Starship Krupa

Has anyone heard from Meg White in a while? She might need a gig.

Requires Kontakt Retail 5.6 or newer.

MEqualizer is a truly excellent equalizer, and my go-to. If I had to choose only one parametric EQ that would be it. From any company, at any price. If you haven't already done it, Vojtech's Holiday Madness sales, when he puts everything on sale for 50% off, including all bundles, are a great time to register the Free Bundle. The deluxe features it enables aren't critical, but I like the plug-ins so much it's nice to have access to every little bell and whistle, and to give the developer his due. He just had a big one, of course, but I think he does another in the warmer months. Between MEqualizer (even in its unregistered form) and the Quadcurve EQ, I rarely reach for any other para EQ's. I like to use something like an EQ-81 type for what I call "character" EQ. Sweetening.

@Alan, I see no link to the project, and I'm curious about it. And yes, gotta post a gear list, as much as you can recall.

At least it loads and runs fine in Cakewalk when Cakewalk is running in Windows 10. I wish I could say that it were a reason for you to make the move from 7 to 10, but, um, not as far as I'm concerned. When quasi-parametrics give me the choice between dragging dots around on the curve display and turning knobs, I usually wind up turning the knobs and observing the effect on the curve display (if any). The AVA Mastering EQ kinda goes in the opposite direction where you sort of mousepaint the cuts and boosts you want around on the display until it sounds good. I can't get used to it. Or rather, I don't find its workflow compelling enough to draw me away from less annoying solutions I already have in place. I wonder if rather than the Ozone Elements or proximity eq category of giveaways that are given because they are most likely to interest the givees in the rest of the product line, AVA Mastering EQ is in the TrueVerb category of "this thing is so idiosyncratic to use we might as well just give a bunch of licenses away and hope it develops a following, like 7th Guest."

Oh, snap (to grid)!? Well, for me at least, Cakewalk by BandLab doesn't come with memories of constant random crashing. Maybe you're thinking of some other program? ?

Or as @CosmicDolphin and I pointed out, there is unused grey space where it could live in happiness without covering up the Ruler. I see no reason (other than of course coding issues unknowable to me) why it couldn't be relocated into that otherwise empty space. If it were, I might be able to read it. As it is now, I can't even read it because it's both tiny and hovering over other numbers and tick marks. @msmcleod, now that you are an official dev, d'you think there's any chance of this happening? We loves our Aim Assist Line, but Helpy The Number Bubble just seems to get in the way.

I know it's too late for Winter NAMM, but where are the Cakewalk by BandLab laptop stickers? Everybody has laptop stickers! We're almost two years into the grand experiment, it's working beyond our (or mine, anyway) wildest dreams, ain't it time to raise that universal hipster coffeehouse flag? My laptop has no stickers on it, but if they were available, I would slap a Cakewalk by BandLab one on there in an instant. And then go out to a coffeehouse just so I could be seen with it on my ancient Dell Inspiron. ?

Your username always reminds me of one of my favorite prog-pop songs, "10538 Overture." ? There sooooooo need to be Cakewalk by BandLab laptop stickers. C'mon now. Everybody has laptop stickers! I'm going to start a laptop stickers thread. I think it's a great idea for BandLab to offer print-on-demand bound Reference Guides. I've purchased several books in that format and the quality is indistinguishable from hardbacks and trade paperbacks from major publishing houses. Even though the deve-bakers are getting more aggressive about adding features, and @Morten Saether is rev'ing the Blessed Ref Guide to reflect them, a printed BRG would stay relevant for a good long while. Excellent! In the meantime, we can have things laser printed and comb or coil bound at the local FedEx-Kinko's or similar print shop. Laser printer toner is of course not water soluble and they will leave whatever margins are necessary for the format. Get a quote. You will likely be surprised at how reasonably priced it is. I'm fortunate enough to have my own monstrous HP LaserJet 8000 with duplexer, so I can crank out 2-sided pages at about 30ppm. Cost of paper only, then run it over to FedEx for binding if I want, or just sit there with my electric 3-hole punch while I watch The Expanse and stick it in a giant 3-ring binder found at curbside.

