Starship Krupa

Also top shelf in sound quality. Years ago, Mixcraft came with a custom 2-soundpack DAW-locked version of Journeys and Entangled Species. It was without a doubt the best sounding virtual instrument I'd ever heard, and this was before they remastered their soundpacks for the v. 3 versions of the synths. Over the years, the number of freebie and Humble Bundle soundpacks I've picked up is in the dozens, and I finally pulled the trigger on Chromaphone and Ultra Analog themselves. Their way of doing business appeals to me as much as the sound quality of their instruments. Even their lone effect plug-in, Objeq Delay, is amazing. Underrated, I think. I got it as a PB BOGO and it's way better than whatever my qualifying purchase was. My only quibble is that their patches tend to have more reverb baked in than I would like, and if you're running them in A|A|S Player, there's no way to dry them out. I also get that if I want to be able to change it, then I can (and did) buy the full synths.

I see that the first link I posted is now selling them for $4.34. $.66 less than it costs to cross a toll bridge here in the SF Bay Area.

The ones I've seen are just reskinned versions of ASIO4All. When I want what ASIO4ALL does (which is when using Ableton Live on my laptop without the PreSonus), I use ASIO2WASAPI. This Humble Bundle is excellent news! My greatest fear about the MAGIX insolvency was that it meant the end of my biennial HB upgrades to Vegas Pro Edit and Sound Forge. Since my version of Vegas is the one just before they added VST3 support, I've had to maintain a separate VSTVegas folder for the audio plug-ins I want to use with Vegas.

Many Cakewalk users have bound the "~" key to Deselect All. It's handy because it's one of the few unassigned keystrokes that doesn't require a modifier. Figuring out why Cakewalk's DAW's have me wearing a shiny spot on my tilde key is on my to do list. There's something about the way it releases (or doesn't release) selected items that isn't such an issue in other DAW's I've used. Not that I think it would ever change, I just want to understand it. This is the very issue that led many of us to request this feature. I like to work with a measure or two at the start of my projects, and I also sometimes "park" things past the end of the song. I'm having a hard time parsing this. When you say "bounce the Master bus to a Master Bounce track," how do you bounce a bus to a track? Since I want to use a bus fader to control my monitor volume without having it affect exporting, I route my Master bus to a dedicated Export bus that has no effects and has its fader always set to zero. I hide it, because it's never going to be touched. Then I route my Export bus to a Volume bus that lets me easily adjust my monitor volume without it affecting anything else. I also keep Mastering the Mix LEVELS or MeldaProduction MLoudnessAnalyzer on the volume bus pre fader. Then at export time, I just export from my Export bus and that's it. My reason for doing all this is that when I first started using Cakewalk, I ran into trouble with exporting because I didn't understand that "entire mix" came off of the hardware outs. I thought it came from the Master bus. I was adjusting volume with the hardware outs and my exports were coming out at low levels. My interface also has a dedicated output for headphones, so I was getting the output from that as well. It was all a big mess, so I stopped using "Entire Mix" and figured out the above routing. There may be a simpler way to accomplish it, but I know that if I take my export from my Export bus, I will be getting what I'm hearing without it being affected by something downstream.

Sure. Makes sense, and I agree with you. Regarding native ASIO and arm4 support, there is nothing to see there for bleeding edge performance. I'm intrigued by the USB thing, though. I was really surprised and disappointed) when PreSonus stopped making Thunderbolt interfaces. Mostly, I'm happy to see Microsoft putting effort into making Windows work better for audio production. I think this is the first big news I've heard since WASAPI, and WASAPI was some time ago.

As you know well, Pwal o'mine, ASIO4ALL will infect your mind, curve your spine, and keep the country from winning the war (as George Carlin used to put it about the Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television).

Well, given that nobody else can either, that's not a stretch. It used to be that I never wanted to be stuck with any important driver that was supplied by Microsoft, but they have gotten WAY better during the Windows 10 era. Working more closely with hardware manufacturers to incorporate their drivers in Windows updates, etc. It wouldn't surprise me if we get a situation similar to what we now have with video drivers. The Microsoft ones will work reasonably well (and reliably), but to squeeze the last bits of performance out of a device, we'll still be downloading them from the manufacturers. nVidia (and AMD, I think) offer me two different drivers for my video card, I can install the "game ready" driver if I want the most performance for gaming. Perhaps we'll have "studio optimized" audio drivers. Then the forum people will still be able to have fun telling people that they should download the manufacturer's ASIO driver rather than just using the generic Microsoft one.😄 And hey, don't knock finally having a reliable driver for those Realtek CODECS. There are times and places where it's not desirable or practical to lug an external audio interface around just to mix or even perform. I watched a video of Four Tet, an artist whose work I admire, do a show in New York, and he plugged his battered Dell notebook into the mixer via its headphone jack. I would not do that, but some would and do.

