Starship Krupa

The thing is that yours is the first theme I've seen that liberates the theme from real life recording hardware or other software. Not that others don't exist, I just haven't noticed them. Approaching the task with the idea of trying to make it look like the control panel of a steam-powered airship that's only existed in fantasy novels is wonderful, great fun. A good theme, to my thinking, should help inspire creativity. I was shopping for a vest to complement my ensemble at the Charles Dickens Fair this year in San Francisco and the young lady helping me pointed out that in the Victorian era, there was no such thing as "too much." Here is a photo of my lovely assistant and me. Sometimes she tidies and I can't find anything! Yrs, unblinded by science, Airship Krupa....

Just an anecdotal data point: more than half of the plug-ins on my system are, like Cakewalk itself, freeware licensed. I watch KVR and when I see one that interests me I download it and try it, from any developer that offers them. I admit, I'm a free plug-in 'ho. I run no antivirus or antimalware software except for Windows Defender and Malwarebytes on an ad hoc basis. Defender and Malwarebytes have never flagged any of my plug-in downloads and I have never gotten a virus or trojan or any kind of malware from a plug-in, freeware or otherwise. It takes trouble, work, and skill to code malware into a software installer, and in the grand scheme of software, the market for freeware VST's is tiny. A black hat would probably choose a larger market to distribute their payload. And for a company to go to the trouble to create a marketing campaign such as this just so they could install some kind of trojan on our computers, or alternately, that they would go to all this trouble and then create an installer that accidentally contained malware, is, by my thinking, unlikely. What would be their gain? Ruining their reputation in the audio community for what? Companies don't need to install software to harvest our data any more, we give it up willingly. In my experience as an IT professional and as the son of a mother in her 80's who has a bunch of friends whose email addresses end in @aol.com, trojans and malware appear on people's systems not from downloading software (that ended somewhere around 1995) but from opening email attachments. Switching mom to GMail (which she loves) took care of that issue. All of which is certainly not to dissuade anyone from taking steps that keep them feeling safe, rather I seek to reassure that our computing world may not be as fraught with danger as the purveyors of anti-malware software may advertise. Antimalware solutions and common sense together are what work best for me. I see these warnings from time to time in this subforum. Have any of them ever turned out to be real trojans or virii or have they wound up being false positives that the antimalware companies eventually acknowledged?

Your themesmanship so captured my imagination that I had to visit the laboratory and engage in a bit of it myself. It occurred to me that the transport background might be fertile ground for pattern fill with a bronze or wood texture rather than the traditional solid or gradient, and then it also struck me: why not add some decoration to the lines that separate the various readouts? Just to prove the concept I started with these primitive dots at each intersection, but by jove, there's no reason a modified fleur de lis border or something more ornate wouldn't be possible! The raised Victorian lincrusta wallpaper is something I found on a royalty-free site, but the sky is the limit there as well. Do you realise what you've unleashed, man? I feel like Professor Sherman waking on the beach days before the eruption of Krakatoa to find himself in the midst of not a primitive jungle, but the most amazing inventions a secret diamond mine could fund! Dinner at Mr. I's tonight, for I love spaghetti!

I daresay old chap, I do rather like what you've done here! While it pains me to risk being perceived as detracting from such a worthy addition to the pantheon of Cakewalk themes, there is, however, one critique that gentlemanly honesty and honour I feel compel me to mention. One colour element jumps out at me as if it belongs to another paradigm. That of which I speak is our old friend 00FEFE (and its cousins 53CDF5 and 43CCAA). Hues that I have applied liberally to my own comparatively primitive efforts, when seeking to find something that will not fatigue the retina against a darker background. My own father, something of an amateur underwater explorer himself, used to fascinate me with his luminescent diving-watch. As a bedtime treat, he would remove it from his wrist and allow me to view the timepiece in complete darkness under the bedclothes. However, good sir, your backgrounds are anything but dark! On the contrary, they recall the burnished bronze and polished wood of ships moored at Greenwich awaiting the signal to set their chronometers and proceed down the timeless Estuary to whatever adventure may await beyond its mouth. If it were your intention to invoke the spirit of someone such as the balloonist-for-hire Lee Scoresby whom we may imagine accepting turquoise in payment from a Native American tribe, then I can understand the choice. However I suspect that such an association is a flight (ha!) of fancy on my part. Were that it were so easily changed, I know, my friend, from my own meagre and now abandoned efforts to create themes of my own. While the text in the Browser may be a simpler matter, the various buttons are images, and as such, a Photoshop of horrors. Would that my own pixel editor skills were up to the task, I would happily take it on, to create a black-on-bronze three-dimensional button set for this worthy theme. Sadly, I am but a GIMP when it comes to such things. Were it but a matter of colour replacement! O joy! For the time being I shall have to accept and enjoy your worthy theme as it is and for what it is, and I must say it had not occurred to me to go in such a direction with my colours! You do bring wider meaning to the term "theme" with this one, Sir Colin. Bravo.

