Starship Krupa

Thank you. I stand corrected. I wonder if this will change with 9.

I think with most of their suites they're getting to the point where even down to the Elements versions you'll be able to use the individual plug-ins. Neutron Elements 3 is like that, every Ozone 8 above Elements is, and so is RX Elements. I agree with you on the quality of the processing, and their UI's are my favorite in the business. It's scary how much smarts iZotope is putting into their stuff. A lot of their plug-ins can communicate with each other across tracks if you want them to. I got the freebie Visual Mixer part of Neutron 3 and I love it for mixing backing vocals, might try it on guitars as well.

Au contraire mon frere! The Ozone Elements Mastering Assistant is perfect for project "Never Quite Finished" because it takes the decisions out of your hands and it makes whatever the state of the rough mix sound at least acceptable when you want to show your friends/family/significant other what you've been working on! It's the lipstick on my eternally fetal pigs. Seriously, I do find the MA quite useful for "A&R" mixes where I want a rough to sound good fast. Been having fun for a few hours doing some tracking with friends, have the basics down, I can shoo everyone out for a smoke/drink/whatever break for 15 minutes, balance everything, throw Ozone on the master bus and let the Assistant do its thing, a couple more minutes for tweaking the maximizer and spatializer and it "sounds like we've been in a recording studio." Especially if I've been engineering/playing the whole time and my ears might not be in top shape, turning it over to the Mastering Assistant will probably come out better in the short term just to give everyone something to listen to. I don't want to watch that video because if they're giving away Elements 8 for free they must be pretty confident we're all going to want to shell out for 9 anyway.

Note to those who don't own one of the following: Compatible with Studio One Artist and Professional (Versions 3.5.6 and higher) Also Compatible with StudioLive Series III Console and Rack Mixers

Sorry, should have read "your Background.bmp inspired me to experiment with floating the program browser so that I can see all the different available instruments." ? I could have sworn I tried it with the original UI. Oh well, thanks for getting me to bumble my way into it.

I doubt that any of the bundled plug-ins have changed since Sonar became Cakewalk by BandLab. They seem to be quite bug-free and work really well.

These look just great, and for whatever reason, your Background.bmp is allowing me to float the program browser so that I can see all the different available instruments, which is a really handy thing that I can't do with the stock one. I love everything about the look of the Drum Kit, but adjusting the knobs and sliders in the mixer is taking some getting used to. Not so much that I'd consider going back to the stock graphics mind you. I sometimes have trouble finding the hot spot for the volume controls for some reason. Great work. This will make me more likely to reach for these.

If only you could go back and undo all the use you've gotten out of Ozone Elements 8 since you paid for the license....

Great VO work is a joy to listen to, isn't it? I don't know how old you are, but when I was a kid, Rod Serling, the great TV writer and producer of Twilight Zone fame, had a second career in the late '60's and early '70's as the narrator for the US broadcasts of The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, among other shows, and at least one silly fun speculative movie called Chariots of the Gods? that was based on the "ancient astronauts" theory. Undersea World was a documentary program featuring the great diver and environmentalist and his crew traveling around the world having diving adventures. The TV show was made in France and syndicated worldwide, with only the narration changing. Serling had a wonderful deep voice and precise enunciation that gave a sense of gravitas to whatever was happening on screen, even if it was just some guy taking his fins off. "Louis-Claude removes his diving fins and places them in the bottom of the skiff." And it glued you to the (14" black and white) screen, because it sounded so heavy, like the fate of the world's oceans depended on this dude and his flippers getting back to the boat okay.

