Starship Krupa

If I leave Sonar open overnight, and the monitor goes to sleep, when I come back Sonar's playback cursor will have disappeared. I can play, rewind, whatever, and the playback cursor just sits there. I haven't reported it because it seemed a bit obscure and "doctor it hurts when I do this," but from day 1 using Cakewalk by BandLab, the program hasn't been the best at keeping control of the playhead. I could make the first version of CbB wig out just by alt-tabbing to another program then dragging the main window. Cakewalk would be in one place on the screen, with the playback cursor merrily cruising along all by itself where the Cakewalk window used to be. They fixed this within the first couple of updates, but over the years I've noticed odd non-fatal behavior from time to time having to do with the program losing control of its cursor. Nothing I considered worth reporting.

I think El has had his coffee today. And we get to benefit! These kinds of comparative listening tests are very valuable for comparing processors.

421 new patches. Also the existing 670 were "remastered" to take advantage of the newer features (2 layers and the ability to run both synth layers through the synth's common effects rack). To me, the UI looks better, crisper, more modern. When Chromaphone 3 first shipped I didn't have it, I was using Chromaphone (and other) soundpacks with Player. I noticed right away that the "remastered" patches in my soundpacks sounded different from how they had sounded before (and I could compare due to having a soundpack that came with Mixcraft and is frozen at the version 2 level). I warned people here to be aware if they (like I did) had existing projects that used the sounds. The new ones are "bigger," and as such, may sit differently in a mix. If you have any Chromaphone soundpacks, try them side-by-side, using Player and Chromaphone 2. If you don't hear a difference, then maybe the upgrade isn't for you. Save the money for a tank of gas or a party size pizza.

The controls look like the ones I see when I click on the advanced controls button in Trackspacer, so if I didn't already have Trackspacer, I would try them both.

Wasn't 3 when they added the second layer? At some point, I think it was 3, they added what's basically most of an entire 2nd Chromaphone synth engine with controls behind a tab. Also hundreds of new factory presets, and the v2 presets will of course work. The layers can be addressed multitimbrally, if you like to fly that way. I've only ever had Chromaphone 3, but I used A|A|S Player before I got it, and when they added the second layers in the synths, the Swatches sounds got noticeably more lush. For String Studio and Analog VA as well as Chromaphone. Whatever Chromaphone soundpacks you're currently licensed for have been "remastered" to take advantage of the second layer, and if you use them in Chromaphone 2 instead of 3 or Player, they'll sound thinner. In other words, way worth it, IMO. As ever, log in to your A|A|S account and see what your direct deal will be, sometimes they toss in the newest soundpack.

Woo-hoo, e-cue, you went all in! I bumped the deal partly because it seemed like nobody else had jumped on it and now I'm extra glad I did. Curious about the difference(s) between the 'bird and the Bottle. I went with the Bottle 'cause I had had a great experience with one 20 years ago in a recording studio, it being used to record my guitar as a demo clip for my own Crucible Fuzzes. I had thought I could do it at home, y'know, point my trusty SM56 at the cone of my vintage Fender Champ and let rip, but it sounded, frankly, like hell. I mean, questioning why I ever thought I was any good at recording hell. I doubt anyone else can relate to that feeling when something sounds awesome in the room, but through your best mic and board and mic placement copied from half a dozen interviews with classic rockers and engineers, it sounds like someone brought their 1972 Panasonic cassette deck in and used its internal mic with the AGC on. Of course, now people earn real money intentionally getting that sound, but that was not what I was after. I might be able to recreate it though....shoot, maybe I'll make an IR of it. Took prototype fuzzbox over to my friend Myles Boisen's Guerilla Recording. Myles, who had/has written many a mic review article for EM, Mix, and Tape Op, rolled out his silver panel Fender Pro Reverb and hung a single mic that looked like something Clark Kent would use for field work about 18" above the front of the grille cloth. Then he put a set of headphones on me and in about 5 minutes I had the clips of me playing "I Wanna Be Your Dog" that I wanted. It sounded great. Not that anyone here would, but dang, never underestimate the skill and efficiency of someone who has placed microphones just about every day for decades. Fun fact: they get pretty good at it. It was of course an early, Latvian Baby Bottle, and I've kind of wanted one ever since but figured they were out of reach of my cheapskate budget. I can do a brand new Logitech made in China version for under $200 just fine, though. It's the first mic I've ever bought brand new. Pity that Logitech seems to have Gibson'd the brand and its studio-oriented products. I hate to see a good veteran brand (and product line) go down. This article from a year ago says that Logitech's intention was to drop the Blue branding and rename the line Yeti, but I don't see any studio mics on Logitech's mic page, only gamer/YouTuber USB models (and a single dynamic non-USB mic). It's so hard for a specialty product to share a corporate roof with mass-market products. The numbers will kill it every time. Why devote resources to a line that while profitable, may only bring in a fraction of the bucks that OEM'ing a mouse for every HP and Logitech computer does, then selling yet another mouse on the aftermarket to go with the same computer? Someone probably did research among their target customers and found that "Yeti" had better recognition than "Blue." Let's hope that nobody buys Shure and renames the line "SM7B." All that Blue mic tooling over in China not being used any more....seems like it could be put to use by someone clever enough to do so. Were I but younger and had the energy....it's not as if it's a big part of Chinese business culture to protect trademarks like the physical shape of a microphone.

Just wait until you see MTurboConfusion and MBaffleMB.