I thought the same about de-reverb processing not too long ago. Once the technology is perfected, and applied to well-known virtuoso rock guitarists' work, o the humanity. It'll be like those "shreds" videos from a dozen years ago.

Hmm, I always do a thorough search, missed it this time, I guess. Hope it wasn"t a waste of bandwidth! I haven't tried it yet.

I find myself only ever using a gate to get hi hat out of the snare mic and snare out of the kick mic. When Boz Digital Labs came out with Gatey Watey, I picked it up as a freebie I think, or maybe it was $5. What it does is simple but ingenious, a well-designed gate that allows you to set a frequency cut-off for the gate. So you can have it still let through the freqs you want when the gate is "closed" and not affect the main signal you're working with. I know that other gates have sidechain functuons that also allow this, but with Gatey Watey, it"s just a slider.

Kontakt warning: all require the full version.

"Vector is a spatial image analysis tool that helps producers and engineers make more informed decisions during mixing and mastering. It helps you to detect and avoid spatial threats such as extreme anti-phase while avoiding false positives that are sometimes given by other tools." Nice looking UI.

Warning: these are Kontakt instruments that require ownership of the full version.

A wiki! That is an excellent idea. There are many who would no doubt love to contribute to such a resource. Transferring the accumulated wisdom of the OF to it would be a great way to start. I shall investigate free hosting solutions. Do you know of any? In all seriousness, @Morten Saether might welcome the input of one or more tuning hotshots like @Jim Roseberry in coming up with a list of Windows 10 hints to replace the outdated ones on that page. A concern I see is how to prevent Windows 10 from interrupting a tracking session with updates, and one of the best performance boosts I got was when I disabled realtime Defender scanning, which may be done temporarily for mixing sessions. There may be ways to exclude the Cakewalk audio directories, sample directories, and plug-in directories from realtime Defender scanning. Such tips would be good ones to replace the ones that no longer apply.

It is a little-known fact that (prior to Mr. Saether's excellent curatorship) several hundred pages of documentation were lost in The Great Boston Molasses Flood. Back then, Piano Roll View meant staring at an actual physical piano roll as it scrolled by. Cakewalk was one of the first programmes that allowed you to import gramophone recordings. Pitch Correction was their method of slowing down audio via the application of tree sap to the surface of the disk.

Indeed, Mr. P, hence my efforts to call attention to it. In this case, it would surprise me if that text had been touched in 20 years and it wouldn't surprise me if it hadn't been touched since 1997. Modems? AOL clients? Hercules cards? IRQ's? It isn't that this stuff belongs to the previous decade, it literally belongs to the previous century. There should be an admonishment somewhere in there to make sure to keep backup tapes of your data. "Someday, perhaps if the United States begins to openly trade with Communist China, we will see the cost of the large diaphragm condenser microphone fall below $1000, at which point even project studios will be able to afford one or maybe even a matched pair. What a fine day for computer recording that shall be!"

