Starship Krupa

The initial tendency is to look outside the bundle for solutions, especially when it comes to the oft-overlooked Sonitus fx collection. I have this tendency myself. However, Sonitus Modulator has a subcategory of factory presets called "Ensemble" that might have what you're looking for, or at least use as a starting point. Their UI's are really dated and tiny, but I did a little digging and the Sonitus fx suite was highly regarded back in the day. The company that supplied them were (and are) some next-level signal processing eggheads. Their only real limitation is that they are DX and so are limited as to which hosts they will run in. For me, that's Cakewalk and Vegas. So they don't make good "go-to" FX for me. Certainly no worse than using the ProChannel modules that can't be used in other programs at all.

Check out the Favorite Free Instruments thread in this subforum. There is a plethora of stuff you can get for free, and pan flutes are a popular instrument. I think the Native Instruments Komplete Start freebie package has some in it somewhere, and probably Swatches from A|A|S.

Can you expand more on what you're trying to do and why? You have certain VST's installed and don't want to use them but also don't want to uninstall them? Perhaps you want to be able to use them in other programs but not in CbB? If you want to keep them, but don't want Cakewalk to scan them, you can move them to their own separate folder that is not listed in CbB's VST scan paths. I've done this with some plug-ins that I only use in other programs and some that are license locked to other programs. It speeds up the scanning process. If you just don't want them cluttering up your Browser you can do as scook suggests and use Plug-In Manager to exclude them.

The usual DAW workflow is to record everything with no processing and then add it later in the mixing process. The exception is when you have an external hardware unit such as a compressor or spring or plate reverb that you want to use at the time of recording. In most cases, when you have plug-in effects on a track during the recording process, even though you hear them while you're recording, the actual audio will be recorded "dry," without them. Once you've got your tracks recorded, that's where, IMO, the real fun starts. Taking those raw materials and shape them into something magical. Tracking is like visiting the lumber yard, mixing is like actually putting the project together. Welcome to the world of mixing, which is where Cakewalk stomps the living snot out of everything else I've used. Recording, comping, MIDI editing, most everything else in CbB is....powerful, and versatile, and flexible, but has taken getting used to. The first time I popped open the Console View, though, it was like "now that's what I'm talking about." Then I hit the button on one of the strips that pops open the ProChannel and it was truly all over. There is a wealth of tutorials on the web, especially YouTube, about how to approach every aspect of recording and mixing, how to get started with every processor. For the specifics of how to apply the principles to CbB, we on the forum love to show off, I mean share, what we know. For processing, the basics to start with are EQ, compression, and reverb. Find out how to apply each of them, what they do to your sounds. CbB comes with a great channel EQ in the ProChannel, and the Sonitus and BREVERB reverb plug-ins that come with it are good. The ProChannel has a couple of compressors and the Sonitus is a goodie as well. I might suggest downloading the Meldaproduction Free Bundle to get MEQualizer and MCompressor, as they were not only great to learn on but I still use them on every project. There will inevitably be one or more people along the way who say "just use your ears," when you ask about how to use these processors, which I think is as helpful as telling someone who wants to learn to drive an automobile "just use your eyes, hands and feet." Forums will have individual conflicting opinions based on what has worked for each individual. I prefer reading or watching tutorials to get the gist and then trying it out on my own material. There are things that I do that are not "by the book" and others that I probably need to work on. Jerry's hint about using a bus for reverb and then using sends is a good one. That's the next step to realistic ambience, if your goal is to have your song sound as if it exists in one sonic space. But don't worry about it for now. Throw a little BREVERB on your vocal and have fun.☺

When I saw that it had a factory preset called "Disintegration" little valentine hearts flew from the top of my head. Just seeing the name made me want to try running my drums through it and drench the snare and do a lot of "dug-a-da-bum" fills and drench the vocals and play ominous string pads. "Prayers For Rain" all the way.

Tried it out, and to loosely paraphrase some of Native Instruments' countrymen, "I'm fond, fond, fond of the 'verb called RAUM."

