Starship Krupa

filo, that's a great deal. Anyone who picks up Xpand!2 for that price (or even the $14.99 price) will be amazed at the sheer number and quality of sounds. I think the list is 2500 or so and don't know if I've made it all the way through auditioning them. Now that would be a nice thing for synth plug-in manufacturers to supply, a file that contains short auditions of each factory preset so that we don't have to go through the process of increment/noodle/increment/noodle to find our favorite sounds.

If you're going to start learning a bitmap editor, I would suggest at least downloading and installing GIMP and going through the first couple of tutorials to see if you can get a handle on it. If you can't, so be it, something simpler like MSPaint or Paint 3D come with Windows and will get this job done. GIMP can do so much that it's worth learning your way around it if you want to dabble in Cakewalk's Theme Editor once you get a taste for customization. If it ain't for you, uninstall it, it costs nothing. If all you want to do is scale an image down to 96x96 and save it as a PNG or BMP, IrfanView will do that handily and easily.

Haven't tried it yet, but I reeeeaaalllly like the logo.

Solid gold advice. When confronted with hugely varying signal levels coming from multiple virtual instruments, rather than wasting your time trying to get them in the same range, fire them all up with whatever's coming out, whether they're almost pegging your meters or barely audible, and use your ear and your creativity to make that mix happen. All that other speculation about gain staging and whatever, it's just superfluous. Who cares? It's all digital. Same with compressors and limiters. Even if you've never used them before and have no idea how they're supposed to work, or even what the function of any of the knobs is, just use your ear. Keep adjusting the controls until it sounds like you want it to. Then you're done. You think I'm kidding? Darn straight I am.

And this means what?

I knew it referred to note names, it's just that my note names are all the good ol twelve tone rather than Bass, Side Stick, Snare, etc. and I have no idea how one would get those to display. Much as I would love to try it. It's probably something obvious like editing a plain text file that associates MIDI note numbers with whatever friendly drum names I want to use and then invoking a command to apply that definition file to the track on which I wish to display the drum names.

Um, no wonder I missed it, I still have little idea what you're talking about; I'll have to dig into the Reference Guide. I presume I will be editing a text file to make MIDI notes correspond to drum note names that Cakewalk will then display in the Piano Roll View. Somewhere along the way I will apply this file to my MIDI track. You said "old method," is there a new one? Thanks to anyone who wants to help a brother out and give me a hint as to where in the Ref. Guide this process is outlined....

What do you mean by this? I'm not seeing anything different in drum maps.

I use the Korg nanoKONTROL2 on a long USB cable method that @msmcleod uses. Works a treat, and you can bring the nanKONTROL2 back to your desk and use it for mixing as well.

When we first add an Instrument Track, the plug-in's UI opens if we have that checked in the dialog. I always have that checked in the dialog because there are never any situations where I want to add an instrument and then not choose a patch or whatever. However, when we Replace Synth, the UI stays closed, which in my case at least, means that every time I have to go through the extra step of opening the UI. So it would be very handy to have the instrument's UI open when I Replace Synth as well as when I create an Instrument Track.

Oops!

When we first add an Instrument Track, the plug-in's UI opens if we have that checked in the dialog. I always have that checked in the dialog because there are never any situations where I want to add an instrument and then not choose a patch or whatever. However, when we Replace Synth, the UI stays closed, which in my case at least, means that every time I have to go through the extra step of opening the UI. So it would be very handy to have the instrument's UI open when I Replace Synth as well as when I create an Instrument Track.

Okay, I see. So it would just automatically omit the last lane/clip if it were incomplete by a certain percentage of the track (or punch-in region). And if you later decided you wanted to recover the few seconds of brilliance, you could just drag out the right edge of your last clip and it would be there. Sure, that seems like a convenient little feature, saving a bit of tidying up at the end of each solo tracking session. As a solo recordist, count me in. ?

First, as you probably know, do your tracking in Comp Mode with Create New Lane and Group All Clips selected, so you wind up with your multi-mic'd takes grouped together for editing. Then as you are listening to the playback, once you get the hang of it, Cakewalk's Comping tool is a really easy way to audition your different takes, because all you have to do to instantly solo a take and mute all the others is click in the lower half of a clip with the Comping tool. The tool takes care of all the muting and unmuting for you. So you can pop open the lanes on just your snare track, for instance, and let the song play, maybe in loop playback if you want, while you click on whichever take you want to check out. Cakewalk will switch to that take without you having to do anything else in the other tracks as long as your clips are grouped properly from the tracking step. Then when editing and comping, you should be able to do your work on one track while having it take effect across all the tracks due to having your clips grouped. Of course, check to make sure that this is happening as you expect it to as you go along.

You mean an option to automatically delete all lanes that don't contain full-length takes? It's probably not something I would use, because sometimes partial takes can contain segments that would be useful for comping. I'd hate to lose a take that was good until where I trainwrecked on the outro and stopped recording. I could punch in a new outro. It's not a big chore to go down the lanes and click the "x" to delete the ones I don't want.

My favorite is ADHD Leveling Tool. One caution: I've had trouble with it when I selected "64-bit double precision engine" on the Audio Driver Settings page. How have things been "changed around" that you can no longer use the VC64?