I just had an audio engine dropout and clicked on the "Help" button on the blue flag that popped up to check out the troubleshooting recommendations. The table is interesting reading, with the codes, and recommendations for tuning Cakewalk settings. Right below it, however, is a veritable treasure trove of Windows tuning advice history. And by "history," I mean in the sense of something being dead and of no further use. The very first bit of advice is that the user may wish to disable Microsoft Office FastFind, which was a fairly obscure feature that has not been included in Microsoft Office since Microsoft Office 2000. The next piece of advice is to avoid scheduling tasks that are part of the Windows Plus Package, which was an add-on originally for Windows 95, and last marketed for Windows XP in 2005. And I think I finally found the source of the superstition about network cards causing Cakewalk to glitch: Okay, let me be the first to say, if this document is where you got the idea that having your Cakewalk DAW plugged into a LAN was going to negatively affect its performance, just consider the antique information surrounding it, none of which has been updated in at least 15 years, probably way more. Maybe there was some truth to it when it was written in 1997 and the network card and the sound card could have been sharing an ISA bus, but it hasn't been true for 20 years or so, and if you're still unplugging your Cakewalk DAW because you think network activity is going to glitch the audio, it's like the computer equivalent of your grandma keeping those "not to be removed under penalty of law" tags on her sofa cushions because she was sure she heard of someone somewhere who went to jail because they tore one off and got caught. You know that your computer's CPU and bus can handle LAN activity without barely even noticing in 2019. If you don't, you should learn more about modern computer hardware. This item also explicitly warns against having the AOL client running while you are using Cakewalk. Having observed the reactions of some of the existing userbase to the announcement of the move to a freeware licensing model, I understand why special attention might be paid to the needs of AOL users. I know that some people get set in their ways, and AOL's where their email and Internet is, but really you shouldn't have your AOL running in the background while you're doing the Cakewalk. This is a good time of year to get some help from a visiting family member if you don't want to fool with it yourself. A little later we have instructions for turning off CD-ROM Auto-Notification and disabling Start Menu Startup items, both sets of instructions applying to Windows XP. Since Cakewalk is not compatible with Windows XP and has not been for quite some time now, I think this advice has outlived its usefulness to Cakewalk users. Further down the user is advised to try turning off hardware acceleration on their video card using the slider in Control Panel Display settings (another XP/98 feature). And if that doesn't do it, they can try using the generic VGA driver instead of the specific one for their graphics card. They are warned that graphics may become sluggish at the expense of smoothly functioning audio. Indeed. I can't see this as a permanent solution or workaround. Next there is special advice on what to do if you have any of the following video cards: STB Velocity 128 (rel. 1997) Hercules Dynamite 128 (rel. 1997) Matrox Millenium (rel. 1996) While I would agree that anyone attempting to use any of those cards in 2019 does need special advice, the advice that I would give them is not on this page. Immediately after this comes a set of instructions on how to solve IRQ conflicts by changing the physical slot your sound card is installed in. Playing musical card slots is something that hasn't been a thing since the ISA days, which ended about 20 years ago. Further down we get to more ancient history with advice on upgrading one's system hardware. There is detailed advice on making absolutely sure that your drives are not operating in MS-DOS Compatibility Mode, which is something that Windows 98 used to use as a fallback when it had problems communicating with hard drives. I believe Cakewalk dropped compatibility with Windows 98 even before they dropped XP, so this advice is a bit moldy. Finally, there's advice on souping up your hard drive controller by getting one of the newfangled UltraDMA IDE controllers that uses "bus mastering." This technology was supplanted by SATA in 2003. There is nothing specific about adding RAM. Perhaps the last time the information was updated, 640K was the limit. All kidding aside, a lot of the information on this page, both on the online documentation and the corresponding pages in the Reference Guide, is hopelessly outdated, by over 20 years.

I already have an account because I scored the Mini-Filter freebie years ago, but I've been clicking on the button to get Plate 140 off and on for hours and nothing has happened. My possession of a license for it is not indicated on the website nor in the Arturia equivalent to BandLab Assistant/Native Access/Waves Central. I think of it as the "I'm fine, how are you?" response, from Bobby Pickett's "Star Drek." Captain Jerk and Mr. Schlock get in the turbo lift elevator and ask it repeatedly to go to the Transporter Room, to which it replies, repeatedly, "I'm fine, how are you?" until they give up and ask Mr. Snot to beam them down to the surface of the planet directly from the elevator. So whenever I make a repeated inquiry of a computer and it fails to respond, I imagine it replying "I'm fine, how are you?" Click here to get your Rev PLATE-140! Click. "I'm fine, how are you?" Synchronize. "I'm fine, how are you?" I even tried to use their AssistantAccessCentral thing to install the demo and can't see it in Cakewalk, so they're really in "I'm fine, how are you?" territory. I'm sure it will show up eventually.

