Starship Krupa

So, how do I get it for free? I followed the link, and the page says it's 100% off, and I get all the way to registering an account and putting it in my cart, but it's still sitting there at 49 euros. Does it change to zero at some point? I must say, that demo audio where they put it on the drum overheads is pretty ferocious. At this point, my thing is finding one or two emulations of each of the classics and sticking with them, but I am a free plug-in 'ho.

Oh, no, I am really digging SampleTank 4 CS. Lots of useful free content, and it doesn't crash hosts like 3 did. Stick a cheapo nVidia card in that thing? Remember this one: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/950683/vcredist-from-vc-2008-installs-temporary-files-in-root-directory. Vojtech loves to run that Visual C++ runtime installer and it leaves that scat behind in the root. BTW, don't know if I've seen it mentioned, but he's letting everyone subscribe to the whole Meldaproduction catalog for 3 months for free. I'm getting to see what all the fuss is about with the more expensive stuff.

It's the principle, kite. ? I'm a Meldamoonie, All Hail The Grand Vojtech, but even The Great One cannot force me to keep 32-bit plug-ins on my SSD. Regarding NI, on my systems, it makes me install them both anew and then I have to delete the 32-bit one all over again. Worth it. Principle. Also, what I said about confusing hosts' scanners. Every host maintains a database of every plug-it scans, and these scans take time at start-up. If I have an idea, I want to get it down quickly. Also, speaking of NI cruft, their installer puts the drivers for their hardware controllers on your system whether you own the controllers or not. So that's another cleanup task I do from time to time, check with Process Explorer to see if I have the NI drivers running and go in and disable them if I do.

OMG, thank you! On my system, it just had the AASplayer .dll, but that is craziness. It does lend credence to my hypothesis that their installer just looks for the string "vstplugins" and slaps copies of the .dll's in the folder. Or who knows, maybe it has a database? All known plug-in locations. I think I'm going to start a spreadsheet or some other way to start tracking this, because it's not good to have multiple copies of plug-ins scattered all over the place. You need to make sure that your DAW is scanning the correct one in the correct order, and the VST thing is weird enough without confusing matters. I have my system's policy down to: 64-bit VST3's only when they are available, then 64-bit VST2's when the VST3 is not. That's just for tidiness's sake, not out of any preference for the silly VST3 format. Everything else is search and delete. Duplicate VST2's when I already have the VST3 installed included. So far I have run into zero issues with just deleting the spurious VST2 .dll's, 32-bit versions, AAX versions, RTAS(!) versions that these installers dump on my precious SSD. I'm shopping for a 500G SSD right now, but I still don't care for shovelware in any form, from any source. I'll take their install shell, that's all in the game, but I'd really rather it didn't make me hunt down and delete all the "trial" copies of their entire catalog (cough T-Racks cough).

Reminds me I need to write a post-Melda installer cleanup script to delete all the 32-bit cruft. The more challenging task will be the post A|A|S installer script. If ever there were a nervous nellie installer....

True, and I am a frugal hobbyist who has never paid more than $50 for any software license. The reason I am in this conversation to begin with is that the Cakewalk license is a free subscription. If I were a professional user of Pro Tools and UAD plug-ins and owned an iLok dongle I might have different thoughts on downtime I also have multiple systems in one location that in a pinch, I can deauthorize licenses from if need be. Something that irks me is that I've seen PACE hawking that "Zero Downtime" service, which I assume is basically some scheme for storing backups of your licenses in a cloud. In this day, if they have the means to do that, they should have just implemented it for free. Otherwise it's basically saying "pay us extra for this service or be exposed to the inherent risks of using our licensing process." Still, if iLok weren't an effective form of copy protection, these companies wouldn't use it. It's a lock, and I do agree with the truism that locks are there to deter honest people. You are correct in saying that cracked software will always exist no matter what companies do in the way of copy protection. However, "sending your friend a copy of the iZotopeRX installer to try out that he somehow never gets around to registering" and "having XPand! 2 casually copied from the DAW class computer by every student who takes the class" (yes, it's a $15 plug-in, but 1,000 people take the class, so....) can be prevented because these are people whose moral event horizon stops before the act of searching out a torrent site, taking the risk of malware, etc. Of course when companies whose revenue is mostly from selling licenses get paid for the highest percentage of copies of their software in use, they don't have to charge as much for their licenses. This results in a direct benefit to you and me in the form of less expensive licenses. So I pay for all the value I get from AIR's plug-ins not getting passed around like party coasters in the form of taking the risk of possible hassle. Yes, there are other ways to license plug-ins, challenge and response, for instance, but they are also vulnerable to disk failure, they don't allow for the license owner easily moving from system to system (if I had an iLok dongle, I could buy a single license for a plug-in and use it on as many systems as I could sit down at, right?), etc.

