snap up castoff software lines that overlapped with their existing products, so how could they do justice to all of them? Then I picked up this huge Humble Bundle last year that took me from Sony Vegas Pro 10 to MAGIX Vegas Pro 15 and threw in a bunch of other MAGIX 'wares including Sound Forge. Vegas Pro went from being this glitchy, crashy, touchy thing to being quick and slick on the same hardware, and Sound Forge instantly became my go-to wave editor. Plenty of the other stuff that came in the bundle was powerful and useful as well, and rock solid. Some consumer-ish things like a vinyl and cassette transcribing program, but I dug into it and it turned out to have some iZotope RX-level restoration tools under the hood. They make quality products, my prejudice was wrong. As for GoldWave, I was turned on to it almost 10 years ago by a housemate who had purchased a lifetime license when he was in high school and holy mother of Windows for Workgroups 3.11, as long as you can deal with the look and feel it's supposed to be a powerhouse, especially in matters of audio forensics. It hurt my eyes and I kept thinking I needed to run it in compatibility mode. Not long after that NASA used it to pull the missing "a" out of Neil Armstrong's "That's one small step for <unintelligible> man, one giant leap for mankind" speech, which showed my silly butt not to judge a program's capabilities by the UI. Still, though. 1991 called and says you can keep its UI standards.

To be sure, but I guess I'm shy about suggestions that involve the "bigger picture" if you get what I mean. I have no real insight into their business decisions. I try to focus on us users' experience of using the software because as a user, I have a lot of insight into that. As I say, "try," but I'm not unaware of the bigger picture. I mean, I said that and then wrote plenty more, right? And I don't suggest that anyone else shouldn't. It's fascinating to watch the industry and culture of making and consuming music and the tools to make it change. Some are down and say that nobody can make any money as a recording artist and that since anybody can download a package of loops and string something together that musicianship is lost, but I'm the opposite view. I think it's great that so many people are interested in making sounds in whatever way. What's in the loops has to come from somewhere. However the sounds are made doesn't matter to me, it's whether the end product moves me.

Welllll, we're now getting into the territory of armchairing the parent company's marketing plans/strategies, which I try to stay away from in this area of the forum, but since it's sort of on topic at the moment, I just discovered a site called splice.com because they partnered with iZotope to give away licenses for Ozone 9 Elements (go go go, it expires on June 5). They're in the business of peddling loops, and maybe getting their feet wet in the plug-in business. They intrigued my because of their resemblance to BandLab, although coming from it from a different angle. Building a community where people can collaborate using the tools that the company provides to them. Splice's revenue stream is, shall we say more "front facing" than BandLab's at the moment, but I keep in mind that there are large companies that spend zillions to just keep their brands out there via television commercials and sports sponsorships. If BandLab, who sell musical instruments and electronics, are just building their brand by giving away DAW's, it's still way cheaper than sponsoring the Rose Bowl.? BandLab attracts users to their site with their DAW's, the iOS and Chrome versions of BandLab and CbB which is a work in progress as far as integration. And let me mention that the perspectives of @E-Wolf Music are very interesting and welcome to me because I think he's the first user I can think of who has explicitly mentioned that he's experienced with the existing BandLab platform and coming at it from that side rather than the other direction. Splice has a curated list of free plug-ins on their site, all of which are included in our freeware threads.

That screen is where you select what you want in addition to the main Cakewalk program. Melodyne is a trial version and Theme Editor is something that most users probably don't need, but the Studio Instruments and Drum Replacer are both quite useful.

Aw, thanks, Larry! I had actually just been wondering where you'd been, as I did a Google search for something or other and landed on one of your posts on the old forum and realized that I hadn't seen your posts in a while around here. But I think I just haven't opened the threads that you've been participating in. Good to see you. Nah, I'm glad that the freeware threads have turned out to be as useful as they have so far and who knows, maybe TPTB will ease up on the stickiness policy and/or the information we've collected will make its way into a more "official" list. If you look at the "views" counts, the Instruments thread is over 7,000 views and the FX thread is over 4,770, so I'll rate the experiment a success at this point!