As for which one I "prefer" it's VST2 by default just because it's the most mature and widest-used technology. As for what kind of app I'd like to see get better integration with DAW's, that's always been audio editors such as Sound Forge, RX, Audacity, etc. Both of the DAW's I use now use the, brute force method of passing the raw audio file off to the external program and then reading it back with whatever changes have been made, with both programs unaware of each other. I'd love to see a protocol similar to ARA for handling this, that would allow for things like carrying over VST's and their settings between programs, minding zero-crossings, gaps, etc.

I've been making some variations to the SteamPunk theme. An attractive one, in my opinion was setting Alternative Text #2 to #E5C258FF. That sets the text colour of the Custom Module.

The thing is that yours is the first theme I've seen that liberates the theme from real life recording hardware or other software. Not that others don't exist, I just haven't noticed them. Approaching the task with the idea of trying to make it look like the control panel of a steam-powered airship that's only existed in fantasy novels is wonderful, great fun. A good theme, to my thinking, should help inspire creativity. I was shopping for a vest to complement my ensemble at the Charles Dickens Fair this year in San Francisco and the young lady helping me pointed out that in the Victorian era, there was no such thing as "too much." Here is a photo of my lovely assistant and me. Sometimes she tidies and I can't find anything! Yrs, unblinded by science, Airship Krupa....

Just an anecdotal data point: more than half of the plug-ins on my system are, like Cakewalk itself, freeware licensed. I watch KVR and when I see one that interests me I download it and try it, from any developer that offers them. I admit, I'm a free plug-in 'ho. I run no antivirus or antimalware software except for Windows Defender and Malwarebytes on an ad hoc basis. Defender and Malwarebytes have never flagged any of my plug-in downloads and I have never gotten a virus or trojan or any kind of malware from a plug-in, freeware or otherwise. It takes trouble, work, and skill to code malware into a software installer, and in the grand scheme of software, the market for freeware VST's is tiny. A black hat would probably choose a larger market to distribute their payload. And for a company to go to the trouble to create a marketing campaign such as this just so they could install some kind of trojan on our computers, or alternately, that they would go to all this trouble and then create an installer that accidentally contained malware, is, by my thinking, unlikely. What would be their gain? Ruining their reputation in the audio community for what? Companies don't need to install software to harvest our data any more, we give it up willingly. In my experience as an IT professional and as the son of a mother in her 80's who has a bunch of friends whose email addresses end in @aol.com, trojans and malware appear on people's systems not from downloading software (that ended somewhere around 1995) but from opening email attachments. Switching mom to GMail (which she loves) took care of that issue. All of which is certainly not to dissuade anyone from taking steps that keep them feeling safe, rather I seek to reassure that our computing world may not be as fraught with danger as the purveyors of anti-malware software may advertise. Antimalware solutions and common sense together are what work best for me. I see these warnings from time to time in this subforum. Have any of them ever turned out to be real trojans or virii or have they wound up being false positives that the antimalware companies eventually acknowledged?

Your themesmanship so captured my imagination that I had to visit the laboratory and engage in a bit of it myself. It occurred to me that the transport background might be fertile ground for pattern fill with a bronze or wood texture rather than the traditional solid or gradient, and then it also struck me: why not add some decoration to the lines that separate the various readouts? Just to prove the concept I started with these primitive dots at each intersection, but by jove, there's no reason a modified fleur de lis border or something more ornate wouldn't be possible! The raised Victorian lincrusta wallpaper is something I found on a royalty-free site, but the sky is the limit there as well. Do you realise what you've unleashed, man? I feel like Professor Sherman waking on the beach days before the eruption of Krakatoa to find himself in the midst of not a primitive jungle, but the most amazing inventions a secret diamond mine could fund! Dinner at Mr. I's tonight, for I love spaghetti!