Did you read the article? Pete lays out very clearly why they are doing it. The two biggies are first, that as we all know well if we've been trying to help people on the forum, not everyone is as savvy and squared away as we are about downloading ASIO drivers. Take the example of someone completely new to computer recording. People have been working for many years with USB devices that just work when they plug them into their computer. So what is going to alert the brand new user that they should download and install this other custom driver? Paper manual? Good luck getting anyone to read one these days. And anyone who's inclined to say "well, that's the price of admission, we all have to pay our dues," well, nope. What computer peripheral these days, other than an audio interface, requires jumping through all of those hoops to get working optimally? ASIO can't perform as well as Core Audio if ASIO never gets installed. What was it that Byron Dickens used to say around here whenever someone was having trouble getting their audio to work? Something to the effect that 99% of those issues would be solved if the person would just use an interface with a good ASIO driver. I didn't and don't entirely agree with him on that, but he's not the only one who believes it. Second, and this is also huge, Microsoft want to make system audio compatible with ASIO, as in, system sounds will still get through, and according to the article, this isn't practical if they're at the mercy of the interface manufacturers' driver. My system is a multi-use computer. I watch movies on it (and often wish to take dialog samples from them), listen to music recreationally, etc. I'm picky enough about audio that I want to use my Focusrite interface to play this stuff back. I tolerate a certain amount of the interface getting confused about sample rates when I start up the DAW while Apple TV is running, because I know the rain dance it takes to get it to settle down, and I know that Windows is at the mercy of Focusrite's driver. If they do their own ASIO driver, they can give that driver the ability to communicate to the OS and tell it not to switch the interface's sample rate, to prioritize traffic from certain programs, etc. As it is now, people who use ASIO do it under the assumption that ASIO will take control of all audio, and anything other than one program at a time using the driver is far from guaranteed. I've seen people struggle plenty with driver issues, and "YouTube doesn't work when I have the DAW running." I also know that for every person who takes the trouble to ask about it on an internet forum, there are probably at least 5 who gave up on it. And that's not good for pro audio on Windows. Also, unlike Apple's Core Audio, ASIO as it is now can't aggregate devices, and that's a disadvantage. He mentioned that they're going to see if they can get device aggregation to work, too. As for laptop users being able to use ASIO drivers, well, they can as long as the CPU in their laptop is an amd64 CPU. Correct me if I got the wrong impression, but I gathered from the article that it's currently uncommon for interface manufacturers to supply an arm64 ASIO driver. BTW, is nobody intrigued by the other part of the news, Windows' USB getting optimized for audio? I think that is GREAT news. The reason I still use Firewire is that I've never taken to the idea of using an asynchronous bus that was designed to connect printers, keyboards, and mice. I know that it's time tested and zillions of happy users rely on their USB 2.0 audio interfaces (I even have a small one for portable use), but I don't think Jim's main interface is USB either. Quantum Thunderbolt, if memory serves? A recompile followed by a LOT of testing.

From known Cakewalker Pete Brown of Microsoft: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/windows-music-dev/making-music-on-windows/ I was most interested to see that the initial testing will be on the arm64 platform. Probably because they knew it would need a longer lead time, but there seems to be a push there to get DAW's working well in Windows 11 on arm64. I count at least 2 interface manufacturers and 3 DAW's that are releasing native arm64 builds. Most interesting. I had only thought of arm64 processors as something aimed at mobile device use, for lower heat and power consumption. Looks like it's going to be making inroads at least for laptop producers. Yoiks, I don't know of any plug-in manufacturers who supply native arm64 versions of their DLL's. Here's hoping for their sake that it's just a recompile.

