Starship Krupa

Yeah, there are a variety of plug-ins that claim to be able to smooth out clipping with varying degrees of success. I finally snagged a license for iZotope RX Elements and it does the job as well as any. The trip to Terry West's site is worth it just to check out the oddness of it all. More about Terry on the Freeware FX thread....

Saturday night's alright for freeware! I'm not like some mix engineers who seem to use mostly emulations of classic analog gear, I kinda go the other direction. My philosophy is why should I constrain myself to what was possible in 1967 in hardware? However, a lot of the records I love were made using that gear, and I do appreciate the value of simplicity and the effect of transformers and real world components on tone shaping. Which brings us to Luftikus, my favorite analog "color" knob EQ. As described: "Luftikus is a digital adaptation of an analog EQ with fixed half-octave bands and additional high frequency boost. As an improvement to the hardware it allows deeper cuts and supports a keep-gain mode where overall gain changes are avoided." It also has "mastering" and "analog" modes, whatever that means, but basically, it's yer familiar 6-knobber, just happens to be my favorite. The developer, ljkb, became slightly notorious in Cakewalk land for entering the 2018 KVR Developer's Challenge with TinyQ, the UI of which was a blatant copy/tribute to the collapsed version of the Sonar/Cakewalk Quadcurve EQ. When it was first released, the developer used a library called JUCE, which I guess at the time was owned by Google and the license for the version they used popped a splash screen and it was supposedly sending info to Google Analytics. I never even tried it, because, hey, I already have a free license for the original so who cares. They have just updated the plug-ins to use "the latest version of JUCE," and I don't see the splash screen, so either they shelled out for the license or JUCE's license changed, but whatever. There's a total of 6 plug-ins, all freeware. Luftikus is my favorite, but I've also messed about with ReFine, and they just came out with a linear phase EQ called QRange. My usual "vetted by Erik 'Starship Krupa'" does not so much apply here because they've just put out these new revisions, but the previous versions were rock solid. Please post back to this thread if there are problems with anything anyone suggests (which should go for any license model).

I recommend AIR's DB-33, which is currently on sale for $14 at Pluginboutique. You can even use its Leslie emulation separately on other tracks.

I bought a Soundblaster Live in the late 90's thinking that its S/PDIF input would be good for copying DAT CD master recordings to my computer. These DAT's had of course been made at 44.1. I made the transfers and they sounded fine, but then I started reading about something called "bit perfect transfer" or "bit perfect audio." This was the notion that contrary to what we had been led to believe, "digital audio" was not this pristine incorruptible thing that once the A/D converters had converted it to ones and zeroes, every step of the way it was going to stay unharmed until it was delivered to D/A converters on our end, then sent to an amplifier for reproduction. Especially in computer realm, this was actually a big, laughable lie on a par with Father Christmas or the Easter Bunny. Your CD had ones and zeroes on it, but once it left the CD drive, the OS would merrily upsample, downsample enhance, do all sorts of terrible things before delivering it, and if you were trying to work with digital audio, it was much more difficult to keep it pristine than if you were just working with analog audio. I also learned that my Soundblaster Live was one of the worst offenders, because without telling anyone, they had designed a card that, while it was fabulously powerful as far as processing digital audio effects, was awful at the job of merely passing a clean stream. While it claimed to be able to do I/O up to 96K, whatever sampling rate you sent it, 44.1, 48, 88.2, 96K, it would resample to 48 for internal processing before passing it along. Yes, it would take in 48K, then perform an unnecessary resample to 48K. And this was 25 years ago, and its algorithms were not great. I read that one could buy sound cards that used a chip by a company called CMedia that had S/PDIF headers on them but did not do the resampling that Soundblaster Live cards did. CMedia chips were used in cards costing anywhere from $12 on up to $150, so I bought a cheapie and did a test transfer of the DAT CD master of my girlfriend's album. What came out of my speakers when I played it back literally brought tears to my eyes. It sounded like her voice was floating in 3-D above my speakers, the way a good mix should. I immediately grabbed all the DAT's I had previously transferred and did them over. The Soundblaster Live was relegated to office computer use and my studio computer continued to use the $12 CMedia for digital I/O.

