Starship Krupa

Of course if you haven't, immediately download and install the Studio Instruments that come free with Cakewalk. Its the button over on the lower left in BandLab Assistant. The Strings are very nice , the Electric Piano is fine, the Bass....well, it's free. Applied Acoustics makes a product called Strum, with a cut down version called Strum Session that a lot of people like for virtual guitar. They have an amazing free sample of over 400 of their sounds called Swatches that you (and everyone) should get. I heard a rumor that if you go to their site and register, and sign up for email updates, they will send you a coupon good for one of their soundsets, and you can use that for one of the guitar ones. I'm a big fan of their products. My only problem with them is that they sound so good that I get lost in auditioning the presets.

It's not one of the big leaps that 6 to 7 and 7 to 8 were, but they weren't as far behind the rest of the market this time. The area with the biggest improvement, and it was the one where it was most needed, IMO, is the mixer/console. They even have various processing modules you can add right to the mixer strip. Parametric EQ, compressor, saturation. It makes the channel strips more professional. They should call it ChannelPro or ProStrip or something. You can also now undock various elements like the control bar. So it makes it even more Cakewalk-y, in a good way. There are a few Mixcraft features I would love to have in CbB, for sure, like marker colors, markers with full-length vertical rules, and the way they handle drag-and-drop submix/folders, The stability and efficiency of their playback engine has always impressed me, although Cakewalk's immediately sounded better to my ears than the v. 8 one. I say playback, not mixdown, which are two different operations, and Mixcraft may be sacrificing some quality in order to get that efficiency. I don't know. Bounces/mixdowns sound comparable to what I get from Cakewalk, and it's all so subjective. Maybe I was dazzled by the pretty mixer in Cakewalk. You still can't hide take lanes, so if you've got tracks with many multiple takes, vertical navigation of big projects can still turn into a scroll-fest. You can put your tracks into submixes very easily, though and hide them that way. I still prefer the tracking workflow in Mixcraft to CbB's, and simple comping is slam bang. Until the revamp of the Smart Tool, I would have said that I preferred Mixcraft over CbB for tracking and comping. Now I've grasped the wonder that is Speed Comping rather than blundering into messing up my projects with it, so I'll give the edge to Cakewalk. Workflow-wise, I think that for me, tracking in Mixcraft, then exporting raw stems to Cakewalk, then comping and mixing might be best of both worlds. The better markers in MX make it easier to get around to sections, etc. Also it comes with a handy-dandy smartphone app to run the transport. As far as the respective various sound engines, playback, bounce, summing, resampling, whatever, I haven't spent enough time with MX9 to say. Tracking in any DAW should result in raw audio with the same 1's and 0's. It's not until you start using the playback, mix, bounce, summing, resampling engines that their differences (and unless you believe that every software engineer at every different DAW company uses the exact same algorithms, implemented in the exact same ways for these operations, there must be differences) should become apparent.

Obvious ripoff. Another supposedly "free" product where I have to pay for Internet service to download their installer program to download the "free" program, and there's something about how I have to buy a whole new USB hard drive to license this "free" thing. I looked and it says I have to upgrade my system to Windows 7, so there's another pile of money I'd have to shell out for this "free" product. I look at the name of this company, "Audio Media Research," and I can tell how they're planning on making money by putting this "free program" on my hard drive. They're not even hiding it. Research=data collection, audio media=sound, so they're in the business of collecting sound. And they're enforcing it with another BS DEMO MODE torture scheme. What if I accidentally unplug my USB hard drive in the middle of tracking at an expensive high tech studio with no internet connection and it goes into DEMO MODE? DEMO MODE is an iron boot stomping on the face of a penniless musician, forever. I would rather be forced to sit through a grainy 30-second video of furries playing hopscotch every time the program starts than face the possibility of DEMO MODE. Furthermore, I demand that in the future, nobody waste my valuable time by posting "deals" that require in-app purchases, upgrading my OS beyond Vista, greater than 4G of RAM, iLok or any other USB device, ownership of any software (even CakeBlab, which I refuse to use since they decided to start giving away the program that I'd been paying honest money for), surrendering my email address, or connecting my DAW or any other computer to the internet to download or register. (kidding, I'm kidding)?