As far as DAW optimization, mostly what Robert has already said. Think about stuff that you would want to access quickly or store cheaply, and place your files accordingly. For me, that's programs, projects, plug-ins, and samples on SSD, everything else. like downloads, documentation, installation files, personal entertainment libraries, etc. on spinny. A thing that I'm adamant about is disabling anti-virus/malware programs that perform realtime scanning of whatever files your DAW reads and writes in the course of its operation. While using Windows Process Monitor, I observed that my malware protection program was scanning every file that Cakewalk was reading from the disk, including plug-ins, audio files, sample libraries, themes, and configuration files. I decided that I did not need nor especially want my CPU power to be used to give breathalyzer tests to audio files and VST plug-ins, nor did I wish the accessing of these files to be slowed down while the analysis took place, especially since nobody had asked me whether I wanted the program to do that, and resolved to put an end to such nonsense. Sometimes you can do this by excluding certain folders, like your sample folders, project folders, audio data folders, plug-in folders, DAW program folders, etc. I chose to do it by turning off realtime scanning entirely in my computer's malware program, which is Windows Defender. Defender now only runs its scans on files that are sitting on my drives, and it does it during times when my system is idle. This made a noticeable difference in playback latency in projects with many tracks/takes. Since Cakewalk reads every audio file associated with every clip in a project regardless of track or clip muting status, this can result in a lot of file reading overhead in cases where one wishes to retain many alternate takes in a project (the way to alleviate this effect is by moving the clips to a different track which you may then Archive).

Thank you, Robert, for giving greater detail regarding the "disable Wi-Fi" advice (and thank you, @John for mentioning that you leave your WiFi adaptor enabled and observe no negative impact on your audio performance as a result). Yes, the network adapter is sometimes the culprit when one is experiencing latency issues. But disabling it with the expectation that it will cause latency issues is, in my opinion, unnecessary and inconvenient. How can I hunt down freeware plug-ins with no network connection? What would be the point of even having a DAW if I couldn't install plug-ins that I will rarely if ever use? I was about to ask you to explain in greater detail, exactly why one should automatically disable their WiFi, what makes a WiFi adaptor different from other hardware devices that it should be deemed guilty before proven innocent. Did Broadcom or Intel release a crappy driver a few years back? I ran Latency Mon on my Optiplex right after I installed Windows 10 and was getting these huge spikes from NDIS.SYS. Turns out the ethernet (hardwire, not wi-fi) adapter driver that Microsoft was shipping was causing it, so I tracked down the earlier Dell version. But that's a case of a device's driver gone bad, not an entire class of driver (or brand of computer or OS, you see what I'm getting at) that I think people should shun. I might say "run Latency Mon to see if some hardware driver might cause trouble, network drivers in particular have been known to be sketchy in the past." There's another thread in which I gave my lengthy opinion about DAW security worries in general. I used to work as a server engineer for a security company and I never encountered anyone convinced that they needed air gap (that is, total disconnection) protection from the Internet until I started hanging out on DAW forums. It's baffling and a bit amusing to me, like encountering a community of computer Amish. Literally every company I can think of that produces DAW software (just about any software period) does so with the assumption that the computer it runs on is going to have an Internet connection, and there are entire genres called "Laptop Techno" and "Laptop Indie," yet I see people who would seemingly leave the keys in their unlocked car downtown before they would leave their DAW computer connected to the Internet (to avoid malware attacks), and other people who automatically suggest that for best performance you should turn off your WiFi. Me, I think if we just use common sense computer security practices like having a malware solution installed, don't visit sketchy websites, don't open executable email attachments, and most importantly back up our data and be able to reinstall our important software, we will be fine and nobody can steal the 3/4 finished Jobriath tribute album we started back in 2006.

They have better and faster zoom and crop and waveform manipulation tools for zeroing right in on those spaces and bumps and cutting or smoothing them out. It's what they're built for, just as Cakewalk is built for multitrack recording, composition, and editing of music. Their waveform displays are usually more detailed so you can spot problems visually without the need to keep listening over and over. Sound Forge Pro can do multiple tracks, and some use it for songs, but I don't think I'd like it. It's hard to describe until you pull up one of your spoken word files and work in each of them to see what their strengths are. Cakewalk will shine on moving around large sections, working with effects, the initial recording, the "big picture." The wave editor will shine at working on cleaning up the little noises and tightening up the gaps. You'll develop a rhythm of "spot a glitch in the waveform, zoom in, select it, audition it, correct it, on to the next one." This can be done in Cakewalk as well. There are plug-ins like RX that are really good at automated cleaning up of mouth noises.