Yes, when your intention was to record the MIDI, which is what I typically want to do. I've never used a program before that made it so easy to record the audio output of the synth, but thinking about it, it could really have its uses in the case of synths where their sound engine is such that no two performances are the same. Ah, Cakewalk. With more options comes greater likehood of unforseen consequences. Good news for those who use Split Instrument tracks as we do, you have the ability to show and hide entire types of tracks in the Track and Console views. So let's say you don't want Synth tracks to appear in the Track View, because you don't want to accidentally arm them for recording or perform other operations on them that you intend for their MIDI counterparts. Up at the top of the Track View, open the Tracks menu and select the Track Manager (or just hit "H"). From there you can hide individual tracks, or just turn off display of Synth (or MID or Audio) tracks entirely. This same functionality is under the Strips menu in the Console View (do not accuse Cakewalk of consistency here). I usually hide Synths in the Track View and MIDI in the Console View because I have no need to see MIDI tracks in my mixer. I don't adjust MIDI volumes during mixing except by accident.

This is how I see it and close to my experience as well. I see plug-ins and hosts as two different programs from two different companies, and if they work together, that's great, and if not, I'm not quick to start blaming one or the other. The bigger the companies involved, and the more commercial, the more I'll say, hey, work it out. Meldaproduction and Waves would have no business failing to work with Digital Performer and Samplitude. The users of all would have invested good money and headspace. But I also understand that my perspective is not everyone's, and I "get" how someone who switches around between three different DAW's, and the only one that won't run the new plug-in they just dropped $50 on is Cakewalk would draw the conclusion that it's Cakewalk's problem and only Cakewalk's. In most other situations, I would draw the same conclusion. That's why I wrote out my comedy "history of the VST spec." I once experienced firsthand the challenges of developing a plug-in host that was not the original host the plug-ins were written for. VST was never created as an industry standard the way that for instance, MIDI was. It was (and remains) a proprietary Cubase add-on that got released into the wild. If they were called "Cubase" plug-ins instead of "VST's," people might be more understanding. "This Cubase3 plug-in isn't working in Cakewalk!" Well, it's great that any of them work at all, considering that they're CUBASE plug-ins.... That is a fine idea in theory, but as Noel has pointed out, and you probably know too, there is no way to do this without slowing things down (adding latency at the plug-in level, which might be cumulative, adding to the time it takes to add a VST to a track, etc.). A step in the right direction was to allow sandboxing at scan time, so at least they don't crash or hang that process. It's a tradeoff that I guess they don't want to make. If people turn on sandboxing, perhaps it will get unacceptably sluggish. And the user still ends up not being able to use their plug-in. And still, no matter how much sandboxing you do, a program inside a program can still probably find a way to make the host program fall down and go boom if it tries hard enough. ? From my armchair, I like the approach of making CbB more bomb-resistant when a plug-in is found to crash it. That achieves the goal of compatibility as well as stability. After all, there is truth in the statement that if REAPER can run the plug-in then so can Cakewalk. It might indeed be a poorly-coded plug-in, but the fact that it runs without crashing in other hosts suggests that it's possible to "code around it" as the expression goes.

A programmer I had somehow missed until he recently updated one of his plug-ins and posted the update on KVR is Sender Spike. He has 3 freeware VST's, a tape machine emulator, a VCA compressor emulator, and a VU meter. I have been looking for a good 64-bit VCA compressor emulation for a to replace my much-loved dlm one sixty-five for a long time so will be checking out the VCA compressor in particular. One important and interesting thing to know is that he is a Cakewalk user himself and his plug-ins are thoroughly tested with CbB.

You created the instrument as a Split Instrument, with separate MIDI and Synth tracks visible and accessible. Then at record time, you armed the Synth track and not the MIDI track before recording. To get the result you want, you could either create the instrument as a Simple Instrument track, which is a hybrid combination of both the synth and MIDI tracks, or you could leave things as you have them and just remember that you need to arm the MIDI track for recording before you hit record.

