Starship Krupa

That's kinda harsh, posting news of a fellow musician's death as a "deal." I've never much cared for Pat Metheny either, but I don't begrudge other people listening to his stuff and I think I've seen Mr. Mays credited on some recordings that I do enjoy. What if someone on this forum were friends with Lyle Mays and saw this mean joke?

Good call. I think I may also have had a PAS (plug-in acquisition syndrome) response to the inquiry: of COURSE this guy wants to find more plug-ins for CbB, doesn't everyone? ?

That is odd. So there were newer versions of these plug-ins than the ones that come with CbB? Do you remember if they had any differences in appearance or function?

A little attempt at humor. Actually, so many people who post here butcher the name of the software that no matter what they call it, I just assume they are talking about Cakewalk by BandLab, the name of which is up at the top of the forum, and which they would have had to have seen on several messages before even getting here. So whether they call it "BandLab" or "BandLab Sonar" or "the new SONAR" or "Bandlad Cakewalk" or "CbD" or "CdB" I just reply with what I hope is something that will help. If they say "SONAR," that help will include the suggestion to switch/upgrade to Cakewalk. I've never heard of a "bandlab mix-editor" that one may download. The only BandLab DAW's I've ever used were Cakewalk (of course) and the browser, iOS, and Android ones. There is a button in BandLab Assistant that will take the user to the browser version, but it's not downloadable and to my knowledge one may not "acquire" effects for it. The effects are included and proprietary. I find it puzzling that people get this far with registering an account and all the windows and forum headers and topics and everything and still be so confused, but they do, and obviously they can use some info once they get here. I don't even know if there are user forums for the other BandLab DAW's, but if the OP is trying to figure out how to add FX to his tracks in the browser-based Mix-Editor, such forums would be a better bet than this one.

Cheers, John. Sounds like the rep was being kinda unscrupulous and misrepresenting the true position of the parent company at the expense of making sales. Maybe that's part of why Roland USA is now a big thing. ? I'll bet that if you had confronted him a year later he would have claimed ignorance of how much Roland had already thrown their weight behind the new spec. Since MIDI is literally a refinement of DCB (according to the Wikipedia article, anyway), if it were "defective and full of flaws," that wouldn't speak too well of DCB! By now I'm sure you know about lead times and how long it takes for a company to get an electronic product into production from conception to delivery. Back then it was even longer, so for Roland to be selling MIDI-capable gear as soon as they were after that rep's spiel....however the math works out. At least anyone who bought into DCB was able to get a converter box. In my imagination, the legendary lunch discussion at NAMM between Kakehashi (Roland), Oberheim, and Smith (Sequential) may have started with the idea of the other two companies licensing DCB from Roland. Now if I'm Tom Oberheim and Dave Smith, I'm going to balk at that because Kakehashi (or forces at Roland) may decide to change the spec to favor their interests. It's a great idea to have everything able to connect to everything else, all those companies are starting to have "systems," and they are willing to admit that some artists prefer workflow and sound from one company's box over another, and ultimately it will be good for the industry as a whole. So Kakehashi compromises: okay, let's do an open standard, but let's make it pretty close to my DCB so that it will be easy for us to retrofit existing product. Sends the schematics off to Smith in California and after hundreds of FAX exchanges between California and Japan, it's on. Then they need to define a data protocol. Yamaha buys in, hey this will be great for the new low cost FM synth we want to introduce.... And every keyboard salesman everywhere begins to have nightmares where people are asking them "does it have MIDI?" My main MIDI input controller is a Kawai K1 that my ex gave me when she moved out. It has this annoying "feature" where it sends All Notes Off (aka "panic") whenever the last key is lifted. So any patch with a long release is suddenly chopped. They considered this so important that there is no way to turn it off in the synth, I have to use a MIDI plug-in to filter it.