I daresay old chap, I do rather like what you've done here! While it pains me to risk being perceived as detracting from such a worthy addition to the pantheon of Cakewalk themes, there is, however, one critique that gentlemanly honesty and honour I feel compel me to mention. One colour element jumps out at me as if it belongs to another paradigm. That of which I speak is our old friend 00FEFE (and its cousins 53CDF5 and 43CCAA). Hues that I have applied liberally to my own comparatively primitive efforts, when seeking to find something that will not fatigue the retina against a darker background. My own father, something of an amateur underwater explorer himself, used to fascinate me with his luminescent diving-watch. As a bedtime treat, he would remove it from his wrist and allow me to view the timepiece in complete darkness under the bedclothes. However, good sir, your backgrounds are anything but dark! On the contrary, they recall the burnished bronze and polished wood of ships moored at Greenwich awaiting the signal to set their chronometers and proceed down the timeless Estuary to whatever adventure may await beyond its mouth. If it were your intention to invoke the spirit of someone such as the balloonist-for-hire Lee Scoresby whom we may imagine accepting turquoise in payment from a Native American tribe, then I can understand the choice. However I suspect that such an association is a flight (ha!) of fancy on my part. Were that it were so easily changed, I know, my friend, from my own meagre and now abandoned efforts to create themes of my own. While the text in the Browser may be a simpler matter, the various buttons are images, and as such, a Photoshop of horrors. Would that my own pixel editor skills were up to the task, I would happily take it on, to create a black-on-bronze three-dimensional button set for this worthy theme. Sadly, I am but a GIMP when it comes to such things. Were it but a matter of colour replacement! O joy! For the time being I shall have to accept and enjoy your worthy theme as it is and for what it is, and I must say it had not occurred to me to go in such a direction with my colours! You do bring wider meaning to the term "theme" with this one, Sir Colin. Bravo.

I thought the same about de-reverb processing not too long ago. Once the technology is perfected, and applied to well-known virtuoso rock guitarists' work, o the humanity. It'll be like those "shreds" videos from a dozen years ago.

Hmm, I always do a thorough search, missed it this time, I guess. Hope it wasn"t a waste of bandwidth! I haven't tried it yet.

I find myself only ever using a gate to get hi hat out of the snare mic and snare out of the kick mic. When Boz Digital Labs came out with Gatey Watey, I picked it up as a freebie I think, or maybe it was $5. What it does is simple but ingenious, a well-designed gate that allows you to set a frequency cut-off for the gate. So you can have it still let through the freqs you want when the gate is "closed" and not affect the main signal you're working with. I know that other gates have sidechain functuons that also allow this, but with Gatey Watey, it"s just a slider.

Kontakt warning: all require the full version.

"Vector is a spatial image analysis tool that helps producers and engineers make more informed decisions during mixing and mastering. It helps you to detect and avoid spatial threats such as extreme anti-phase while avoiding false positives that are sometimes given by other tools." Nice looking UI.

Warning: these are Kontakt instruments that require ownership of the full version.

A wiki! That is an excellent idea. There are many who would no doubt love to contribute to such a resource. Transferring the accumulated wisdom of the OF to it would be a great way to start. I shall investigate free hosting solutions. Do you know of any? In all seriousness, @Morten Saether might welcome the input of one or more tuning hotshots like @Jim Roseberry in coming up with a list of Windows 10 hints to replace the outdated ones on that page. A concern I see is how to prevent Windows 10 from interrupting a tracking session with updates, and one of the best performance boosts I got was when I disabled realtime Defender scanning, which may be done temporarily for mixing sessions. There may be ways to exclude the Cakewalk audio directories, sample directories, and plug-in directories from realtime Defender scanning. Such tips would be good ones to replace the ones that no longer apply.

It is a little-known fact that (prior to Mr. Saether's excellent curatorship) several hundred pages of documentation were lost in The Great Boston Molasses Flood. Back then, Piano Roll View meant staring at an actual physical piano roll as it scrolled by. Cakewalk was one of the first programmes that allowed you to import gramophone recordings. Pitch Correction was their method of slowing down audio via the application of tree sap to the surface of the disk.

Indeed, Mr. P, hence my efforts to call attention to it. In this case, it would surprise me if that text had been touched in 20 years and it wouldn't surprise me if it hadn't been touched since 1997. Modems? AOL clients? Hercules cards? IRQ's? It isn't that this stuff belongs to the previous decade, it literally belongs to the previous century. There should be an admonishment somewhere in there to make sure to keep backup tapes of your data. "Someday, perhaps if the United States begins to openly trade with Communist China, we will see the cost of the large diaphragm condenser microphone fall below $1000, at which point even project studios will be able to afford one or maybe even a matched pair. What a fine day for computer recording that shall be!"