I didn't mean to imply that I endorsed or even excused the practice, only meant to share my possible explanation. I think it's lame, too. ? I have great respect for Vojtech as a programmer and algorithm designer. His system of sharing code among the plug-ins is an amazing feat of software engineering/project management. The marketing hook of the Free Bundle is pretty genius as well. Where Meldaproduction falls short is in documentation, which is a real bummer, because the stuff has so much depth it could benefit from it. But if you go to the website there is no FAQ or anything similar, no quick links to basic installation guides, not much of the usual "click here if you're new and having trouble or just need information" linkage one usually sees. He likes to describe his processors as the best, most advanced, powerful, incredibly unique like nothing you've ever seen or heard before widgets on the market, but then seems to expect the user to already know how to access this powerful uniqueness. I mean, I don't disagree, I've given him more of my money than any other vendor, but if the world has never seen the like of the thing I'm buying, I'll need some instructions. Tell me how to get started with making it do the amazing. For a lot of the plug-ins, especially the Free Bundle ones, it seems that he followed the same philosophy of reusing his work, but this time to the detriment of the product. For instance MEQualizer and MCompressor are really quite powerful, but their 60-odd pages of documentation have no table of contents or index, start out describing the generic features of preset saving and loading, then half a dozen pages down get around to giving a few terse paragraphs to describing the features of the equalizer (and compressor) features, then the rest goes on about the style system, the analyzer, mid-side mode, all the other features that they share with the rest of the plug-ins. Maybe not so much lame as frustrating. It's like I found an alien artifact that looks like it can do all kinds of neat things, but I can only get it to do 30% of them. Still worth it.

Wow, I didn't know about any of these except my beloved and much-used DrumMic'A and Fruit Shake. Going to check them out and add them to the Freeware Instruments thread. Freeware Kontakt Player content (kontent?) is rare. Soniccouture has a Rocksichord!

Doesn't it seem like in most cases (Melda an exception) the installer is an "off-the-shelf" component? Or there are maybe 3 variations? I think most development environments do come with a pre-rolled InstallShield component, and Steinberg and Avid may include code in their dev kits. My guess as to why developers spew 32-bit/AAX plug-ins around is that it's easier to have unnecessary ones installed than it is to answer support inquiries from people who chose the wrong options and now can't see their plug-ins in whatever host they're using. And it's amazing how often those people will go straight to some forum and declare that "I bought plug-in XXX and installed it and it didn't work" leading to other people who read their posts drawing the conclusion that plug-in XXX is "incompatible" or "has problems" with that host. And so the legend is perpetuated that the host/plug-in has "compatibility issues." I've seen posts from people who come here and say that they've read on the forum about people having trouble getting CbB to recognize their SPlum plugs and saying that they're scared to make the upgrade lest CbB "break" their SPlum installation. When the solution is a 30-second trip to Preferences to add a folder name to their VST search path! We forum regulars are pretty savvy compared to users out there who treat the software as a black box and leave all their Preferences on the defaults and would never dream of editing a config file or a Drum Map. We had a guy the other day wanting help getting SONAR LE working on his system. I told him he was in for a real treat. Give a user options and they will abuse them (former tech support tech here). Do most users even know whether they need to install the AAX versions of their plug-ins? What if they don't install them, then decide to try Pro Tools First? Probably easier to just put the AAX's in there for them just in case. (BTW, for those who know how to set Windows Environment Variables, a type-saving trick is to make one called VST_PATH that is set to your VST2 directory. Smart installers and DAW's will then default to that location.)

