Starship Krupa

I don't have any ideas about top hits from today, as I went underground some time ago, but I have some fun suggestions about older hits that people might find useful if broken down using your methods. All have iconic drum, synth, and guitar (and sometimes bass) sounds: New Order "The Perfect Kiss" Rush "Tom Sawyer" Van Halen "Panama" Michael Jackson "Beat It" Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers "You Got Lucky" Billy Idol "Rebel Yell" Prince "1999"

Interesting how some of these categories don't match any of the current collection of ProChannel modules. Interesting indeed.?

I really have to hand it to the devs, though, for so far spending two full years polishing and tuning, smashing bugs, adding long-requested "featurettes" as I found out they used to call them. And I think we've seen some fairly big updates, it's just that they were ones that expanded upon existing features rather than being new features of their own. There was that thing with adding colors to tracks that happened in one of the first releases that sure helped make the program more visually attractive. How many people were clamoring for the Ripple Edit Indicator and now take it for granted, because of course it should have been there from the start? How about the brilliant changes to the Smart Tool and Take Lanes workflow to open the way for another type of comping workflow? Note names on MIDI notes? Fab! Those are a few things that I consider "big" updates that have a huge impact on the ease of use and the way I use the program. Ah, how about for the new users (like me) the release of the Cakewalk Reference Guide? I think we kind of take these for granted because they were such good ideas, they fit right in. Well of course we have the names of the notes in the Piano Roll. But a couple of releases ago they were just blank rectangles. Well, sure, I can change the behavior of the Smart Tool, but I remember when I couldn't and it would just choose a tool that I didn't want to use. That's why I just don't get the "still using SONAR" crew. There's so much good stuff in the new program.

Jon, what's up with the rest of your system, your video driver and whatnot? Looking back over what I wrote, I hope I didn't come down too hard on Lynx. That bit in their manual that seems to be talking smack about the coding practices of Cakewalk and Ableton Live and Studio One rubbed me the wrong way. I just consider that sort of thing to be bad form. Full disclosure: I used to write user manuals for tech companies. I happen to know some of the history with Cakewalk's business practices, and one of the things we as users have going for us is that Cakewalk, Inc. always had a close relationship with Microsoft, one that Noel and co. have maintained into the BandLab era. They pay attention to standards and specifications, and while I don't know about Ableton, I do know the early history of Studio One. It started as a project of a couple of engineers who had left Steinberg, the company who wrote the ASIO specification in the first place. These people all very much know what they are doing. The above is what I would consider more professional language. If they fixed the issue with their "work-around," there is no need to name names and cause the kind of fear, uncertainty and doubt that resulted in this thread. BTW, I had it wrong when I said that MMCSS settings had no bearing on ASIO mode performance. In Cakewalk at least, they definitely do.

Yes, I am, and lest ye be of the perception that I speak for the company, I do not, I am merely sympathetic to their position and like to think that the many years I spent in the trenches at various multimedia software companies (Adobe/Macromedia, Learning Company, etc.) gives me some insight. What I meant to say was that it is entirely possible that Sequoia/Samplitude/Music Creator has a really good-sounding playback engine in comparison to other DAW's including Cakewalk. Fun hypothetical time, if I were setting up a professional studio, the kind with clients and deadlines and outside engineers and all that, I would have a different set of criteria for it than I would for my personal home studio. First thing I would do would be to ask around and see if Pro Tools was still the most popular tool for professional recording engineers, and necessary to be the primary DAW to build the studio around. Once I had that bit of information, I would order a couple of proper A/V computers from a system integrator such as Jim Roseberry. At that point I'd do the survey I do every few years by obtaining the free starter versions of the full-featured DAW's, Studio One, Cubase, etc. and trying them out to see how they stacked up against Cakewalk. At that point I would choose two DAW's to build the studio around, one of them probably still Pro Tools, the other likely Cakewalk because I'm familiar with it, but maybe not. I run Cakewalk here at home because the BandLab announcement came just as I was outgrowing Mixcraft and I checked it out and liked the feature set and the sound and saw that it had potential. I was and am very interested to see what happens under the BandLab stewardship. I predicted good things and am happy that so far I was right. I trolled the naysayers relentlessly and with great fury on the old forum, so I would have been kinda red-faced if things had turned to poo.? Even the forum is better and getting better all the time. I especially enjoy the relative lack of defensiveness, which may be down to the fact that there's not so much to be defensive about with CbB!

I guess it just needed cooling.

Why do you think your missing plug-in issue has something to do with "paid for life" or whatever? BREVERB as far as I know doesn't have a registration that expires. Have you gone into preferences and made sure that a plug-in path didn't somehow get deleted?

