Starship Krupa

I remember being a little kid and as I started to understand how the world functioned, that it wasn't Mommy's Magic Purse, you had to get paid in order to be able to do things, watching TV and having this sudden moment of panic and confusion when I realized that the people doing it were giving it away for free. And I was really freaked out, like little kids get when they don't understand something that's really important to them. I grew up in Los Angeles, I understood from an early age that movies and TV cost a lot of money to produce, yet TV was free. I couldn't ask anyone because I didn't want to seem stupid. Finally it dawned on me: the commercials. The people who run the commercials pay the people who do the shows to run the commercials. But for that time period before I got it, I was really freaked out, I felt like I was in danger of losing something that was central to my life. Like, what if these people who are doing it for free decide that they're tired of it? No more Laugh-In, no more Star Trek? Maybe we have a basic urge to understand and feel comfortable with the supply chain of things that are important to us. It's probably in our DNA. (There's also a lot of conditioning about "if it's too good to be true, it probably isn't." And lemme tell ya, when I heard that SONAR was about to be renamed and released under a freeware license, it was like, "pinch me, I must be dreaming." It is an incredible deal. How is it even possible? Even for the abandoned SONAR people, to suddenly have a savior swoop in and continue the updates. Too good to be true. So what's the catch? When does it all go sour?) The funny thing is, Laugh-In and Star Trek were cancelled, and SONAR, hate to use the word, but it failed as a commercial product and is thriving like a mo-fo as freeware. So under the business model that was more easily understood, the program tanked, yet 2 years into the new business model, which has shown no signs of trouble, premiering a huge new feature just in time for everyone to stay home and learn how to use it, some people are still kinda twitchy. As a favorite character on Star Trek might say, I find it....fascinating.

I'm sorry, I just can't resist sometimes, it's become a compulsion. Showing the light to people who use Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox to express doubt that there's any way a company could have a plan for making money from their 4 free DAW's.... I'll just go sing a poor boy's song....

Oh my, I'm happy to say that I went to Pluginboutique to check out the #StayInCreate package of freebies, you know, Neutron Elements 3, the Producertech courses, Radio plug-in, Loopmasters content, and I had Neutron Elements 3 in my cart and looked down below and what to my eyes should appear but they have a "You might also be interested in...." that included yet another iZotope/Exponential plug-in, Excalibur, for $9.99. I didn't even bother to trial it, after my experience with Phoenix Verb I knew that whatever that guy at Exponential came up with, it would be worth the tenner for at least one license, which would also qualify me for the little Denise trifle that's this month's PB freebie. And oh heck yeah it is. I guess it's supposed to be a sort of like those old digital multiFX rack units. So the promotion worked just like it was supposed to, I bought a product from the company that was giving another one away for free. (another piece of the puzzle for those who might still be wondering "how can BandLab possibly ever make money on Cakewalk if they give it away for free?")

I have been interested in it, y'know, every so often you hear something really cool and it's an interesting idea to be able to go back in time 30 seconds and capture it for study/use. I still have too many old school shackles on my head to just outright nick someone else's sound or groove, but I don't have a problem with putting it under the microscope to figure out what made it tickle my fancy. Listening to it right now. First impressions....sounds pretty good despite WASAPI and ASIO being absent from audio output choices....lack of search function for finding stations is needlessly frustrating....hmmm, pasting SomaFM stream addresses results in "station offline" error messages, but the same stations load okay from their preset menu....can't find a way to examine their presets to see what a "good" address looks like. Kinda rough around the corners, sort of looks like development stopped at some point. Verdict: worth every penny, glad I have it, glad I didn't pay more.

I just trash them, and I've had no problems. If you want to play it safe, and I do recommend playing it safe, you can create a folder on another drive called "32 VST Hold" or whatever, and drag them there temporarily until you are sure that there are no unintended consequences. I've never seen it, but it's not 100% impossible that the 64-bit version of a plug-in could be using the 32-bit .dll as a resource or something.

Anyone else develop a resentment for Audified after jumping through all those hoops to download and register their tarted-up compressorwhatsit? They seem to kinda think they're hot doo-doo or something....