Playing devil's advocate here, and because I used to do phone support at a software company, they probably dump the AAX stuff in there in case the user decides they're going to run Pro Tools someday. It reduces the need for tech support calls. After all, look at the people who come here convinced that "Cakewalk deletes your Sonar plug-ins" or "Cakewalk won't run your Sonar plug-ins" because a friend couldn't figure out that all they needed to do was reinstall Sonar or just fix their VST scan paths. The Native Instruments Native Access program will also indicate that your products need "repair" if you remove the 32-bit components, but they will work fine without them anyway. And disabling the drivers that they install for their hardware (even when you don't own any of their hardware) will not negatively affect anything.

I'd prefer mine to be non-destructive.

Unfortunately, it appears that Beatmaker, the company who originally made it, has gone under, but ATMOS is my favorite ambient piano, and one of my favorite instruments for ambient music period. The link is to the page at VST4Free, which is still hosting the download. I haven't mentioned VST4Free because it's just a repository and as such doesn't vet the plug-ins it hosts, but it is a hugely valuable resource if you're willing to be adventurous and try out what's there. They will host downloads when a company goes under. The page for each plug-in also includes a place for users to review the plug-in, so you can get a good idea whether it's buggy or worth the time to try out. (Many of the plug-ins hosted at VST4Free are 32-bit. I only use these on a legacy basis, meaning that I don't acquire 32-bit plug-ins. I think I'm down to 3 of them that I use occasionally when nothing else will do the job. One of them is the de la mancha dlm sixtyfive, which is an emulation of the dbx 165a compressor that so far, nothing else I've heard can touch.)

What Bob Bone said is a clue: ACPI.SYS is part of what controls your processors to give your laptop longer battery life. Take it out of the picture and you get performance back. Me, I refuse to believe that there is no way to wrest control of the hardware away from the OS, although you may need the help of Google searches and maybe a 3rd-party utility. I have had good luck with Process Lasso. Rather than having it running all the time, I set it up to kill all the processes that I didn't want running while I'm doing DAW work, then start it before I do a Cakewalk (or whatever) session. The default view is to have its activity log visible, and I still remember this one session where it delivered a repetitive utter beatdown upon the poor Apple Mobile Device Service, which I had excluded. It kept trying to start up, but Process Lasso would have none of it. It went on, every 200mS for about 15 seconds, which is forever in computer time, until the Apple Mobile Device Service just stopped trying.

Yeah, MusicMan, I can't read your screen cap, but I assume from context that it's a folder with AAX plug-ins? I go further and hunt around for possible extra content that the installers may have left around, like convolution files, samples and whatnot. Meldaproduction, much as I love their products, is one for shoveling unnecessary content in with installs. And if you've installed the Native Instruments Komplete Kontrol stuff, be aware that you now have at least 3 software drivers running on your system that are useless if you don't also own one of Native Instruments' hardware controllers.

I just experienced "Cakewalk: The Vanishing" right after inserting an instrument track. Sequence of events: Save project (yay) Insert Instrument Track (simple) Boom, Cakewalk disappears from the screen with no crash, no dialog, no dump file, nothing.

Excellent! The telltale was where you were seeing MIDI activity in the system tray icon but nowhere else in Cakewalk.

Keni, this is a long shot, but I recently had the dreaded "MIDI can talk to everything but Cakewalk VSTi's" effect, and what it turned out to be was a rogue control surface entry. I looked at Preferences/MIDI/Control Surfaces, and for whatever reason, the input device was set to be my MIDI keyboard controller, and so Cakewalk was interpreting all of its keypresses as control surface movements. Once I set that device to be what it was supposed to be (my nanoKONTROL), all was well.

Yes, Gerry, please post the solution, and not just to satisfy our curiosity. There are lots more people who read this forum and don't post and plenty more who will have the same problem you did and search for a solution via Google. It lets the forum serve as a database of issues and solutions.

This. Same with plug-ins that I have authorized via PACE/iLok. I had one experience similar to the OP's, but the next one was careful to just deauthorize or move all my licenses to the cloud before rebuilding my DAW computer. This is critical, for anyone reading this thread, you must do this before changing your motherboard or system drive. I have moved my Waves licenses to a thumb drive so that I can take them anywhere or upgrade my system and not have to mess with anything and it works great. Then, once your DAW system is up and running, you move the licenses back to your hard drive if you want, as I said with Waves, I just leave them on the thumb drive.