Jon, since you're obviously having some serious playback issues, as I've read in your other posts, could you do as I've done and put more about your system's specs in your sig? There are so many variables with hardware on Windows systems, I know you have more trouble than most and I seem to remember you are using a PCIe card for audio, but I don't remember what version of Windows, what video card, etc. Also, regarding Samplitude's playback engine sounding better to your ears, that is entirely possible. MAGIX claim to have completely overhauled their engine about a year or so ago up and down the line all the way down to Music Creator. There are some who will say "all DAW's sound the same, it's been proven," but that statement can't be true, it makes no sense. For it to be true, every DAW would have to use the same summing algorithms when mixing, use plug-ins the same way, implement panning the same way, and on and on. The statement could only be true as far as recording an audio test file with no effects, then playing it back with no effects, which is not what DAW's are for. I was a user of Mixcraft before I tried Cakewalk, and I noticed the difference immediately. Cakewalk sounded smooth and silky by comparison, Mixcraft harder edged. Also, there is playback and there is mixdown/bounce, which are two different processes. A DAW developer may choose to cut corners on the playback engine in order to make it more efficient, which could be why Mixcraft so seldom drops out on me compared to Cakewalk, but Cakewalk sounds better. I know from studying the two of them that Mixcraft isn't streaming audio from the disk during playback, unlike Cakewalk.

It sounds like ein grosse hassel, but A|A|S sound packs are pretty irresistible.

Often a stuck plug-in, so test it with a project with no plug-ins. If you can open a project with no plug-ins and close Cakewalk and then open it again, work your way back from there adding your favorite plug-ins until you find which one Cakewalk is choking on. At that point, you may be able to switch to or from the VST3 or 2 version, contact support, etc. or at least rule out a plug-in as the source of your trouble.

Then you should have been around when the demise of SONAR and the entire Cakewalk, Inc. was announced. SONAR was a paid product. BandLab's Cakewalk, on the other hand, isn't dependent on the sales of licensing fees in order to thrive, therefore its survival is not as tied to the fluctuations of the economy as a DAW that depends on selling licenses for revenue. How many people are shelling out $300 licenses for DAW software right now? It's the payware titles that are going to be looking at trouble. Furthermore, AFAIK, Cakewalk's development team already mostly if not entirely work in home offices, so there likely hasn't had to be a large adjustment in terms of work logistics. They're already set up to handle a situation such as we find ourselves in. BandLab is a well-funded company who like to acquire and nurture much-loved MI brands. Cakewalk is one of four free DAW's in their portfolio. One of the side effects of not needing to grub for license fees is that when the developers want to really work on the product, they can hold the next release longer than usual to make sure that the new feature(s) are working properly, that whatever bug fixes are sound, etc. without worrying that the company needs upgrade license money to pay their salaries. So kick back, relax, learn something about Cakewalk you didn't already know how to use. Wait for the next Early Access release to ooh and aah over. Honestly, if I were a Logic X or Cubase or Studio One devotee I'd be much more concerned about disruptions in development.

Progress? Do you mean progress on learning whether Lynx are interpreting Steinberg's specification correctly when they say that no application should ever set the priority of the driver thread, and why they think they know that Cakewalk, Studio One, and Ableton Live! are setting the priority of the ASIO driver thread and if that's actually the problem when their card fails to work smoothly with these products? That is cause for pondering. It seems odd, PreSonus has more than a little bit of experience working with ASIO drivers and the hardware that uses them, and the team that started Studio One came to PreSonus from Steinberg. Shoot, my 15-year-old Firepods are still going strong, 4 versions of Windows down the line. With a product that whines right out of the box about having driver compatibility issues with 3 different popular and established DAW's I guess you're kind of rollin' the dice anyway. Is it too late to maybe find a card with more robust drivers? If not, it sounds like Jon's good at finding audio software that's compatible with their cards. I think he said that on his system it's a matter of course that Cakewalk's the only one that the Lynx chokes on. I presume there's no Studio One or Ableton Live! in the picture? @Jon White, if you were having problems this severe I'm sure you must have opened a ticket with BandLab's support about this issue, what did they say about it? Note: MMCSS and ASIO have nothing to do with each other. MMCSS is part of Microsoft's WASAPI specification. ASIO is a Steinberg invention and designed to bypass Windows' built-in audio driver systems.

Also, if you actually are running SONAR at this late date, give the latest version of Cakewalk by BandLab a spin. The audio engine has had some nice optimization performed on it in the 2 years since BandLab's been in charge of it.