I eventually picked up the Baby Bottle at $164. Probably the best mic I own, certainly the most I've ever spent on a single mic. This is a great deal, and they're still selling at these prices.

Presumably v17 is still "beta." The downloads page says that the latest kernel is 17.00.08. MMystique or MObtuse?

Wow, Saverio, good to see you. You and HorNet are legendary around here. The first time I ever got a drum sound that I liked was with HoRNet DrumShaper CM. I studied the article that went along with it so closely trying to figure out what it was doing, how it had bested all of my efforts up to that time. Since then I've bought several of your other products. Now that you've come out with HA/2A and H76, I'm watching for HNX 165! Among the vintage emulation compressor plug-ins out there, I see fewer dbx 165 emulations. Waves have one, Softube have one....who else?

That is likely due to some hosts automatically using the VST3 if both are available on your system. Sonar has an option for this. I do my own housekeeping: if a plug-in installer automatically installs both VST3 and VST2 versions, I delete the VST2 DLL's. If only the VST2 version works properly (as with Acon Multiply), I keep the VST2 and delete the VST3's dynamic linking library (.VST3 file).

Yeah, Sonar's plug-in oversampling is still just 2X I'm curious which specific plug-ins are benefiting from the 4X and 8X over the 2X. A lot of newer plug-ins (MeldaProduction) either have their own oversampling options or just do it internally anyway. In my testing, with some plug-ins (mostly older synths like Hybrid 3) I can hear the results of 2X, but after that, there's nothing. Theoretically (although I'm a fan of empirical over theoretical when it comes to these matters), at 2X it's already way far away from the Nyquist. Testing with Plugin Doctor concurs. I also get the same audible results when I leave oversampling off and just export the whole project at 88.2K. I suppose you could try doing the 2X on the plug-ins where you can hear it and then export at 88.2 or 96 and maybe get similar results to 4X, but if you want it on a granular (no pun) level, REAPER is it.

That would be an evil move on their part if you think about it. If they ever removed sounds from Swatches, there would be a chance that someone's older projects would no longer work. Anyway, it's been updated yet again, this time the sounds are from Jazz Café. Unfortunate news for people who like to use the Strum 2 sounds, this time they've thinned out the number of articulations, so Jazz Café's examples (ugh, Swatches is so difficult to write about because there are no good synonyms for "sampler" and "sample") don't have the more extensive complement of loop and rhythm ones. Whaddaya want for nuttin', I know, but I finally figured out how to work the articulations in A|A|S Player and have used some Swatches sounds in projects. But of course the ones I used are still there, just not for new ones it seems.

In a year or so when they remove the exception on the Unfiltered Audio Battalion+LION two-fer, I'll likely snag that. I'm a 'ho for wacky drum machines, and this looks like UfA's take on Break Tweaker. I wasn't impressed with LION when I demo'd it. It ate too many resources.

Is it catch 22 because track 22 is the first one that doesn't respond?

Strictly speaking, .VST3 files are dynamic linking libraries, hence they too are "DLL's." VST3 DLL's have the extension ".VST3" while VST2 DLL's have the extension ".DLL."

Funny about those vaporDAW's, isn't it? Behringer has/had one. Maybe it's way more difficult to come up with one than the people who make the announcements expect. I don't know how long the bakers were working on Next before the first builds were dropped to the beta team, but the beta team had it for a good long time before last year's announcement. And Next is a DAW made by people who already had decades of experience in the craft. We do know that it took years after the MacOS release for UAD to get LUNA to open beta on Windows. Of course, some of that time was probably devoted to re-coding LUNA to run on Apple Silicon....

As I mentioned earlier, they do have Unfiltered Audio, whose plug-ins are about as creative as they come, and who continue to release new ones at least yearly. If you're referring specifically to Brainworx, I agree. How many variations on bx_masterdesk does the world need?

Same. I also wonder whether the advances I've seen with my two main DAW's (Cakewalk and Mixcraft) would be as far along if they had to bother with chasing Apples.

I'd say that Unfiltered Audio BYOME and TRIAD are worth that fee. TRIAD is BYOME with multiband functionality. Sort of Snap Heap meets MeldaProduction meets Glitchmachines. The insane versatility and depth of MeldaProduction multi parameter/modulation options, choose the blocks you want in any order like Snap Heap and the capacity for sheer weirdness of Glitchmachines. I snarfed so many plug-ins for so little cash from PA that my perspective on their monetary worth is broken.

Long requested feature that, and one that I approve of wholeheartedly: double click on the channel strip EQ plot to open the full UI.

Mine didn't come with the pop filter, unfortunately. I suspect that when Logitech bought the brand and started having the mics made in China, they did away with it. Still, it came with a very nice shock mount and the traditional wooden box. I've tried singing into it without a pop filter and it is very resistant to plosives on its own.

I suspect that the women who would hold less respect for you for not driving, you probably wouldn't want to go with anyway. It's kind of the opposite of the old joke about not wanting to belong to any club that would have me for a member: I wouldn't want to date a woman who doesn't want to date guys like me. As a fan of the Buggles for the past 45 years, I am going to need a citation on that. My understanding is that he did some programming for them in the studio and appeared as a keyboard player in the video, but didn't play on the record.

I appreciate it when deals from the same retailer are posted individually because it makes it easier to search by scrolling titles.

Larry is the man, no doubt, and things do tend to slow waaaaay down when he takes breaks but sometimes other people come up with stuff. Sometimes. ?