I have never gotten that, I guess I'm more stoic than you, or too busy writing my notoriously long-winded replies, but while we're on the topic of reactions, y'know how we all have our "Member's total reputation?" (huh-huh, huh-huh) I wanna know which reactions add and subtract to it so I don't accidentally step on some member's reputation when I didn't mean to. I'm free with the Like, because I really do think that anyone who participates in a discussion, especially new people who might be afraid to, contribute to it. Also the Thanks and the Good Idea when appropriate. But if someone posts about John Prine passing away and I react "Sad," I would hope that doesn't ding them, and similarly, if they were to post that, say, Pro Tools added pop-out channel strip plug-ins and Avid were crowing about how innovative that was, and I reacted "Meh," I wouldn't want that to ding them. Even if someone were to post that they only use WASAPI instead of ASIO because they had done A/B testing and it sounded better and I reacted "Confused," I still wouldn't want it to lower their reputation. I'm pretty sure that "Meh" is the "downvote," so I reserve that for people posting words in all capitals commanding that the developers get their act together or whatever, but I wanna know, I really wanna know. Not that anyone in this topic doesn't have rep to friggin' burn, I notice.

For me, the quest had always been for my single best go-to reverb that I could put on a send and it would sound the most like sending the track to a real or imagined 3-D space. I'd have that, and then a quiver of "character" reverbs like plate emulations, psychedelic space things, etc. When Phoenix first went on sale at PB for a tenner, I downloaded the demo, threw it on my send bus in an existing mix just with the default medium room preset and my search of 5 years came to a very abrupt halt as my mix expanded into this holographic soundstage. Yeah, forget it, every other room reverb. I'm willing to entertain the possibility that you might be able to do something as good with TrueVerb or one of Melda's M*Verbs, but preset after preset in this thing was just stunning. No grain in the tails, and I don't know what kind of processing he's throwing in there to get that spatial effect, but man oh man. In other words, get the dang thing, if you are in any way in the market for an algorithmic room/hall/chamber reverb. But you can test drive it first and see. Caveat: unlike most iZotope products, license allows for a single installation, not two. Also, the UI is not as pretty as its iZotope brethren.

I don't think my Firepods qualify me for this....?

Thanks for all the information. As I am wanting to explore more EDM production methods, I will be checking out the Matrix . I'll search YouTube for tutorials and check out Craig Anderton's articles.

I'm going to drop in again on the Matrix, thanks to the encouragement from @JoseC. I had just kind of poked at it, and looked at the documentation, and left it.

Thanks, Steve, for the reminder about Sitala. It looks like a nice little one-shot player, and TX16Wx can certainly fall into the category of "way more sampler than I need for this." Not sure why I didn't delve deeper, maybe it was the developer referring to all of their releases as "beta." I mean, at some point, release one that you're confident enough in to call 1.0. Opening the Ref Guide pages for Matrix View is frustrating because there's so much potential there. If it were better integrated with the other elements of Cakewalk. And not that better integrated, just basic stuff like being able to directly route MIDI inside the program, using FX in your cells, being able to drag and drop clips directly from Tracks without first rendering them, connecting the outputs of the MV to Console strips for processing, and recording from audio or MIDI devices into cells. Hooking up a few parts of the program to it, like you'd do with a ReWire object. It feels as if it was a big planned feature, they got it working, yay, the stuff I listed was going to be implemented in the next release, then some catastrophe happened, maybe it lost its advocate in management or something.

@Keisari, I think I know what you're trying to do: you want to take a single audio sample, like a hi-hat or kick sample, and have it play when a MIDI note sounds. As scook has said, the Matrix View is closer to what you're looking for, but at this time it's set up so that if you want to compose this way, the Cakewalk Track View and Matrix View are not integrated tightly enough that I would feel comfortable using both in a project. You can do a project in Matrix View using loops, clips, samples, and then get it over to the Track View, but for instance I don't think you can trigger Matrix cells from MIDI events in the Cakewalk Track View, if you have edited a clip using the Track View you must bounce it before importing it to the Matrix view, Matrix View cells don't have access to VST effects, etc. It's set up so that you can do a project/performance in Matrix View, then "capture" it to clips in the Track View. It's great for what it is, it's just not connected to the other areas of the program yet. If you want to be more tightly integrated with the Track View workflow, use a software sampler such as T16Wx, which is freeware, a favorite of Cakewalkers and works great as a Cakewalk plug-in.