As we've witnessed with Our Favorite DAW, if you judge a piece of software/technology by how buggy it was during the early Obama administration, you're sure to miss out on some great stuff. If I were to go by Sampletank 3, for instance, I'd never touch the thing again, because despite the freebie having one of the best sampled grands I'd heard, I could play it for about 3 minutes before it would crash the snot out of whatever host I was using, Cakewalk, Mixcraft. But I checked out Sampletank 4, and dang, even more freebie content and the thing is strong like bull, solid like rock. And I'm sorry, SONAR lovers, but when I installed and tried the first build of CbB, I was kind of stunned by how crashy and fragile and dropout prone and just buggy it was compared to what I had been used to, which was Mixcraft. Usable, for sure, great features and it sounded like a million bucks, but I had to baby it. Couldn't leave it running. But the next build, what was it, a month and a half later, those boys had put their butt-kicking boots on. By the next one after that, I was convinced that they were deadly serious. And now, I think y'all know what an advocate I am. I'm an "East German judge" of software, I used to work in the industry, I have a low threshold for excuses and defensiveness. I also think that it's great that we have so many DAW's to choose from, and even the highest end of them costs less than my 4-track cassette did 35 years ago. Ableton Live! and FL Studio have great workflows for electronic music, Reaper is a tweaker's delight and seems to work with everything when others don't, Cubase and Studio One seem to be ones with the more traditional workflow and at the forefront of introducing new features, Cakewalk is free and to me, like a Winchester Mystery House where I keep finding out cool things it can do, and it's now taking some inspiration again from what the industry leaders are up to.

What's the big deal about iLok licensing? The PACE service is a teeny tiny thing running on my computer compared to Apple Mobile Device Helper, Apple iPod Service, Apple Updater, Google Crash Handler, Microsoft Photos, all this other crap I have running and can't turn off for fear it will break iTunes or Chrome. I did have to go through the hassle of retrieving the iLok'd licenses I lost on a computer where I upgraded the motherboard and Windows (and therefore PACE/iLok) decided that it was a different computer. I contacted the companies involved and asked them to please deactivate the licenses and they all did without a fuss. Next time I do major surgery on a computer, I deactivate the iLok (and Waves) licenses first. Never owned one of their dongles, 'cause I don't hop from studio to studio to work.

I remember being a little kid and as I started to understand how the world functioned, that it wasn't Mommy's Magic Purse, you had to get paid in order to be able to do things, watching TV and having this sudden moment of panic and confusion when I realized that the people doing it were giving it away for free. And I was really freaked out, like little kids get when they don't understand something that's really important to them. I grew up in Los Angeles, I understood from an early age that movies and TV cost a lot of money to produce, yet TV was free. I couldn't ask anyone because I didn't want to seem stupid. Finally it dawned on me: the commercials. The people who run the commercials pay the people who do the shows to run the commercials. But for that time period before I got it, I was really freaked out, I felt like I was in danger of losing something that was central to my life. Like, what if these people who are doing it for free decide that they're tired of it? No more Laugh-In, no more Star Trek? Maybe we have a basic urge to understand and feel comfortable with the supply chain of things that are important to us. It's probably in our DNA. (There's also a lot of conditioning about "if it's too good to be true, it probably isn't." And lemme tell ya, when I heard that SONAR was about to be renamed and released under a freeware license, it was like, "pinch me, I must be dreaming." It is an incredible deal. How is it even possible? Even for the abandoned SONAR people, to suddenly have a savior swoop in and continue the updates. Too good to be true. So what's the catch? When does it all go sour?) The funny thing is, Laugh-In and Star Trek were cancelled, and SONAR, hate to use the word, but it failed as a commercial product and is thriving like a mo-fo as freeware. So under the business model that was more easily understood, the program tanked, yet 2 years into the new business model, which has shown no signs of trouble, premiering a huge new feature just in time for everyone to stay home and learn how to use it, some people are still kinda twitchy. As a favorite character on Star Trek might say, I find it....fascinating.

I'm sorry, I just can't resist sometimes, it's become a compulsion. Showing the light to people who use Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox to express doubt that there's any way a company could have a plan for making money from their 4 free DAW's.... I'll just go sing a poor boy's song....

