Starship Krupa

I seem to recall that when the Piano Roll View first got note names on the MIDI notes, a couple of people mentioning that it was cool that one could also get drum names to show up on the MIDI notes. I didn't get around to asking them how to accomplish this at the time, but I do so now. Is it possible to get individual drum instrument names to show up on the MIDI notes in the PRV? If so, how do I do it?

I don't mean having it as a plug-in. It can still behave like an offline "process," just one that doesn't mess with my audio file. Other DAW's do it that way. The same way that volume automation, edits, phase invert, EQ and most other processing is handled: the audio file sits unaltered on the disk and the DAW applies the processing during playback/mixdown.

Non-destructive normalize is surely at the top of my feature request list. The fact that it's destructive in the first place seems kind of weird, like why normalization out of all the things that you can do to audio in Cakewalk? Do anything you want to do to your sound except....normalize its level?

SONAR Platinum came with more modules including compressors and a limiter, so more PC modules do exist and are in the possession of BandLab. They would need to test them with the current Cakewalk and decide whether to re-release them. There were also a few companies whose products were released in the format. The only one I can think of at the moment is Boz Digital's Bark of Dog I, but there were others.

I get you, and thank you for reminding me of Heimholz and On the Sensations of Tone and how any waveform can be created using sines. In my musings I had sort of forgotten about ol' Hermann's work. I would like to point out that I did not say that "sine waves do not exist in the real world," I said "almost entirely devoid of pure sine waves," which is different. I also did not mean to imply that the standard hearing test was somehow not valid nor suited to its purpose of measuring hearing loss, although I can see where it looked as if I was. What I was contending, and still do, is that when discussing audio reproduction and perception, there may be abilities or acuities we haven't studied on the human side, and things on the reproduction side that relate to that. We already know, for instance, that different people have different curves and different ranges. What if we also have differing degrees of sensitivity to IM distortion or group delay or phase coherence or transient sharpness or whatever? Maybe researchers are studying that, I don't know. The most prominent blind test I've seen for whether people could choose lossless vs. lossy music files, the NPR one, was completely flawed due to the delivery system being a web browser. Yet hundreds of thousands of people accept it as proof that even recording engineers can't spot the difference. Well, not through Firefox I can't. I am a skeptic. I accept 100% that recording at 96K should make no difference whatsoever in what a normal human can hear. My hearing rolls off around 12K anyway. I record at 44.1. I am also open to the possibility that recording at higher rates may have some side effect that makes the audio sound better to some people. Maybe not all people, maybe just people with the ears that are extra sensitive to whatever. 50 years ago guitar amplifier designers and musicians and audio engineers were told that vacuum tubes would soon be phased out in favor of solid state devices, that transistor amplification was in every way superior, if they heard any difference it was imaginary, or the solid state device would sound superior, etc. and so on. The only people who bucked this were the musicians, and since they were all on drugs anyway, nobody paid them any mind. I will not bore you with recapping the story of how that turned out, but I will say that I have made a good living recapping tube amplifiers from 50 years ago.

Although I have what I consider to be a decent quiver of mics for a home studio (Audio Technica, MXL, Sterling, Shure), every so often I like to set up something weird just to see what I can do with it. The other night I recorded some acoustic guitar stereo mic'd using a tie clip lav of unknown provenance into the mic in on my Dell laptop for one channel and the laptop's built-in mic for the other. Once I pulled the room resonance out of it with proximity eq and put on MAutoAlign it started to sound like it could be usable as a background atmosphere track. A BM800 is not a useless microphone for a beginner to start using and man I would have loved to have one 35 years ago. The best thing to do when asking for help in improving tracks is to post an example track so that we can hear how your track sounds now. The BandLab site is a great way to host tracks for free for those of us on the forum to listen to. I'm in agreement with the others who have suggested that from the photo, putting up some sound-deadening on your walls or going to a room with as few reflections as possible will probably make things easier. With a Chinese medium diaphragm condenser, which I believe the BM800 is, I'd start out with the "address" side of the mic facing the 12th fret about 12" away. Record and see how it sounds. If it's too boomy, move it away, too thin, get closer. Once recorded, use a para EQ to roll off the bass up to about 200Hz, and find the "honk" frequency and notch it down by about 5dB. Then add a bit of medium room reverb. Tezza's suggestions are excellent. Trial and error, there's going to have to be some of that. YouTube viewing, some of that, too. Post recording(s)!