While the Humble Bundle includes a license for Miroslav Philharmonik 2 CE, SampleTank 4 MAX v2 includes a license for the full version of Miroslav Philharmonik 2. And the top tier of the bundle includes ST4 MAX v2. It's confusing, but I think it goes back to the previous Humble Bundle, where they added ST4 MAX to the top tier. ST4 MAX v2 includes everything in the bundle in their full most recent versions, so in effect the top tier is ST4 MAX v2. All of the other licenses would be duplicates. If you check the ST4 MAX page at IKMultimedia, you will see: https://www.ikmultimedia.com/products/st4/?pkey=sampletank-4-max-v2 It also includes Orchestral Percussion and Cinematic Percussion, if you're into that sort of thing.

I have happily run CbB and Sonar side by side with zero issues since Sonar came out. Even my custom plug-in presets persisted from CbB to Sonar, so they must store them in the same location (registry?). If you are going to uninstall CbB (which I don't recommend you do), I would get those plug-ins to a different location before doing so. I don't know whether the CbB uninstaller also deletes all of its program subfolders. Some programs do, some don't, CbB probably doesn't, but be safe. Going forward, it's a better practice to create a dedicated folder for your VST2 plug-ins that is not part of any program's subfolders. So if it's not too much hassle, create a C:\VST2 (or whatever/wherever) folder and install them there. Otherwise, you could make a copy of your current VST2 plug-ins with a different name, then after the uninstall, if CbB did delete its subfolders, you can rename the folder as it was before. You will of course need to open Preferences in Sonar and tell it where to find those plug-ins. Also, it's a good idea to only install the VST3 version of a plug-in if the option is available. DAW's (not just CbB and Sonar) can get confused if they scan both. They are supposed to be able to handle it, but for instance if you have both installed, somehow use the VST2 version and later decide that you want to tidy things up and go all VST3, the DAW may not be able to recognize that the VST3 version is the same and it will not load automatically with its settings intact with older projects. I've been stung by this, so even when plug-ins don't give me the choice to opt out of the VST2 version, I delete the VST2 version manually (along with the Pro Tools version). Quarantining would work too, but I've never had any issues with just deleting them. No issues there, many settings like sample rate are per project. If you have custom workspaces, those are a little more difficult to migrate, but I believe it is possible. Good idea to check Preferences after the Sonar install and make sure. All that said, I suggest just keeping CbB installed, at least for a month or so, if not longer. It takes up little disk space on its own, and since you have multiple concerns, it will give you more peace of mind. The rest of your points were addressed in the first two replies, and by a Cakewalk developer, so I won't repeat the answers.

It's an encore of the Humble Bundle that was offered earlier this year. The important price points are $29 for SampleTank 4 MAX v2 and $1 for SampleTank 4. ST4 MAX includes SampleTron 2, Syntronik 2, Miroslav Philharmonik 2 and much much more. I've gone on at length about the value of ST4MAX before, so if you somehow missed that and are interested in what I have to say about it (very positive at this price), search for my earlier comments.

I'm not sure I understand this request. Can you elaborate? This is what I do to have my favorite FX and instruments close at hand. It's just another Category. It's named "A-List" because the "A" followed by a dash puts it at the top of the Category list:

I of course have Quadravox because they've given licenses away so many times it's almost impossible not to have a couple. When I first got it I was stoked, but it hasn't made it into any projects. So I'm curious: what is the "one feature" that you think would make it really useful?

Not everyone always does. I certainly don't. Some people never work things out in their head before starting to get it down. I usually compose my music on the fly, section by section, move sections around, etc. That's why using a DAW is so awesome. To me, it can be like playing in a sandbox. My last (and so far only) single came out of auditioning patches on a synth plug-in. I wasn't even trying to come up with a song in the first place. Sri's request is a good one. Selective muting, repeating or skipping of Arranger sections sounds to me like a great idea that if it were possible to implement, would make the Arranger Track even more useful. "Combinatorial proliferation" in this scenario....I think he means (correct me if I'm wrong) that you'd risk creating too many permutations of your arrangement if you have to duplicate the arrangement when you want to try something slightly different. I get it, my ADHD brain doesn't like project clutter. Getting a quick answer to the question "what would happen if I play the next section twice instead of only once?" without having to duplicate the entire section and create another arrangement, would be pretty slick indeed. Or, in the specific case of his request, "what would happen if I skipped that section the first time?" Some DAW's have a feature called the "scratch pad" for checking out alternate ideas without cluttering the main project. I don't know how they work, but this sounds like it would be in the same spirit of that. I also appreciate Mark's hints for how to accomplish similar things within the confines of the existing feature.