I just had an audio engine dropout and clicked on the "Help" button on the blue flag that popped up to check out the troubleshooting recommendations. The table is interesting reading, with the codes, and recommendations for tuning Cakewalk settings. Right below it, however, is a veritable treasure trove of Windows tuning advice history. And by "history," I mean in the sense of something being dead and of no further use. The very first bit of advice is that the user may wish to disable Microsoft Office FastFind, which was a fairly obscure feature that has not been included in Microsoft Office since Microsoft Office 2000. The next piece of advice is to avoid scheduling tasks that are part of the Windows Plus Package, which was an add-on originally for Windows 95, and last marketed for Windows XP in 2005. And I think I finally found the source of the superstition about network cards causing Cakewalk to glitch: Okay, let me be the first to say, if this document is where you got the idea that having your Cakewalk DAW plugged into a LAN was going to negatively affect its performance, just consider the antique information surrounding it, none of which has been updated in at least 15 years, probably way more. Maybe there was some truth to it when it was written in 1997 and the network card and the sound card could have been sharing an ISA bus, but it hasn't been true for 20 years or so, and if you're still unplugging your Cakewalk DAW because you think network activity is going to glitch the audio, it's like the computer equivalent of your grandma keeping those "not to be removed under penalty of law" tags on her sofa cushions because she was sure she heard of someone somewhere who went to jail because they tore one off and got caught. You know that your computer's CPU and bus can handle LAN activity without barely even noticing in 2019. If you don't, you should learn more about modern computer hardware. This item also explicitly warns against having the AOL client running while you are using Cakewalk. Having observed the reactions of some of the existing userbase to the announcement of the move to a freeware licensing model, I understand why special attention might be paid to the needs of AOL users. I know that some people get set in their ways, and AOL's where their email and Internet is, but really you shouldn't have your AOL running in the background while you're doing the Cakewalk. This is a good time of year to get some help from a visiting family member if you don't want to fool with it yourself. A little later we have instructions for turning off CD-ROM Auto-Notification and disabling Start Menu Startup items, both sets of instructions applying to Windows XP. Since Cakewalk is not compatible with Windows XP and has not been for quite some time now, I think this advice has outlived its usefulness to Cakewalk users. Further down the user is advised to try turning off hardware acceleration on their video card using the slider in Control Panel Display settings (another XP/98 feature). And if that doesn't do it, they can try using the generic VGA driver instead of the specific one for their graphics card. They are warned that graphics may become sluggish at the expense of smoothly functioning audio. Indeed. I can't see this as a permanent solution or workaround. Next there is special advice on what to do if you have any of the following video cards: STB Velocity 128 (rel. 1997) Hercules Dynamite 128 (rel. 1997) Matrox Millenium (rel. 1996) While I would agree that anyone attempting to use any of those cards in 2019 does need special advice, the advice that I would give them is not on this page. Immediately after this comes a set of instructions on how to solve IRQ conflicts by changing the physical slot your sound card is installed in. Playing musical card slots is something that hasn't been a thing since the ISA days, which ended about 20 years ago. Further down we get to more ancient history with advice on upgrading one's system hardware. There is detailed advice on making absolutely sure that your drives are not operating in MS-DOS Compatibility Mode, which is something that Windows 98 used to use as a fallback when it had problems communicating with hard drives. I believe Cakewalk dropped compatibility with Windows 98 even before they dropped XP, so this advice is a bit moldy. Finally, there's advice on souping up your hard drive controller by getting one of the newfangled UltraDMA IDE controllers that uses "bus mastering." This technology was supplanted by SATA in 2003. There is nothing specific about adding RAM. Perhaps the last time the information was updated, 640K was the limit. All kidding aside, a lot of the information on this page, both on the online documentation and the corresponding pages in the Reference Guide, is hopelessly outdated, by over 20 years.