Plug-in compatibility is weird. SONiVOX are known for tech non-support and sub-zero code, and their Orchestral Companion series have an issue where in some DAW's, when you have the instrument playing back in a looping fashion, after the first iteration of the loop, all notes will sound truncated. So you'll be mixing a song with a nice legato string or woodwind or brass part, and of course have the project looping, and after it comes back around your string section turns staccato. In some hosts. I went to the "support" forum at SONiVOX and saw that FL Studio users were reporting the same issue, and a couple of other DAW's as well. It was pretty clearly a bug in the Orchestral Companions that was never going to be addressed by SONiVOX. It worked fine in Mixcraft until one maintenance update. I raised the alarm and entered a bug report. Their devs uncharacteristically pointed the finger, threw up their hands and deferred it, because their libraries were compliant with the VSTi spec and of course every other VSTi on the planet worked correctly. Two maintenance updates later it mysteriously fixed itself when they opened the same section of the code where they had "broken" it earlier. Which goes to show, a host can be perfectly compliant yet expose a bug in a plug-in that other hosts do not. Were FL Studio and Mixcraft at fault because loop playback of Orchestral Companions "worked just fine in REAPER?" Of course not. I mean, if your instrument doesn't loop correctly in FL Studio, get in the game. All the DAW devs can do is try to open communications with the plug-in devs, not possible in some cases, like SONiVOX. They can try to "code around it," or in the case of crashiness build in quarantining measures to allow plug-ins to crash without bringing down the host. The problem with the latter is that processing added between plug-in and sound engine inevitably slows things down, which nobody wants. Cakewalk has a form of this where it can scan plug-ins in a "sandbox" to prevent crashing. But only to prevent crashes during scanning.

Ah, now this is a tidbit for those who have been wondering about the LP plug-ins and whether/when BandLab will make them available. And for that matter, other cool things written with Cakewalk, Inc. code now owned by BL like Rapture. Oh how I'd love to get my hands on the Pro version of that, having managed to wrangle a Home Studio license. Some of them may be due for a bit of tidying up in the years that have passed since the demise of Cakewalk, Inc. Yes, years, plural. 2017. Libraries updated, compatibility with newer releases of Windows and drivers ensured, all that.

Do you have another VST3 host you can load it into just for the purpose of adjusting the setting? Cantabile or a REAPER or Mixcraft trial? Tracktion? Sound Forge? Also, he just dropped v14, so who knows, give that a shot, too. I don't remember what nVidia card you have, but is swapping a newer AMD/ATi into your system a possibility? My ATi 5770, which works a treat in my Dell with both CbB and Mixcraft, turned Mixcraft 7 64-bit into a crashy slug when I had it installed in my Gateway Core 2 Quad system. I swapped my cards around and back and forth and now the 5770 is in the Dell and my nVidia is in the Gateway and there is peace in the valley. But sometimes the combination of adapter and BIOS and motherboard and who knows what else just conspire to mess things up.

Meldaproduction plug-ins also have a way to change how their GUI's interact with the video driver, but theirs is accessible via a GUI in any Meldaproductions plug-in's Settings. You don't have to manually edit a configuration file as you seem to need to do with the Cakewalk LP's. Just open the GUI on MAutoPitch and click on Settings. Over on the left, under GUI and Style, you'll see a control for GPU Acceleration. The choices are "Enabled," "Disabled," and "Compatibility Mode." Try "Disabled" and see if anything changes. I don't see where anyone has mentioned it in this thread, but using the 64-bit Double Precision Engine has stifled at least one plug-in of mine, so if you haven't tried turning that off, give it a shot.