Does the whining stop when you stop playing? Does the whining only occur when other people are in the room? Does it only occur when you play with a door or window open? But seriously, folks.... My understanding of what your setup is is that you are using an SL-990, which is an 88-key weighted piano action MIDI keyboard controller, to play a piano sound on Cakewalk's TTS-1 softsynth. Am I correct? Your Studiologic MIDI controller doesn't have any practical limit to its "polyphony," BTW, it just puts out MIDI notes as fast as any human can possibly play them. I also own one, and I also have an owner's manual. Not much to it except for how to set the velocity curves and set up splits, stuff that most people don't bother with. It has no sounds in it, it must be hooked up to a sound module or a computer to make any sound at all. Polyphony limitations are in the synth itself, which would be the TTS-1. Polyphony limitations don't show up as "whining," you just get notes cutting off short or not sounding. TTS-1 is more than adequate to the the task of a bit of piano practice, unless your practice involves holding down the sustain pedal and running down the keyboard to make all the notes sound at once. A "whining" sound would seem to indicate some kind of feedback/loopback somewhere in your audio routing. What you're doing should work fine all day long. The SL-990 is a fine controller for piano. What does the rest of your setup look like? What audio/MIDI interface are you using? You must be using an external interface, because the SL-990 is 5-pin DIN. Are you using the external interface to monitor your playing? And although I asked the question I jest up above, does the whining sound stop when you stop playing? Just curious: can you go into Cakewalk's Preferences and in the Audio/Configuration File section, check to see what your ThreadSchedulingModel is set to? It should be set to 2. If it's set to 3, set it to 2 and please reply quoting me so that I get a notification. Also, while you're poking around in the Audio section, check in Playback and Recording and see what Driver Mode you're in, and in Driver Settings to see what Latency you are running at.

I have it on good word that since the man from Mars stopped eating cars and eating bars, he is only eating guitars. BandLab support have been known, as a courtesy service, to help Cakewalk Inc. customers who have valid serials and registration codes and whatnots with their validation issues. As you pointed out, they're not parties in your license agreement with Cakewalk, Inc., but Cakewalk's licensing server seems to be one of the assets they acquired, and apparently the support staff knows how to get it to behave. Ask them.

You must select a MIDI or Instrument track before you may access the Step Sequencer. This is the message you would get if you dragged an audio clip to a MIDI track.

I don't have any ideas about top hits from today, as I went underground some time ago, but I have some fun suggestions about older hits that people might find useful if broken down using your methods. All have iconic drum, synth, and guitar (and sometimes bass) sounds: New Order "The Perfect Kiss" Rush "Tom Sawyer" Van Halen "Panama" Michael Jackson "Beat It" Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers "You Got Lucky" Billy Idol "Rebel Yell" Prince "1999"

I really have to hand it to the devs, though, for so far spending two full years polishing and tuning, smashing bugs, adding long-requested "featurettes" as I found out they used to call them. And I think we've seen some fairly big updates, it's just that they were ones that expanded upon existing features rather than being new features of their own. There was that thing with adding colors to tracks that happened in one of the first releases that sure helped make the program more visually attractive. How many people were clamoring for the Ripple Edit Indicator and now take it for granted, because of course it should have been there from the start? How about the brilliant changes to the Smart Tool and Take Lanes workflow to open the way for another type of comping workflow? Note names on MIDI notes? Fab! Those are a few things that I consider "big" updates that have a huge impact on the ease of use and the way I use the program. Ah, how about for the new users (like me) the release of the Cakewalk Reference Guide? I think we kind of take these for granted because they were such good ideas, they fit right in. Well of course we have the names of the notes in the Piano Roll. But a couple of releases ago they were just blank rectangles. Well, sure, I can change the behavior of the Smart Tool, but I remember when I couldn't and it would just choose a tool that I didn't want to use. That's why I just don't get the "still using SONAR" crew. There's so much good stuff in the new program.