As I described, "pristine," meaning clean, without adding or subtracting anything. Put in a 10Hz-20KHz sweep recorded at 44.1K, convert it to 96K, compare the two waveforms using the appropriate analysis tools and they should match. By "mastered," I meant whether they had had some kind of final mixdown or processing done at that rate, for whatever reason. On another subject, an aspect of audio perception that I just thought of that I have never seen discussed is possible differences in people's ability to detect transients. I've never been tested for anything like that by an audiologist. They put headphones on me and run a series of pure monophonic sine waves and that's the extent of my hearing test. It's 100% frequency response. Seeing how our hearing evolved in an environment that was almost entirely devoid of pure sine waves, yet filled with directional transients that were important to hear if one were to survive, maybe there's more to the story than can be learned by playing sine waves to people. Is it possible that frequency response has been deemed the thing that matters because that's the thing the researchers know how to test for? ? It wouldn't be the first time....

I've not looked into their descriptions, but yeah, it sure would be nice to know whether the record in question was actually mastered at that rate. ?Otherwise, as you say, even if the buyer does think that there's some benefit to be gained by playing a higher bit rate file back through their fancy DAC, they could get the same effect by running their 44.1K or 48K lossless file through a good resampling program. And when I say "good" resampling program, I only wish that every audio program could up and down sample audio at every rate without bungling it. The fact that not all of them do is an empirically proven fact. Our dear Cakewalk's resampling algorithms handle the job in pristine fashion. (There's a site that shows test results on this, and I've resampled sine waves in upward and downward directions in programs I use then compared the results using SPAN. Oh man.) I was surprised that the Radiohead album was offered lossless at 48K and not at 44.1K. That implies to me that they're working at 48 rather than the old CD-friendly 44.1. I still work at 44.1 because....habit? Tradition? My Firepod takes a moment to switch rates when I play back different files.

According to the Reference Guide, Quick Grouping should allow you to do this, but the feature doesn't work. It seems like it was designed in but never implemented. If you do a bit of digging you can find the page in the Guide where it says it should work just as you want it to. Feel free to start a thread in Feedback about how much you would like to see the bug fixed.

HDTracks and its fellow HQ download sites beg to differ. I bought Radiohead's A Moon-Shaped Pool from them because it was the only downloadable way to get it lossless and oh man does that record sound good in 48K. They have other albums available for purchase in 96K. I don't think I would buy in that format myself, as I find that my limit of quality perception goes to "lossless" and that's about it. 256K AAC is pretty good, but I like my music like it was made, lossless.

(this rantlet is not directed at you personally, G, I just sound off about higher rates every once in a while) This assumes of course that all there is to being able to measure what all humans are able to perceive with our ears is frequency response and that there is nothing more to learn about human hearing and sound perception and reproduction. Sure, 95% of people can't tell the difference between a heinous low bitrate MP3 and a pristine FLAC, but for 99% of people, "Las Meninas" is also a picture of a bunch of history-looking people standing around in a bedroom. Sayin' you might have to know what to look/listen for, and that hearing perception and acuity can possibly be learned. I say "possibly" because I am not 100% sure and I haven't performed rigorous double-blind tests. I will say that I hear the difference between 125 MP3's and FLAC's being played back in MusicBee but I failed the snot out of that NPR test thing. What it told me was that I can't tell the difference between those formats when they are delivered through a web browser. Gimme the same files and a bit-perfect music player and then see how I do. There is a wide variation in color perception and even visual acuity (look at how many people wear eyeglasses) in the human population. 4% of music students possess the innate ability to identify absolute pitch while the rest of us have to learn relative pitch. Maybe there is more to hearing perception than can be measured with a frequency counter. Why can I, at age 58 after playing in loud rock bands for years, still dig a tiny finger squeak in a guitar track out of a dense mix? I'm not saying it's so, I'm saying that I'm open to the possibility that there may be more to it than raw frequency response, and my own empirical observations suggest that there's a good chance. There may not be information up there that we can hear (and that our primitive paper-or-plastic drivers can even reproduce), but recording with the extra bandwidth may have an effect on things other than just frequency response, like phase or group delay of higher frequencies. I personally still track at 44.1, but if I were running a pro studio, and had the disk space, I might do more at 88.2 or 96 just because we can. It will give future generations more to work with if they ever dig up what we do and want to work with it. And, BTW, for the OP, the thing to do if you intend to mix down at 96 is to start the project at that rate. Otherwise, at least with Cakewalk, there is little point. Any advantage as far as plug-in sampling is already covered elsewhere in the program.

Nice clean interface. I'll add it to the Favorite Freeware Instruments Thread. I see that they are targeting it as a drum sampler, how does it perform as a general phrase sampler?

Nice work, Alan! Sounds like we might have been listening to some of the same stuff back then. I'm getting whiffs of Eno, Talking Heads, Bowie, Fripp, Belew, Nelson?

Good heavens! For decades, "disable the onboard sound" has been such a part of DAW tuning/troubleshooting folklore that whenever I've obtained a computer for DAW use, one of the first things I do is open the case, pry the Realtek chip off the MB, toss it in the outside trash, then go through any printed manuals that came with the system and cross out any reference to built-in audio.?

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

Requires Kontakt Retail 5.6 or newer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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