I wish I could recall the links to the posts and articles, but if you trust my credibility at all as a 58-year-old musician/business owner who spent most of the '90's in the software industry, in everything from startups to Adobe, I'll tell you that the situation with plug-in specifications and compatibility is probably not what you imagine. Even (especially) with the latest, VST3, if anyone thinks that Steinberg and other industry players (or even plug-in vendors) sat down and worked out the details of how VST's and DAW's should work together, then wrote out a spec, went over it checking for omissions and errors, and finally published it, then as errors and inconsistencies were uncovered by other companies and plug-in vendors, Steinberg was alerted and those changes were incorporated into revisions of the spec, then I must now inform you that the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny were actually just your parents leaving you money and candy. It probably went more like: Scene: Offices of Steinberg, 3 Months before Musikmesse 1996 Sales: "I think we can sell more copies of our new pluggy-inny Cubase if we let other people make plug-ins for it too." Marketing: "Great idea! The new version with the plug-ins! Let's let everyone make plug-ins for it! We'll be legends, it'll be the new MIDI!" Management: "Hey, people who chose coding and not technical writing as their career, give us the specification for the plug-ins so that other people can write them." Engineering: "That's insane, we can barely make our own that don't crash the host, and we don't have it all written down in one place, it's in the form of comments in the code!" Marketing: "Ha, ha, you geeks have a great sense of humor. The spec must be ready for our presentation at Musikmesse. We're calling it VST for 'Virtual Studio Technology.' And don't worry, the outside vendors' plug-ins will all be certified by our QA process." Engineering: "You're insane, Musikmesse is in 3 months and furthermore our QA staff can barely handle testing our own products with the resources they have." Management: "Just have that spec ready for the presentation at Musikmesse. Even if you have to write it on a cocktail napkin and hand it to them, it will be ready." A couple of years pass.... Scene: offices of an unidentified other DAW company Other company's marketing: "Cubase got such a huge head start on us with that VST thing that it's become the friggin' standard, we have to make our host support VST's because people have these huge libraries of them. And plug-in houses don't want to code for DX." Other company's management: "Hey, engineering, this is the VST spec from Steinberg, we will be showing off how our product can host every VST ever coded by anyone at Winter NAMM this year." Other company's engineering: "This is a series of German swear words written on the back of a cocktail napkin from Steinberg's Musikmesse booth a couple of years ago and Winter NAMM is in 2 months." OCMgmt.: "Ha ha, you geeks have a great sense of humor. It's the full VST spec. Steinberg says so." OCEng.: "Steinberg has no incentive for our host to be able to run VST's. It's the opposite. There's nothing in this about crash protection, memory management, preset management, default UI, installation location, sidechaining, UI scaling, they barely tell you how to get audio in and out. People will blame us when the things fail to load and/or bring our host down. We're at the mercy of Steinberg and the plug-in developers. It'll be a testing and support nightmare forever." OCMgmt.: "This is the VST spec. We'll be showing off how we can host every VST on the market. I have faith in you." (I made up the foregoing drama based on reading KVR and Wikipedia and my own experiences as a QA engineer testing a photo editor that was advertised as being "compatible with Photoshop plug-ins." There is a financial incentive for the company who creates the spec to make it difficult for their competitors to use it. Cakewalk and DP and Samplitude and FLStudio and Mixcraft get reps for being "buggy" and having compatibility problems, bingo, less competition for Cubase. Poor Mixcraft couldn't run a VST3 without crashing to save its life until the most recent version, 9, and Mixcraft is a stable program. Sampletank 3 never has been able to run for more than about 10 minutes without crashing in either CbB or MX. I'll bet it works a treat in Cubase.) From reports, it didn't get any better with VST3. Maybe they added plugin-based sidechaining to the German swear words. From all I can gather, VST3 is the "New Coke" of plug-in formats, for those of you old enough to remember that marketing debacle/accidental success. As for some plug-in vendors being dix, well, some of them are virtually one-person operations, and being good at coding does not necessarily, or even greater than 50% of the time, in my experience, go hand-in-hand with being good at dealing with other people. They're not all as personable as Noel! I am a one-person operation myself, and one of the reasons for that is I don't want other people telling me how to do things I feel passionate about. If you're even an average coder, you can make a fortune working for any number of companies and not have to hassle with the things you have to deal with as a business owner, and have retirement and health benefits as well. So why have your own company? Many engineers are, as they say these days "on the spectrum," and one of the things that goes along with that is difficulty in reading and conveying emotions. Being on the spectrum is often an advantage when it comes to the main work of coding, but a disadvantage when it comes to things like hashing things out with engineers at other companies. They can read to neurotypical people as rude and abrupt. They want to focus on the important thing (which would probably be the signal processing algorithm) and get annoyed by "peripheral" things like host compatibility. Larger companies can hire people to act as a buffer between the coding talent and the rest of the world. I've had that role at a couple of companies. I felt like the "Jive Lady" in Airplane! "Stewardess, I speak geek." One-person operations don't have that luxury, so it's the world talking directly to the programming genius. In the end, what works for ensuring compatibility is if the plug-in vendors feel it is worth their resources to help ensure it. Whenever possible, on forms or questionnaires, I let the vendors know I use Cakewalk. I put it in my sig on recording forums so people can see. I use Cakewalk and I buy plug-in licenses!