I've changed the colors for my Meldaproduction plug-ins, especially since the v13 UI overhaul. He changed the default colors to some barf-o-bits stuff. People complained about it on the forum to not much avail. It can be an issue when something is the product of a single visionary. He had an idea for how he wanted the new colors to look and it made sense to him. Fortunately he gives the user plenty of choice in color configuration. Mine are now mostly translucent darker blues and greens with dark yellow-orange scales and grids. It looks subdued and pretty sharp if I do say so. Heaven knows, once you get past the ones in the Free Bundle, I would not recommend them to everybody across the board. I do believe that you should find the UI of what you're working with attractive. Just like with a good-looking guitar, it should inspire you to grab it and use it. I love iZotope's stuff for this reason. It just looks so cool it makes me want to fire it up and do things with it. Same with Newfangled Audio. Meldaproduction was an acquired taste.

Whoa, that is a strong reaction. Plain I can get, unexciting, maybe homely, but nauseating? ?

This is most brilliant. Will it include names from drum map definitions?

This is something that I, too would like to be able to do but have not yet even tried. Maybe @msmcleod can share some wisdom?

My favorite is AIR Technology's DB-33, which Pluginboutique currently has on sale for $14. Among its charms is that it lets you use the Leslie emulation as a standalone VST effect.

The return of the JB Broadcast Processor, now in 64-bit form! And it's still free! I've long been a fan of ToneBoosters plug-ins. A nice handful of them came bundled with Mixcraft, the DAW I honed my DAW skills on, and I'm also a fan of the work of Jeroen Breebart, one of the founders, who released several freeware plug-ins prior to starting ToneBoosters. Some of them became TB products in altered form. One of my favorite plug-ins when I was first learning how to mix and master was his JB Broadcast Processor, a combined multiband compressor/spatializer/brickwall limiter/width limiter. Sort of a free iZotope Ozone. I didn't know anything except that when I put that thing on my master bus and called up one of the 4 presets (smooth, normal, loud, high pressure), my mixes would go from sounding "pretty good for having been at this for just a few months" to "dang, dude!" I had no idea what the thing was actually doing, I had never even seen a multiband compressor before, and since the manual kind of assumes you know about setting up compressors and limiters, it's heavier on the psychoacoustic aspects. I got it to sound even better once I figured out how to set compressor and limiter thresholds and actually started doing my own presets. ? Jeroen has a list of patents to his name and presented papers at the AES Convention on psychoacoustics. Excerpt from the manual: Regarding the detector in the compressor: "JB Broadcast features a 'psycho-acoustic relevance' mode. Instead of using a peak or rms- level estimation, this mode employes a perceptual loudness model to compute the loudness of the input signal. This perceptual loudness model is combined with advanced attack and release stages that model peripheral adaptation of the human auditory nerve." Enough! How do I get it? Go to ToneBoosters' site and download their plug-in installer, which is one of those things that allows you to subsequently pick and choose which of their products you want to install/demo. When you run the installer, choose the Free plug-ins. It can be easy to miss, they don't mention on the site "hey FREE plug-ins!" But they are there. You'll also get their EZ Q equalizer and Mid-Side Transformer for free. Now, issue 1: The installer, oddly enough, installs the .dll's to C:\\Program Files\Common Files\VST2, which I am 90% sure is not where you keep your plug-ins. Solution: move the folder with the ToneBoosters .dll's in it to the folder where you do keep your plug-ins. Issue 2: it doesn't come with the manual. Solution: go to the JB Broadcast Processor page at VST4Free and download the ZIP for the old 32-bit one and it will have the manual, which you will want. The UI is kinda small, and although he changed the color scheme to white on brown instead of white on light blue, it's still kinda squinty. Now all I need is for de la mancha to build One Sixty-Five in 64-bit and that will be it for 32-bit plug-ins that I miss.

I don't know that the originals had much in the way of velocity sensitivity either! ? Both of these plug-ins are fantastic emulations, and the Vox Continental one is a staple for me. The graphics are beautiful, all the controls, I can see why Arturia hired the programmer. I think he started Martinic back up again. I keep seeing a listing on KVR for something called a Kee Bass that's an emulation of the bass-only keyboards from the '60's like Ray Manzarek used in the Doors, but when I follow the link, it just takes me to the company's main page. (btw, there is a companion thread for freeware instruments that would love some resuscitation)

The sale blurb says that this started July 3rd, but I don't remember it, and anyway, it's worth a bump. Strings, Woodwinds, Brass, they're all great deals at this price. Pluginboutque, and of course, they always throw in a giveaway license, which this month is for a master analysis program.

Since arranger's workhorse Xpand!2 seems to be on permanent sale for $14 and I already had it when I came to Cakewalk land, TTS-1 has never been a big deal for me. I let it pleasantly surprise me from time to time. Some of the rock and combo organs are pretty hip if you drill into the submenus, and the harpsichord is respectable, if I'm remembering correctly. I used to be way into GM files, about 20 years ago, and I bet TTS-1 is a great player for those. We used to think of GM files as "tablature for keyboard players" because we could figure out pop and rock arrangements and put them up for all to use like guitarists were and still do with tab. Now of course we have YouTube for music instruction and three cheers for that!