Starship Krupa

My recommended purchases are the MFreeFX bundle pro upgrade, which is 61% off at $20, and the MEssentialsFX bundle, which is going for$118. First time buyers may use someone's referral code to get 20% off their purchase, as well as getting a $10 credit for signing up for their newsletter. If you're a first-time buyer who's been waiting for one of these sales to upgrade your FreeFX bundle, you'll end up getting it for about $8 if you apply your newsletter sign-up credit and use someone's referral code. IMO, the upgraded FreeFX bundle is the best deal in the plug-in business even when it's not discounted. The plug-ins included are better than many companies' top of the line equivalents, and usually include features that you won't find in any competing product, like the harmonics feature in MEQualizer. The dynamics display on MCompressor is my favorite of any compressor, including MeldaProduction's other compressors. Also, if you already have some of their stuff, especially if you got them at deeper than 50% discount, log in to your account and check bundle prices. Before I got my MComplete license, I don't think there was ever a bundle sale that came up where I wasn't surprised at how low my upgrade prices were.

It appears to be the season of it.

This. One of the reasons that I keep bashing my poor head against this is that when I can get it to work, the Drum Pane is great to work with. I prefer a view and workflow that's designed to work with percussion, showing "hits" rather than rectangles of varying length. The way that you can rearrange where the instruments are vertically just by dragging and dropping is handy (I like to group kick, snare and hats together), being able to mute or solo individual instruments is useful, the way the notes/hits show the velocity right on them is very useful, and easier to see than the plain piano roll. I know the general consensus is that it's easier to just use an instrument definition, and when I talk about the feature, I usually only talk about having the note names on the left, but the Drum Pane has more to offer than just note names. About the only thing I'd change would be the bland grey-on-grey text and background of the note list. Something easier to read. I also like the "external hardware on channel 10" version and wish that it were easier to access.

Try it anyway. Just try it, you don't have to leave it that way. If you turn off your network card and find that the problem goes away, then you know exactly what you need to fix: your network card (or some service that's using it). I'm very much one to leave the network on while I'm DAW'ing, but I had a situation once where the network card WAS the problem. I saw it on LatencyMon and traced it back to having installed Intel's (newer) network card driver on my Dell. I rolled it back to Dell's driver and my latency issues went away. Latest is usually greatest when it comes to driver versions, but not always. Sometimes, especially in tightly integrated systems like Dell's, the computer vendor's driver, even if it's a rev or two older than the chip vendor's driver, will work better.

If RC-20 is included, this would be a great time to pick it up. If you are trying to get a sample to sound old and lo-fi, RC-20 is the shortest route. I thought that I could do what it does by using an effect chain, and I probably can, but RC-20 is purpose built for it and takes a minute or so to dial in.

https://www.pluginboutique.com/meta_product/1-Instruments/57-Complete-Collection/6335-Glitchmachines-Plugins One of the periodic blowouts from one of my favorite plug-in houses. I'm upgrading Tactic to Tactic 2 and Quadrant to Quadrant 2. If you're a fan of their work, the version 2's are usually worthy upgrades, especially at $10. I find using their products to be a good exercise in letting go of the desire to understand and control every aspect of sound creation. They don't just reward experimentation, they demand it. For those like me who get their products confused with each other, Tactic is sort of the drum machine (that's how I use it anyway, it's my breakdown-in-a-box) and Quadrant is the one with the virtual patch cables and 50 different modules you can arrange into any order in 12 slots. I have every plug-in in their line-up except for Subvert, the "distortion," because my computers threatened to quit if I installed another distortion plug-in. I negotiated a special dispensation for bundles, but I don't want to anger them. With these, I can take any sound and warp it entirely beyond recognition, and with some of the FX' presets, you don't even have to run sound into them, they oscillate enough on their own.

"Add Drum Map" or "Use Drum Map," either of them would be way better than "New Drum Map." If needing to look in an entirely different area of the program (Inspector or Console) doesn't stop the inexperienced user, then "I don't want to make a new drum map, I want to use an existing one" is waiting for them to trip over (in two senses of the word).

The Ed Straker-mobile was NOT a "bad" 70's sci-fi vehicle. It was the perfect ride for a long country drive accompanied by Nick Drake's sister. To make sure this stays off-topic, here's a great Peter Cook and Dudley Moore parody for Gerry Anderson fans: SuperThunderStingCar

An electric tricycle and a pack of 4 St. Bernards. You obviously have your priorities squared away.❤ Did Cybertrucks just go on sale or something? I spotted my first one in the wild a couple of days ago myself. My reaction was laughter. It looks like a car someone in my 1970's grade school class would draw for an art assignment. And of course who can forget Elon Musk reminding the world of the great value of rehearsal at its introduction?