I dunno about Audio Assault's amp sims specifically, but if you're in the mood to try amp sims, I recently tried Blue Cat's Free Amp and was pleasantly surprised. I haven't tried to get a djent tone with it, but one of the models is a "Modern Drive" that I think is supposed to be "rectifier-esque." Might be fun to play with. Certainly worth the money.

I would recommend against it. As @scook has already stated, VST3's have a default location, and installers are usually hard-coded to put them there. They shouldn't go anywhere but in C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3. I don't know if plug-in manufacturers hard code their stuff to expect the .VST3 file to be there, but anything's possible, and you are having a whole world of trouble. For VST2's, the problem with putting them in a folder under C:\Program Files is Permissions. On my system, I am in the Adminstrators Group, so it doesn't much matter, I can override most folder security settings if I don't already have Write and Delete permission. However, if one is but a lowly User, by default, one only has Read & Execute permission to the Program Files folder and subfolders, at least on my system. This can lead to trouble if a plug-in tries to save parameters or presets using the user's permissions. So that I may manage my VST2's more easily, I install them to a top-level folder, C:\VST64, which I have Full Control permissions on. You might try shifting your problem plug-ins around like this and see if anything changes. Can't make it any worse. Be sure, of course, to inform Cakewalk of the new location of the VST2's.

Yikes! Unbelievable. This issue has been a friggin' bugbear for the users and developers, and they were convinced they had nailed it in all its manifestations. I'm disappointed that Sturgis is being a *****. His collaboration with Boz, Sidewidener, is my favorite stereoizer. Well, I trust that the devs have been alerted to its rearing its ugly head once again. Maybe they can open communication channels with JST. I know for sure that they are motivated to squash this one. Is there no workaround like creating Cakewalk presets? I can't remember if that worked with the other plug-ins. I suspect not.