The first step on the road to recovery is admitting that you have a problem. Welcome, and keep coming back!?(except in this case, "coming back" will only make it worse) I decided in my first year or so of learning how to mix in the box that the best way for me was to decide on a "best of breed" or "go-to" for each major type of processor and focus on it. It's hard for newbies to "get" that because plug-in makers publish quotes from their celebrity endorsers making it seem like they must be deciding on a different compressor, EQ, and reverb for every track. Of course they make it seem that way so they can keep us excited about buying more flavors of processors we already know we have enough of. Reverb was the first one I decided to go through and audition every one I had downloaded and just pick the best-sounding one. It was Orilriver, a freeware one, followed by TrueVerb, an oldie that Waves gives away every Arbor Day, Flag Day, Presidents' Day, Easter.... Then once I decided on my first round of "go-to's," I built up a quiver of "special occasion" ones and sometimes change favorites as my tastes and skills evolve. There are also handy utilities such as MAutoalign that goes on every drum project because I have it and it makes the tracks sound better. But give me copies of MCompressor, MEQualizer, and Orilriver (freeware reverb) and the "house" delay and chorus of whatever DAW I'm in and I'm okay to mix. For free, any of my "best of breeds" are at risk of losing their jobs. The Meldas are at the least risk. If RAUM can dust off Orilriver or TrueVerb, we listen more closely. I do all my reverbing via sends, so if RAUM performs well in that role, I'll like it. Not all reverbs do. I think it may be a demanding task, more complex signals, but I don't know. They can start to sound muddy and cluttered no matter how I pre-process or what algorithm I choose. De gusti(reverb)bus.

Since I have nowhere else to turn for emotional support, I say it here: it's been 25 minutes since I clicked on the link to get the free license and Native Access is still telling me "YOU HAVE NO PRODUCTS TO INSTALL" The free plug-in junkie's worst nightmare! As if I didn't already know! My name is Erik and I have no products to install. I guess all I can do is keep coming back.

To have ambience is important to some So they gave us a 'verb, and the 'verb is RAUM!

For the effort you went to and as useful as it's going to be, its creator can name it anything, and I happen to like the name, and quirky "guide" names in general. "A Young Person's Guide To King Crimson," "The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy." All the funnier given how the demographic skews toward the male in our fair forum.

....and in case anyone wasn't aware, Cherry Audio, makers of Voltage Audio, is a new company formed by principals from Acoustica. I haven't spent much time with Voltage Audio, as I am an admitted "preset tweaker" when it comes to synthesis, but it looks great. Actually most of the plug-ins work in Cakewalk, including the Acoustica Studio Instruments, which is their really good-sounding GM player. Some off the top of my head that I can think of: the G-sonique plug-ins all do, although most of their VST FX are 32-bit. The VTD Psychedelic Delay is one of my favorite "weirdo" FX, sad that Acoustica haven't licensed the 64-bit version. The vintage synth emulations all do, the MemoryMoon, MiniMogue, ME80, Messiah, etc. Pianissimo, which along with Melodyne Essentials alone might make the upgrade to Pro Studio worth the money for some, works just fine in Cakewalk. All of the Acoustica FX, like their Pro Studio Reverb, and Vocal Zap, work in Cakewalk. Glass Viper does. A|A|S Journeys/Entangled Species works in Cakewalk. The ones I can think of that appear locked are the ToneBoosters ones, which say ""unregistered" down at the bottom when I load them in Cakewalk, the VB-3 organ, and the Lounge Lizard Session Piano v.3. Too bad about the ToneBoosters plug-ins, too, because they are niiiiiice. Mixcraft remains an excellent choice for people getting started with DAW's on Windows to get something done right away. That was one of the main criteria when I was doing my own personal shootout to choose which one to start with 5 years ago. I downloaded all the demos, my budget was $100, with the idea that as I learned more I would "graduate" if necessary. From the "Studio" versions to the "Pro" versions where applicable. And there were less mature ones (at the time) like Mixcraft, Tracktion, REAPER and others that might add features. One basic benchmark was how long did it take me from installing the program to being able to arm a track and record audio. I figured the faster I could perform that basic task with it, the more new-user friendly the program was and also specifically friendly to my needs. For those who know REAPER, it will be no surprise which program came in absolute dead last. I think it was over an hour including downloading the user guide and then some user's incomplete tutorial for first-time users. The documentation had the same blind spot that Linux and other open source software used to suffer terribly from: my task was too basic for it to occur to anyone to document. I wound up almost screaming at the computer screen. Mixcraft did it in under a minute. And it came with a remote app that runs on Android and iOS that lets you start and stop recording and playback and rewind and adjust the fader on the Master bus. Sold. The rest of them were all crippled in some way or other that ruled them out. Limited to 16 tracks? No VST support? Sticking every UI element into a single window when I have two monitors? Mixcraft is a meat-and-potatoes DAW that is easy to switch to and from as necessary. It's still an excellent backup, a go-to for when I can't get MIDI to work in Cakewalk no matter how many chickens I sacrifice. Like every DAW, it has its annoying blind spots. After this round of features, in which they nailed some of the biggies, like "Fisher-Price Mixer" and "Transport Stuck In The Middle" the worst remaining one for me is the lack of keystroke support. Many functions lack any keystroke at all, and there is no way to assign your own. That's just lame. Mouse in the right hand, left hand on the keyboard, people. No keystroke for an operation hampers possible efficiency.