Great news! But c'mon, Marco, tell us what the solution was so we can help the next geezer with 24-year-old projects. ?

This is my preferred lossy distribution format if I must go lossy. I've already set up the Nero AAC Encoder for export. I notice that I can drag and drop .M4A files into CbB, which implies that at least some of the CODEC is present, but it doesn't show up as an option in the Export dialog. It would be nice if it did.

I've been looking at a Logitech wireless keyboard with built-in touchpad as an interim solution. But....no more gadgets, please! For now I use a Korg nanoKONTROL2 on a long cable with @msmcleod's control surface software. I don't like having another cable to get all tangly, and Mark suggests wireless USB as a possibility, but another gadget just to get in and out of Record and Play modes? The tethered nanoKONTROL will do for now. I wanna use my phone or $50 Android tablet. Leave it to Avid to come out with something that only runs on iPads. ?

My friend Jim is a pro VO artist and teacher and makes good use of iZotope RX in his work. I scored a license for RX Elements at deep discount and believe that it would be an excellent tool for spoken word recording, either using the individual plug-ins within Cakewalk or the standalone editor itself. As far as differences in setup and all that, when I was doing narration for a friend's technical book, I found that it was in some ways more difficult than singing, because I wanted to maintain a consistent speaking "voice" throughout the project. A song vocal take is minutes at longest, but a book reading is much longer, even if it's just phrases. Different discipline. Plosives, lip clicks, stuff like that come through way more obviously because there's not this whole rock (or whatever) band covering them up. It's "naked," like having your vocal solo'd all the time with minimal FX. These are some things that worked for me: Use your pop screen and any old LDC, and get close to the mic for an intimate sound. This will sound good on earbuds. Maintain a consistent distance (having the tone drift doesn't sound good). Sit in a comfortable chair with the text you are reading displayed at an angle that allows you to read it while holding your neck and throat at a good angle for the voice work. Have a bottle of water close at hand! Be prepared to at first detest the sound of your speaking voice, then fall in love with it. ? As others have alluded to, trying to do it all entirely in Cakewalk would, IMO, be possible but needlessly difficult. I would do it in a hybrid way: Track in Cakewalk making use of the multiple tracks, sound effects (fun in a book project!), punch-ins, etc. available in a DAW Comp in Cakewalk using CbB's fabbo Take Lanes, Speed Comping, etc. Export the result in lossless format of your choice, WAV or FLAC Open the file in an audio editor such as Audacity, Wavosaur, iZotope RX, Sound Forge Audio Studio, any number of free or reasonably-priced and excellent audio editors. My favorite happens to be Sound Forge AS, which you can get for about $25 for v. 12 on Amazon. Edit out your breath intakes, long pauses, lip clicks, page turns, mobile phone notifications, whatever Import the result back to Cakewalk for final mastering/sweetening or if it supports VST's you can stay in your audio editor

As long as each person has their own user account it's fine.