I started using this DAW from the first BandLab version, and in my opinion, which is an opinion and based on the experience of this one single user, I thought it was pretty bad. The core version was supposed to have been the next release of SONAR Pro/Plat. It kept crashing and freezing and my Now Time marker would go off on its own journeys, leaving the main UI behind. There was no user manual, only online help, so it was hard to get a handle on this huge venerable beast. By happenstance I had an account at the old forum, which was populated with shell-shocked veterans of the Gibson deathwatch and who, yes, tended to cop a heavy attitude. I remember being scared that they would chase new users away, but for over 6 months, no new users could join the forum anyway. I had a bit of fun trolling geezers who were convinced that the new owners were going to plant malware in the program to steal information from everyone's hard drives, because otherwise how could they make money by giving away a program that used to cost $300 to buy?? We still get the tinfoil hat people from time to time but not as much. I can't resist, I'm like a kitten with a ball of yarn when one pops up. ? But I kept an eye on it and by the second release, about 60 days later, it took a big jump in stability, started to load faster, started to load projects more quickly. That's when I sat up and started to take BandLab's experiment in reanimating SONAR with a free subscription license seriously. I used to work in the commercial software industry and that was one quick turnaround. Bad reputation is a hard thing to change, but whatever, it is what it is. If people want to believe that Cakewalk is still as fragile as it was 2 years ago, all I can do is say that it's definitely not on the 3 computers I use it on and maybe you'll think I'm one of those people who is pushing back against the criticism or whatever. That is my experience. The point in telling someone that some procedure or plug-in or other works on my Cakewalk system isn't to somehow "defend" a program that I use to record music with or a corporation whose owners and employees I've never met and who still won't make it so I can turn off that stupid number box at the top of the Aim Assist line. The point (when I say it, anyway) is to give someone who is having trouble a little more info to work with. It may not seem helpful, but knowing that it's not broken on all systems helps with troubleshooting. Then we can ask what's different between your system and mine. Sound driver? Video driver? Anything? Well this sounds pretty awful, and when I was reading it my eyes automatically jumped over to see how many posts you have made on here, because you seem well-spoken and all and I was surprised I didn't recognize your handle/avatar. Only 16? Have you brought these plug-in issues up on the public forum? I'd encourage you to do so immediately if you haven't. I've witnessed multiple examples of the developers addressing plug-in issues that were being batted about in the public forum. The squeakier wheels do tend to get the grease, and at the least, people need to know if other people are having problems getting their favorite plug-ins to work with Cakewalk. You don't want to start a big project and then find out that you can't use your favorite pitch corrector on the vocal. It's also helpful to share these fixes you found with the rest of the forum. I'm specifically interested in whatever trouble you're having with MAutopitch, because I have more invested in Meldaproduction plug-ins than any other brand, including a license for MAutopitch, so I can try whatever it is you're trying. I just tried inserting it on an audio track, so it at least loads okay. I'm going to get silly here and point out that Cakewalk doesn't care. Cakewalk, Inc. no longer exists, and Cakewalk the program is not sentient. ? As for saying "okay, bye" when someone throws a temper tantrum and threatens to take their Behringer C1 and go home, I'm okay with that. The program is freeware. What is someone trying to leverage with when they say that? Watch it or you'll decrease your installed user base by one? There was one guy, Scott, who posted a video on YouTube, and he was frustrated and angry with Cakewalk, and justifiably so, he had been working with Cakewalk, Inc. for a long time on some longstanding bugs and had been producing a series of YouTube tutorial videos using Cakewalk and said bugs had shown up again and fatally interfered with the workflow on the projects he was trying to demonstrate in the videos. So he got on there and posted a video about his frustrations and said that he could no longer recommend the program to new users nor could he stand to use it himself, that the bugs had been outstanding for too long, etc. Fair enough. Someone posted a link to it here, controversy ensued, and yes, there were the predictable Cakewalk apologists. But the devs responded and put a ton of work into fixing his main complaint, which did go back a long time and involved getting in touch with Steinberg and digging into arcane areas of the VST3 spec and all sorts of things. It was a bear to iron out, but they did it. The guy's statement (not threat) he was going to bail had leverage, though. He had a YouTube channel with followers, he posted a video, and he was telling the truth, he had actually submitted the issues to Cakewalk, Inc. years earlier, back in the Gibson days. It wasn't just some dude coming on like everyone should quake at the idea that he wouldn't be using Cakewalk any more because now it makes you go online every 6 months to validate and his internet only works for 3 weeks after Christmas when his grandson comes over and fiddles with it then the cleaning lady does something and messes it up again. Yes, it's good business for BandLab to listen to its users. Yes, it's good business for people who use Cakewalk to be happy with Cakewalk. Does it cost BandLab anything when someone downloads Cakewalk, checks it out, and decides they don't like it? Does it cost BandLab anything more when someone who "used SONAR since 8.3, paid for every single upgrade all the way through X3 and then bought the Lifetime Subscription" decides to start using Cubase instead? I hope we see more of you around here. Go on over to Instruments and Effects and post about what's going on with MAutoPitch if you haven't yet. I want to know what's up with that.