Onboard chip is fine for playback. I've even hooked a mixer up with a 1/8" stereo jack and recorded some decent sounding vocals and guitar just to f- the haterz. And for those of you onboard soundcard jockeys I have a small bit (pun intended) of advice: for playback of your sound files, like your mixdowns or purchased or ripped music, try a media player that supports WASAPI and ASIO playback. MusicBee and Foobar2000 are the recognized champions. VLC is okay, but you have to go deep into its settings. I use MusicBee because I like the look, it's skinnable and supports VST plug-ins! I use it for internet streaming radio and ripping CD's too. The thing is to bypass the Windows sound playback engine with its layers of resampling. I won't start a debate, just get one of those players, set it up for WASAPI and listen. The difference is most obvious on cheapo D/A's for some reason. It's like swabbing the wax out of your ears.

The obvious of course is GarageBand. How "full-featured" do you mean? The only freeware cross platform DAW I can think of at the moment is Tracktion 7, which has a quirky interface that might make it not the best choice.

Right. When you're playing it back in Cakewalk, and you have your reverb on there, a little compression to bring it up front, you've EQ'd out the "honks," everything sounding good and deep and fat and present and with some air, then you can stop and go to File/Export/Audio. What you export from that dialog should sound just like what you hear on the playback. Sometimes people have trouble with the Export process. I did for a while. It's one of those things with Cakewalk where so many options led to confusion on my part. I didn't know which ones to choose and picked the wrong ones. But if you have any questions when you get there, we can answer them. Me especially because I had some confusion of my own to sort out.? One recommendation about exporting is that you consider what you're going to use the file for. If it's just a rough mix to listen to in the truck or give to your band so they can learn the song, MP3 is great. Doesn't take up space on your phone. But if it's to give to a radio station or something where better sound quality is important, a lossless format like FLAC (compressed) or WAV (uncompressed) might be better.

If you have only the player, they are offering loyal customers a free sound pack right now. My guess would be that you will find your '80's lead in the Plastic Pop collection. I have so many of their sound packs that I can't decide which one I want. The Ultra Analog Session 2 I referred to is a cut-down version of their synth, part of their Session Bundle, and I ran through a few presets on it. It gives you access to some of the parameters and the arpeggiator. It has presets that I can't find in any of the sound packs, but I may not be looking hard enough.

If you save the Cakewalk project and then open it again, your reverb and any other effects will be as you left them. You will be able to remove them if you wish. It's only when you Export (or bounce) that reverb or other effects get permanently applied to the finished product. Just a quick explanation: Cakewalk, like most DAW's, performs most of its operations non-destructively, meaning that in Cakewalk, you can split your audio into clips, cut, paste, edit, add effects, delete entire takes and tracks, and your original recorded or imported raw audio tracks will still be sitting on the hard drive, untouched. There are some operations that are destructive, meaning they do change your original audio files, but they are few and are advanced operations like some forms of pitch shifting, tempo matching, and time stretching. Nothing to be concerned with until you get to that level. The overall concept is that you have this raw audio that you record or import, and while you're doing all this mixing, processing, and editing, Cakewalk just "remembers" all your moves. Then when you tell it to export (or "mix down" or "bounce") the finished piece, it applies all of these things that you've done and spits out a finished audio file in whatever format you tell it to. And it still leaves the original audio untouched. If you don't like how the song sounds, you can go back and start the mixing process from scratch with entirely different plug-ins. Try a different reverb if you want. For this reason, it's hard for some DAW users to truly "finish" a mix, because we're always learning how to make it sound better. I'm not kidding. I wish I were.

If you have A|A|S' Ultra Analog Session 2 (I think it came with SPlum, I got it as a Pluginboutique BOGO), load it up and select the first bank, category "Leads." Crank the mod wheel and go through the patches and try to find one that doesn't sound like that. ? I remember it being a popular electro-pop lead sound back in the day, maybe a sawtooth and a sine with the filter modulated? Could have been an attempt at "violin." I can imagine it coming out of an SH-101 or Poly 800 or other price-smasher.