'cause if they are, something is broken. And if they are not, that is a draaaaag. I do a certain amount of transcribing live drum parts to MIDI, and for this I have the original audio file in a track, with a MIDI drum track that I'm dropping notes into to match what's being played on the audio track. This happens section by section, so I will get a couple of measures programmed, then move my playback loop points over by a couple of measures, program the beats for the next section, and so on. However, when I reposition a loop point while the transport is running, the MIDI and audio go out of sync, and they don't get back in sync until I stop and restart the transport. Even if I sit back and let it cycle through the loop a time or two, the MIDI and audio playback stay out of sync with each other. In order to get them back in sync, I must stop and restart the transport. This is a pain in the neck and slows my roll. If this behavior isn't an anomaly confined to my computers, I request that if possible, Sonar can either not go out of sync in the first place, or at least "right itself" on the next cycle after a new loop point is set.

You ain't seen nothin' yet. By this time you've probably found out that David missed by a hair when he said that Base Octave for Pitches setting was in Preferences/Editing. I think we can forgive him. It's actually set in Preferences/Customization/Display. Because of course it is! I doubt that whoever put it there was trying to make it the last place in Preferences a naive user would look for it, but if they were trying, they couldn't have done much better. When trying to track down why you can't get octaves to line up correctly in a DAW, is the first thing that comes to mind "better check the display preferences and make sure it's all ship shape?" Someone apparently thought so. Not so long ago, I proposed a feature that would place an audition button in each clip's header. I got the usual chorus of "why don't you just...." replies, including one from a very veteran user who had this process for auditioning clips that required at least 5 clicks. He wasn't aware that you can click on a clip and hit Alt+Spacebar. I wanted the buttons (one for Mute as well) because I don't like features that are keystroke-only. As long as REAPER and Tracktion remain on the market, Cakewalk Sonar will never be the least intuitive DAW on the market. I like to think that I can still imagine I'm a new user and trying to figure it out without being able to refer to the forum or documentation existed. There is a lot of learning with any DAW, but I think it should be made as easy as practical. We do what we can do. When the Cakewalk Reference Guide was first published, after there had been no such manual the first years of CbB's release, I got busy and over the next months submitted several pages of corrections and suggestions. I submit bug reports, make suggestions here on the forum, try to help on the forum. Most things that someone wants to do can be figured out with the help of Google. As long as BandLab lets Cakewalk keep the forums online it should be okay. As for my own special troubles with the Drum Pane, it seems like if something is going to go wrong with it, I'll be the one it goes wrong for. But who knows, since so few seem to even use the feature? 🙄

Hmm. I wonder why I'm not getting the virtual instrument itself coming in with the track template....

As Wookiee suggested, tell us what you want to be able to drag and drop. With Sonar, you never know, there may already be some way to get there.

The reason that I read for the MIDI octave numbering is much worse. Having pulled off the miracle of cooperation that was the MIDI standard, Yamaha immediately set about introducing incompatibilities. Roland synths had started at zero, but then Yamaha made the hugely popular DX7 respond to the 2 octaves up thing. Greg probably had a Roland synth and/or thought that it made more sense the Roland way, as do I. This causes so many problems. The two most powerful tools I have for making glitch and scratch effects are MRythmizer and Stutter Edit 2, and both of them are set up to respond to the Yamaha standard. So I have to use a MIDI transposer plug-in in order to be able to trigger them from a controller in real time.

My latest dance with the Drum Grid in the pale moonlight was learning that unlike with other virtual instrument tracks, if I create a track template with a drum map applied, it doesn't save the drum map or the virtual instrument. All I get is an instrument track with no instrument on it, routed to an empty drum map. And before anyone says "yes, of course, because you need to add the drum map first," yeah I figured that out. But sheesh, track templates are one of the best possible tools for sorting this out. If the track template could load the instrument and the drum map, that would be huge. So at this point, from what I can figure out, if I have a beat that I want to program before I forget it, the only way to jump into that without going through half a dozen steps that may or may not work depending on whether I do them in the right order is to load up a project template. Seems simple, but in cases where I don't start a project with that template, we're back to the buzzkill. And since I don't always use Addictive Drum Stew as my drum instrument, I can't just use that template all the time. There are such simple things that could make this way easier, it doesn't have to be a full on overhaul at first. Maybe not simple from the devs' standpoint, but not huge changes in the UX.