Wellll, actually. Roland were one of the original companies who contributed to the idea in the first place, and hardware-wise, 5-pin DIN MIDI owes a lot to DCB. But don't just take my word. From Wikipedia: "The MIDI Standard was born out of conversations between Oberheim Electronics founder Tom Oberheim, Roland founder Ikutaro Kakehashi and Sequential Circuits president Dave Smith at the Summer NAMM show in 1981.....Using Roland's DCB as a basis, Smith and Sequential Circuits engineer Chet Wood devised a universal synthesizer interface...." It was a long time ago. I was living in Sunnyvale, California, USA, not far from Sequential Circuits' headquarters. I was also an avid reader of not only Electronic Musician, but Polyphony, the self-published 'zine that @Craig Anderton published before EM began. I think I may still have a cache of back issues of Polyphony around somewhere. Craig probably named the magazine that because at the time it seemed like an unobtainable goal, like nirvana. I worked across the street from Atari, which was just then about to implode. The ST400 and ST800 were the systems to have for musicians, though. I attended the 1982 US Festival and met Bob Moog, who, between having lost and regained control of his company name, had taken a gig doing something or other with Fairlight, IIRC. He gave a lecture and demonstrated the Fairlight System at the festival. My first exposure to musical sampling, so I can say "Bob Moog was the one who introduced me to sampled instruments." Mattel showed off their Synsonics drum machine at the US Festival as well. I wanted one immediately! 5-pin DIN, no MIDI. Never got one, but I did get a TR-606 a couple of years later. 5-pin DIN, no MIDI. Sold it on eBay 20 years ago for a small profit. A few years later I veered off into San Francisco and the underground music scene of the day. The groundwork was being laid for the grunge wave that was (to us at least) a rebellion against corporation-approved-and-packaged pop of the early and mid-80's. Which had been characterized by both big synth sounds and by pop metal shred dudes with MIDI-controlled guitar rigs. The hip music world went low tech for a good while and I happily went right along with it. I didn't become interested in MIDI or electronic music again until around 1999 when the rave scene was in full bloom in the San Francisco area and I started digging deep house and downtempo electronic sounds as well as the Big Beat thing that Fatboy Slim got up to. Now that stuff is retro and I still like it. It's fun to be able to jump from writing and recording totally "live rock band" songs to composing "ambient electronic" to something else that is inspired by Air or Nine Inch Nails all centered around the same music-making software.

Aaaaargh! This is one of my personal peeves, if it is the case with Melodyne. When I am running an analysis program, and I kind of know where the data are going to fall, how about the program lets me do some of the heavy lifting before we start and I can tell it that for instance the song is definitely not going to wander beyond 150-160BPM? So then it can filter out glitch results like 78BPM. So that it can focus its powerful detection algorithm in that range rather than figuring out everything from 1BPM to 250BPM.

+1 on posting examples of the recorded files. It would be good to have examples of both acceptable and unacceptable recordings. If you use your BandLab profile to host the audio you can link to the files using a button right here in the message editor. Makes it simple. I endorse upgrading your system from Windows 7 to Windows 10. More and more software and hardware companies are abandoning development for Windows 7 and compatibility issues will only get worse the longer you wait. While Cakewalk will install and run in Windows 7, it is specifically optimized to take advantage of features in Windows 10, and is extensively tested in Windows 10.

One caution: when doing this, I consider it best practice to go easy on the FX I'm using. Just whatever I or the talent need to hear to get a good performance. Or if I have a rockabilly singer and they need to hear the slapback so they can do the "hug-a-mug-a-huh" thing in the right rhythm or whatever. If you find that there is a noticeable delay in monitoring, it could be caused by a plug-in. iZotope products are well-known for this. They sound amazing when I use them on mixdown, but I can't use them while I'm tracking because they cause so much latency. The thing to do in that case is only use the FX that you need for the vocal tracking session and disable the rest. Then flip the others back on at mixing time.

Good idea, unless the OP really just wants to skip that part and go straight to "acquiring effects."