While you're in a Windows 10 configure-y mood, a suggestion of mine that has worked well for many on this forum is to go into your Security settings and exclude certain folders from Windows Defender's realtime scan. The reason this is extra important for Cakewalk is that Cakewalk's playback engine reads every audio file associated with every unarchived Track as it is rolling, and Defender scans every file that is accessed by every program. That means that every time you load a sample, loop, plug-in, .dll, .WAV file, vocal take, guitar solo, whatever, Windows 10's built-in malware scanner is running it through its filtering engine to make sure it's not carrying a malicious payload. And Microsoft makes it difficult to disable realtime scanning. Not so bad on Pro, but I think it still gets switched back on every time you get an update. So, I exclude all folders associated with DAW work, including my plug-in folders, sample folders, loop folders, project folders, audio folders, and the Cakewalk program folders. Because, you know, otherwise Windows Defender would be doing its duty to protect my computer from potential harm lurking within "Luna 2020, Snare, Rec (95).wav" and "iZotope Iris2.vst3" by adding another layer of computer processing to the disk reads. And....speaking of privacy and disk activity, I found another wonderful Win 10 thing it does. This was after I put a new SSD in my main system, yay, and I switched it over to UEFI booting, which, BTW, if yours is still doing it the BIOS way, look into it. I found that not only did it speed up the boot time from "what I remember as being standard Windows bootup time from about 2005" to "holy crap I looked away and it has the screen with the baby elephant on it!" but it somehow made it so that Windows 10 recognizes my hardware better somehow. It sounds odd, I know, but I was able to run newer versions of my graphics drivers and so forth once I made the switch to UEFI. It's not for the fainthearted, and for sure have an image backup ready, but I found it to be worth the trouble. Anyway, after I switched to UEFI, I checked to see what all the disk activity was about with the computer just sitting idling. Using Process Monitor, I looked at exactly what the file activity was about and saw that the SYSTEM process was responsible for dozens of log files constantly being written to the Windows\system32 directory. Dusting off my decades-old Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer training, I launched Event Viewer to see what that was all about and in addition to the usual Application, Security, and System logs I knew from the Windows NT4.0 days, under the hierarchy Applications and Services Logs/Microsoft/Windows there was this HUGE list of log files just logging away all day long. When I opened some of them, it was just mundane stuff like this service stopped or started or something occurred, and none of it was information that was of any use to me whatsoever. It's not like I'm going to troubleshoot my system by going into the logs subsystem and reading them, so what they are basically is Microsoft checking on how well my computer is running for their own purposes. Which, hey, I don't care about that in and of itself, happy to help if that's all there was to it, but they are degrading the performance of my computer and shortening the life of its components by doing so. If they asked me "would you like to help us improve the product by sending anonymoust weekly reports?" I might consent to that. But instead, without asking me, they set my system up to do writes 24/7 and then spew the results to their data collection servers at unknown intervals. Um, no. Here's how to turn those logs off. In the Event Viewer, click the >'s until you've opened Applications and Services Logs/Microsoft/Windows. In all of those you will find logs. Click on them and you will see whether they have been active or not. Right click on the log icon and you'll be able to disable/enable the log. There are hundreds. I know of no way to disable all of them at once. I just go in every so often and do a bunch. Oddly enough, I found one category, Audio, that had logs I wanted to enable. One of them, Glitch Detection, seems to log about 4 of them a day. The others say the usual "audio device state changed" like I'm going to have to look for my Firepod in Reno or something....

