Starship Krupa

Cool, thanks! Something that trips me out is how often people who make YouTube demos obviously have mix engineer skills, but can't or won't apply that to the VO track for their narration. The guy's lip and tongue clicks drive me nuts. ?

Kurre, @Terry Kelley, I'm curious as to how you liked the expansions and whether you consider it worth the money. Cheers.

Really? There are many free ways to edit lyrics, it doesn't need to be a part of the same software we use to make music. Cakewalk's "Lyrics" feature won't do what you and I would like it to, but a good free plug-in will, "A pity," perhaps, but depressing?

I've posted earlier in this thread about the wonders of Swatches, the freebie from A|A|S that is basically a player that demos their other instruments. It comes with almost 500 sounds. If you have Swatches/AAS Player, the AAS Player and sound packs that use Chromophone 3, Ultra-Analog 3, and String Studio 3 have all been updated to the new engines and sounds and they sound fantastic. I did a 1:1 comparison using some favorite Cinémathèque ambient pads and the already-magnificent sounds were huge. So go update your version of Swatches, and certainly, if you, like me, own a bunch of sound packs and only use them in Player, update your sound packs as well.

Okay, this is pertinent for other Swatches/AAS Player users who may be reading this: The AAS Player and sound packs that use Chromophone 3, Ultra-Analog 3, and String Studio 3 have all been updated to the new engines and sounds and they sound fantastic. I did a 1:1 comparison using some favorite Cinémathèque ambient pads and the already-magnificent sounds were huge.

I love the sound of their stuff, but keep it to the "Session" versions and AAS Player with a pile of sound packs. Player works fine for me (except I've found no use for the Strum packs I got in bundles), the only feature I would add to it would be a way to mark favorites. For those having CPU issues, a trick that has worked for me in Player is reducing the number of voices. This may seem like it would reduce the lushness of those ENORMOUS AAS pads, but I've never even noticed a difference when going from 12 (the default) to say, 8. I think this is because some of those long, evolving highly effected pads have such long tails that voices can really pile up if I'm doing something with a lot of changes or arps. The thing is, if I'm doing something with lots of changes, long tails can get in the way anyway. 8 or even 6 voices works just fine. If I'm doing piano key entry, 6 note chords are kinda my limit anyway.

That's a feature that many of their plug-ins have, you can design simplified control panels. It looks as if for the various vintage compressors they've come up with they also made panels. Click on the "Edit" button at the top and the panels will go away and you'll see the usual zillions of options. The LE one doesn't give you access to the "Edit" screen. I wonder if that's a typo on the artwork they are using for the website and advertisements, because I have owned Meldaproduction compressors for years (I'm one of the few with any love to show for MModernCompressor, which, now that I'll have MTurboCompLE might be seeing less use), and ratio is expressed as a ratio, release and attack in mS, everything is as it usually is on compressors. And anyone who gets MTurboCompLE, be sure to poke around and see if you can find the "psychoacoustic prefiltering" option for the detector and A-B it against the other detector settings. Really nice on a snare. MModern has it easily accessible, one of MModern's few claims to fame.

Well, last month, I made two purchases at PB, and the first time I opted for Animate, and the next time they again offered me my choice of the remaining 2 on the freebie list, so it's time to get one of those under $10 plug-ins we all keep in our PB wishlist so that we always have something to qualify (those deals have sold a lot of SoundSpot licenses over the years).

https://page.waproduction.com/monthly-free-product With any order, and last time I did it that included products that are themselves already free, like their numerous other genre packs. I can say that if you're a droner, glitcher, or sound designer, you won't regret investing $7.90 in a license for Venom. It's another of their crazy useful creative tools.

At least now that their BF sales are over I can finally get my best price on Sandman Pro. I have a $25 voucher that must be used on an order of $35 or more (and have no $5-10 plug-ins that can be used to pad an order), and their silly "any plug-in $29" sale meant that the one plug-in I was interested in would have cost me $4 more if I'd bought it on sale.

Oh heck YEAH to some MTurboCompLE, that so much more than makes up for my missing the Waves dbx 160 spiff.

I think this is RFK, but Klang seem to live in a "one simply owns a license for Kontakt, doesn't one?" bubble, so it's hard to tell.

RFK* *(Requires Full Kontakt, not Bobby Kennedy)

The cost of this mistake on the part of the dealer may be that Eventide will charge them full wholesale for each license. Eventide may cut them a break and wave it off, and in that case their cost is that anyone who got the plug-in and who would otherwise have paid for a license now will not. Have Plug-In Fox or Eventide announced that they made an error? If not, then how does anyone know that it was an error? Did they tell Tomislav so? Maybe it was a stealth promo made to look like a mistake so that software deal aggregators and "insiders" like Larry and BPB would talk up both the site and Eventide. This thread is now up to 2 pages, sitting at the top of the Deals subforum every time someone posts. I didn't know Plug-In Fox existed, and now I'm curious to see what they offer that my main vendor, Plugin Boutique, doesn't. In this one post, I've typed the names of both companies at least twice. I have a pile of licenses that Eventide have flowed me over the years starting with UltraChannel (which includes an Omnipressor module). When they announced the introductory deal on EQuivocate I pounced on it knowing that their stuff is top quality. I've spent hundreds of dollars on software from companies that I learned about via their free promotions (most notably Meldaproduction with their FreeFXBundle). It amounts to advertising for both Plug-In Fox and Eventide. If it was a mistake, well, mistakes happen and now they know to harden their procedures against making them in the future. Also, everyone now knows that the companies involved will honor their deals, no matter.