Oh my, I'm happy to say that I went to Pluginboutique to check out the #StayInCreate package of freebies, you know, Neutron Elements 3, the Producertech courses, Radio plug-in, Loopmasters content, and I had Neutron Elements 3 in my cart and looked down below and what to my eyes should appear but they have a "You might also be interested in...." that included yet another iZotope/Exponential plug-in, Excalibur, for $9.99. I didn't even bother to trial it, after my experience with Phoenix Verb I knew that whatever that guy at Exponential came up with, it would be worth the tenner for at least one license, which would also qualify me for the little Denise trifle that's this month's PB freebie. And oh heck yeah it is. I guess it's supposed to be a sort of like those old digital multiFX rack units. So the promotion worked just like it was supposed to, I bought a product from the company that was giving another one away for free. (another piece of the puzzle for those who might still be wondering "how can BandLab possibly ever make money on Cakewalk if they give it away for free?")

I have been interested in it, y'know, every so often you hear something really cool and it's an interesting idea to be able to go back in time 30 seconds and capture it for study/use. I still have too many old school shackles on my head to just outright nick someone else's sound or groove, but I don't have a problem with putting it under the microscope to figure out what made it tickle my fancy. Listening to it right now. First impressions....sounds pretty good despite WASAPI and ASIO being absent from audio output choices....lack of search function for finding stations is needlessly frustrating....hmmm, pasting SomaFM stream addresses results in "station offline" error messages, but the same stations load okay from their preset menu....can't find a way to examine their presets to see what a "good" address looks like. Kinda rough around the corners, sort of looks like development stopped at some point. Verdict: worth every penny, glad I have it, glad I didn't pay more.

I just trash them, and I've had no problems. If you want to play it safe, and I do recommend playing it safe, you can create a folder on another drive called "32 VST Hold" or whatever, and drag them there temporarily until you are sure that there are no unintended consequences. I've never seen it, but it's not 100% impossible that the 64-bit version of a plug-in could be using the 32-bit .dll as a resource or something.

Anyone else develop a resentment for Audified after jumping through all those hoops to download and register their tarted-up compressorwhatsit? They seem to kinda think they're hot doo-doo or something....

I have never gotten that, I guess I'm more stoic than you, or too busy writing my notoriously long-winded replies, but while we're on the topic of reactions, y'know how we all have our "Member's total reputation?" (huh-huh, huh-huh) I wanna know which reactions add and subtract to it so I don't accidentally step on some member's reputation when I didn't mean to. I'm free with the Like, because I really do think that anyone who participates in a discussion, especially new people who might be afraid to, contribute to it. Also the Thanks and the Good Idea when appropriate. But if someone posts about John Prine passing away and I react "Sad," I would hope that doesn't ding them, and similarly, if they were to post that, say, Pro Tools added pop-out channel strip plug-ins and Avid were crowing about how innovative that was, and I reacted "Meh," I wouldn't want that to ding them. Even if someone were to post that they only use WASAPI instead of ASIO because they had done A/B testing and it sounded better and I reacted "Confused," I still wouldn't want it to lower their reputation. I'm pretty sure that "Meh" is the "downvote," so I reserve that for people posting words in all capitals commanding that the developers get their act together or whatever, but I wanna know, I really wanna know. Not that anyone in this topic doesn't have rep to friggin' burn, I notice.

For me, the quest had always been for my single best go-to reverb that I could put on a send and it would sound the most like sending the track to a real or imagined 3-D space. I'd have that, and then a quiver of "character" reverbs like plate emulations, psychedelic space things, etc. When Phoenix first went on sale at PB for a tenner, I downloaded the demo, threw it on my send bus in an existing mix just with the default medium room preset and my search of 5 years came to a very abrupt halt as my mix expanded into this holographic soundstage. Yeah, forget it, every other room reverb. I'm willing to entertain the possibility that you might be able to do something as good with TrueVerb or one of Melda's M*Verbs, but preset after preset in this thing was just stunning. No grain in the tails, and I don't know what kind of processing he's throwing in there to get that spatial effect, but man oh man. In other words, get the dang thing, if you are in any way in the market for an algorithmic room/hall/chamber reverb. But you can test drive it first and see. Caveat: unlike most iZotope products, license allows for a single installation, not two. Also, the UI is not as pretty as its iZotope brethren.

I don't think my Firepods qualify me for this....?

Thanks for all the information. As I am wanting to explore more EDM production methods, I will be checking out the Matrix . I'll search YouTube for tutorials and check out Craig Anderton's articles.