Ah, let's be gentle with the lad. Like all of us he just wants Cakewalk to work better for everyone. Why it took him so long to find the Freeware Instruments thread is that it scrolls away so quickly and people don't use the Search engine. As for #1, that's been suggested and decided against so far, as for #2, well, good question, but it just doesn't occur to people I guess. For decades, people have thought I'm some kind of computer genius because I can Google their error messages and spew back a solution that someone else has already figured out. All I can do as a service to new users is bump the threads when I remember. I don't believe Keyzone Classic or Amplesound have been mentioned, so I'm going to use them to bump the Instruments thread, so good. Also, well and good enough for him and for you and for me, but he's talking about other users of BandLab making the transition. Not everyone who downloads and installs Cakewalk registers for and reads this forum. Maybe not even most, although putting a link to the forum right on the Help menu was a move of awesomeness. I'm in agreement that in 2020, a freeware DAW no longer needs to ship with a pile of ancillary bonus plug-ins. Even as recently as 2 years ago I may have disagreed, but things have changed since Cakewalk first shipped. I wonder how Cakewalk's arrival may have helped change things. I think the old formula was "sell creative software to a small community of creative people for a decent chunk of change." The newer formula may be "expand the community of creative people by giving away some of our stuff and lower our license fees and sell a lot more." Speaking for myself, I have spent plenty of money I wouldn't have otherwise spent if I didn't have access to lower cost and free tools to attract me and learn with. So it may seem paradoxical, but giving things away can bring more money in. When I was learning how to mix on a DAW I had OrilRiver and learned how I wanted a reverb to sound. Then iZotope put Exponential Phoenix Stereo on sale for $10 and I knew enough to know that within 5 minutes of trying it that it was light years better than anything I'd ever tried and plunked down $20 for 2 licenses. When Exponential Excalibur went on sale for $10, there went $20 more. They don't have to sell that many more licenses for it to scale up pretty well. With lower fees, there's less incentive to crack, etc.

Here's a good bump* for the thread: RealSpread is an interesting single-knob stereoizer plug-in by TrualityAudio. Since I love to work with nasty little mono phone recordings where someone was standing in the corner behind the drum kit, I just can't have enough stereo processing plug-ins Truality is the brainchild of Antonakis Christoforides. a broadcast and recording engineer in Cyprus. I'm always interested to check out the results when people have psychoacoustic theories to put into practice and he has done so in the form of two plug-ins. The other is a one-knob compressor he calls TruPressor which he also says has some psychoacoustic magic under the hood but I haven't tried it much yet except to make sure it didn't crash Cakewalk so I could post it here. Although I was interested when I first ran across his stuff on KVR, they were both 32-bit, and we don't post 32-bit in the thread, but he has gotten busy with his Flowstone compiler and they are now both 64-bit VST2. *Since this and the Freeware Instruments thread are not stickied, they become invisible unless they get bumped. It's a nice thing to do to post in this thread whenever you spot a good freebie, not just for us freeware hounds, but as a service to new users, to have the thread on the first page. Since Cakewalk doesn't come with a large number of exotic plug-ins anymore, but there are excellent ones among its freeware brethren, new users can get a faster start if they know where to find the goodies.

Sigh. I started both the "Freeware FX Thread" and the "Freeware Instruments" threads on this forum in order to do just what you suggest. SampleTank, Syntronik, and Sitala have all been posted in that thread. I would love for the developers to partner with the developer of Sitala to integrate it with Cakewalk so that there could be a function where we could drag and drop clips to the sampler, back and forth from the Track View and Matrix. There are two issues with the threads: first, they scroll down into invisibility unless I or someone else bump them, which I don't always remember to do, despite the fact that there's always some new free gadget available these days. Second, people apparently either don't think to use the Search function, or their use of it isn't turning up those threads. When they were first created, there was talk of making them sticky, but @Jesse Jost and the other mods are trying to avoid overuse of sticky threads. I think it's important information given that Cakewalk itself is freeware and therefore attracts people who have limited budgets, and, as many have already pointed out, doesn't come bundled with a ton of extra slick plug-ins. And I wholeheartedly agree with the others who have said that it doesn't need to in these days of so much other excellent freeware. But I'm just a user with one opinion, don't run the forum, don't decide on the content vs. clutter. There are also many, many excellent inexpensive instruments such as those made by AIR. XPand2! for $15, SONIVOX' Orchestral Companion series, which are regularly put on sale as a bundle for $30, AIR's Hybrid 3, Vacuum Pro, both of which I got for $10. There's a subforum dedicated to Deals that people on a budget should not miss. Lots of freebies in there. If you want to help, I'd say the best thing to do at this point is remember that we have threads for freeware FX and instruments and bump them whenever you discover something new. That will help keep them near the top where new people can see them. As a veteran of the commercial software business, I can say that there are issues with official bundling of other companies' software, whether it be freeware or payware or whatever. The people involved still must work out issues of copyright, legal ownership, all that, and whenever the creator of the bundled content updates it, there must be some mechanism in place to update the bundled version, BandLab's Cakewalk support will be expected to also support the bundled content and so on. And really, I believe that if someone's savvy enough to become a BandLab bada55, and/or download Cakewalk, the most they should require is a list in order to be able to get the rest of what they need to fill out their DAW. It doesn't have to be part of the download. I am in favor of making it as easy as possible for Cakewalk users to acquire other free and inexpensive music making software. I would also love to see as much of the rest of the old Cakewalk, Inc. software released as is practical. Beyond that, an integrated clip-to-phrase sampler would be nice, but I have Break Tweaker (on sale for $8.88) and TX16Wx, and sforzando and even SampleTank CS will let me import samples.