I suspect that where things get difficult is when the document contains a lot of images with text that flows around the images, which of course describes the BRG. All those screenshots, tables, etc. seem like they would make it tougher. At this point I am so happy that the BRG was finally updated. I had my doubts for a long time due to the "online" focus of BandLab as a company.

I agree with your points in general principle, with specifics to be addressed by the developers as best suits. I, too would like help keep ing current with the version, especially now that we're seeing more substantial changes and additions to the features. Adding a date code to the file name is a good idea, and a bigger version number/date on page 2 wouldn't hurt either. I would even take your points 2 and 3 further and suggest that BA download the latest BRG (Blessed Ref Guide) with every CbB update, install it to the Cakewalk directory, and that there be an item under the Utilities Menu to allow the user to launch it. I do all of this manually, having used Steve Cook's utility to add menu items. It is so handy not to have to switch out of Cakewalk to launch the BRG. As for 4, here's my devil's advocacy: you and I of course recall the difficulty we had trying to get the thing into different formats. I'm keeping in mind that the devs have not yet even published the BRG in html form. I used to do tech writing, including publishing in electronic formats, and getting everything just right in a single format is a challenge, more so when it includes images. Making it work in multiple formats, and then making sure that all those formats are kept up to date with version control adds more difficulty. Just saying that while I, too would love to have the BRG available in as many formats as would be convenient for people to use, adding more formats might be more difficult that it seems, so we may have a wait on that. Manuals these days seem to come in PDF form, sometimes HTML if the product is open source. "Let them use iPads!"?

I just popped in to one of my favorite makers of virtual instruments, Applied Acoustics, to update my email preferences. Rumor has it that around this time of year they send out a free voucher for your choice of soundsets if you are signed up. They have a free VSTi called Swatches that offers a sampling of each of their many sound packs. Swatches is periodically updated to add more sounds as more sound packs are created, so I check in from time to time. There was a new version, now they are up to over 420 sounds in the thing! And they are really good sounds, obviously they choose some of the best ones to show off each soundset. A|A|S stuff, especially products that use only the player, like Swatches, is usually pretty resource-friendly.

Of course if you haven't, immediately download and install the Studio Instruments that come free with Cakewalk. Its the button over on the lower left in BandLab Assistant. The Strings are very nice , the Electric Piano is fine, the Bass....well, it's free. Applied Acoustics makes a product called Strum, with a cut down version called Strum Session that a lot of people like for virtual guitar. They have an amazing free sample of over 400 of their sounds called Swatches that you (and everyone) should get. I heard a rumor that if you go to their site and register, and sign up for email updates, they will send you a coupon good for one of their soundsets, and you can use that for one of the guitar ones. I'm a big fan of their products. My only problem with them is that they sound so good that I get lost in auditioning the presets.