To boil it down, the user tried a performance tweak that had unintended (and unexpected) consequences. To take a wild guess, I'd say that with the more aggressive thread scheduling, whatever thread(s) services MIDI interrupts somehow keeps missing the bus (so to speak) on certain systems, and the MIDI latency keeps adding up to the point where it's noticeable and then unusable. I think at this point it's a "doc, it hurts when I put my arm like this" issue. Works on most systems, just not on mine. My ThreadSchedulingModel only goes to 2, but I won't worry that someone else's can go to 3. The computer is a hand-me-down, Some might call it a throwback of sorts that Cakewalk uses and exposes such things as .INI files in this day and age, but I suppose it's the result of its long heritage. I don't know how other DAW's do it, maybe they have a program-within-the-program that scans the hardware and sets everything to what it thinks is optimal based on processor type, clock speed, amount of RAM, etc. or the engine adapts on the fly or it's just one size fits all or they do it the same way Cakewalk does, with config files. BandLab has a support staff to recommend necessary changes, anything else is optional on the users' part. It's like editing the registry: back it up and don't even try if you are not good and sure of what you are doing.

What he said. This is a known issue on some systems (including mine). If your ThreadSchedulingModel is set to 3, set it to 2 and I'm pretty sure your issue will vanish.

I think the freebie from last month at PB was MSW2, Nebula, and Percolate, so if you got last month's freebie, never mind any of those three, and avoid Percolate no matter what. They are full versions. No, it looks like they reneged on Renegade. You'll probably have the most fun with Hiku, FireFly, Kinetik, Overtone, Oracle, Kara, Renegade Mini....

I have no problem with any of these statements or claims. Nowhere in the first three sentences do they actually say that they're talking about Waveform. I do think that it's presumptuous to call any DAW "the world's best," but I happen to prefer Cakewalk over all others, and it's FREE for all music creators and anyone else, so for me, the first three sentences are true, although the grammar is not quite right. I admit to a bit of puzzlement that Larry felt the need to remind us of those things on a forum devoted to Cakewalk, out of the blue, but thanks. (note: Cakewalk also supports unpopular plug-ins, like Sonic Anomaly and Dead Duck) At the moment I shall refrain from taking his suggestion that I download another doubtlessly worthy freeware DAW, but I appreciate his calling it to my attention. It's always good to have a backup recording solution. Tracktion's former insistence on "single window, track headers on the right, no mixer" used to drive me nuts whenever I'd try it, but it looks like they came to their senses.

I've been slowly acquiring SoundSpot's products over the years as they've been available as PB giveaways and $5 twofers and some are good and some were not and that somewhere along the way they at least got a good UI designer. I think that it's unfortunate that their website is so crappy, and that half of the products don't even have manuals, but look how every page of the documentation for CbB still has instructions on how to enable "offline help" 2 years after the first release of CbB, which has never had offline help. The critical eye I turn to their products is different to other companies. I think they might develop their products more toward the DJ/dance track/ DAW-as-instrument paradigm than toward the record, mix, master and print paradigm. What makes a plug-in better suited to purpose in each paradigm may be different. So when critiquing SoundSpot's product, maybe I take 30-40 years off my age perspective. ? Beware: when you're shopping in this sale, there are two pages that list their products, and the pages have different lists of products. https://www.soundspot.audio/audio-plugins-2/ Has a shorter list than: https://www.soundspot.audio/ For instance, Overtone Mastering EQ isn't listed on the first url I posted, and it's probably worth putting on your list of 5. Hiku and Nebula are unique FX that are both "Buy It Now's" for a buck. I don't think you can get what they do in that form anywhere else. FireFly is a nice versatile bus compressor, MSW2 is a spatial controller similar to Boz' Mongoose but with a more informative display and sadly, no documentation. Overtone is a stereo mastering para EQ with a big shiny GUI. Orbit is a transient shaper. If you are bored with your current mastering type EQ or transient shaper or want ones to give to someone, get them. Kickbox is a nice all-in-one for kick shaping, the compressor in it can bring some serious boom. Focus is a handy hi pass/lo pass with a graphic in the center. Do not get Percolate. It is bad. Similar to Larry, I just ticked off the ones I don't have that interest me, Kinetix, VoxBox, Kara, Glitch and Oracle. I'm sure the algo in Oracle can't touch the one in Phoenix Verb, but it has some interesting SoundSpot-ty things like LFO and compression.

An interesting exercise in key/mood is to sit on the sofa with your guitar or a small keyboard controller as you're watching TV and figure out what key the incidental music scorer is using under each scene. I binged Game of Thrones a few months ago and most of it seemed to be in Dm.