I think it would be really great if this essential tool were made available via BandLab Assistant via the "Install Add-Ons" menu. After all, BA allows the user to install the Theme Editor, which for most users is not going to be nearly as useful as the Reference Guide. As it stands, AFAIK, a user has to do a good bit of hunting to find it and keep it updated.

I'm going to drop in again on the Matrix, thanks to the encouragement from @JoseC. I had just kind of poked at it, and looked at the documentation, and left it.

Thanks, Steve, for the reminder about Sitala. It looks like a nice little one-shot player, and TX16Wx can certainly fall into the category of "way more sampler than I need for this." Not sure why I didn't delve deeper, maybe it was the developer referring to all of their releases as "beta." I mean, at some point, release one that you're confident enough in to call 1.0. Opening the Ref Guide pages for Matrix View is frustrating because there's so much potential there. If it were better integrated with the other elements of Cakewalk. And not that better integrated, just basic stuff like being able to directly route MIDI inside the program, using FX in your cells, being able to drag and drop clips directly from Tracks without first rendering them, connecting the outputs of the MV to Console strips for processing, and recording from audio or MIDI devices into cells. Hooking up a few parts of the program to it, like you'd do with a ReWire object. It feels as if it was a big planned feature, they got it working, yay, the stuff I listed was going to be implemented in the next release, then some catastrophe happened, maybe it lost its advocate in management or something.

@Keisari, I think I know what you're trying to do: you want to take a single audio sample, like a hi-hat or kick sample, and have it play when a MIDI note sounds. As scook has said, the Matrix View is closer to what you're looking for, but at this time it's set up so that if you want to compose this way, the Cakewalk Track View and Matrix View are not integrated tightly enough that I would feel comfortable using both in a project. You can do a project in Matrix View using loops, clips, samples, and then get it over to the Track View, but for instance I don't think you can trigger Matrix cells from MIDI events in the Cakewalk Track View, if you have edited a clip using the Track View you must bounce it before importing it to the Matrix view, Matrix View cells don't have access to VST effects, etc. It's set up so that you can do a project/performance in Matrix View, then "capture" it to clips in the Track View. It's great for what it is, it's just not connected to the other areas of the program yet. If you want to be more tightly integrated with the Track View workflow, use a software sampler such as T16Wx, which is freeware, a favorite of Cakewalkers and works great as a Cakewalk plug-in.

Does the whining stop when you stop playing? Does the whining only occur when other people are in the room? Does it only occur when you play with a door or window open? But seriously, folks.... My understanding of what your setup is is that you are using an SL-990, which is an 88-key weighted piano action MIDI keyboard controller, to play a piano sound on Cakewalk's TTS-1 softsynth. Am I correct? Your Studiologic MIDI controller doesn't have any practical limit to its "polyphony," BTW, it just puts out MIDI notes as fast as any human can possibly play them. I also own one, and I also have an owner's manual. Not much to it except for how to set the velocity curves and set up splits, stuff that most people don't bother with. It has no sounds in it, it must be hooked up to a sound module or a computer to make any sound at all. Polyphony limitations are in the synth itself, which would be the TTS-1. Polyphony limitations don't show up as "whining," you just get notes cutting off short or not sounding. TTS-1 is more than adequate to the the task of a bit of piano practice, unless your practice involves holding down the sustain pedal and running down the keyboard to make all the notes sound at once. A "whining" sound would seem to indicate some kind of feedback/loopback somewhere in your audio routing. What you're doing should work fine all day long. The SL-990 is a fine controller for piano. What does the rest of your setup look like? What audio/MIDI interface are you using? You must be using an external interface, because the SL-990 is 5-pin DIN. Are you using the external interface to monitor your playing? And although I asked the question I jest up above, does the whining sound stop when you stop playing? Just curious: can you go into Cakewalk's Preferences and in the Audio/Configuration File section, check to see what your ThreadSchedulingModel is set to? It should be set to 2. If it's set to 3, set it to 2 and please reply quoting me so that I get a notification. Also, while you're poking around in the Audio section, check in Playback and Recording and see what Driver Mode you're in, and in Driver Settings to see what Latency you are running at.

I have it on good word that since the man from Mars stopped eating cars and eating bars, he is only eating guitars. BandLab support have been known, as a courtesy service, to help Cakewalk Inc. customers who have valid serials and registration codes and whatnots with their validation issues. As you pointed out, they're not parties in your license agreement with Cakewalk, Inc., but Cakewalk's licensing server seems to be one of the assets they acquired, and apparently the support staff knows how to get it to behave. Ask them.

You must select a MIDI or Instrument track before you may access the Step Sequencer. This is the message you would get if you dragged an audio clip to a MIDI track.