Be sure to read the entire thread, especially the information about the tweaks that I use. I've tried them on multiple systems. For heaven's sake, don't disable hyperthreading. Longtime Dell Optiplex user here, make sure you go to Dell's site and download the recommended drivers and BIOS updates.

With the Marble, it's thumb for the left button, forefinger on the ball, and ring on the right button for me. Middle finger assists with either ball or right button, depending. It sure beats trying to use a mouse on my knee.

Longtime fan of the Logitech Trackman Marble. My pointing device of choice in places where I don't have enough flat space to use a mouse. And yeah, for gaming, I can just about do my daily Elder Scrolls Online crafting writs, but any kind of combat would be out of the question. My biggest issue with the Marble in non-gaming use is the lack of a wheel equivalent. May I assume that the ring surrounding the ball on the Kensington acts as the "wheel?" @Jim Roseberry, if you have any condition that is aggravated (or even caused) by mouse action, check out either the Logitech Lift or MX Vertical. I went with the Lift because although it's less expensive, it looks like reviewers like it better than the MX Vertical.

Simple: I'd really like to be able to drag a synth from the Browser to a Track View folder (the header that is) with the resulting track(s) being inserted in the folder. Drag and drop operations make the DAW seem slicker.

It's a long-requested, much-needed feature. The XSampler is maybe halfway to the goal. At this point, Sonar is the only DAW that aspires to be mainstream that lacks a phrase/pad sampler. Freeware ones are, oddly enough in this time of abundant free plug-ins, still kinda uncommon, and of course they're such a joy to use when well-integrated with the DAW. For me it's not all about a build-your-own drum machine (although I would use it for that) it is for my beloved dialog samples. Being able to just "play" phrases from the keyboard wherever I want them in the song, that is really the way to do it rather than dragging clips around on the timeline. And dialog phrases can be fun to trigger with the step sequencer.... To this end I tried loading some dialog phrases into Session Drummer 3 and it dutifully played them back when clicking on the various pieces of the drum kit and from the keyboard. Sort of weird to see the kick drum wiggle as a 5 second spoken word phrase plays, but I could get used to it. It doesn't have the versatility of a full-featured sampler, you can't set the individual samples to loop or reverse or retrigger. You can do some fun echo-ey effects with it if you load a long sample.

This applies especially to lecturing people on what constitutes contributing.

Whoa, what?? I've been using Session Drummer and had no idea that I could drag and drop samples directly onto its pads. With the endless requests for samplers, why didn't the devs ever mention this? I'm gonna have to try that out immediately. I've been waiting for the pad sampler companion to XSampler to come along, but doesn't NuSonar already come with Session Drummer? I have a SONAR Platinum license, so I'm not 100% sure about that. I even made a skin for Session Drummer 2 to update it to the NuSonar flat dark look. Link is in my sig. This is material for the Tutorials forum.

Not great at all. The developers have shown no interest in the format. As mentioned earlier, they've developed their own file format, which allows projects to be opened in and from the only other DAW that matters to them, Cakewalk Next.

I just tried it again and this time it worked just like it's supposed to, with the usual exception that I had to open the Drum Map Manager and set all of the outputs to route to the Addictive Drums 2 instrument rather than my Saffire Pro's MIDI in port. I've always had to do that anyway, and it's a trivial procedure with a good success rate. That is, it's successful at getting the controller's notes mapped to the soft synth's sounds. So I think what I'll do going forward is, rather than having my heart set on using the drum pane with Addictive Drums 2, I'll just try it once at the start of the project, and if it doesn't work, fall back to using the keyboard view with the AD2.INS definitions. Then if that doesn't work, I'll fall back to figuring out where the instruments are on the piano keyboard with a bit of educated trial and error. And however I end up editing my drum track is how I will edit my drum track. The idea is that while using the drum pane is my first choice, it's not guaranteed that it will work on any given attempt. So rather than letting the failure blow the mood, I'll be ready with a backup plan and then a failsafe in case the backup plan doesn't work. So at least sometimes I'll be able to work in my preferred view. When I can't I can't, no sense getting my knickers in a wad over something that's out of my control. My distress came from believing that I can get it to work reliably if I just follow the correct steps, but observed time after time that this belief was not true. If I just let go of that assumption, I'll be fine. After all, if the drink I like best at my favorite restaurant is iced tea, and I go there and they happen to be out of iced tea, I don't let it ruin the entire meal. Sometimes the drum grid fails to display correctly, and that's okay. If today's a day when it works, well, super. If not, I can still edit drums. If the drum pane works, it usually keeps working, so that's not a worry.