Oddly, it was created to help ease people's way into using the program. I have, however, been the user who was so determined to have something go wrong that there was no stopping me. No wonder I wound up testing software for a living! I recently somehow depopulated my entire templates folder, stock and custom alike, except for Basic.cwt. It's a good excuse to roll up my sleeves and get serious about creating some new templates, but dang, what was I up to when that happened? Why isn't it in any of my backups?

I think this one, as it seems more like an instrument:

There are a few issues. And, sincerely, I'm not saying all this to be pedantic, but we need to clear the waters before we can dive, so to speak. There are companies named Arturia, Plug&Mix, and BandLab. BandLab makes Cakewalk, which is similar to an older program called SONAR. Cakewalk is named after the company that made SONAR, which has given rise to some confusion, which we need no more of at the moment. SONAR is gone, long live Cakewalk the program. As to your software, I think you probably meant "E-Max" rather than "Mix E-Max." However, there is no VST plug-in on the market named "Echoverb" sold by Arturia or Plug&Mix or anyone else according to Google. Are you 100% sure you are looking for the right name in the list? I've made...just as silly errors. From what I can gather, you have successfully installed: Cakewalk (by BandLab) Melllotron (by Arturia) E-Max (by Plug&Mix) Your issue is that you can't see Echoflex (by Plug&Mix) in Cakewalk, and perhaps one other unspecified plug-in. (You definitely can't see Echoverb, and since it has never existed, the best solution I can offer is to just accept it) This is actually encouraging news, because if you were able to successfully install plug-ins from both the companies you bought them from, that means that the install process for both of the companies' products works on your system. So if you just try it again for whatever product you aren't able to see in Cakewalk chances are it will work again. Also: Mellotron, excellent choice.

I love MCompressor. The Dead Duck Free Bundle of 25 effects includes a compressor and a gate.

Yes, once you have your tracks in MIDI format, the sky's the limit as far as what you can do with it in terms of sounds with Cakewalk, even if you have no money to invest at this time. Get SampleTank Free CS 4, which has many really good sounds, Kontakt Komplete Start, 6GB of free high quality content, or even just start with the SI Strings, Drums, and Piano, and TTS-1 and put on some effects.