I downloaded the PDF and read it and the only reference to SONAR is in the filename and the first line. The rest of the instructions are only "how to use an iPad as a MIDI controller with Windows" with no further references to Cakewalk by BandLab or SONAR. It describes downloading and installing the necessary software, then testing it using nanoHost, then stops. Are you sure you uploaded the correct file? It seems to me like there should be another page of instructions in there for setting up rtpMIDI as a MIDI device in Cakewalk, testing it Cakewalk, something along those lines? I'm not trying to be a dick, just asking if the file might not be what you intended to upload and if it is, let you know that one person who read it finds it helpful but a little incomplete. The instructions should probably work with CbB in place of nanoHost for anyone who wants to try it, and I'm sure you wouldn't have uploaded it if you hadn't tried it, so thanks! I found a wifi keyboard app for iOS with a small server component that works a treat. "WiFi Keyboard"

By "user" I mean a party who is not a commercial entity, doesn't wish to earn money from creating Kontakt instruments/libraries. From my understanding there is Native Instruments, the company who licenses Kontakt, the tool for making these libraries for money, and licenses Kontakt Player for free. And then they and other companies use Kontakt to create libraries to license that can always be played with Kontakt and sometimes with the Player. My understanding of the licensing is that anyone who owns a license for Kontakt may create and distribute Kontakt libraries that can be played in Kontakt, but the library creator must pay Native Instruments if they wish to create and distribute libraries that are playable in Kontakt Player. Do I have this right?

Good on ya for taking the trouble to find it and put the bump on. I happen to have another nice giveaway, this one from our friend Boz Millar of Boz Digital. It was actually released a couple of days ago, it's designed to ease the psychological effects of isolation. It's a virtual companion for the studio, uses AI technology to mimic human behavior: Boz Digital Labs Studio Companion Make sure to hit the button for "Live" mode. I found out that interesting effects may be achieved by clicking on a companion icon before another has finished its output.

Nice to see @ChernobylStudios happy with Cakewalk again. Scott, I posted a comment (as Euthymia) on the video regarding bus strip width. I thought the video implied that it wasn't possible to narrow bus strips, but that's only true when you do it from the pull-down menu. It's doable if you use the right click context menu, you do know that, correct? The way you rip around in Cakewalk it should only take you half a second to narrow and widen all of your bus strips if you use shift-click to select all of them.

If you are not running 32-bit audio software, then there's no reason to install 32-bit versions of your plug-ins. Unless your version of Reason is 32-bit, in which case you would have both Reason and a reason. IMO, there are multiple reasons for not installing them. First, if you are like most and have an SSD as your system/program/plug-in drive, you may be like me and consider space on that drive to be at a premium. I am currently disabled and working at reduced capacity so was only able to afford a 240G drive for my computer. The first time I did a sweep I reclaimed about 4G, which for me, is a Cakewalk project or two's worth of SSD space. My system drive is also my only SSD, so it gets the projects, too. As you noted, this stuff builds up! Second, there's the matter of plug-in scanning and registering, which for most happens each time Cakewalk starts up. If you still wish to have a few legacy 32-bit plug-ins, you need to have Cakewalk scan your 32-bit plug-in directory. If it's full of iZotope and Native Instruments plug-ins, Cakewalk (and other DAW's that natively support 32-bit plug-ins) still scans and makes registry entries for all of them It's smart enough to hide 32-bit plug-ins that it knows you have 64-bit versions of, but that takes more time, makes for more possibility for error, etc. It's needless work for your DAW. (what you did with leaving the .dll's in there is fine in this scenario, because the devs recently made it so that Cakewalk will ignore VST2 .dll's in VST3 folders) Third, I'm a cantankerous sort of person who doesn't want companies putting software on my computer that I didn't ask for. I'm willing to jump through the hoop of installing their installation/authorization manager, I'm fine with iZotope Portal, Cakewalk Command Center, Waves Central, BandLab Assistant, Native Access, iLok et al, but what I want is 64-bit VST3's, and if they only have VST2's, then those. Period. I don't use 32-bit VST2's or VST3's, I don't use AAX's and I sure as heck don't use RTAS, thank you iZotope, A|A|S and Celemony for heaven's sake. I've gone to the trouble of learning that the VST2 spec has both a registry entry and an environment variable that installers may query to find out where the system's VST plug-ins directory is, and I have set my systems up to have that. Not many installers seem to look for it, though.

It's not really my world. my only use for sampling at this point is for phrases, but I am a consumer of sampled instruments for sure. Most of my sampled instrument money has flowed in the direction of SONIVOX so far. I am curious about that end of it from the creators' viewpoint. It seems like there are some pretty advanced products out there. I have been poking around the new free version of SampleTank 4 and am curious about it, and there is Halion, and then the MAGIX Independence mentioned earlier. Kontakt seems to have the most devoted following in these parts. To them, Kontakt seems to be the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful sampler they've used in their lives. To me, I have the need for playing sampled instruments that doesn't include the need for all of the cool stuff that Kontakt can do on the sampling side. They have the freeware Player, but have library licensing locked down tighter than the iOS App Store so that user-created libraries that can be played on the freeware Player do not exist to my knowledge.