Yeah. That's why I usually embed a request not to do that when I post these rants. But at the end of the day, they're just trying to help ease a user's frustration. In a way, it builds a case for the Drum Pane really needing some attention, because it's this huge, and IMO, important, feature and it's so unfriendly to set up that most people have given up on it. Obviously, initially a LOT of work went into that UI. And there's a lot to like about it as opposed to similar views in other DAW's. The velocity tails, the way that you can drag the individual kit piece names around, those are the things that keep me coming back to it. The Drum Grid itself is great, it's setting it up that is its own circle of hell. So the fact that even multi-decade veterans have abandoned it speaks volumes. Heh, I know that, I was being ironic. I mean, making beats and drum programming in general is its own industry these days. I was thinking more of EDM when I typed that, I hadn't even thought of black metal, death metal, etc. I'll namedrop here, I used to play bass in a band with Jef "Wrest" Whitehead. AKA Leviathan. Freaking amazing drummer, he and I locked in way tight.

That's an odd one for sure. All I can offer at this point are general troubleshooting suggestions that you may already have tried, but no harm in going over them. A suggestion: when you're having issues like these, it's always a good idea to post the specs of the system you're running it on. In your case, the make and model of your laptop, amount of memory and HD, whether you're using its internal sound or an external audio interface. Is the battery in good shape, are you using it plugged in or on battery, and what sort of power plan(s) are you using? I ask because I just last night replaced the battery on my Dell Latitude. On every laptop I've ever done audio work with, their power plans are usually set up to throttle the processor when it's on battery, so I've turned that off and gone with a high performance plan for both cases. With laptops, as highly integrated as they are, it's always a good idea to check the manufacturer's website to make sure you have the latest drivers installed (especially, in your case, the video driver).

Heh, it chafes me that music with beats is called "ambient," but unfortunately, Aphex Twin had to go and call his album Selected Ambient Works over 30 years ago. With that guy, it seems possible that he meant it as a goof, but whatever, the toothpaste is out of the tube. The record was innovative and influential, and probably so among many people who were not already familiar with existing ambient music. So when asked to describe what they were trying to do, people who dug Aphex Twin probably said, "ambient, like Aphex Twin ambient" and the press ran with it. This is just my guess. For all I know, Richard D. James was uncharacteristically earnest and thought that all of the stuff was ambient music. I somehow doubt it, though. At the time, I had already been listening to Brian Eno for 10 years, and to me, Discreet Music was "ambient." In my mind, Eno coined the term, or at least brought it to light, and it specifically meant music that can be appreciated at the edge of attentiveness. But preferably, also reward close listening, with the occasional "what's that?" moments mixed in. To me, it's almost as if Throbbing Gristle's 20 Jazz Funk Greats had resulted in some strains of industrial noise subsequently coming under the banner of "jazz funk." But it is what it is. At least with the term "producer," it's become a term for someone who produces music, as in creates it rather than guides someone else in creating it. But whatever, when the day is done, I want to make music that I would want to listen to, influenced by artists and styles I like. It's only when I'm called upon to hang a term on it that it becomes an issue. I call what I'm currently doing "electronica" because it's electronic, but a friend of mine who owns a record label listened to my first single in this vein and called it "90's ambient." Whatever. We soldier on under our own banners. Mine's Superabbit music. And to me, it sounds like me.

That they surely do, thanks to the usage data that CbB and NuSonar collect. How many have left, how many new users have come in due to Sonar's inclusion in their BandLab membership, how many have left and would return in case of perpetual or hybrid, we can only guess. My suspicion is that if/when any changes are made, they will be around the time of quarterly reviews of the data. Who's using Sonar, who's using Next, who's still on CbB, how much clickthrough is CbB generating since the orange toast notification was installed.... There is a vast silent majority of Cakewalk users who have never posted a word in public regarding their use of it. Maybe too busy, um, using it to make audio recordings? Stranger things have been known to occur. It's the only program I use other than The Elder Scrolls Online where I give any thought to a "community" of people who might be using it. The MMORPG was subscription-only when it launched 10 years ago, then they started offering a perpetual license, one of which I got for free and have since been off and on with their subscription, which allows the user access to more content and some useful in-game quality of life features. Not my video editing software, nor my photo editing software, web browser, paint software, messaging software, mobile phone. No idea about any "politics" with any of them. Only the DAW and the MMORPG. Not sure what to make of that. They are the two programs I overwhelmingly spend the most time with.