Dawg, I got more plug-ins on my laptop than 1K. I wouldn't think so. "Dry" suggests that the recording room was deadened, "dead" makes me think that the drums themselves were tuned for minimum sustain and/or had muffling applied.

Those of us who take our laptops out to coffee houses and don't wish to lug around our Studio 2|4 or Scarlett 2i2 thank you in advance. 😍 That said, I see improvements on my 2017 Dell Latitude with a 2-core i7 using WASAPI Exclusive. If any performance tuning has been done by a user within CbB, checking that AUD.INI is important. Thread Scheduling Model is key here.

Long requested feature, and one I would love to see. Since plug-ins are initially slotted into whatever category they report, and the display name of the plug-in is usually at least shortened, it can be a pain to see if a new one was successfully installed for Cakewalk. I usually switch my layout to "Sort by Manufacturer" to make it easier to track them down and edit their display names and/or put them into my preferred categories. Even a "New" category or indicator that only appears the first time a plug-in is scanned by Cakewalk would be so handy.

Nah, once I get the drum pane set up, it tends to keep going okay. The problem isn't getting sound to come out, it's getting a drum grid with note names on the left. And I don't use the note remapping feature for any synth that's not a drum machine. You're thinking in terms of "he's having trouble with drum maps." The "map" part of the feature is the part that actually works for me. Remapping controllers to different MIDI note numbers. Nice feature. A bit clunky, but it works solidly. The feature that tends to fail miserably is displaying the drum pane with the names of the notes on the left. They are two different aspects of "drum maps." Note mapping and drum grid editing. One works fairly well, the other one is frankly such a mess that even veteran, savvy Cakewalk users have given up on it. How many people chime in to say that the drum grid works just fine for them vs. how many say that they use Instrument Definitions or just memorize the note locations on their MIDI controller? I myself have a strip of board tape on my keyboard controller with the GM note numbers written on it. Which I submit is a less common goal than wanting to edit drums on a nice compact grid with note names on the left. One good thing is that XLN just issued a free upgrade to Addictive Drums 2 that makes accessing its own internal MIDI mapping more inviting, so I may be able to just use an extended GM mapping with AD2. Or, since they've made their own drum editing grid more inviting, I may get more into editing patterns with that. For AD2 users: this upgrade is a must, it has so many new features and such an extensive UI update that it could have been called Addictive Drums 3 and been a paid upgrade. It functions as a great preview of things to come when AD3 ships.

Not in decades. LibreOffice or Google Sheets here. What does Excel use Scroll Lock for?

I'll give credit where it's due and say that it's been quite a long time since I've had to sacrifice a chicken to Cakewalk's MIDI routing. You know the scenario, where a MIDI track and a synth track are happily joined and cooperating, but then....something changes and the synth stops producing sound. You check everything, all the inputs and outputs are set correctly, nothing solo'd, nothing muted, lights on the MIDI track indicate that data is flowing, yet somehow no sound is being produced. Then you start Trying Things, and eventually some combination of saving/deleting/exiting/reloading/reinserting the project/track/computer makes it start producing sound again. The sound comes back as mysteriously as it went away. There was a time in the past where you would try to retrace the steps that led to the dysfunction, in the hope of avoiding the situation in the future, but it is now as impossible to break as it was to fix. All you can do is Save As and thank the spirits that control such things for allowing you to continue. Anyway, I'm holding you to your earlier pledge to help more when you were back in the studio, assuming you are now back in the studio. How do I get my spiffy diamond drum editing grid without having to piddle around with forcing it to use Channel 10 or some such?

As a pro QA engineer for multiple companies, and a beta tester later, the reaction I usually get from software engineers when I refer to those is along the lines of "yeah, yeah, nobody likes a smartass." 😄 I'm not sure why this is so, perhaps by the time it's brought up they are so far into the design process that an outsider saying "no need to reinvent the wheel" is....unwelcome. Cakewalk was around long before Windows, so it mostly gets a pass on keystroke standardization. It's still the only program I've ever seen make use of Scroll Lock (and a damn good use it is), so deserves an award for avoiding a missed opportunity. Many programs could benefit from stopping scrolling, there's a dedicated key right there for it, so why is it so seldom implemented? As most people do, I use multiple programs, and every time I want to Deselect All I'm reminded of how miserable it is not to have a standard keystroke for such things. Interestingly, Google's AI Overview for "keystroke select none" currently show, in order, Adobe Lightroom, Cakewalk, Google Docs, and Microsoft Excel as its examples to demonstrate "The keyboard shortcut for "select none" varies depending on the application." I would chalk Cakewalk being in the #2 slot as due to how often I search Google for Cakewalk, except for the fact that I don't remember ever Googling Adobe Lightroom or Microsoft Excel.