Oh, the hopes I had for that part of the spec. Unlike the rest of it, which is redundant rubbish, this is something that I could get behind. That's really using your heads, thinks I. Instead of sitting there churning away, all these programs-within-a-program can intelligently go into a sleep state so that the processor-intensive cabinet simulation convolver you're using on nothing but the 4-bar guitar solo can just pop in and do its thing and then politely release its resources. Ah, but a couple of things about this spec that even I, as a cynical, informed veteran of the consumer software industry, didn't pick up on immediately. First, I'm going to hazard a guess that there's some kind of signaling protocol that comes from the host that tells compliant VST3's that they are allowed to go sleepy. Only if this=TRUE may VST3 go sleepy. Otherwise we play it safe and stay "on." This would be for processing FX that have long "tails" and perhaps for troubleshooting and such. So right off the bat the host has to be able to give it the okay to sleep. Maybe some hosts will decide that it's not worth the effort and just leave the condition=FALSE so that VST3's never go offline. Second, and this is most important, notice how the pitch says "can" rather than "will" or "must." That means that it's only a feature that the plug-in may implement or not at the choices of the developer. For now, most developers are still coding their VST plug-ins in both VST2 and VST3 formats. With the exception of Waves, have any of them touted any features that are exclusive the VST3 version of their product that are or were not available in the VST2 version? That would be a good way to find out. I am pretty sure that as much as possible they are keeping a common codebase for both the VST2 and VST3 versions, and/or in some cases, using their own portable VST2-to-VST3 wrappers. All of which seems to preclude using the "processing economy" feature. If I am remembering correctly, someone asked Vojtech on the Meldaproduction forum if he were using the feature or had any plans to in the immediate future and he replied that he had experimented with it and decided not to for whatever reason. He seemed a little dismissive, but dismissiveness toward other people's technology is kind of his default mode. From what I've seen on DAW forums in general, I've yet to find anyome who noticed a difference in resource usage doing side=by-side tests of the same plug in VST2 and VST3 versions. Still. I use VST3's wherever possible, because that's the way the industry is headed and if there are problems, I want the people I get my pluggies and hosts from to know about them.

I, too, found new possibilities with the option of turning the text box off and on. I thought I would want it either on or off, but as it turns out, I leave it off when I'm zoomed out, then switch it back on when I'm zoomed in for surgical work. Now I use it as the handy tool I think it's always been for most people. The Aim Assist line has been intermittently sticking and disappearing on my system as well. This is not due to the Alt-X feature, as it predates it. I haven't reported it due to not being able to reproduce the conditions that make it happen.

That's a pretty strong statement! Given that you are bringing this up in the "Themes" subforum, is this a matter of colors and text colors and button styles for you? If so, this is the right place to look, and I'll ask: if it's a matter of theming, then there may be an existing user-created one that might be less....um, repulsive, and if you give us better clues about what's so barf-o-bits we might be able to point you in the right direction. If it's not so much a matter of colors and such, then that's more fundamental than "theming," and voicing your dissatisfaction in the "feedback" forum would be better.

@msmcleod, who participated in this thread earlier, is a member of the development team, so it's on the radar.

@Dennis G Pelton, welcome to Cakewalk and welcome to the thread. As mentioned, orchestral sounds are the most difficult, but there are some recent posts in this thread about them. B3's are another toughie. The thread's supposed to be about free instruments, but the following are inexpensive enough to almost count. ? At Pluginboutique, you can currently pick up SONIVOX' Film Score Companion Suite for $29. It includes their Strings, Woodwinds, and Brass instruments, as well as a sampled piano and orchestral percussion. I've spent $10-$15 each on licenses for the Strings, Woodwinds, and Brass as individual instruments and consider it money well spent. As for the B3, they also have AIR's DB-33 for $15. It's one of the best B3 and Leslie emulations I've found. (and if you buy something from PB right now, you get licenses for 2 of their sound banks and the player to use them-a nice add on)