Jon, what's up with the rest of your system, your video driver and whatnot? Looking back over what I wrote, I hope I didn't come down too hard on Lynx. That bit in their manual that seems to be talking smack about the coding practices of Cakewalk and Ableton Live and Studio One rubbed me the wrong way. I just consider that sort of thing to be bad form. Full disclosure: I used to write user manuals for tech companies. I happen to know some of the history with Cakewalk's business practices, and one of the things we as users have going for us is that Cakewalk, Inc. always had a close relationship with Microsoft, one that Noel and co. have maintained into the BandLab era. They pay attention to standards and specifications, and while I don't know about Ableton, I do know the early history of Studio One. It started as a project of a couple of engineers who had left Steinberg, the company who wrote the ASIO specification in the first place. These people all very much know what they are doing. The above is what I would consider more professional language. If they fixed the issue with their "work-around," there is no need to name names and cause the kind of fear, uncertainty and doubt that resulted in this thread. BTW, I had it wrong when I said that MMCSS settings had no bearing on ASIO mode performance. In Cakewalk at least, they definitely do.

Yes, I am, and lest ye be of the perception that I speak for the company, I do not, I am merely sympathetic to their position and like to think that the many years I spent in the trenches at various multimedia software companies (Adobe/Macromedia, Learning Company, etc.) gives me some insight. What I meant to say was that it is entirely possible that Sequoia/Samplitude/Music Creator has a really good-sounding playback engine in comparison to other DAW's including Cakewalk. Fun hypothetical time, if I were setting up a professional studio, the kind with clients and deadlines and outside engineers and all that, I would have a different set of criteria for it than I would for my personal home studio. First thing I would do would be to ask around and see if Pro Tools was still the most popular tool for professional recording engineers, and necessary to be the primary DAW to build the studio around. Once I had that bit of information, I would order a couple of proper A/V computers from a system integrator such as Jim Roseberry. At that point I'd do the survey I do every few years by obtaining the free starter versions of the full-featured DAW's, Studio One, Cubase, etc. and trying them out to see how they stacked up against Cakewalk. At that point I would choose two DAW's to build the studio around, one of them probably still Pro Tools, the other likely Cakewalk because I'm familiar with it, but maybe not. I run Cakewalk here at home because the BandLab announcement came just as I was outgrowing Mixcraft and I checked it out and liked the feature set and the sound and saw that it had potential. I was and am very interested to see what happens under the BandLab stewardship. I predicted good things and am happy that so far I was right. I trolled the naysayers relentlessly and with great fury on the old forum, so I would have been kinda red-faced if things had turned to poo.? Even the forum is better and getting better all the time. I especially enjoy the relative lack of defensiveness, which may be down to the fact that there's not so much to be defensive about with CbB!

I guess it just needed cooling.

Why do you think your missing plug-in issue has something to do with "paid for life" or whatever? BREVERB as far as I know doesn't have a registration that expires. Have you gone into preferences and made sure that a plug-in path didn't somehow get deleted?

Jon, since you're obviously having some serious playback issues, as I've read in your other posts, could you do as I've done and put more about your system's specs in your sig? There are so many variables with hardware on Windows systems, I know you have more trouble than most and I seem to remember you are using a PCIe card for audio, but I don't remember what version of Windows, what video card, etc. Also, regarding Samplitude's playback engine sounding better to your ears, that is entirely possible. MAGIX claim to have completely overhauled their engine about a year or so ago up and down the line all the way down to Music Creator. There are some who will say "all DAW's sound the same, it's been proven," but that statement can't be true, it makes no sense. For it to be true, every DAW would have to use the same summing algorithms when mixing, use plug-ins the same way, implement panning the same way, and on and on. The statement could only be true as far as recording an audio test file with no effects, then playing it back with no effects, which is not what DAW's are for. I was a user of Mixcraft before I tried Cakewalk, and I noticed the difference immediately. Cakewalk sounded smooth and silky by comparison, Mixcraft harder edged. Also, there is playback and there is mixdown/bounce, which are two different processes. A DAW developer may choose to cut corners on the playback engine in order to make it more efficient, which could be why Mixcraft so seldom drops out on me compared to Cakewalk, but Cakewalk sounds better. I know from studying the two of them that Mixcraft isn't streaming audio from the disk during playback, unlike Cakewalk.

It sounds like ein grosse hassel, but A|A|S sound packs are pretty irresistible.

Often a stuck plug-in, so test it with a project with no plug-ins. If you can open a project with no plug-ins and close Cakewalk and then open it again, work your way back from there adding your favorite plug-ins until you find which one Cakewalk is choking on. At that point, you may be able to switch to or from the VST3 or 2 version, contact support, etc. or at least rule out a plug-in as the source of your trouble.