It's not one of the big leaps that 6 to 7 and 7 to 8 were, but they weren't as far behind the rest of the market this time. The area with the biggest improvement, and it was the one where it was most needed, IMO, is the mixer/console. They even have various processing modules you can add right to the mixer strip. Parametric EQ, compressor, saturation. It makes the channel strips more professional. They should call it ChannelPro or ProStrip or something. You can also now undock various elements like the control bar. So it makes it even more Cakewalk-y, in a good way. There are a few Mixcraft features I would love to have in CbB, for sure, like marker colors, markers with full-length vertical rules, and the way they handle drag-and-drop submix/folders, The stability and efficiency of their playback engine has always impressed me, although Cakewalk's immediately sounded better to my ears than the v. 8 one. I say playback, not mixdown, which are two different operations, and Mixcraft may be sacrificing some quality in order to get that efficiency. I don't know. Bounces/mixdowns sound comparable to what I get from Cakewalk, and it's all so subjective. Maybe I was dazzled by the pretty mixer in Cakewalk. You still can't hide take lanes, so if you've got tracks with many multiple takes, vertical navigation of big projects can still turn into a scroll-fest. You can put your tracks into submixes very easily, though and hide them that way. I still prefer the tracking workflow in Mixcraft to CbB's, and simple comping is slam bang. Until the revamp of the Smart Tool, I would have said that I preferred Mixcraft over CbB for tracking and comping. Now I've grasped the wonder that is Speed Comping rather than blundering into messing up my projects with it, so I'll give the edge to Cakewalk. Workflow-wise, I think that for me, tracking in Mixcraft, then exporting raw stems to Cakewalk, then comping and mixing might be best of both worlds. The better markers in MX make it easier to get around to sections, etc. Also it comes with a handy-dandy smartphone app to run the transport. As far as the respective various sound engines, playback, bounce, summing, resampling, whatever, I haven't spent enough time with MX9 to say. Tracking in any DAW should result in raw audio with the same 1's and 0's. It's not until you start using the playback, mix, bounce, summing, resampling engines that their differences (and unless you believe that every software engineer at every different DAW company uses the exact same algorithms, implemented in the exact same ways for these operations, there must be differences) should become apparent.

Obvious ripoff. Another supposedly "free" product where I have to pay for Internet service to download their installer program to download the "free" program, and there's something about how I have to buy a whole new USB hard drive to license this "free" thing. I looked and it says I have to upgrade my system to Windows 7, so there's another pile of money I'd have to shell out for this "free" product. I look at the name of this company, "Audio Media Research," and I can tell how they're planning on making money by putting this "free program" on my hard drive. They're not even hiding it. Research=data collection, audio media=sound, so they're in the business of collecting sound. And they're enforcing it with another BS DEMO MODE torture scheme. What if I accidentally unplug my USB hard drive in the middle of tracking at an expensive high tech studio with no internet connection and it goes into DEMO MODE? DEMO MODE is an iron boot stomping on the face of a penniless musician, forever. I would rather be forced to sit through a grainy 30-second video of furries playing hopscotch every time the program starts than face the possibility of DEMO MODE. Furthermore, I demand that in the future, nobody waste my valuable time by posting "deals" that require in-app purchases, upgrading my OS beyond Vista, greater than 4G of RAM, iLok or any other USB device, ownership of any software (even CakeBlab, which I refuse to use since they decided to start giving away the program that I'd been paying honest money for), surrendering my email address, or connecting my DAW or any other computer to the internet to download or register. (kidding, I'm kidding)?