Short answer: no, it is not now, nor has it ever been necessary to unplug your computer from the Internet for DAW use. At least not if you are following the most basic guidelines for avoiding malware infection and data loss on the system. Longer answer: I am a former IT security professional and I promise you, I never saw such a cautious (nervous) bunch until I started reading DAW forums! It's pretty unusual for the workstation of a rocket scientist or biochemist to be behind an airgap, heck, for their servers to be behind airgaps ("airgap" means the system is physically disconnected from access to the Internet). It's actually harmful for systems to be offline and allow their software to become out of date, fall behind in patches, etc. Who is spreading this terror? Has any recording magazine such as Tape Op run an article or something suggesting that this was "best practice," or was it just "some guy(s) on an Internet forum?" A bunch of people said so therefore it became "true?" Think about this. Have you experienced or even read or heard a verifiable story of a hobby, semi-pro, or pro recording studio experiencing loss or theft of data due to a "malicious attack" on a DAW system that happened because the computer was connected to the Internet? I'm asking because I haven't. Maybe you have. The largest and most tragic loss of data I'm aware of was at a facility that was storing it in analog form, the fire at Universal. What data do you keep on your DAW computer that a data thief would think worth stealing? How would a thief become aware that it was there (I know, BandLab Assistant?)? Of course you know not to blindly run email attachments and browse sketchy porn sites and the like on your DAW computer. Do you have a robust anti-malware scanner installed that you can run every so often? Is your system behind a router/firewall? Does your system have Windows built-in firewall enabled (the answer is yes for the majority of computers connected to the Internet). Do you make backups of your project/audio/data files on separate media? How about installation files/media for your software? Software keys? If you are a pro or semi-pro, have you spent an hour or two outlining how you would get your DAW system back up and running if a large hairy man came into your studio with a sledgehammer and smashed your computer to bits? And if he did that 5 minutes from now, how many minutes/hours/days' work would be gone forever due to backup intervals? These last two questions are the most important of all (especially if your studio is in the American Pacific Northwest, where large hairy men run rampant). Do you know that even Windows 10 Home allows you to schedule updates so that they only happen outside certain hours of the day? And that you can set it so that even during that time, if it detects that you are working and it has an update, it will defer the update? This is how I have my system set up. I have had situations where LatencyMon detected that my ethernet driver was causing latency issues, and disabling the card would have ended the troubles. Instead, what I did was a bit of sleuthing and wound up rolling the driver back a revision and the problem went away. The issue was not that I was running with the network enabled, it was that I had a malfunctioning driver. This might be how the "you should always turn off wi-fi when you're doing DAW work" thing started. You don't need an airgap for DAW use, never did as long as you take the basic steps to ensure your computer doesn't get malware on it. It's not even a good idea, as your plug-ins and other software will start to get behind on patch level, then the next time you do connect the system to the Internet, you'll sit for an hour while all this stuff downloads and installs. As far as network activity being a source of dropouts, it shouldn't as long as your network adaptor is properly configured. It's just another bit of hardware. One thing that I found that was causing undue overhead was Windows 10's built-in malware program's default setting of scanning every file as it's read from the disk. I used Group Policy Editor to disable realtime scanning and only do scheduled scans.

It seems dependent on whether you have a license for Sonar>Artist.

When I was running on my i5 notebook with 4G of RAM, I used Process Lasso to kill any unnecessary programs. Just start it before I start Cakewalk or whatever other resource-sensitive program.

That's cool you're still a faithful user. Waves is a weird plug-in system. Every once in a while I go checking around my drives to see if any plug-ins are putting files anywhere I don't expect and Waves has their stuff all over the place, and they install every different flavor even though I only want Windows 64 VST2 and 3. Every so often with version 9 upon starting Mixcraft, Waves would ask me over and over for the location of its files. The SONAR Platinum licensees have been treated fairly to say the least, IMO. Even though the company has not existed for almost 2 years, the Cakewalk zombie licensing server is still running, still able to download and authenticate old Cakewalk software as well as it was when Cakewalk Inc. existed, and I think that's pretty amazing. Needing to run an ethernet cable to your DAW every 6 months to let it canoodle with the home server is standard stuff for a subscription license, which is what Cakewalk by BandLab's is. With any other subscription license (Adobe, Avid, etc.) your computer would somehow need to check in with the home office every so often for validation, same deal with BandLab. It's like that free subscription to Tape Op, the only price I pay is they get my address, and to keep it coming I have to confirm yearly that I'm still here and still want the magazine.

The expected behavior for me would be that it would just do what it says: if your FX are on, it will turn them off when you hit Record. When you stop recording, your system will be returned to whatever state it was in before you hit Record. If you had already switched global FX off, that would be the same.

Oh I like this idea. It would be a good thing to have under Preferences/Record. Having FX switch back on when in Play would also eliminate that moment of "my mix sounds like poo" before I remember that of course it does, I turned off all the FX in order to track. ?

A nice stylized "V" would do the trick.

I have yet to try any of these FX, but there's one GLARING problem I have with the UI. You have something to be proud of there, they should have your logo on 'em.