Very entertaining thread. I'm a mid-field olde tymer, had the one college programming class back in '79 where I submitted my FORTRAN programs via deck of punched cards, built my first computer from a kit, Sinclair ZX-81 in 1981, then next one was a frankenclone XT out of castoff parts in 1990. Been participating in online forums since 1989. Was one of the founding architects of the SF Bay Area's notorious NirvanaNet; our first meetup was at one of my bands' gigs in the lower Haight. Good times. Been keeping an eye on Linux since I downloaded a copy in 1991 and gave it to a programmer friend at the company I worked for. Also obtained a pirated copy of "Chicago" for the same company via my sketchy BBS connections, delivered to my doorstep by what was known back in those days as a "courier." Nice feller, I met him again when we both worked at Macromedia a few years later, pre-Adobe. I agree with the OP for the most part, although in my impression, Linux-as-moonieware is nowhere near as rabid as it once was. Perhaps I've learned to tolerate the moonieware phenomenon. It has been my impression that most Linux desktop users had just settled into using "Windblows" DAWs under Wine. Let me dust off my Linux user trolling hat and remind them that the argument that the ongoing hilarity of trying to set a native DAW under Linux using the most common of audio interfaces is somehow the fault of the hardware manufacturers seems odd, because, hey, your pet platform is supposed to be all about this army of coders toiling away for the common good, isn't it? So why don't they just write the drivers you need for your hardware? Or is that beyond their capabilities? Why is this one area of code the one thing that the Linux world is sitting around on its collective utopian a55 waiting for commercial entities to hand them on a silver platter? Nobody can take a break from the Mr. Robot fan forum long enough to code up a driver for the Scarlett 2i2? Having said that, I don't think that there's anything holding it back from use in any field except serious NLE creation like audio and video. I use GIMP on Windows, it finally made it to the point where it will do what I need it to, and it's a native Linux app, so I'll give Linux photo editing, and Inkscape is a powerhouse as well. So as long as the content you're creating doesn't move it's great. Video and audio editing is just too close to the hardware. We find crash bugs in Cakewalk, and it has a dedicated team of veteran programmers who work on it for a living and have done for a long time. For productivity, with so much being done in browsers these days, and with Libre Office having matured, the underlying platform is becoming superfluous. My mom is 82 and her main system is a Chromebook she got a couple of years ago. Originally when it arrived at her place, she was going to wait for Mr. Family Tech Support Guy to come and set it up for her, but her curiosity got the best of her and the next day I spoke with her on the phone and she had it up and running and connected to her wifi router with no outside intervention. The hardest part for her was finding and typing the wifi password. I migrated her to Google Docs from Libre Office a bit before that, so she was good to go. She runs into bit of trouble from time to time when her friends and collaborators can't deal with something that's not in Word format, so I discovered Microsoft Office Online last week, and I hope she gets up to speed on that. I know that Google Docs can export as .doc, but I figured it might be the better route. So there you go, a desktop Linux computer passes the "old lady" test with (almost) flying colors. However. The hardware bugaboo again, when she needs to print something, she still fires up her old iMac, which sits next to her printer, even though I set up the Chromebook to print to her wireless printer. Something about the printing dialogs with the Chromebook escapes her. Next visit, after the pandemic dies down, we'll be investigating this. My girlfriend has an iPad and does everything on it, including photo editing. She does most things in Safari, even, I can't get her to use things there are native apps for, like YouTube and Google. Another friend of mine, who has a rippin' Mac Pro tower for Pro Tools, prefers his iPhone 6s for everything else, and I mean video editing, photo editing, screenplay writing, everything. I sometimes feel like a dinosaur for doing so much using, you know, a regular desktop Windows 10 computer. People ask me if I saw this or that that they posted on Instagram and I say not yet. I would browse Instagram more often if Instagram worked better in a damn browser. You still can't upload pictures from anything but a mobile device. I have some fun pictures I'd like to put up, but sometimes not taken with a phone, and I just don't stare at the thing as much as I do the 'puter. And I like to throw a bit of cropping and color correction on my photos, which I do using GIMP. Now, as a veteran IT guy, a few words about the clinging to Windows 7 phenomenon. I was a later adopter, mostly because my behind the curve computers worked, and I got cantankerous about Microsoft putting that unwanted tray icon on my system. What tipped it was Noel and Jon telling me that BandLab were no longer interested in active support for Windows 7. I upgraded my oldest system, and wonder of wonders, it actually seemed to work better than it did before, and a bunch of hardware that I couldn't get to work under Windows 7, like my old Canon scanner, started to work again. I had put an SSD in this because it was an older computer. Windows 10 must have a fast system drive. The first rule of Windows 10 is that it must have a fast system drive. My laptop, running 7 Pro, so went to 10 Pro, also great. 7200RPM spinny. The main system, however, has been more problematic. I'm still working on that, and I'm finding out that part of the issue was that Windows 10's behavior exposed a hardware issue on my system. I'm learning a lot about Windows 10 system optimization. I'm glad I made the upgrade, and consider it an upgrade for sure. One thing it does that I really do not like, it writes a LOT of logfiles, but these can be turned off. I'm going to post about this in the regular forum as a tuning tip. As far as staying with Windows 7, what's the big deal about "OMG, I'm not going to get security updates from Microsoft, so I must airgap my system from the internet!" I'm open to new information, what disastrous outcome do you imagine from having a computer system operated by you, connected to the internet, but no longer getting security updates from Microsoft? I presume that the system in question is mostly dedicated to DAW usage, so doesn't contain any sensitive information like email messages or personal documents, and since we're cautious about data loss, we're meticulously backing everything up. So tell me: what happens to systems connected to the internet that aren't getting patches from Microsoft? You want to know what my protection against malware is? I don't open executable email attachments. I run Malwarebytes on an ad hoc basis to clear the occasional browser hijack. And In 35 years of using computers, Windows 10 is the first time I've every had a permanently resident anti-malware program running, and that's because Microsoft forces it on you as part of the OS. I have, in all those years, gotten exactly one virus, 20 years ago, when I broke my rule about running sketchy downloaded executables. Hey, I thought it was an archive. I should have scanned it first. Since being on Windows 10, I have had this Coyote/Roadrunner battle with Windows Defender's Realtime Scanning. I found a way to turn it off permanently using Group Policy Editor, which I had to figure out how to enable on Windows 10 Home, then Microsoft figured out how to get around it and an update turned realtime scanning back on. Currently they are winning, but I'm working on a fix. My computer, my rules. In the meantime, at least I can exclude my audio and plug-in folders.