I didn't mean to imply that I endorsed or even excused the practice, only meant to share my possible explanation. I think it's lame, too. ? I have great respect for Vojtech as a programmer and algorithm designer. His system of sharing code among the plug-ins is an amazing feat of software engineering/project management. The marketing hook of the Free Bundle is pretty genius as well. Where Meldaproduction falls short is in documentation, which is a real bummer, because the stuff has so much depth it could benefit from it. But if you go to the website there is no FAQ or anything similar, no quick links to basic installation guides, not much of the usual "click here if you're new and having trouble or just need information" linkage one usually sees. He likes to describe his processors as the best, most advanced, powerful, incredibly unique like nothing you've ever seen or heard before widgets on the market, but then seems to expect the user to already know how to access this powerful uniqueness. I mean, I don't disagree, I've given him more of my money than any other vendor, but if the world has never seen the like of the thing I'm buying, I'll need some instructions. Tell me how to get started with making it do the amazing. For a lot of the plug-ins, especially the Free Bundle ones, it seems that he followed the same philosophy of reusing his work, but this time to the detriment of the product. For instance MEQualizer and MCompressor are really quite powerful, but their 60-odd pages of documentation have no table of contents or index, start out describing the generic features of preset saving and loading, then half a dozen pages down get around to giving a few terse paragraphs to describing the features of the equalizer (and compressor) features, then the rest goes on about the style system, the analyzer, mid-side mode, all the other features that they share with the rest of the plug-ins. Maybe not so much lame as frustrating. It's like I found an alien artifact that looks like it can do all kinds of neat things, but I can only get it to do 30% of them. Still worth it.

Wow, I didn't know about any of these except my beloved and much-used DrumMic'A and Fruit Shake. Going to check them out and add them to the Freeware Instruments thread. Freeware Kontakt Player content (kontent?) is rare. Soniccouture has a Rocksichord!

Doesn't it seem like in most cases (Melda an exception) the installer is an "off-the-shelf" component? Or there are maybe 3 variations? I think most development environments do come with a pre-rolled InstallShield component, and Steinberg and Avid may include code in their dev kits. My guess as to why developers spew 32-bit/AAX plug-ins around is that it's easier to have unnecessary ones installed than it is to answer support inquiries from people who chose the wrong options and now can't see their plug-ins in whatever host they're using. And it's amazing how often those people will go straight to some forum and declare that "I bought plug-in XXX and installed it and it didn't work" leading to other people who read their posts drawing the conclusion that plug-in XXX is "incompatible" or "has problems" with that host. And so the legend is perpetuated that the host/plug-in has "compatibility issues." I've seen posts from people who come here and say that they've read on the forum about people having trouble getting CbB to recognize their SPlum plugs and saying that they're scared to make the upgrade lest CbB "break" their SPlum installation. When the solution is a 30-second trip to Preferences to add a folder name to their VST search path! We forum regulars are pretty savvy compared to users out there who treat the software as a black box and leave all their Preferences on the defaults and would never dream of editing a config file or a Drum Map. We had a guy the other day wanting help getting SONAR LE working on his system. I told him he was in for a real treat. Give a user options and they will abuse them (former tech support tech here). Do most users even know whether they need to install the AAX versions of their plug-ins? What if they don't install them, then decide to try Pro Tools First? Probably easier to just put the AAX's in there for them just in case. (BTW, for those who know how to set Windows Environment Variables, a type-saving trick is to make one called VST_PATH that is set to your VST2 directory. Smart installers and DAW's will then default to that location.)

Plug-in compatibility is weird. SONiVOX are known for tech non-support and sub-zero code, and their Orchestral Companion series have an issue where in some DAW's, when you have the instrument playing back in a looping fashion, after the first iteration of the loop, all notes will sound truncated. So you'll be mixing a song with a nice legato string or woodwind or brass part, and of course have the project looping, and after it comes back around your string section turns staccato. In some hosts. I went to the "support" forum at SONiVOX and saw that FL Studio users were reporting the same issue, and a couple of other DAW's as well. It was pretty clearly a bug in the Orchestral Companions that was never going to be addressed by SONiVOX. It worked fine in Mixcraft until one maintenance update. I raised the alarm and entered a bug report. Their devs uncharacteristically pointed the finger, threw up their hands and deferred it, because their libraries were compliant with the VSTi spec and of course every other VSTi on the planet worked correctly. Two maintenance updates later it mysteriously fixed itself when they opened the same section of the code where they had "broken" it earlier. Which goes to show, a host can be perfectly compliant yet expose a bug in a plug-in that other hosts do not. Were FL Studio and Mixcraft at fault because loop playback of Orchestral Companions "worked just fine in REAPER?" Of course not. I mean, if your instrument doesn't loop correctly in FL Studio, get in the game. All the DAW devs can do is try to open communications with the plug-in devs, not possible in some cases, like SONiVOX. They can try to "code around it," or in the case of crashiness build in quarantining measures to allow plug-ins to crash without bringing down the host. The problem with the latter is that processing added between plug-in and sound engine inevitably slows things down, which nobody wants. Cakewalk has a form of this where it can scan plug-ins in a "sandbox" to prevent crashing. But only to prevent crashes during scanning.