As I understand it through reading various fora and my experience with plug-ins, the VST3 spec added a few features that were already being implemented by many, if not most, plug-in manufacturers within the VST 2.4 spec. These were most notably sidechaining and UI scaling. Sidechaining is not inherently "difficult" with VST2.4 or DX plug-ins. The ones that implement it have a button or checkbox in the UI to turn it on, and the hosts interface with it in their own ways, just as with VST3. Similarly, there were/are plenty of VST2 plug-ins that implemented UI scaling before VST3 was published. All VST3 does is define how everyone should implement it if they choose to do so. Another thing to be aware of: as with most industry specs, just because sidechaining and UI scaling are defined in the VST3 spec, plug-in manufacturers are not obligated to do it. Nor are hosts. AFAIK, there is no organization that enforces compliance with the specification. Anyone can publish a plug-in and say "it's a VST3." In my experience, the only advantage that the VST3 spec brought was defining the install location as C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3\ One big disadvantage is that as @marled mentioned, preset handling changed somehow. It used to be that when I installed a VST2, it could install presets to the host natively, but that seems to have been abandoned with VST3 in favor of each plug-in having its own poorly-implemented preset manager. Both plug-in and DAW manufacturers seem to be having a rocky time making the transition from VST2 to VST3. I've had several instances of crashy/buggy plug-in syndrome in different DAW's where the cure was to switch to the VST2 version. Cakewalk itself has had past issues with state-saving (now happily fixed) due to certain plug-in manufacturers being sloppy with their VST3 implementation. Unfortunately as scook says, Steinberg has deprecated the VST2 spec in favor of the VST3 spec, so going forward, we'll have the format that doesn't yet seem to work as well. I don't see any hosts except for maybe Cubase and Nuendo dropping VST2 support. It'll be a drag for Cubase users because they'll be stuck with libraries of legacy VST2's that they can't use. My current policy is to install the VST3 version if the plug-in has it, switch to the VST2 if it crashes my host(s).

To answer Music Radar's question: while it looks as if it should be of reasonable interest to people who compose and perform EDM, I do not think that this 1 euro soft synth will change the VST plug-in market forever.

Hello and welcome to Cakewalk and the Cakewalk forum. There is a variety of effects (FX for short) included with CbB, some of them quite good, some of them excellent. My guess is that you are new to the world of DAW's so I will suggest that as you start out, figure out how to use what's already there in Cakewalk. As I say, they sound good, but another benefit is that if you ask for advice on this forum, it will be easier for anyone on here to give you advice if you are using tools we all have access to. There are two EQ's supplied. One, the Sonitus Equalizer, may be added via the track or bus FX rack. The other is the Quadcurve EQ, which may be added via the ProChannel. Both are versatile parametric EQ's. There are three reverbs that come with Cakewalk. BREVERB (algorithmic reverb) may be added via FX rack or ProChannel, REMatrix Solo (convolution reverb) may be added via ProChannel, and Space (may be added as a ProChannel Style Dial). Space is the simplest, a one-knob "clockwise is more" reverb. Cakewalk comes with most of the tools one needs to mix a song (some might say all). Having said that, I augment it with a variety of plug-in FX, both free and commercial, which make it easier for me to get the sound I like. I'm putting links down below to sources for plug-ins to augment the ones that come with CbB. Here are relevant documentation pages regarding how to add effects to your projects' tracks: Included plug-ins Adding effects to a track ProChannel (humorous content ahead) Later, as you grow bored with recording and mixing music, you can start "acquiring" effects, a pastime which once you start engaging in it can help ensure that you never need play or record another note, just spend all your DAW time hunting down freebies and deals and auditioning plug-ins trying to find the "best" emulation of a hardware compressor you've never used in real life. Here is how you can get started (even for free): Favorite freeware FX thread Favorite freeware instruments thread Deals

Oh, that's cool, with its own fader? You can probably throw FX on there as well. That's nice, that Pro Tools is introducing a feature at 2020 Winter NAMM that Mixcraft introduced at 2016 Winter NAMM. It used to be that other DAW's imitated PT, but when was the last time that PT came out with a new feature that users of other DAW's coveted? I ask because I don't know, it's not a rhetorical question. I know they were busy for a couple of years implementing "not locking up at random and critical moments," which CbB also successfully did, but I'm not sure if they were strictly copying them or if it came out of user requests.