Probably Pianissimo. I'm familiar with the doings over at Acoustica and I know that Spin It hasn't been touched in at least half a dozen years and they've never included it in any kind of promotion in the past half dozen years either. I think it's not really a live product. I also don't think it's worth $19, or even a fraction of that. Pianissimo, on the other hand is a very nice-sounding, very easy on the CPU virtual piano made by combining sampling and modeling. twenty bucks is a rather good deal for it. And with IK Multimedia giving the superb Berlin Piano away for free with SampleTank 4 CS, I can see where they might feel the need to be more competitive on the price. And to clarify for those who may have misunderstood what Larry said: when you purchase a license for Mixcraft Pro Studio, Pianissimo is one of the bundled instruments. That's how I became familiar with it. I have a friend who bought an upgrade license from Mixcraft to Pro solely to get the Pianissimo license, although I don't think he minds having the Melodyne Essentials. Mixcraft has a few juicy features that would be sweet to have with Cakewalk. The integrated phrase sampler and performance panel are really useful, and their new vocoder looks cool. Not locked to Mixcraft Pro Studio either, far as I can tell.

For the great unwashed who don't own Kontakt (there are such people), it looks like it's basically the SynthOne instrument.

My experience so far is exactly similar to @iScream's. It would be nice to have another titler to play with, but if all I get is their one-knob de-esser, I ain't complaining.

I don't fully understand ARA2 technology, but I wonder if editing of wave files with an external program is an area where it might find an application.

XPand!2 at $14 is one of the best deals there is to be had for a virtual instrument, especially for someone with Cakewalk, which is a relatively bare-bones DAW when it comes to bundled instruments. 2000 patches. The only minor complaints for me are the limited parameter adjustments (you can adjust amplitude and filter ADSR and that's it, no glide) and, given the massive number of sounds in the thing, no way to do a text search for presets. Few synths have that feature anyway. TTS-1 is very much a 90's GM synth, excellent for its time but now dated. Still, there are some very usable sounds in there if you dig down below the top levels of the preset browser, especially the pianos and organs. I have a template for when I want to get ideas down quickly and TTS-1 with one of its pianos is in it. Light as a feather, loads in an instant. If you have a General MIDI file you need to work with, there's nothing better.