Ah, now this is a tidbit for those who have been wondering about the LP plug-ins and whether/when BandLab will make them available. And for that matter, other cool things written with Cakewalk, Inc. code now owned by BL like Rapture. Oh how I'd love to get my hands on the Pro version of that, having managed to wrangle a Home Studio license. Some of them may be due for a bit of tidying up in the years that have passed since the demise of Cakewalk, Inc. Yes, years, plural. 2017. Libraries updated, compatibility with newer releases of Windows and drivers ensured, all that.

Do you have another VST3 host you can load it into just for the purpose of adjusting the setting? Cantabile or a REAPER or Mixcraft trial? Tracktion? Sound Forge? Also, he just dropped v14, so who knows, give that a shot, too. I don't remember what nVidia card you have, but is swapping a newer AMD/ATi into your system a possibility? My ATi 5770, which works a treat in my Dell with both CbB and Mixcraft, turned Mixcraft 7 64-bit into a crashy slug when I had it installed in my Gateway Core 2 Quad system. I swapped my cards around and back and forth and now the 5770 is in the Dell and my nVidia is in the Gateway and there is peace in the valley. But sometimes the combination of adapter and BIOS and motherboard and who knows what else just conspire to mess things up.

Meldaproduction plug-ins also have a way to change how their GUI's interact with the video driver, but theirs is accessible via a GUI in any Meldaproductions plug-in's Settings. You don't have to manually edit a configuration file as you seem to need to do with the Cakewalk LP's. Just open the GUI on MAutoPitch and click on Settings. Over on the left, under GUI and Style, you'll see a control for GPU Acceleration. The choices are "Enabled," "Disabled," and "Compatibility Mode." Try "Disabled" and see if anything changes. I don't see where anyone has mentioned it in this thread, but using the 64-bit Double Precision Engine has stifled at least one plug-in of mine, so if you haven't tried turning that off, give it a shot.