At the moment, I would call it a "newly discovered color mapping." In other words, good find. If there is not already such a thing, I would love to have a Google Sheet or some kind of shared document where we could keep track of these correlations, maybe also map some of the terms into "friendlier" names. I spent hours trying to figure out which color parameter affected the text in the Custom Module before I found it in this forum. I'm new to this, both to themesmanship and to Cakewalk itself, but the Theme Editor looks like something that were originally designed to be used in-house but then made into a more end-user friendly tool. It's serendipitous discoveries like yours that led me to that suspicion. It makes better sense when you're designing an overall color scheme for a product that's going to be reviewed by an in-house team before being released to the public, and it explains the obscure naming.

I know why CD's are 44.1, and that's what I use, because I still go by the theory that if my audio files are recorded at 48 and I then mix down to a CD master, they will have to go through a downsample, which costs more in CPU and puts me at the mercy of the downsampling algorithm. My DAW computer has 8 virtual cores, runs at 3.2GHz and barely even notices when I render video. I've read that up and downsampling algorithms are now so sophisticated that this has no effect whatsoever if it even ever did, and who the heck even listens to CD's any more anyway. Yet I cling to my silly notions like an old lady throwing eggshells in her Krups coffee maker. I also do video projects, and when I do, I try to keep the whole thing at 48, because I am off my rocker, no, I mean, DVD's are at 48. I don't know why the standard for video became 48K. Anyway, the sensible answer is probably "it depends on what your eventual target master is." If you'll be making CD's, go ahead and record 44.1/24 and it will give the rendering engine one less thing to think about. If CD's are not a consideration, then it doesn't matter. As Mark (kind of) said, the rate is of no concern quality-wise. The "difference" could be measured in a lab. It's bit depth that we wallow in, that wonderful 24 bit dynamic range. If you really want to experiment with sound quality differences regarding rate, crank that puppy up to 88.2 or 96 and record some acoustic guitar or vocals and listen on a good set of headphones and see if you hear a difference. Some do, some don't.

No, it's a free license, like Cakewalk, I just had to give them the Yahoo email address I use to sign up for things like free software. I suggest that anyone who regularly takes advantage of free offers that require you to give up your email address create an account at Yahoo or GMail or Proton or wherever just for this purpose. And here's a security tip from someone who used to work in IT for a nationwide security company (me). If they make you create an account, don't use the same email, username and password you use for more sensitive activities. Not that the owners of the software companies will do anything nasty with the information, but we can't expect smaller companies to have the same protection against hacking that larger ones do. They just can't afford it. Wells Fargo's security dept. is probably larger than iZotope's entire company. I use a system that allows me to have a unique password at every site, but if you don't do that, you can at least split them up so you have a "banking password" and a "buying toys password." And/or use a different email address. Not trying to put the panic into y'all, just suggesting you maybe ease into doing this in future transactions if you aren't already.

Cakewalk has shown you how to "sacrifice a chicken" to your MIDI configuration to get it to work. From when I first started using CbB, I found out that every so often I will screw up my MIDI configuration in one way or another, usually in this way, where a MIDI input device will work fine with every other program but Cakewalk ignores it, with or without blinking indicator lights. Sometimes it happens when I get too curious and decide to click on one of those numerous mysterious pull-down menus that lurk on MIDI channel strips that usually won't open when you click on them but sometimes they do so I figure why not check every once in a while. Nothing I try will allow me to get MIDI information to flow until at some point, it just starts up again as if by magic. I'll exit the program, restart it, create a new project, add a new instrument track, delete it, add a different softsynth, delete it, delete a marker, turn looping on and off, whatever, and then it suddenly all starts working just as mysteriously as it stopped, and I open the other projects that wouldn't work and they're all just fine too. There is one thing I know and it is this: if your Z1 stops being able to communicate with Cakewalk, exit gracefully, start Cantabile, load up Kontakt, make sure you can play notes, then start Cakewalk and play some notes and see if the problem has been cured.

Thank you, thank you, you have rescued me from the depths of MIDI-no-worki H377! All I did was switch my active Firepod, which I do every 6 months or so to even the wear between the two of them. I usually only use one at a time, with the other one held in reserve in case I need more than 8 inputs or another submix or whatever. During that switchover, Cakewalk decided that Firepod 1 was its new best friend and that it liked it so much it would use it as the In Port for my control surface instead of my Korg nanoKONTROL thereby causing both the nanoKONTROL and my MIDI keyboard to go completely limp and lifeless while of course they worked perfectly outside of Cakewalk.