Not that DAW software you don't. ? You're in for a real treat once you get your V-Studio working. (By that I mean a pretty girl will cough and then someone will give you a handful of aspirin)

Themesmanship can be a tricky business. You can literally fix one thing and create 3 problems because when you adjust one single color, for instance, it may adjust the color in 4 locations, and those locations may not seem to have much to do with each other. I recently saw someone asking about which color to change for a text label, and it turned out to be the same color as for some slider controls in the Track View. The tool was supposed to be in-house only originally, so there's some roughness around its edges. Wonderful thing to have, I must say, and my candidate for Cakewalk's most underrated feature.

Heavens, the OP did say "please." I don't begrudge anyone posting a deal in whatever form they wish, but it would be nice if folks could mention that the "Free Hammond B3" in the topic was soundware for or otherwise required ownership of a proprietary platform, be it Kontakt, Sampletank, Ableton, PreSonus or otherwise. For me it's not the time, trouble or effort to click and read about it, it's getting stoked when I read it and then disappointed when I find out that it's Studio One owners only or whatever. But that's my issue, and as I said, I begrudge nobody, and I post deals the way I choose and so should everyone else as long as the information is factual.

You're not the only one. I love the Aim Assist Line, but I really, really, would like to be able to toggle that box off. It's sort of a tradeoff for me. If I use Aim Assist, I lose the ability to see the ruler numbers, but if I turn it off, I lose its functionality, which is great. Usually I leave it on. The box would be fine if it just didn't cover up the ruler numbers....

Good question, actually! And although I'm not an employee of BandLab, I'm an enthusiastic user of their products and platforms, and not only Cakewalk. I think I can shine some light on how it all fits together. Technically, BandLab Assistant doesn't have a "demo mode," but I understand what you mean. BA is a lot more than simply a way for users to download, install, and register Cakewalk, although you might get the idea that's all it does from reading this forum. After all, this forum is for discussing Cakewalk. But if you take 5 minutes to navigate around BA, you'll notice that the Cakewalk-specific parts of it are just a fraction of its functionality. Yes, it downloads and installs CbB, and keeps it registered, and it also allows you to download and install the Cakewalk add-ons like the Theme Editor and Studio-Instruments. But right up above that, you'll see a panel that says "BandLab," with a button to click on the BandLab website. It serves as a gateway to the BandLab website. Not that a smart user needs that, but it may serve to direct a curious user there. That's the advert, I suppose. Next, if you click on the Sounds tab, you'll see that it takes you to a screen where you have access to thousands of free loops for download. The final tab is the most important one, as it takes you to a screen that provides an interface to upload sound files to your Bandlab account, and another to go directly to the BandLab browser-based DAW. Down below those is a list of your BandLab projects which you may manage from BA. I've already used my BandLab account to share audio files. It's great, no limit on the storage, supposedly. Under the hood in BandLab Assistant are various mechanisms that allow Cakewalk to upload and download audio files/stems/tracks from your BandLab account. This functionality will surely be expanded in the future. Importantly, BA also allows BandLab to know how many of the downloaded copies of Cakewalk are actually installed, unlike other freeware licensing models which would not provide this information. Those are just some of the things that BandLab Assistant does for the user and for BandLab. If you can't figure out how they might at least someday make money from any of that, you're probably still expecting them to go broke because they're giving Cakewalk away for free.? CbB goes into a mode where it won't save projects if it either A. hasn't had its subscription renewed over the internet in the last 6 months or B. hasn't been installed properly using BA on an internet connected system. Why it does this I can only speculate, but numero uno guess is that BandLab Assistant does all of the above stuff and they want people to at least look at it once. As for the 6 month validation, I suspect that they just want to know if people are using it, much like TapeOp wants to know that copies of their magazine are still being read, so I have to re-up every year. BandLab are always improving the thing, and they probably want people to go online and see that there's a new version available with new collaborative features that they may choose to install or not. An important thing is that Cakewalk is one of BandLab's 4 DAW's, the one that is still least connected to the online service. BA is the connector. Easier ways to get projects back and forth between them are doubtlessly on the horizon. A Cakewalk that could be separated from BandLab Assistant would go against those plans. I hope this helps. P.S. As Elon Musk's recent experiences with steel spheres and "unbreakable" windows reminded us, before any important gig, take your equipment on a dry run beforehand. Don't wait until you show up at the studio to run your DAW only to discover that it uses a free subscription license that must be renewed at least once every 6 months. I also defer my updates on critical path systems, but as we see, in these times, leaving your computer unplugged from the internet is not a "safety measure." P.P.S. I agree that the process by which BandLab Assistant updates itself seems to happen too often and also fail too often, making the user go to the hassle of downloading it from the website. It's broken. They're trying to fix it. I hope. When it's working smoothly, I'm fine with it in principle. I do understand there are people who want/need to keep their systems mostly offline and I have had long conversations with them about working out strategies for that.