I wish I could recall the links to the posts and articles, but if you trust my credibility at all as a 58-year-old musician/business owner who spent most of the '90's in the software industry, in everything from startups to Adobe, I'll tell you that the situation with plug-in specifications and compatibility is probably not what you imagine. Even (especially) with the latest, VST3, if anyone thinks that Steinberg and other industry players (or even plug-in vendors) sat down and worked out the details of how VST's and DAW's should work together, then wrote out a spec, went over it checking for omissions and errors, and finally published it, then as errors and inconsistencies were uncovered by other companies and plug-in vendors, Steinberg was alerted and those changes were incorporated into revisions of the spec, then I must now inform you that the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny were actually just your parents leaving you money and candy. It probably went more like: Scene: Offices of Steinberg, 3 Months before Musikmesse 1996 Sales: "I think we can sell more copies of our new pluggy-inny Cubase if we let other people make plug-ins for it too." Marketing: "Great idea! The new version with the plug-ins! Let's let everyone make plug-ins for it! We'll be legends, it'll be the new MIDI!" Management: "Hey, people who chose coding and not technical writing as their career, give us the specification for the plug-ins so that other people can write them." Engineering: "That's insane, we can barely make our own that don't crash the host, and we don't have it all written down in one place, it's in the form of comments in the code!" Marketing: "Ha, ha, you geeks have a great sense of humor. The spec must be ready for our presentation at Musikmesse. We're calling it VST for 'Virtual Studio Technology.' And don't worry, the outside vendors' plug-ins will all be certified by our QA process." Engineering: "You're insane, Musikmesse is in 3 months and furthermore our QA staff can barely handle testing our own products with the resources they have." Management: "Just have that spec ready for the presentation at Musikmesse. Even if you have to write it on a cocktail napkin and hand it to them, it will be ready." A couple of years pass.... Scene: offices of an unidentified other DAW company Other company's marketing: "Cubase got such a huge head start on us with that VST thing that it's become the friggin' standard, we have to make our host support VST's because people have these huge libraries of them. And plug-in houses don't want to code for DX." Other company's management: "Hey, engineering, this is the VST spec from Steinberg, we will be showing off how our product can host every VST ever coded by anyone at Winter NAMM this year." Other company's engineering: "This is a series of German swear words written on the back of a cocktail napkin from Steinberg's Musikmesse booth a couple of years ago and Winter NAMM is in 2 months." OCMgmt.: "Ha ha, you geeks have a great sense of humor. It's the full VST spec. Steinberg says so." OCEng.: "Steinberg has no incentive for our host to be able to run VST's. It's the opposite. There's nothing in this about crash protection, memory management, preset management, default UI, installation location, sidechaining, UI scaling, they barely tell you how to get audio in and out. People will blame us when the things fail to load and/or bring our host down. We're at the mercy of Steinberg and the plug-in developers. It'll be a testing and support nightmare forever." OCMgmt.: "This is the VST spec. We'll be showing off how we can host every VST on the market. I have faith in you." (I made up the foregoing drama based on reading KVR and Wikipedia and my own experiences as a QA engineer testing a photo editor that was advertised as being "compatible with Photoshop plug-ins." There is a financial incentive for the company who creates the spec to make it difficult for their competitors to use it. Cakewalk and DP and Samplitude and FLStudio and Mixcraft get reps for being "buggy" and having compatibility problems, bingo, less competition for Cubase. Poor Mixcraft couldn't run a VST3 without crashing to save its life until the most recent version, 9, and Mixcraft is a stable program. Sampletank 3 never has been able to run for more than about 10 minutes without crashing in either CbB or MX. I'll bet it works a treat in Cubase.) From reports, it didn't get any better with VST3. Maybe they added plugin-based sidechaining to the German swear words. From all I can gather, VST3 is the "New Coke" of plug-in formats, for those of you old enough to remember that marketing debacle/accidental success. As for some plug-in vendors being dix, well, some of them are virtually one-person operations, and being good at coding does not necessarily, or even greater than 50% of the time, in my experience, go hand-in-hand with being good at dealing with other people. They're not all as personable as Noel! I am a one-person operation myself, and one of the reasons for that is I don't want other people telling me how to do things I feel passionate about. If you're even an average coder, you can make a fortune working for any number of companies and not have to hassle with the things you have to deal with as a business owner, and have retirement and health benefits as well. So why have your own company? Many engineers are, as they say these days "on the spectrum," and one of the things that goes along with that is difficulty in reading and conveying emotions. Being on the spectrum is often an advantage when it comes to the main work of coding, but a disadvantage when it comes to things like hashing things out with engineers at other companies. They can read to neurotypical people as rude and abrupt. They want to focus on the important thing (which would probably be the signal processing algorithm) and get annoyed by "peripheral" things like host compatibility. Larger companies can hire people to act as a buffer between the coding talent and the rest of the world. I've had that role at a couple of companies. I felt like the "Jive Lady" in Airplane! "Stewardess, I speak geek." One-person operations don't have that luxury, so it's the world talking directly to the programming genius. In the end, what works for ensuring compatibility is if the plug-in vendors feel it is worth their resources to help ensure it. Whenever possible, on forms or questionnaires, I let the vendors know I use Cakewalk. I put it in my sig on recording forums so people can see. I use Cakewalk and I buy plug-in licenses!