The Tungsten theme does have flatter buttons, and some of the many user-created themes also have flat buttons, but yes, the size of the various elements must be the same as the default theme. No resizing allowed. Resizable (vector) UI is a long-requested feature, so know the developers of Cakewalk know that many users would like it to be as you suggest. In the meantime, please avail yourself of the user-created themes. I usually run a user-created theme (slightly modified by me). I agree that Mercury, which is the current default theme, is starting to look a little dated. Tungsten is better. Given that the Theme Editor exists, I would like to see a more modern default look for Cakewalk, but such decisions are not mine to make.

I think it's cute when Pro Tools gets a feature that Cubase and Cakewalk and Digital Performer and Logic users have all been taking for granted for half a dozen years and their marketing department goes nuts and their smug users get further confirmation that PT is the greatest. I didn't watch the video, but I'm guessing that PT folders work the same way as Cakewalk folders? You can group tracks and mute, solo, arm? Collapse the folder to save real estate? The last one I saw that cracked me up was Clip Gain Automation. Pro Tools apparently only got the ability to automate gain within a clip in the previous revision and that was a HUGE DEAL. OMG THA CLIP GAINZ AUDDOMASHIONNZ BUY YOUR UPDATEZ NOWZERZ!! Even freaking little old Mixcraft has had all of those things for years. I would love for Cakewalk to handle folders the way that program does.

Confirmed, on my system, it's not a matter of monitor 1 or monitor 2. Behavior is that pinned plug-in UI's get covered up by any Cakewalk child window. In other words, they stay open, but will only stay visible on top of the Track View. If I float the Console, Piano Roll, Browser, Inspector, Synth Rack, Help, etc. and give them focus, they cover up plug-in UI's. That happens whether I have the Track View or child windows on monitor 1 or 2. I had a similar confusion to @Rod L. Short had because I usually have the Console max'd on monitor 2 during mixing and mastering. I thought my pinned plug-ins were closing. Now I know that they were buried. Thank you Rod for bringing this up. IMO they should stay on top when the Console View and Piano Roll have focus. Not sure about the other windows, but I don't undock the Browser, Synth Rack, etc. often enough for it to be an issue anyway.

Hey, a favorite freeware compressor of mine has gained some new features and is now Audio Damage Rough Rider 3. Try it on a drum bus you'd like to fatten up. Ohhhh yeah.

Good heavens, @User 905133, thank you so much for trying all these permutations and documenting them so well! It's going to take me some time to digest it, but rest assured that your work here is going to be very valuable. I'm acquainted with the people in the cadre that rhymes with "tater beam" and will alert them to this thread. From my standpoint, as to the way it "should" work, I think that first, whatever Cakewalk window the user has open, be it Track View, Console, Piano Roll, or whatever, minimized, maximized, docked, floating, on a single monitor or multiple monitors, if they have plug-in UI's open and pinned they should never wind up behind a Cakewalk window. Next, pinned plug-ins should stay open until the user closes them.

Funny thing is, at one point I had it working like that too, which is what I was used to before CbB. When I invoke something I like it to hang around until I explicitly banish it. Then at some point I started playing with the settings and switched video cards and the program went though half a dozen updates and things went sideways and I've never quite taken the time to figure out why it doesn't quite behave the way I want any more. I also want to be able to set things so that when I Replace Synth, the UI automatically opens, but that is a matter for a Feedback thread....