How do we tell what version of Cakewalk Theme Editor we have, and/or update it accordingly? I'm going to presume that at some point the program will be updated. I don't know what the "current" version is, or if I am running it. How do I find out?

Indeed. And if you're inclined to clean up after it like I am make sure that you get the 32-bit VST3's that are in Program Files (x86)\Common Files\VST3 folder. I regularly make a tour of my Program Files\Common Files\Avid and Program Files (x86)\Common Files\VST3 folders to make sure nothing I have no need for is taking up space on my SSD. It's amusing to see the places that some of these plug-in companies put their stuff in addition to the places that I specify. Waves is the weirdest, those Wave shell dll's wind up all over the place, but I'd have to say that A|A|S is right behind them. It seems like if a folder even has the string "vst" somewhere in its name, A|A|S will plop copies of their .dll's in it just in case. And when I started using Cakewalk, the A|A|S installer decided it had found an old friend, probably because of the old SPlum bundling agreements, and started spewing .dll's across the Cakewalk folder system.

Whoo, this thread needs a bump, but I don't have any new freebies at the moment (although I will in the next few days). A couple of 2019 Black Friday freeware alerts: Make sure to go to Waves and sign up for their annual Black Friday freebie. Whatever it is, it's usually worth the cost of an email address. And remember, email addresses are free. Good idea to have one that you use for offers like this and not for more sensitive things like banking and whatnot. Next isn't exactly a freebie (and please don't raise any debates about why Vojtech calls his MFreeFXBundle "free" when it's possible to pay to upgrade it), but Meldaproduction has a 50% off everything sale, which includes the registration/upgrade license for the FreeFXBundle. If you've tried it and use the plug-ins regularly, $28 to access the advanced features is worthwhile. It's a bundle of 34 plug-ins, and he adds to the bundle from time to time, and all additions come under the "lifetime" license. Of course we Cakewalkers know about lifetime licenses: be happy with the software as it is when you buy your "lifetime" license.

For those who only have the Free Bundle, dropping the $28 to register/upgrade the 34 plug-ins is a worthwhile investment. While they are just fine unregistered, the features that are unlocked are handy. Resizable GUI, access to the multiparameters, sonograms, etc.

I see great possibilities in the use of tailored workspaces and they might even take off like user-created themes have. I'd be into checking out workspaces created by other users. Things like "Podcast," "Audiobook," "External MIDI Control," "Loops and MIDI," "Loop Construction," "Live Audio Recording," "Studio Session," all kinds of specialized clean workspaces. Once the project is started, of course the user can switch to a more comprehensive workspace if they want to work with types of tracks or other features that are hidden from the workspace that they started with. That's the cool part, you're not restricted to the features included with your original workspace.