I've found that for "flat" themes it's best to start from Tungsten. I'm interested to see what you come up with as far as knobs go. My own theme (that I've been working on and hope to soon release) uses an alternate set of slider knobs that I found in a subfolder.

Odd, I have installed iLok Manager and various SONiVOX plug-ins in willy-nilly order and never run into this. I can't find tpkd.sys on my C: drive.

Now that the subject of having one's email pwned has come up, I'll repeat my public service announcement: If you haven't already done so, create a separate email address for registering plug-ins, getting free offers, etc. Separate from the one you use for banking and personal communication and so forth. The reason for this is not that plug-in companies are likely to abuse your address, it's that they are more likely to have "softer" security than financial institutions, etc. This is just because the stakes are lower and the banks have staffs of thousands of people working on it that your 2-person plug-in house doesn't. Having said this, I have never had a plug-in (or any other) company get compromised and release my email address and password (of which I make a different one for every site I use), But it makes for greater peace of mind. Especially if one is a freeware 'ho like me. It's "best practice," if you will. It goes the other way, too, if you're using your personal address to register plug-ins, and it gets compromised by Uncle Ferd's AOL address book being hacked, you'd have to go around and change your address with 2 dozen plug-in manufacturers and other stores.

If you want some real amusement, once you get your song laid out and words entered into the Lyrics View, edit the song a little and then open the Lyrics View. It was almost disturbing, as if Cakewalk had taken too much of some drug or other and was randomly repeating phrases and words. I decided to just leave it in the chill out room. Maybe useful if one were into the William Burroughs cut-up-and-paste thing, which many artists have used. David Bowie, Brian Eno, and Thom Yorke, for instance. For those not familiar, it's where you take a bunch of words and phrases, write them down on paper, then cut each of them out, put them in a hat, and reassemble them in random order. The Lyrics View might be useful in that context.

Okay, I've been talking up the wonders of the MFreeFXBundle and how each plug-in rewards closer scrutiny (unlike, say, Cakewalk's Lyrics View). Here's another example. If I remember correctly, the initial reason I found the bundle half a dozen years ago was that someone mentioned MNotepad on the Mixcraft forum. So, first Meldaproduction plug-in I tried, I still use it, and I didn't know it could do this. ?‍♂️ I'm going to examine it more closely, for all I know it could have some multiparameter or modulator that changes the font or color in time with the project tempo or in response to signal level....?

I still use Yahoo because of My Yahoo, their customizable start page. It's crazy, nobody's come along with a viable competitor for that.

Ugh. Just like with Matthew, they keep saying they need to confirm my email address, then it never shows up in my Yahoo mailbox, not in the Spam folder either. GMail I guess.

Full version of Kontakt required.

Other than a gateway drug? ? My favorites: there's a really good, useful para EQ and I wish every compressor had the same graphical display that MCompressor (which also has all the usual compressor parameters plus HP and LP filters for the sidechain and curves you can draw yourself) uses. My two most used EQ's are the one in the Cakewalk Pro Channel and MEQualizer. MLoudnessAnalyzer is on the mix output bus in every project I do, and MStereoScope is on every drum overheads bus. MComb is a very versatile 4-pole filter, each pole can be set up to have its frequency, Q, and boost/cut modulated, and the modulators can be LFO or envelope follower, in combination, and the LFO shapes (and speeds) can be set a bunch of different ways. MTuner is a polyphonic tuner that also includes a pitch-to-MIDI converter. Any one of those would be a pretty good value at $11 by itself. Most of the rest are of the "need to have in my toolbox for when I need one" category for me. Ring modulator, flanger, phaser, tremolo, saturator, autopanner, algo reverb, convo reverb, vibrasto, spectrum analyzer, test oscillator, noise generator, oscilloscope. MAutoPitch is, I am told, a not-too-shabby realtime pitch corrector. I don't use them myself. There are even more. One I've never tried but want to is MCCGenerator, which lets you send out up to 8 MIDI CC values driven by its modulators. I think the idea is that you can use the LFO's in this plug-in to sweep the controls of other plug-ins whose parameters don't have LFO's of their own. I had the bundle for years only using about half a dozen of them before one evening deciding to put a drum loop on and go down the MFreeFX list until I had tried all of the processors. I was....impressed, especially with MComb. I had thought before that that Arturia's Mini-Filter was pretty hot stuff for juicing up a drum loop. Not that it isn't, it's just that I haven't used it since I found out about MComb. I just bought my new-to-DAW's buddy a license and it came to $10.72 USD after setting up his account, etc.

Cakewalk’s Lyrics View is the most baffling, strangely-implemented feature I have ever encountered in a DAW, and is in at least the top 5 in any software I’ve tried. When I want to have lyrics written down as part of the project, I use the Notes feature or Meldaproduction’s plug-in. As for learning to use the Arranger Track, my approach was/is to just start making Sections that correspond to intro, verse, chorus, bridge and see if it inspires me to continue with the tool. It did, once I realized I could so quickly copy and paste and move Sections. If nothing else it’s a way to have bits of the song sort of permanently selected. Change something and wham-wham, it’s easy to chop ‘n’ drop the altered verse without going through all the steps of finding the markers, selecting, etc. It just streamlines the process. Along the way it’s gotten me to be more aware of and think in terms of arrangements rather than a song as a linear thing.

Not technically incorrect, as it does zoom horizontally, but unfortunately it also zooms your project vertically to fill the Track Pane with your project. Which if you only have a handful of tracks, results in Humongous Towering Tracks Syndrome. I would love for Cakewalk to have a command to zoom horizontally to fit the project, but it ain't there.