Good for "referencing" mixes, eh?

Time for a bump to the top. Another of my favorite stereoizer is Polyverse/Infected Mushroom Wider. Said to create stereo from mono without phase issues, man oh man can this effect ever get extreme. I've not tested what it sounds like summed to mono. If, like me, you like having a, uh, wide variety of ways to turn mono sources into stereo, grab it. The UI is pretty cool.

I can't help feeling that there's something I'm missing with it, because obviously the developer put a ton of work into it, the UI is beautiful, it has all these options, there are the people raving about it on YouTube, there are announcements about add-on packs, etc. So I take all that trouble and time to get it to work and it seems like a tarted-up arpeggiator. If I had put in the same amount of time and effort running scales on my piano.... Well, if anyone here sees the white light and can tell me what it is about Instachord that makes intelligent-seeming grown men froth at the mouth, please do. The guy I'm thinking of seemed to know some music theory, so it wasn't just excitement over finally making his synths sound like someone good was playing them. I know I sound down on Instachord, but I wouldn't be disappointed if I hadn't been interested in it to start with, and if anyone reading this wants to try it out, the price isn't too steep. Pluginboutique has the bundle of both Instachord, Instascale, and the 3 preset packs, all for $10. This runs through August 4, 2019.

Heavens, no, you've taken your first good steps toward getting your system working great. Well done so far, I say. Your system is quite capable of doing what you're trying to do, i3, plenty of clock speed, 8G RAM. The original problem you were having was because Cakewalk was forced to deal with two different audio devices, one high-quality and capable of low latency (AudioBox) and the other made for playing back YouTube videos and whatever from the web (onboard Realtek). When you do that, Cakewalk (or any program like it) will revert to the (s)lowest common denominator. For low-latency droput-free monitoring while you record, you should remove the Realtek from the picture completely. In Cakewalk's Preferences, make sure that you are in ASIO mode and that there are no references to the Realtek anywhere. Plug your speakers (or headphones) into the AudioBox. This is the configuration to be in when you are doing DAW work, tracking or monitoring. If you still get dropouts when set up that way, check back here and we can help you sort it. Now, as far as the question of how to still listen to YouTube videos and whatever else happens in programs other than Cakewalk. The solution that I use, because I am one of those "golden ear audiofools," is that I don't use my onboard Realtek at all. I have Windows set up to play back everything, even YouTube videos and the rest, through the nearfield monitors connected to my PreSonus Firepod. Music is very important to my life, and life's too short to listen to it through a Realtek chip when I have a Firepod handy. ? Windows will happily use just about any audio output device that's properly connected to it. In order to do this, just go into Settings, select System, then Sound, then Choose your output device. Your AudioBox should be listed as an option. Down at the bottom of the page there are further, more advanced audio options if you care to mess with them. If nothing else, this will make your YouTube videos sound better when you click on the little gear icon and switch it to "720p." Another solution, the one mentioned by Mark, is to use a physical switching device, or some people use "computer speakers" plugged into the onboard jack for browser sound. You don't have to live with it, as I said, your hardware and Cakewalk are quite capable of doing this without glitches. (I came up with the handle when I joined the Vintage Drum Forum, because I am silly, and a fan of Gene Krupa, and I like incongruities like taking the title of a prog rock/science fiction classic and combining it with the surname of a great drummer. If you complete the phrase, "Starship Krupaaaaa, flying overhead!" it's even weirder to imagine Gene playing drums, flying over your head. Or Gene Krupa dressed in a space suit battling giant insects? It fits my nitwit sense of humor.)

My apologies to the forum, I just tried following my own recipe and now I can't get it to work either.

You do know that Cakewalk is supported software, as in if you have a consistent issue you can open a support ticket with BandLab and someone will try to help you with it? As Lady Fuzztail alluded to, you should focus on one particular issue at a time, such as a project that crashes on trying to open it, take note of the steps that lead to the crash, what type, audio, MIDI, what plug-ins, etc. Without that information, all we can do is guess at things like drivers and incompatible plug-ins, because of course Cakewalk isn't crashing for the rest of us.